Date: 7/15/2004 1:59:56 AM Pacific Standard Time
From: Trimtantre
To: H-ITAM@h-net.msu.edu

Associate Prof. Pugliese

You apparently are still digesting my First message.
Here is the Second, that I had promised.

Allow me to Address your Second point:
YOU SAID: To say that "his Social Security program was copied by FDR" is a simplification that would earn an undergraduate a firm rebuke, and at minimum a "D".

Benito Mussolini... was widely touted in the popular press as a "black-shirted Garibaldi." The fascisti were compared to the Old West's vigilantes. Even Nation magazine ran an article during the 1932 Presidential campaign entitled, "Wanted: A Mussolini."

This adulation of the "new Columbus" extended through the early thirties. Delegation after delegation went for an audience with the Duce, coming away impressed with his energy, candor, and apparent ability to reshape the Italian character (which Americans were sure needed reshaping). President Roosevelt sent several new cabinet members to learn from Mussolini's social programs, including government support for the arts and SOCIAL SECURITY. (Emphasis Added)

To Italian Americans, this added fuel to their already inflamed hopes: Mussolini was helping them gain the respect of America and other Americans they had always lacked. When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, respect changed....

Prelude to War: Una Storia Segreta
http://hcom.csumb.edu/segreta/prelude.html

FDR, Reagan and Mussolini
Memo To: Bob Novak and David Corn
From: Jude Wanniski
October 5,1999

JUDE WANNISKI. As an associate editor of The Wall Street Journal from 1972 to 1978, repopularized the classical theories of supply-side economics. ...

...Franklin Roosevelt admired Mussolini and fascism... As a matter of fact, when FDR was inaugurated in March 1933, most of the world was agog over Mussolini’s success in avoiding the Great Depression that gripped the rest of the world.

As I wrote in my 1977 book, The Way the World Works, Roosevelt and his "Brains Trust," the architects of the New Deal, were fascinated by the concept of Italy’s "fascism," a term which was not pejorative at the time. It simply meant a form of economic nationalism built around consensus planning by the established elites in government, business and labor.

FDR’s intellectual team included three academics, Raymond Moley, Rexford Tugwell and Adolph Berle, plus Henry Morganthau, his Treasury Secretary. They, like everyone else in the world, had assumed the Depression had been brought on by the failure of the free market in the 1929 Wall Street Crash.

If the free market did not work, then wise men had to step in to manage the national economy. As I put it in my book (p.154): "The idea was to use the central government both to promote economic growth through regulation of business and to assure balanced growth between industrial and agricultural sectors. This meant a reallocation of resources away from the direction they would normally flow in a free market, either by government direction, government partnership with business and labor (in syndicates, which is why the process is sometimes called syndicalism), or taxation and spending.

The Brains Trust was impressed not only by the experiment in central government direction, but in 1933 there was a general interest in Washington and other world capitals in what Mussolini had accomplished in Italy."

You can find all this and more in Elliot Rosen’s 1977 book, Hoover, Roosevelt and the Brains Trust, ... both Roosevelt and Hitler were (impressed by) Mussolini's "corporatism"...

Reagan, FDR and Mussolini -- October 5, 1999
http://www.polyconomics.com/searchbase/10-05-99.html

During the 1920s and early 1930s, major publications like Fortune, the Wall Street Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as the man who rescued Italy from anarchy and radicalism.

They spun rhapsodic fantasies of a resurrected Italy where poverty and exploitation had suddenly disappeared, where Reds had been vanquished, harmony reigned, and Blackshirts protected a "new democracy."

Blackshirts and Reds Parenti
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/
Parenti/BlackshirtsReds_Parenti.html

When Franklin Roosevelt assumed the presidency in 1933, Americans expected him to fulfill certain promises that he had made during the presidential campaign: balance the budget; lower taxes; reduce government spending; downsize government; and keep the U.S. out of foreign wars.

Americans were in for a surprise. Roosevelt not only broke all of his promises, he also engaged in the most radical restructuring of society in American history...

>From the day he assumed the presidency, Roosevelt told the American people that what mattered was not the sovereignty of the individual, but rather the sovereignty of the nation — society — the collective. He said that whenever the freedom of the individual collided with the interests of society, as expressed through the government, the individual's interests would have to be sacrificed....

[The State is Superior....hmmm. Sounds a lot like Mussolini]

How did FDR sell this new order of things to the American people? He said that the stock market crash of 1929 proved the failure of America's free-enterprise system. What was needed, Roosevelt said, was massive government intervention into people's economic affairs in order to save free enterprise.

...FDR approached Congress and asked to be given virtually unlimited powers to deal with the economic emergency. Give me the power to rule by decree, Roosevelt said, because I know the way out of this crisis. And Congress gave him what he requested.

What was Roosevelt's plan for America? Contrary to the campaign promises he had made, he embarked on a massive program of governmental borrowing; government spending; public works (including road construction); tax hikes; military spending; welfare; economic regulation; and a national youth corps.... [Sounds like its straight out of the Fascist Manifesto]

There were two obstacles to Roosevelt's plans: the Constitution and the U.S. Supreme Court....The court declared the NRA and several other New Deal programs unconstitutional.

Roosevelt was outraged. How can "nine old men" interfere with my power... He came up with a plan to pack the court... FDR's court-packing scheme failed. However, as a result of the pressure he had put on the court, one justice changed his vote ("the switch in time that saved nine"), enabling Roosevelt to win the judicial war.

>From 1937 on, the court took the position that government had omnipotent powers over the wealth and economic activity of the American people.

Ironically, in 1933, another man assumed high political office, and it is instructive to review his philosophy and programs. Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany when that nation, too, was suffering from the Depression. The Germans actually had it worse — they were still suffering the effects of World War I. Their industrial base had been shattered; thousands of young men had been killed; they were still paying reparations; their country had been split in two (the Polish Corridor separated East Prussia from the rest of Germany); and there was communist agitation.

Hitler immediately approached the Reichstag and said: Give me the power to rule by decree; I know the way out of this crisis. The Reichstag granted Hitler his wish. And when German President von Hindenberg died, the Reichstag granted Hitler's request to combine the offices of president and chancellor into one. Hitler had secured even more power than Roosevelt to address the German economic emergency. What did he do? He embarked on a massive program of governmental borrowing; government spending; public works (including road construction, e.g., the Auto-bahn); tax hikes; military spending; welfare; economic regulation; and a national youth corps.

Hitler's philosophy was encapsulated in the Nazi Party platform: "The activities of the individual must not be allowed to clash with the interests of the community, but must take place within its confines and be for the good of all." Any German who objected to Hitler's plan was immediately threatened with persecution and prosecution.

If you detect a similarity between the economic philosophy and programs of Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler, then it will not surprise you to know that Hitler sent the following letter to U.S. Ambassador Thomas Dodd on March 14, 1934: The Reich chancellor requests Mr. Dodd to present his greetings to President Roosevelt. He congratulates the president upon his heroic effort in the interest of the American people. The president's successful struggle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German people with interest and admiration. The Reich chancellor is in accord with the president that the virtues of sense of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline must be the supreme rule of the whole nation. This moral demand, which the president is addressing to every single citizen, is only the quintessence of German philosophy of the state, expressed in the motto "The public weal before the private gain."

John Toland observes in his biography Adolf Hitler (1976): Hitler had genuine admiration for the decisive manner in which the President had taken over the reins of government. "I have sympathy for Mr. Roosevelt," he told a correspondent for the New York Times two months later, "because he marches straight toward his objectives over Congress, lobbies and bureaucracy." Hitler went on to note that he was the sole leader in Europe who expressed "understanding of the methods and motives of President Roosevelt."

And Hitler was not Roosevelt's only admirer. Benito Mussolini had led Italy into fascism, an economic philosophy that called for government control over economic activity, including government-business partnerships. Mussolini said that he admired FDR because he was, as Mussolini, a "social fascist."

Of course, Hitler had his admirers too. Toland points out: [Winston] Churchill had once paid a grudging compliment to the Führer in a letter to the Times : "I have always said that I hoped if Great Britain were beaten in a war we should find a Hitler who would lead us back to our rightful place among nations."

Toland points out that the American economist John Kenneth Galbraith would later write: Hitler also anticipated modern economic policy . . . by recognizing that a rapid approach to full employment was only possible if it was combined with wage and price controls. That a nation oppressed by economic fear would respond to Hitler as Americans did to F.D.R. is not surprising.

It was this similarity between communism, socialism, fascism, welfare statism, and New Dealism that caused Friedrich Hayek, who would later win the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science, to warn the West that it was following the same collectivist, statist road as the Nazis, socialists, fascists, and communists. Hayek's famous book, The Road to Serfdom (1944), angered Americans — they did not like hearing what Hayek said to them....

Repatriation -- The Dark Side of World War II, Part 5
http://www.fff.org/freedom/0795a.asp

The Role of Facism was NOT Totalitarian, but just as with Democracy and Marxism, it was to advance the welfare of their people by becoming responsible for the economic well-being of their citizens, as explained below.

THE EVOLUTION OF STATES with EMPHASIS on the NATION STATE

...The nation state arose after the Civil War in the United States, and in Europe at the end of World War I with the destruction of the 19th century empires. The role of these new nation states was to advance the welfare of their people by becoming responsible for the economic well-being of their citizens.

The Theory of the Modern State

The ongoing development and evolution of the modern state, as presented by Philip Bobbitt, can be traced through the following stages:

1) The Princely States (1494 - 1648)
The princely states, that evolved in Italy during the Renaissance, replaced the previous feudal lords by offering citizens the first significance territorial protection and security in return for granting individual princes territorial power. Under these arrangements, princes hired mercenaries to protected their territories and the trade routes that ran through them. In return, the princes collected taxes and normalized daily commerce and relations within their domains.

2) The Kingly States (1648 - 1776)
The kingly states emerged under the concept of the divine, God-given right to rule enjoyed by kings. During this era, the state continued to fulfill its responsibility to provide security, albeit for greater territorial areas, through the creation of armies and navies. In return, the subjects of the regime enjoyed a kind of participation in the king’s divine status and the glory of his dynasty.

3) The State-Nation (1776 - 1914)
During the late 18th century, a new order arose under the ideas of freedom and democracy that united a population around a common participation in a national, ethno-cultural identity. During this era, we see the rise of imperialism, and the expansion and exploitation of national identity.

4) The Nation State (1914 - 1991)
Toward the turn of the 19th century, the nation state emerged to benefit the people it governed by providing for the economic welfare of it citizens. During this era, communism, parliamentarianism, and   fascism, competed to provide the greatest welfare to its citizenry.

5) The Market State (1991 - )
Emerging during the 1990s in the U.S. and Western Europe with the global economy, the market state exists to maximize the opportunity for people to advance themselves and to ensure the existence of the market structures that provide for wealth and social prosperity.

During the 20th century, three primary models of nation statehood vied to better the material well-being of their people.

The fascist model, adopted by Germany and Italy, under the leadership of Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini.
The communist model, advanced in the Soviet Union by Valdimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin.
And the parliamentarian-capitalistic model adopted and advanced by the U.S. and the U.K. under the leadership of Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill.

World War II, and the subsequent “cold war” era, provided the stage upon which each theory of nation statehood advanced its claims until it became clear that the greatest true welfare for the greatest number was provided through individual freedom, democracy, parliamentary-representational government, and a capitalistic economy.

In the United States, the nation state pursued the material wealth of its citizens by maximizing the opportunities for individual advancement and by ensuring a fair distribution of the emerging wealth.

During this time, business and government worked hand-in-glove to accomplish this work through the government regulation of markets and the operation of social welfare programs.

Toward the end of the era of the nation state, in the U.S. it became increasingly clear that markets provided the most effective way to run an economy, and thus the incentives and dynamics of the marketplace increasingly replaced regulation and governmental social programs.

Today, under the emerging market state, the state finds its legitimacy in fostering the free enterprise and free markets necessary to increase the aggregate wealth of the citizenry, in continuing to maximize opportunities for individual advancement, in encouraging the growth of public-private partnerships, and in devolving the welfare state....

KLM, Inc. Strategic Chronicle Spring 2004 p2
http://www.klminc.com/strategic_chron/
spring2004/stratchronsp04b.html

Please be patient with me, and allow me to submit this additional article more relative to my previous Message re Marxism equating to Fascism.

KIMBELL Quotes Muravchik Equating of MARXISM and FASCISM

Muravchik's... Heaven on Earth in large part, is given over to the rise and eventual foundering of what we might call “soft socialism.” ~M patiently details the experiments of utopians...

Perhaps his most illuminating pages are devoted to the careers of Mussolini and of Engels. We tend to think of fascism as the antithesis of socialism or Marxism.

But as ~M reminds us, there are in fact deep continuities between them. Mussolini began as a disciple of Lenin and did not so much repudiate Marxism-Leninism as become a self-declared “heretic.” Thus one of Mussolini’s groups of thugs called itself the Cheka, after Lenin’s secret police. As ~M observes,

“However fierce they grew in their antipathy to communism, the fascists never ceased mimicking it, implicitly underscoring their claim to be the true or superior heirs to the same legacy.” (Something similar can be said of Hitler, whose party, after all, was called National Socialism. It is true that Hitler was adamantly anti-Communist; at the same time, he acknowledged that he had “learned a great deal from Marxism.”)...

~M’s argument has two aspects. Like many other disabused commentators, he presents a sobering chronicle of socialism’s delusions and crimes. He reminds us—if we still need reminding—of the central role that the “annihilation … of reactionary races” (Marx), the “extermination” of enemies (Lenin) has always played in “really existing” Marxism....

The Death of Socialism by Roger Kimball
http://www.newcriterion.com/archive/20/apr02/social.htm

On reviewing this material would you be kind enough to reconsider the previous rebuke, and the  "D"? :)

Respectfully,
Richard Annotico