Wednesday, January 6, 2010

The Doctrine of Fascism


Does any of this sound familiar to you?   I have written previously how the US is beginning to look  like Germany in 1938 but when compared to Fascist Movement of Mussolini from the mid 1920 until the early 1940’s the comparison takes on a whole new perspective.  Combining the two creates a very scary situation, which I believe is now occurring and has occurred over the last year. Take time to read the following and I believe you will be able to see the path that this country is being lead and pushed down.    

The Doctrine of Fascism
                                                       Benito Mussolini



THERE IS no concept of the State which is not fundamentally a concept of life: philosophy or intuition, a system of ideas which develops logically or is gathered up into a vision or into a faith, but which is always, at least virtually, an organic conception of the world.


1. Thus fascism could not be understood in many of its practical manifestations as a party organization, as a system of education, as a discipline, if it were not always looked at in the light of its whole way of conceiving life, a spiritualized way. The world seen through Fascism is not this material world which appears on the surface, in which man is an individual separated from all others and standing by himself, and in which he is governed by a natural law that makes him instinctively live a life of selfish and momentary pleasure. The man of Fascism is an individual who is nation and fatherland, which is a moral law, binding together individuals and the generations into a tradition and a mission, suppressing the instinct for a life enclosed within the brief round of pleasure in order to restore within duty a higher life free from the limits of time and space: a life in which the individual, through the denial of himself, through the sacrifice of his own private interests, through death itself, realizes that completely spiritual existence in which his value as a man lies.
...
3. Therefore it is a spiritualized conception, itself the result of the general reaction of modem times against the flabby materialistic positivism of the nineteenth century. Anti-positivistic, but positive: not skeptical, nor agnostic, nor pessimistic, nor passively optimistic, as arc, in general, the doctrines (all negative) that put the centric of life outside man, who with his free will can and must create his own world. Fascism desires an active man, one engaged in activity with all his energies: it desires a man virilely conscious of the difficulties that exist in action and ready to face them. It conceives of life as a struggle, considering that it behooves man to conquer for himself that life truly worthy of him, creating first of all in himself the instrument (physical, moral, intellectual) in order to construct it. Thus for the single individual, thus for the nation, thus for humanity. Hence the high value of culture in all its forms (art, religion, science), and the enormous importance of education. Hence also the essential value of work, with which man conquers nature and creates the human world (economic, political, moral, intellectual).
4. This positive conception of life is clearly an ethical conception. It covers the whole of reality, not merely the human activity which controls it. No action can be divorced from moral judgment; there is nothing in the world which can be deprived of the value which belongs to everything in its relation to moral ends. Life, therefore, as conceived by the Fascist, is serious, austere, religious: the whole of it is poised in a world supported by the moral and responsible forces of the spirit. The Fascist disdains the “comfortable” life.
5. Fascism is a religious conception in which man is seen in his immanent relationship with a superior law and with an objective Will that transcends the particular individual and raises him to conscious membership of a spiritual society. Whoever has seen in the religious politics of the Fascist regime nothing but mere opportunism has not understood that Fascism besides being a system of government is also, and above all, a system of thought.
6. Fascism is an historical conception in which man is what he is only in so far as he works with the spiritual process in which he finds himself, in the family or social group, in the nation and in the history in which all nations collaborate. From this follows the great value of tradition, in memories, in language, in customs, in the standards of social life. Outside history man is nothing. consequently Fascism is opposed to all the individualistic abstractions of a materialistic nature like those of the eighteenth century; and it is opposed to all Jacobin utopias and innovations. It does not consider that “happiness” is possible upon earth, as it appeared to be in the desire of the economic literature of the eighteenth century, and hence it rejects all teleological theories according to which mankind would reach a definitive stabilized condition at a certain period in history. This implies putting oneself outside history and life, which is a continual change and coming to be. Politically, Fascism wishes to be a realistic doctrine; practically, it aspires to solve only the problems which arise historically of themselves and that of themselves find or suggest their own solution. To act among men, as to act in the natural world, it is necessary to enter into the process of reality and to master the already operating forces.
7. Against individualism, the Fascist conception is for the State; and it is for the individual in so far as he coincides with the State, which is the conscience and universal will of man in his historical existence. It is opposed to classical Liberalism, [ Please note that the reference here is classic Liberalism which is not the Liberalism of today. It refers more to the Libertarian form of Liberalism rather than the Progressive Liberalism of today] which arose from the necessity of reacting against absolutism, and which brought its historical purpose to an end when the State was transformed into the conscience and will of the people. Liberalism denied the State in the interests of the particular individual; Fascism reaffirms the State as the true reality of the individual. And if liberty is to be the attribute of the real man, and not of that abstract puppet envisaged by individualistic Liberalism, Fascism is for liberty. And for the only liberty which can be a real thing, the liberty of the State and of the individual within the State. Therefore, for the Fascist, everything is in the State, and nothing human or spiritual exists, much less has value,-outside the State. In this sense Fascism is totalitarian, and the Fascist State, the synthesis and unity of all values, interprets, develops and gives strength to the whole life of the people.
8. Outside the State there can be neither individuals nor groups (political parties, associations, syndicates, classes). Therefore Fascism is opposed to Socialism, which confines the movement of history within the class struggle and ignores the unity of classes established in one economic and moral reality in the State; . . .
9. Individuals form classes according to the similarity of their interests, they form syndicates according to differentiated economic activities within these interests; but they form first, and above all, the State, which is not to be thought of numerically as the sum-total of individuals forming the majority of a nation. And consequently Fascism is opposed to Democracy, which equates the nation to the majority, lowering it to the level of that majority; nevertheless it is the purest form of democracy if the nation is conceived, as it should be, qualitatively and not quantitatively, as the most powerful idea (most powerful because most moral, most coherent, most true) which acts within the nation as the conscience and the will of a few, even of One, which ideal tends to become active within the conscience and the will of all — that is to say, of all those who rightly constitute a nation by reason of nature, history or race, and have set out upon the same line of development and spiritual formation as one conscience and one sole will. Not a race, nor a geographically determined region, but as a community historically perpetuating itself a multitude unified by a single idea, which is the will to existence and to power: consciousness of itself, personality.
10. This higher personality is truly the nation in so far as it is the State. It is not the nation that generates the State, as according to the old naturalistic concept which served as the basis of the political theories of the national States of the nineteenth century. Rather the nation is created by the State, which gives to the people, conscious of its own moral unity, a will and therefore an effective existence. The right of a nation to independence derives not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own being, still less from a more or less unconscious and inert acceptance of a de facto situation, but from an active consciousness, from a political will in action and ready to demonstrate its own rights: that is to say, from a state already coming into being. The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right.
1 l. The nation as the State is an ethical reality which exists and lives in so far as it develops. To arrest its development is to kill it. Therefore the State is not only the authority which governs and gives the form of laws and the value of spiritual life to the wills of individuals, but it is also a power that makes its will felt abroad, making it known and respected, in other words demonstrating the fact of its universality in all the necessary directions of its development. It is consequently organization and expansion, at least virtually. Thus it can be likened to the human will which knows no limits to its development and realizes itself in testing its own limitlessness.
12. The Fascist State, the highest and most powerful form of personality, is a force, but a spiritual force, which takes over all the forms of the moral and intellectual life of man. It cannot therefore confine itself simply to the functions of order and supervision as Liberalism desired. It is not simply a mechanism which limits the sphere of the supposed liberties of the individual. It is the form, the inner standard and the discipline of the whole person; it saturates the will as well as the intelligence. Its principle, the central inspiration of the human personality living in the civil community, pierces into the depths and makes its home in the heart of the man of action as well as of the thinker, of the artist as well as of the scientist: it is the soul of the soul.
13. Fascism, in short, is not only the giver of laws and the founder of institutions, but the educator and promoter of spiritual life. It wants to remake, not the forms of human life, but its content, man, character, faith. And to this end it requires discipline and authority that can enter into the spirits of men and there govern unopposed. Its sign, therefore, is the Lictors’ rods, the symbol of unity, of strength and justice.

The following statement is embedded in a speech delivered by Mussolini at Naples, October 24, 1912:

WE HAVE created our myth. The myth is a faith, it is passion. It is not necessary that it shall be a reality. It is a reality by the fact that it is a good, a hope, a faith, that it is courage. Our myth is the Nation, our myth is the greatness of the Nation! And to this myth, to this grandeur, that we wish to translate into a complete reality, we subordinate all the rest.




 The following is added as a further explanation of Fascism and as a further  explanation of what is occurring in this country today.



Fascists advocate the creation of a single party state with the belief that the majority is unsuited to govern itself through democracy and by reaffirming the benefits of inequality. Fascist governments forbid and suppress openness and opposition to the fascist state and the fascist movement.



Fascism is a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion.

Fascist movements advocate the creation of an authoritarian, autocratic single-party state led by a charismatic dictator




Fascist states pursued policies of social indoctrination, through propaganda in education and the media, and through regulation of the production of education and media material. Education was designed to glorify the fascist movement and inform students of its historical and political importance to the nation. It attempted to purge ideas that were not consistent with the beliefs of the fascist movement, and taught students to be obedient to the state.



Fascists advocated a new national class-based economic system, variously termed "national corporatism", "national socialism" or "national syndicalism". The common aim of all fascist movements was elimination of the autonomy or the existence of large-scale capitalism.



Fascist governments exercised control over private property but did not nationalize it. They pursued economic policies to strengthen state power and spread ideology, such as consolidating trade unions to be state or party-controlled. They pursued economic policies to strengthen state power and spread ideology, such as consolidating trade unions to be state or party controlled. Private property rights were supported, but were contingent upon service to the state. For example, "an owner of agricultural land may be compelled to raise wheat instead of sheep and employ more labor than he would find profitable. "State intervention in economic production may take place only where private initiative is lacking or is insufficient, or when are at stakes the political interest of the State. This intervention may take the form of control, encouragement or direct management."




Fascists declared their opposition to finance capitalism, interest charging and profit taking. Fascist governments nationalized some key industries, managed their currencies and made some massive state investments



The people who supposedly benefited from Italian fascist social policies were members of the middle and lower middle classes, who filled jobs in the vastly expanding government workforce, which grew to about a million in 1930. Health and welfare spending grew dramatically under Italian fascism, with welfare rising from seven percent of the budget in 1930 to 20% in 1940.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

Familiar, you betcha. Scary, hell yeah ! Get out the vote in 2010 and don't lose the energy.

Fred G.

Anonymous said...

From Neo-Neocon

{Every now and then I may post an excerpt from Milton Mayer’s They Thought They Were Free. The book, first published in 1955, is an exploration of Germans’ attitudes in the period leading up to WWII and including the war and its immediate aftermath. It features interviews with ten “typical” Germans, conducted a couple of years after the war’s end, and offers extraordinary and often relevant insights into how it was that Hitler came to power and stayed there so long. Here is my general discussion of the book and its author, who was a man of the left. To understand the following excerpt, it is helpful to know that for the purposes of the book, Mayer refers to the ten interviewees as his “friends.” ]

"National Socialism was a repulsion of my friends against parliamentary politics, parliamentary debate, parliamentary government—against all the higgling and the haggling of the parties and the splinter parties, their coalitions, their confusions, and their conniving. It was the final fruit of the common man’s repudiation of “the rascals.” Its motif was “throw them all out.” My friends, in the 1920’s, were like spectators at a wrestling match who suspect that beneath all the grunts and groans, the struggle and the sweat, the match is “fixed,” that the performers are only pretending to put on a fight. The scandals that rocked the country, as one party or cabal “exposed” another, dismayed and then disgusted my friends…

While the ship of the German State was being shivered, the officers, who alone had life preservers, disputed their prerogatives on the bridge. My friends observed that none of the non-Communist, non-Nazi leaders objected to the 35,000 Reichsmark salaries of the cabinet ministers, only the Communists and the Nazis objected. And the bitterest single disappointment of Nazism…was the fact that Hitler had promised that no official would get more than 1,000 Reichsmarks a month and did not keep his promise.

My friends wanted Germany purified. They wanted it purified of the politicians, of all the politicians. They wanted a representative leader in place of unrepresentative representatives. And Hitler, the pure man, the antipolitician, was the man, untainted by “politics,” which was only a cloak for corruption…Against “the whole pack,” “the whole kaboodle,” “the whole business,” against all the parliamentary parties, my friends evoked Hitlerism, and Hitlerism overthrew them all…

This was the Bewegung, the movement, that restored my friends and bewitched them. Those Germans who saw it all at the beginning—there were not very many; there never are, I suppose, anywhere—called Hitler the Rattenfänger, the “ratcatcher.” Every American child has read The Pied-Piper of Hamlin. Every German child has read it, too. In German its title is Der Rattenfänger von Hameln "

Fred G.

Independent Cuss said...

Ticker,

If "the common aim of all fascist movements was the elimination of the autonomy or the existence of large-scale capitalism", then this bunch sure has a funny way of accomplishing that goal. Forcing the American people to subsidize the health insurance industry under penalty of law certainly doesn't seem calculated to head us in the direction of eliminating it -- quite the opposite.

That point aside, I have contended since I was in high school that the educational system was geared toward teaching all American young'uns to happily live in a police state an not to ask too many questions.

And see what we now accept: pee into this cup or you can't have this job; empty your pockets or you can't enter this courthouse upon which you pay the upkeep; submit to a background check or you can't own this gun; take off your shoes (and disrobe if we insist) or you can't board this airplane; pay your Socialist Security "for the good of all" or face foreclosure and/or imprisonment.

Call it fascism, socialism, communism or what you will; the aspect which no one seems to wish to face is that sometimes it even masquerades as capitalism. No matter the name(s) you choose give to it, it is already here and ever-present in our daily lives. The only way to avoid it (to some degree) is to become a hermit such as I am.

And, of course, to fight like hell against it when the opportunity presents itself.

Jeff Dreibus

Brenda Bowers said...

Americans 30 to 50 are beginning to see what is happening in greater and greater numbers, and this will be the group who will save us if our nation is saved. There are a few of us older folks who see the problem, but I am ashamed to admit that most of the elderly are in the fray only because they don't want to lose their government dole (Medicare and Social Security). They will accept anything and support anyone who claims to be protecting their welfare for the elderly. They are only against this health care monster because Medicare is being attacked.

Those "20 somethings" are still in the dark and of course were the ones who came out and voted for Obama. But after voting him in office they lost interest and did not heed his call during the townhalls to come out and fight for him. This is where he and his conrades miscalculated because they thought they had this huge army that they could call out because they had them for a few months in the fall of 2008. Even the Black thugs who helped in the elections have gone back to fighting each other and destroying their own people in the state supported welfare slums. They are not about to support Obamanation because they don't see anything in it for them.

But the young adults both Black and White from 30 to 50-ish are beginning to stir and are reading and listening and seeing what is happening. They just aren't yet sure what to do and I believe are putting too much store in the elections this November. By that time a whole lot of irreparable damage will have been done! BB

Ticker said...

Jeff,
The point of seemingly subsidizing the health industry is just another step in the total take over.

This explains just what I said:

"State intervention in economic production may take place only where private initiative is lacking or is insufficient, or when are at stakes the political interest of the State. This intervention may take the form of control, encouragement or direct management."

Once set into place with insurance companies receiving so called subsidies and government favor they will soon say, "it not working properly" and blam, no more free enterprise and the government controls the total system.
And you think it's bad now? Just wait.

Ticker said...
This comment has been removed by the author.