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.
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