[Mb-civic] "It Can Happen Here"

[ean at sbcglobal.net]

http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0719-15.htm
 
Published on Monday, July 19, 2004 by CommonDreams.org  

The Ghost of Vice President Wallace 
Warns: "It Can Happen Here"  
by Thom Hartmann 
  
The Republican National Committee has recently removed from their website 
an advertisement interspersing Hitler's face with those of John Kerry and 
other prominent Democrats. This little-heralded step has freed former Enron 
lobbyist and current RNC chairman Ed Gillespie to resume his attacks on 
Americans who believe some provisions of Bush's PATRIOT Act, his 
detention of American citizens without charges, his willingness to let 
corporations write legislation, and the so-called "Free Speech Zones" around 
his public appearances are all steps on the road to American fascism. 

The RNC's feeble attempt to equate Hitler and Democrats was short-lived, 
but it brings to mind the first American Vice President to point out the 
"American fascists" among us. 

Although most Americans remember that Harry Truman was Franklin D. 
Roosevelt's Vice President when Roosevelt died in 1945 (making Truman 
President), Roosevelt had two previous Vice Presidents - John N. Garner 
(1933-1941) and Henry A. Wallace (1941-1945). In early 1944, the New York 
Times asked Vice President Henry Wallace to, as Wallace noted, "write a 
piece answering the following questions: What is a fascist? How many 
fascists have we? How dangerous are they?" 

Vice President Wallace's answer to those questions was published in The 
New York Times on April 9, 1944, at the height of the war against the Axis 
powers of Germany and Japan. 

"The really dangerous American fascists," Wallace wrote, "are not those who 
are hooked up directly or indirectly with the Axis. The FBI has its finger on 
those. The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the 
United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian 
way. The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to 
poison the channels of public information. With a fascist the problem is never 
how best to present the truth to the public but how best to use the news to 
deceive the public into giving the fascist and his group more money or more 
power." 

In this, Wallace was using the classic definition of the word "fascist" - the 
definition Mussolini had in mind when he claimed to have invented the word. 
(It was actually Italian philosopher Giovanni Gentile who wrote the entry in the 
Encyclopedia Italiana that said: "Fascism should more appropriately be called 
corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power." Mussolini, 
however, affixed his name to the entry, and claimed credit for it.) 

As the 1983 American Heritage Dictionary noted, fascism is: "A system of 
government that exercises a dictatorship of the extreme right, typically 
through the merging of state and business leadership, together with 
belligerent nationalism." 

Mussolini was quite straightforward about all this. In a 1923 pamphlet titled 
"The Doctrine of Fascism" he wrote, "If classical liberalism spells 
individualism, Fascism spells government." But not a government of, by, and 
for We The People - instead, it would be a government of, by, and for the 
most powerful corporate interests in the nation. 

In 1938, Mussolini brought his vision of fascism into full reality when he 
dissolved Parliament and replaced it with the "Camera dei Fasci e delle 
Corporazioni" - the Chamber of the Fascist Corporations. Corporations were 
still privately owned, but now instead of having to sneak their money to folks 
like Tom DeLay and covertly write legislation, they were openly in charge of 
the government. 

Vice President Wallace bluntly laid out in his 1944 Times article his concern 
about the same happening here in America: 


" If we define an American fascist as one who in case of conflict puts money 
and power ahead of human beings, then there are undoubtedly several 
million fascists in the United States. There are probably several hundred 
thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search 
for money and power are ruthless and deceitful. ... They are patriotic in time 
of war because it is to their interest to be so, but in time of peace they follow 
power and the dollar wherever they may lead." 
Nonetheless, at that time there were few corporate heads who had run for 
political office, and, in Wallace's view, most politicians still felt it was their 
obligation to represent We The People instead of corporate cartels. 
"American fascism will not be really dangerous," he added in the next 
paragraph, "until there is a purposeful coalition among the cartelists, the 
deliberate poisoners of public information..." 

Noting that, "Fascism is a worldwide disease," Wallace further suggest that 
fascism's "greatest threat to the United States will come after the war" and 
will manifest "within the United States itself." 

In Sinclair Lewis's 1935 novel "It Can't Happen Here," a conservative 
southern politician is helped to the presidency by a nationally syndicated 
radio talk show host. The politician - Buzz Windrip - runs his campaign on 
family values, the flag, and patriotism. Windrip and the talk show host portray 
advocates of traditional American democracy as anti-American. When 
Windrip becomes President, he opens a Guantanamo-style detention center, 
and the viewpoint character of the book, Vermont newspaper editor Doremus 
Jessup, flees to Canada to avoid prosecution under new "patriotic" laws that 
make it illegal to criticize the President. 

As Lewis noted in his novel, "the President, with something of his former 
good-humor [said]: 'There are two [political] parties, the Corporate and those 
who don't belong to any party at all, and so, to use a common phrase, are 
just out of luck!' The idea of the Corporate or Corporative State, Secretary [of 
State] Sarason had more or less taken from Italy." And, President "Windrip's 
partisans called themselves the Corporatists, or, familiarly, the 'Corpos,' 
which nickname was generally used." 

Lewis, the first American writer to win a Nobel Prize, was world famous by 
1944, as was his book "It Can't Happen Here." And several well-known and 
powerful Americans, including Prescott Bush, had lost businesses in the 
early 1940s because of charges by Roosevelt that they were doing business 
with Hitler. These events all, no doubt, colored Vice President Wallace's 
thinking when he wrote: 


" Still another danger is represented by those who, paying lip service to 
democracy and the common welfare, in their insatiable greed for money and 
the power which money gives, do not hesitate surreptitiously to evade the 
laws designed to safeguard the public from monopolistic extortion. American 
fascists of this stamp were clandestinely aligned with their German 
counterparts before the war, and are even now preparing to resume where 
they left off, after 'the present unpleasantness' ceases." 
Fascists have an agenda that is primarily economic. As the Free Dictionary 
(www.thefreedictionary.com) notes, fascism/corporatism is "an attempt to 
create a 'modern' version of feudalism by merging the 'corporate' interests 
with those of the state." 

Feudalism, of course, is one of the most stable of the three historic tyrannies 
(kingdoms, theocracies, feudalism) that ruled nations prior to the rise of 
American republican democracy, and can be roughly defined as "rule by the 
rich." 

Thus, the neo-feudal/fascistic rich get richer (and more powerful) on the 
backs of the poor and the middle class, an irony not lost on author Thomas 
Frank, who notes in his new book "What's The Matter With Kansas" that, 
"You can see the paradox first-hand on nearly any Main Street in middle 
America - 'going out of business' signs side by side with placards supporting 
George W. Bush." 

The businesses "going out of business" are, in fascist administrations, 
usually those of locally owned small and medium-sized companies. As 
Wallace wrote, some in big business "are willing to jeopardize the structure of 
American liberty to gain some temporary advantage." He added, 
"Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it 
stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small 
and energetic enterprise [companies]. In an effort to eliminate the possibility 
of any rival growing up, some monopolists would sacrifice democracy itself." 

But American fascists who would want former CEOs as President, Vice 
President, House Majority Whip, and Senate Majority Leader, and write 
legislation with corporate interests in mind, don't generally talk to We The 
People about their real agenda, or the harm it does to small businesses and 
working people. Instead, as Hitler did with the trade union leaders and the 
Jews, they point to a "them" to pin with blame and distract people from the 
harms of their economic policies. 

In a comment prescient of George W. Bush's recent suggestion that 
civilization itself is at risk because of gays, Wallace continued: 


" The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted 
to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be 
identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears 
and vanities of different groups in order to gain power. It is no coincidence 
that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the 
growth of prejudice. It may be shocking to some people in this country to 
realize that, without meaning to do so, they hold views in common with Hitler 
when they preach discrimination..." 
But even at this, Wallace noted, American fascists would have to lie to the 
people in order to gain power. And, because they were in bed with the 
nation's largest corporations - who could gain control of newspapers and 
broadcast media - they could promote their lies with ease. 

"The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate 
perversion of truth and fact," Wallace wrote. "Their newspapers and 
propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the 
common front against fascism. They use every opportunity to impugn 
democracy." 

In his strongest indictment of the tide of fascism the Vice President of the 
United States saw rising in America, he added, "They claim to be super-
patriots, but they would destroy every liberty guaranteed by the Constitution. 
They demand free enterprise, but are the spokesmen for monopoly and 
vested interest. Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is 
to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power 
of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal 
subjection." 

Finally, Wallace said, "The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many 
people. ... Democracy, to crush fascism internally, must...develop the ability 
to keep people fully employed and at the same time balance the budget. It 
must put human beings first and dollars second. It must appeal to reason and 
decency and not to violence and deceit. We must not tolerate oppressive 
government or industrial oligarchy in the form of monopolies and cartels." 

This liberal vision of an egalitarian America in which very large businesses 
and media monopolies are broken up under the 1881 Sherman Anti-Trust Act 
(which Reagan stopped enforcing, leading to the mergers & acquisitions 
frenzy that continues to this day) was the driving vision of the New Deal (and 
of "Trust Buster" Teddy Roosevelt a generation earlier). 

As Wallace's President, Franklin D. Roosevelt, said when he accepted his 
party's renomination in 1936 in Philadelphia, "...out of this modern civilization, 
economic royalists [have] carved new dynasties.... It was natural and perhaps 
human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting 
for power, reached out for control over government itself. They created a new 
despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction.... And as a result the 
average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man...." 

Speaking indirectly of the fascists that Wallace would directly name almost a 
decade later, Roosevelt brought the issue to its core: "These economic 
royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. 
What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power." 

But, he thundered in that speech, "Our allegiance to American institutions 
requires the overthrow of this kind of power!" 

In 2004, we again stand at the same crossroad Roosevelt and Wallace 
confronted during the Great Depression and World War II. Fascism is again 
rising in America, this time calling itself "compassionate conservatism." The 
RNC's behavior today eerily parallels the day in 1936 when Roosevelt said, 
"In vain they seek to hide behind the flag and the Constitution. In their 
blindness they forget what the flag and the Constitution stand for." 

It's particularly ironic that the CEOs and lobbyists who run the Republican 
National Committee would have chosen to put Hitler's fascist face into one of 
their campaign commercials, just before they launched a national campaign 
against gays and while they continue to arrest people who wear anti-Bush T-
shirts in public places. 

President Roosevelt and Vice President Wallace's warnings have come full 
circle. Which is why it's so critical that this November we join together at the 
ballot box to stop this most recent incarnation of feudal fascism from seizing 
complete control of our nation. 

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-
winning best-selling author and host of a nationally syndicated daily 
progressive talk radio show. www.thomhartmann.com. His most recent 
books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The 
Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," and "We The 
People: A Call To Take Back America." His new book, "What Would 
Jefferson Do?: A Return To Democracy," based on four years of research in 
Jefferson's personal letters, begins shipping this week from Random 
House/Harmony.

###
 



-- 
You are currently on Mha Atma's Earth Action network email list, option C (up 
to 1 email/day).  To be removed, or to switch options (option A - 1x/week, 
option B - 3/wk, option C - up to 1x/day, option D - up to 3x/day) please reply 
and let us know!  If someone forwarded you this email and you want to be on 
our list, send an email to ean at sbcglobal.net and tell us which option you'd 
like.


Action is the antidote to despair.  ----Joan Baez
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://www.islandlists.com/pipermail/mb-civic/attachments/20040719/039bf80e/attachment.html