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.

Health Care Crisis or Culture Crisis

I received this in an e-mail sometime earlier today. It sums up the situation on health care in a very few short sentences. Perhaps a few folks in Washington need to start looking at things in the same light rather than how many votes they can buy.

Friends & Associates,

Please meet Dr Starner Jones from Jackson , Mississippi .

His short 2-paragraph letter to the White House accurately puts the blame on a "Culture Crisis" instead of a "Health Care Crisis". It's worth a quick read:




I am a seventh generation Mississippian and wanted to come back here after going somewhere else for college and medical school. My extracurricular interests are golf, hunting, fishing and college football.

Dear Sirs:

"During my last night's shift in the ER, I had the pleasure of evaluating a patient with an expensive shiny gold tooth, multiple elaborate expensive tattoos, a very expensive brand of tennis shoes and a new cellular telephone equipped with her favorite R&B tune for a ringtone. Glancing over the chart, one could not help noticing her payer status: Medicaid. She smokes more than one costly pack of cigarettes every day and, somehow, still has money to buy beer.

And our Congress expects me to pay for this woman's health care? Our nation's health care crisis is not a shortage of quality hospitals, doctors or nurses. It is a crisis of culture - a culture in which it is perfectly acceptable to spend money on vices while refusing to take care of one's self or, heaven forbid, purchase health insurance. A culture that thinks "I can do whatever I want because someone else will always take care of me." Life is really not that hard. Most of us reap what we sow. Don't you agree?

STARNER JONES, MD
Jackson, MS

2009, It's About Gone

If this looks a bit familiar it should because it is very similar to the post I wrote last year with the exception of a few changes here and there, such as the dates and some of the things that I predicted would happen that actually happened.  No, that doesn’t make me a Nostradamus or a prophet of any sort.  It just makes me someone who happened to be paying attention.

Last year I wrote about a couple of foolish folks who were going to do some rather stupid things such as jump a truck over a sand pile and another who risk becoming a scrambled brain omelet on the side of a building by jumping a motorcycle to the top of a building.  They both made it since there was no notice of anyone dying needlessly just to achieve a few seconds of fame and I also see that the poor misguided person who drove the truck over the sand pile is now part of the “team” of reporters who will report of another young misguided individual who plans on driving a car up a ramp and jumping it over some kind of body of water to another ramp and barge anchored a daring distance away.  At least he will only risk getting wet if he fails or at worst drowning if he fails and can’t get out of the car. Of course hopefully there are divers ready to rescue him should that occur. 

Just as last year, I have no desire to watch some one drop the ball from Times Square in New York since I have spent the last year watching a bunch of folks drop the ball over and over again in Washington DC.  It certainly has not created any excitement for me to watch these folks drop the ball and attempt to pick it up again and explain just why it ain’t bouncing they way they predicted it would.  I am afraid they are going to continue having difficulty explaining why things are not all well as they predicted. Of course I expect to hear the same story I heard last year and the year before, it was someone else’s fault.  No folks, this time you dropped the ball and no one else is to blame and you still haven’t figured out how to pick up the ball and start over again.  You are just going to continue dropping the ball over and over, it seems until it is busted, flat busted.  Sure nothing exciting about watching “the ball get dropped”.  I am sure that I watched that occurrence in Times Square for at least fifty years but for the life of me I still can’t figure out what was so exciting about it. 

I heard a few fireworks going off in early celebration just a few minutes ago and went to the door to see where they might be coming from and all I got was a surprise of seeing more snow. Yep, folks, it snowed again tonight in North Texas and may snow a bit more since the temperature is only 34 degrees and is expected to drop. It has not cleared as forecast so that we could see what was mistakenly called the “Blue Moon”.   I wonder how the Left Reverend Al and all his converts are feeling about this “global warming”, errr, excuse me, it’s climate change, since global warming doesn’t seem to be occurring but just the same all this cold and snow here in Texas and the rest of the country is being blamed on this fiasco.  I believe Al attempted to blame Bush for the snow just the other day but I still haven’t figured out how Bush managed to make it snow when they claimed he couldn’t do anything else right. Besides, being from Texas, he doesn’t like snow any more than I do, or at least I figure he doesn’t.  I haven’t met too awful many folks here in this neck of the woods who do like snow but we don’t usually complain much about it since it is all melted before noon the following day.

I wrote last year about the local water department needing to move into into the 21^st century and making it so I can pay my water bill on line. They haven’t managed to do that so I will once again have to remember to change the date on the one lone check I write each month. It took me about three months to remember to write 2009 last year. Hopefully I can do better this year, 2010.  Perhaps that should be a New Year’s Resolution for me but then I don’t make those useless things either since I can’t remember ever keeping any of them and don’t know a lot of folks who get around to doing what they so fervently swore to do as the ball was dropping in Times Square.  Opinion wise and from observation most of the folks who made those resolutions didn’t remember where they were much less what they pledged to do on New Years Eve.  About all many of those folks will remember is that on January 1 they had one heck of a headache and a few of them will remember hugging “john” for a better part of the night.  From what I have been told “john” is a very cold and unyielding “lover”.

I do happen to have about three quarters of a bottle of “Wassail” which I opened Christmas Eve and the three of us, the wife , our son and myself, shared about two ounces each of this warm, spicy wine. According to the book which came with the bottle that we purchased two years ago at a winery in Fredericksburg, Texas  the sharing of a small cup of this wine is a tradition from the Old Country during the celebration of Christmas.  I re-corked the remainder and carefully placed it back into the refrigerator until next year.  It had a pleasing flavor but none of us really cared enough for it to have more than the one small cup and the wife and I will not be opening it tonight in order to celebrate the New Year . Our celebration will be because we are alive and able to enjoy each others company for another wonderful day.  Of course that is not exactly a new thing with us since that is something we do each and every day.  We can say with certainty that we have been truly blessed this past year despite some illness at our house and the death of some very good friends.  I don’t reckon one could ask for much more than the blessings that have been poured out on us this past year. I bet if you look back you will find that to be true in your life as well and the blessings have far outnumbered the lesser times.

Folks, that is about all that is happening here in Corinth, Texas at 11:53 PM on this New Year’s Eve, 2009.   We will both take the opportunity to wish each of you,  the regular readers of the blog , the friends which we have known for years or those of you who just happened to drop by and read this post, a very Happy and Blessed New Year.