The Left (both in the USA and Europe) has always portrayed the Right as neo Fascists, who if they have a chance will take away our freedoms. This is false. In this essay, I shall prove that Fascism is really a leftist phenomena. The danger of dictatorship comes from the Left, not the Right.
Firstly, what is Fascism? Most people can't define it. They assume its some right wing ideology which they associate with Mussolini and Hitler. Its true that Mussolini was the Father of Fascism. So we should start by examining him and his policies to see if he was a creature of the Left or Right.
Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named by his Socialist father, Alessandro Mussolini, after Benito Juarez, the Mexican revolutionary who toppled and executed the emperor Maximilian. The other two names were inspired by then Socialist icons, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa. Alessandro was a member of the First International along with Marx and Engel and read passages from Das Kapital to the young Benito Mussolini.
When he grew up, the young Benito became the editor of "La Lotta di classe" (Class War). He belonged to the extreme wing of the Italian Socialist Party. When the First World War broke in 1914, he at first hewed to the Partly Line.That is to say he was anti-nationalist (like the anti-American radical left in America today) and opposed the war. (That, by the way, was why Barrack Obama initially refused to wear an American flag pin lapel or swear allegiance to the USA.)
In this picture, I believe that Obama was signalling to America's Socialists that his loyalty was not to the USA but to the Socialist struggle. Anti-patriotism has deep Socialist roots.
War was a matter for the bourgeois and need not involve the working class. Only a class war was acceptable to him.
But that did not last long, given his opportunistic nature. He saw that the majority of Italians were patriotic and supported the war effort. Soon, he broke with his Socialist comrades and supported the war too. For this sin, he was expelled from the Socialist Party. But he regarded himself as a Socialist albeit a Nationalistic Socialist (like Hitler) till his last breath.
After he was kicked out of the Socialist Party, Mussolini said, "Socialism is in my blood."
He added, "You think you can turn me out, but you will find I shall come back again. I am and shall remain a Socialist and my convictions will never change! They are bred into my very bones."
Realising that the idea of an international "working class" cannot trump the call of nationalism, Mussolini and his comrades founded the Fasci di Combattimento (the Fascist Party) in 1919 based on the fusion of nationalism and Socialism.
The word Fasci itself betrays Mussonlini's leftist or Socialist leanings. Fasci means union or bundle. The simple idea was that just as one stick can be broken but a bundle of sticks cannot, workers must unite themselves into an unbreakable union. The difference between his party and his old comrades was that his Fascist Party consists of pro-war leftists whearas his old comrades believe that the only war worth participating in was the class war. See the book, "Liberal Fascism" by Jonah Goldberg.
His party platform included calls for a minimum wage, an eight hour work day, government bodies run by workers' representatives, appropriation of land from land-owners (except those personally cultivated by them) and giving them to workers' co-operatives, a large tax on capital amounting to a partial confiscation of wealth. Naturally, as a leftist, Mussolini was opposed to Christianity just as leftist parties are today. His program also called for the establishment of "rigidly secular schools" for the raising of "the proletariat's moral and cultural condition."
It also calls for the seizure of goods belonging to religious congregations and the abolition of episcopal revenues. Thus in spirit, if not in actual details, his program is similar to most leftist parties in the west today, including the Democratic Party of the USA.
Hitler too was a creature of the Left. After all, the Nazi Party was officially known as the German Workers' National Socialist Party. I will not elaborate further since I have written in detail about Hitler's Socialism in an earlier essay, "Why are the worst mass murderers from the Left." But that's enough for the history lesson.
The purpose of this essay is to explain why the danger of dictatorships come more from the Left than the Right and why Leftist dictatorships kill more people and last longer than Rightist ones.
Rightist dictators like Pinochet or Chiang Kai Shek allowed and encouraged free market capitalism. This means vast portions of the economy are in private hands. The dictator does not have absolute control over the country. If he does dumb thigs, private businesman can take his money elsewhere. The feedback to any wrong move is immediate.
That is why right wing dictators kill less people. A dictator of a free market economy does not have as much power as a Socialist dictator. He needs the co-operation of private enterprise to keep his country prosperous. Free market policies create wealth. With growing wealth comes demands for political freedom. Thus free markets always lead to political freedom. Today, Chile and Taiwan are democracies. But Cuba and N Korea are not.
On the other hand, Hitler, Stalin, Kim Jong Il, Pol Pot and Castro killed more people simply because they had or in the case of Kim still has total control of the country. In a Socialist dictatorship, the entire economy was controlled by one man. Once in place, such a dictatorship can last a long time. Witness Castro's hold on power.
In Hitler's case, he did not abolish private property nor did he wipe out the capitalist class like the other Leftist dictators did. Instead he co-opted them. But as I explained in the earlier essay, the substance of ownership was passed to the state. The government controlled nearly every aspect of the production of goods and services in the economy. It sets price controls, told the nominal "owners" of businesses how many workers to employ and how much to pay them and what price to sell their goods.
This was in fact what happened to a lesser extent during the Roosevelt years in the USA. He made laws telling people how many hours they can work, what to charge for their goods and services. Gone was the idea of letting the free market decide such things. One man, Jacob Maged ran foul of such a law and was jailed for three months.
Jacob charged 35 cents for pressing a suit instead of 40 cents as decided by one of Roosevelt's bureaucrats. It was not much different from what Hitler and Mussolini did. Its basically state control of nearly everything and Americans lost some of their economic freedom. The goal of Roosevelt's New Deal was to drive prices up by deliberately creating scarcity which was stupid economic policy. Bountiful crops were burnt, pigs were slaughtered and farmers were paid to leave their fields empty. That was why the Depression lasted so long.
In fact, Roosevelt's administration got many of his ideas from Mussonlini, a fact acknowledged by former Democrat and New Dealer, Ronald Reagan. Reagan said in 1976, "Fascism was really the basis for the New Deal."
While Fascists did not obliterate the capitalist class like what Stalin did, they co-opted them. Their idea was that labour and management work together for national goals that they set. The tendency of that is that big business gets bigger. Laws will be passed that only the bigger companies can afford to comply. Smaller companies will find it too costly to comply. Small companies go under as a result.
The political leaders will favor this as it is easier to deal with a smaller group of large companies than with thousands of smaller companies. Big business will favor the arrangement because they have less competition. The collusion between big business and big government will create a marriage of convenience that will not benefit the small guy.
It is ironical that western Socialists claim to be the friend of the little guy. But their Socialist policies of government intervention gives rise to larger companies and the decimation of the smaller ones. In the end, big business and big government will co-opt each other.
The businessman is like a bee-hive. If you leave them alone, they will leave you alone. But if you throw a stone at a bee-hive, they are going to swarm over you. Bill Gates did not bother with Washington till Washington bothered him. The votreprenuers thought that breaking up a large company might make them more popular. They claimed that Gates' company, Microsoft was being unfair to the competition. Soon an army of lobbyists hired by Gates swarmed Washington. The industries with the least government interference also hire the least number of lobbyists.
What happens when business goes to bed with government? Corruption will come into the picture. Take a look at the current Financial Crisis. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac were established by Congress during the Roosevelt era to encourage home buying.
Together, they dominate the housing loans market. These are Government Supported Enterprises. Invariably politics come into the picture as explained in my previous article. Fannie Mae's former CEO, Franklin Raines was Bill Clinton's budget director and has close links with the Democratic Party leaders. Under him, Fannie Mae bought up sub-prime mortgages and he also donated generously to Christopher Dodd's and Barrack Obama's election campaigns.
Was he acting for the benefit of his political masters to win votes from people who were unqualified to acquire housing loans? Very likely and in the process, he also enriched himself. Had there been 10 or 20 much smaller Fannie Maes and Freddie Macs instead of two giant ones, it would be more difficult for the votreprenuers to influence the mortgage markets. Hence they would have done less damage in their pursuit of votes. Thus we see how votrepreneurs and big business corrupt each other and damage the country.
Making things worse is the Community Reinvestment Act which I have written in greater detail earlier in an article called, "The Political Roots of the Financial crisis."
The Act compelled banks to make sub-prime loans to unqualified people who were the regular voters of the Democratic Party. These loans were packaged into Mortgaged Backed Securities which were bought up in large part by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac whose top executives were friendly to the Democrat Party.
The result of the current financial crisis is that Americans are lurching to the Left just as they did in the 1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s gave power to Leftist movements like the Italian Fascists, German Nazism and Roosevelt's New Dealism where Socialist solutions were advocated. Greater government control of the economy actually favors big business.
Concentration of power in the hands of the governments leads to abuses of that power. That is why the greatest mass murderers were from the Left as I explained before. Could the current financial crisis lead to a loss of our economic as well as political freedoms? The danger is there that history repeats itself. Contrary to what Leftists say, the danger to our freedoms comes, as before, from the Left and not the Right.
As of this writing, Barrack Obama leads in the polls. With the financial crisis and an unpopular war in Iraq, he could well be the next President. From all indications, he is from the Far Left just as Mussolini once was. According to the National Journal, Obama is the most liberal Senator in 2007. Besides that, Obama has the penchant of having friends and acquantances from the Radical Left. There is Bill Ayers, who was a terrorist in the 1960s. Then of course there is his ex-Pastor Rev Jeremiah Wright whose sermons condemn his own country, America.
This is a red flag that his organisation is really a front for a Socialist or Marxist group. As in Mussolini's day, the Socialists or Communist groups are anti-patriotic. (Recall that Mussolini was booted out of his party for supporting the war.) Their loyalty is not to their own country but to the so called "oppressed working class". Rev Wright's church is a black power church and black power groups have Marxist roots. Obama's brief career as a Community Organizer is another red flag.
Community Organizing was a technique developed by Marxist, Saul Alinsky to further the Socialist Agenda. In Alinsky's words, "... the community organizer ... must first rub raw the resentments of the people; fan the latent hostilities to the point of overt expression."
In other words, get the people to riot by making them angry over real or imagined injustices in order to bring about instability. When the country looks like its going to the dogs, they will be ripe for a Marxist revolution.
That was why Fascism made such inroads in the 1930s. Roosevelt, Hitler and Mussolini were Leftists who acquired power when people in their countries were disenchanted and demoralized. The three carried out similar economic policies. Each gathered power in their own hands, stifling to varying degrees freedom in their countries.
One of them committed mass murders. Another interned Japanese Americans. Today, we have the same mood in America with markets crashing and a recession looming. Faith in the free markets are at a low and America is ripe for a turn to the left. Today, a Far Leftist, Barrack Hussein Obama is, as of this writing, ahead in the polls and may take power in America. Could history repeat itself? We are living in interesting times.
