Fascism

In a clash of political ideologies, Fascism got a bad rap. Let us fathom out what it stands for without picking up the bad press it gets today. Remember that it has vast numbers of adherents until a rather large war and millions of deaths allowed a different ideology to reign supreme as Fascism lost out to more destructive forces. I shall start with a soft description devoid of the typical derogatory statements.

Fascism: is a political ideology and popular movement that dominated many parts of central, southern, and eastern Europe between 1919 and 1945. It also had adherents in western Europe, the United States, South Africa, Japan, Latin America, and the Middle East. Benito Mussolini was Europe’s first fascist leader. He derived the name of his party from the Latin word fasces, which refers to a ‘bundle of elm’ or birch rods (usually containing an ax) used as a symbol of penal authority in ancient Rome. These fascist parties and movements tended to differ somewhat from one another.

Fascism is certainly a complex ideology. There are many definitions of fascism. Some describe it as a set of political actions, a political philosophy or a mass movement. Fascism tends to be authoritarian whilst promoting national interests above the individual. However, its characteristics are a subject of debate. Like most political ideologies, what they say and what they do – do not match. The Fascist principle supposedly ensures private freedom and public service. But freedom is an unusual word. Total freedom is also the freedom to be beaten up as in times before we became civilized. In reality, we are free to do as we please under any political ideology. Under Capitalism, one is free to work off personal and national debt. Under Communism, one is free to work for little reward. Mussolini said: “Fascism is the complete opposite of…Marxian Socialism”

Fascism is definitely and absolutely opposed to the doctrines of liberalism, both in the political and economic sphere.

Benito Mussolini

State intervention in economic production arises only when private initiative is lacking or insufficient, or when the political interests of the State are involved. This intervention may take the form of control, assistance or direct management.

Benito Mussolini

But Oswald Mosley had some good points:

“Newspapers are not made any longer by news or journalism. They are made by sheer weight of money expressed in free gift schemes. They serve not the interests of the many, but the vested interests of the few.”

Oswald Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered.

“The Press will not be free to tell lies. That is not freedom for the people, but a tyranny over their minds and souls. Much humbug is talked on this subject. What is press freedom? In practice it means the right of a dew millionaires to corner newspaper shares on the stock exchange and to voice their own opinions and interests, irrespective of the truth or of the national interest.”

Oswald Mosley, Fascism: 100 Questions Asked and Answered.

“Naturally we believe in our own race. Any man or woman worth anything believes in his own race as he believes in his own family. But because you believe in your own race or in your own family doesn’t mean you want to injure other races or other families.”

Oswald Mosley

“In his public life, a man must behave himself as a fit member of the State, in his every action he must conform to the welfare of the nation.”

Oswald Mosley, Fascist Voices: Essays from the’Fascist Quarterly’ 1936-1940 – Vol 1

“The Fascist principle is private freedom and public service. That imposes upon us, in our public life, and in our attitude towards other men, a certain discipline and a certain restraint; but in our public life alone; and I should argue very strongly indeed that the only way to have private freedom was by a public organisation which brought some order out of the economic chaos which exists in the world today, and that such public organisation can only be secured by the methods of authority and of discipline which are inherent in Fascism.”

Oswald Mosley, Fascist Voices: Essays from the’Fascist Quarterly’ 1936-1940 – Vol 1

A fight between several parties of the British people: Nothing of the kind! A fight between two or three big money combines, that and nothing else. Without the weight of money behind the party machines, in an electoral battle today determined purely by principle and by the number of active workers… British Union could fight and beat today the old parties over the whole electoral field. But you know and I know, the battle is nothing of the kind. The battle is between big money combines who spend a thousand pounds or more on every constituency they fight. Or when they speak democracy, they don’t mean government by the people… they mean financial democracy, in which money counts and nothing but money.

Oswald Mosley

Feudalism worked in its crude and inequitable fashion until the coming of the Industrial Age. Today the Feudal tradition and its adherents are broken as a political power and in most cases are ignobly lending their prestige and their abilities to the support of the predatory plutocracy which has gained complete control of the Conservative Party. In modern times the old regime is confronted with two alternatives. The first is to serve the new world in a great attempt to bring order out of chaos and beauty out of squalor. The other alternative is to become flunkeys of the bourgeoisie. It is a matter of constant surprise and regret that many of my class have chosen the latter course.

Oswald Mosley

Living financially and economically on American charity, selling up the house to the Yanks when he won’t pay any more charity out. Are you content to be occupied and protected by American aeroplanes? Are you content to be in the position of an old woman, jipped by her young relations? You who were the greatest power on earth fifty years ago, and still can be! Why do I say, ‘you still can be’? Because, my friends, I know you, I know the British people! I know that twice in my lifetime in the world war I fought in, in the world war the younger men fought in. We the British have put our effort, our energy of valor, of heroism, unequalled in the history of mankind.

Oswald Mosley

You might see that you could study the policies and definitions of Fascism and not determine what they stood for. From the above, it is more clear that they stood against those that corrupted and abused Capitalism through money power, whilst also standing against those same people allowing politics to drift towards Communism. On can see that in that sense, a strong figure is needed, to disrupt democracy where both parties get their instructions from the same source which also happens to be the same controllers of Communism. If one reads: “The Nameless War” by Archibald Ramsey and listens to the Benjamin Freedman speech, one can understand why a strong person is need to wrest the power from the usurers that use the ill-gotten gains to influence politics, media, and economics. These usurers finish up owning the money creation in the form of virtual credit. They then own and control the printing press. The vast profits from usury are then used to purchase the shares of corporations. They then own the money creation and the means of production along with both sides of politics. I say to people: “If we voted you into parliament, you would not get to decide policy. You would have to ‘tow the party line’. So who sets the party line if it is not the constituents nor the politicians? You either get a dictatorship of finance or a strong man acting as president, or king, or dictator. In reality, is there much difference between a president, a king, or a dictator? For that matter, a coup d’état is not that disastrous — Thailand continues under its king with a coup d’état.

In this passage here, you can see that the communists were against the fascists:

In discussions with his supporters in the United States, Leon Trotsky stressed the need to create union-based defense guards as a central aspect of a strategy for fighting fascism. This policy was implemented in only one city—Minneapolis, Minnesota—for a short period of time in the late summer and early autumn of 1938. Trotsky had hopes that the Teamsters Local 544 Union Defense Guard (UDG) could become a model for organizing against the resurgent fascists to “show the entire country.” ²

Thus communists were operating from outside the USA to influence items within the USA. Capitalists

In this next speech, it is possible to see why the ‘moneyed’ class would be opposed to Mosley and his Fascist Party:

To play with the problem of finance, merely by nationalising the Bank of England which for all practical purposes is nationalised already, is only worthy of the make-believe of a Labour Party which has no serious intention of putting any of its theories into practice, and resists in principle the power in Government by which alone finance can be subordinated to the nation. We do not propose, by nationalising the banks, to substitute for financial ability a miscellaneous collection of civil servants and party hacks to play with intricate problems of which they have little understanding. We propose, by the exercise of ruthless power in Government, to make those who understand finance do what the people want done, and to let them know in plain fact what will happen if they do not do the job the nation commands.

Credit

Within such a system the supply of credit must be adequate to a system of greater production and greater consumption. The credit system will rest on certain clear and basic principles: that British credit created by the British people shall be used for British purposes alone; that British credit shall be no monopoly in the hands of a few people, and often alien hands at that, but shall be held in high trusteeship for the British people as a whole; that British credit shall be consciously used to promote within Britain the maximum production and consumption by the British of British goods; that the credit system shall maintain a stable price level against which the purchasing power of the people is progressively raised in the development of higher wages.

Tomes could be written on credit policy, and have been written, with infinite diversity in particular if with broad agreement from modern minds in general. The writer in earlier years has contributed to these diverse studies of one of the most fascinating subjects that can engage the modern mind. But experience brings some lessons, and one lesson is that the creative urge of modern man to build a modern credit system, that serves the people and not the financier, may well be lost in the desert sands of diverse detail. The broad principles of action are agreed by most thoughtful and modern minds. The full details must await the vast resources of a Government armed with power, and a full mobilisation of the finest intellects of our time to evolve the final pattern. But the principles here stated shall stand, and a new credit system shall be opened by the key of revolutionary Government entrusted by the people with real power. To play with credit problems, in the absence of real power, is merely to court the classic inflationist disaster of an impotent reformism.

Taxation

The problem of taxation is lifted naturally by the general economic policy of British Union. Taxation depends upon revenue, and revenue in turn depends upon national wealth production. A lesser burden of taxation can produce a larger revenue, if based on a greater national production of wealth. Therefore a system which is designed to evoke the maximum wealth production of the nation automatically lifts the burden of taxation. We rely for greater wealth production not only on the absorption into productive industry of those now unemployed or working short time, and not only on the maximum production of all present machinery; the elimination of redundant middlemen, and the great network of purely parasitic occupations which have grown up of recent years in the decline of productive industry, will release great new forces for wealth production, in addition to the labour of those unemployed or on short time. Any analysis of the swing over from staple productive to distributive industry, and still more redundant quasi-luxury occupation in service of the profiteering rich, will yield the most startling figures.

In a civilisation in which the rich profiteer can buy too little of the essential, a disequilibrium takes place in the national economy, and hundreds of thousands are drawn from productive to non-productive industry. The elimination of overlapping and redundant distributive services, and the re-absorption of such labour, together with labour employed in ultra-luxury trades, back into productive industry, in response to the people’s new demands for “real” goods, will increase the productive power of the nation in almost incalculable degree. The proportion of the people actually engaged in real productive processes is small to the point of being one of the outstanding anomalies of the system. This phenomenon is created by the low purchasing power of the mass of the people and the extraordinary purchasing power of the ultra-rich. Consideration of the latter category belongs to the next chapter, but here we may note that the release of workers, from redundant distribution and ultra-luxury occupations, will enable the new economy vastly to increase the nation’s wealth production. From this it follows that revenues will greatly increase and taxation, despite the extension of service to the people, can be greatly lightened.

Oswald Mosley – The Economic System : What is Wrong 1938

Here is the description of Fascism from ‘Encyclopedia Italia’ 1932:

“The State not only is authority which governs and molds individual wills with laws and values of spiritual life, but it is also power which makes its will prevail abroad…. For the Fascist, everything is within the State and… neither individuals or groups are outside the State…. For Fascism, the State is an absolute, before which individuals or groups are only relative.”

“It is thus necessary that the individual should finally come to realize that his own pride is of no importance in comparison with the existence of his nation; that the position of the individual ego is conditioned solely by the interests of the nation as a whole; that pride and conceitedness, the feeling that the individual … is superior, so far from being merely laughable, involve great dangers for the existence of the community that is a nation; that above all the unity of a nation’s spirit and will are worth far more than the freedom of the spirit and the will of an individual; and that the higher interests involved in the life of the whole must here set the limits and lay down the duties of interests of the individual. … By this we understand only the individual’s capacity to make sacrifices for the community, for his fellow men. ”

Adolf Hitler speaking at Bueckeburg, Oct. 7, 1933; The Speeches of Adolf Hitler, 1922-39, ed. N.H. Baynes (2 vols., Oxford, 1942), I, 871-72; translation Professor George Reisman.

[1] https://isreview.org/issue/87/it-cant-happen-here ‘Confronting the fascist threat in the US in the late 1930s’ By Joe Allen