Friday, February 19, 2016

FDR and Hitler Admired Mussolini's Fascist State





Hitler was a great admirer of Italy’s Mussolini.  Fascism was an alluring mistress to government functionaries of that time, including FDR and the minions in his administration; indeed, the feeling was mutual.  Here is an excerpt from Freedom Outpost.    

In the North American Review in 1934, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” He wasn’t hallucinating. FDR’s adviser Rexford Tugwell wrote in his diary that Mussolini had done “many of the things which seem to me necessary.” Lorena Hickok, a close confidante of Eleanor Roosevelt, who lived in the White House for a spell, wrote approvingly of a local official who said, “If [President] Roosevelt were actually a dictator, we might get somewhere.” She added that if she were younger, she’d like to lead “the Fascist Movement in the United States.” At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), the cartel-creating agency at the heart of the early New Deal, one report declared forthrightly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”


Roosevelt himself called Mussolini “admirable” and professed that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” The admiration was mutual. In a laudatory review of Roosevelt’s 1933 book Looking Forward, Mussolini wrote, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices.… Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.” The chief Nazi newspaper, Volkischer Beobachter, repeatedly praised “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” and “the development toward an authoritarian state” based on the “demand that collective good be put before individual self-interest.”

Liberals, as long as I can remember, have insisted fascism is a right-wing ideology.  They bastardize our language and history as a means to mask their failures only to ensure we repeat them again and again.
 
Source:

No comments: