On the Infamous "Have You No Decency?" Remark

---

Every so often I will read some commentary involving or referring to Joe Welch's infamous riposte to Joe McCarthy--"Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?"--and almost without exception, the commentary makes it clear that the writer knows only part of the story behind that remark. It was only a few weeks ago that I read another such bit of commentary. I thought, at the time, "You poor devil. You have only part of the story, and have no idea what an ignorant footstool you've made yourself out to be." And I thought, too, that it would be a good thing for the correct story to be "out there" in the blogosphere.

Anyone genuinely interested in the full story of Joe McCarthy has been perfectly free to pick up M. Stanton Evans' massively researched and painstakingly documented Blacklisted By History: The Untold Story of Senator Joe McCarthy and His Fight Against America's Enemies for a couple of years now. Of course, most of the people who cite Mr. Welch's remark are not interested in the whole story; they are simply interested in making McCarthy look bad. They do not care that McCarthy has indisputably been proven correct: the federal government in the thirties, forties, and fifties did harbor quite a lot of communists. Nor do they care overmuch that communists persist to this day, that our wonderful president, Barack Obama, Peace Be Upon Him, has been known to appoint avowed communists such as Van Jones to positions of power and influence.

I have often thought that such people either have convinced themselves that communists are a thing of the past, something from the "old days," a specter, a phantom, a chimera which Republicans hope to use to scare up a few more votes, or even that communism itself has been hideously misrepresented. It was/is a simple reformist agrarian movement, they think. Nice spread-the-wealth folks. Can't possibly be as bad as those conservatives or Republicans.

I must disagree. Communism was, and is, a murderous, totalitarian ideology, and hard-core communists are, at heart, themselves murderers.

Now, I know--I know--that at this point, some poor soul is even now scrambling for his keyboard, eager to inform me that conservatives have no room to talk, that, after all, fascism is a murderous ideology, too, and fascism is a totalitarian ideology of the right. Sorry. It isn't true, and in trying to argue for it, you are only making yourself look more uninformed than you already did. Read this excerpt, and learn that fascism sprang from the bosom of socialism, is, in fact, simply a different variety of socialism, and learn that your devastating counter-argument is stillborn: fascism, too, is a creation of the left, not the right.

I hesitated somewhat before typing up this lengthy quote from the book. My fervent hope is that reading the material will cause at least a few people to take the step of actually ordering and reading the book, but nevertheless, this extended quote is perhaps somewhat longer than most authors would prefer. Should Mr. Evans (and I will not be satisfied with someone merely claiming to be Mr. Evans) ask me to take the post down, I will of course comply, but hopefully he will approve my intent and reap some additional sales. The remainder of this post is from the book and will give you a much fuller sense of the genesis of Mr. Welch's remark to Senator McCarthy. If I have missed any typos, I apologize, but they are perhaps inevitable in the copying of such a long section. Anything in bold is something I have emphasized. Lastly, I would be remiss in not mentioning that in the book, Mr. Evans includes a photocopy of the New York Times article to which he refers.

---

Having thus exhibited his instinct for the capillary, Welch would outdo himself in a third notable episode of this nature--the matter of Frederick Fisher. Fisher was a young attorney from Welch's Boston law firm of Hale and Dorr, brought down to Washington to help prepare the case for Stevens-Adams. In getting ready for the hearings, Welch had asked Fisher if there were anything in his background that could prove embarassing to the Army.

Well, yes, said Fisher, there was. He had been a member of the National Lawyers Guild, which was indeed a problem. As the Guild had the year before been branded by Attorney General Herbert Brownell as the "legal mouthpiece" of the Communist Party, and before that by the House Committee on Un-American Activities as the party's "legal bulwark," it was decided such past membership would be an incapacitating factor in hearings so heavily devoted to issues of subversion. Fisher was sent home to Boston.

Nevertheless, his name would show up in the hearings, as Welch was cross-examining Roy Cohn in what would be a famous confrontation. This began with the standard Welch technique of exaggerated buildup, to the effect that Cohn had been remiss in not communicating whatever he knew about Communists in the Army directly to Robert Stevens. This colloquy is worth quoting in extenso as an example of Welch in action and the degree to which the lovable codger could change his mien as needed.

WELCH: If you had gone over to the Pentagon and got inside the door and yelled to the first receptionist you saw, "We got some hot dope on some Communists in the Army," don't you think you could have landed at the top?
COHN: Sir, that is not the way I do things.

***

WELCH: And although you had this dope and a fresh and ambitious new Secretary of the Army, reachable by the expenditure of one taxicab fare, you never went during March, if you had it in March, did you, is that right?
COHN: Mr Welch--
WELCH: Just answer. You never went near him in March?
COHN: No, I--
WELCH: Or April? Did you?
COHN: Mr. Welch--
WELCH: Tell me, please.
COHN: I am trying, sir.
WELCH: Or April?
COHN: No, sir.
WELCH: Or May?
COHN: I never went near him, sir.
WELCH: Or June?
COHN: The answer is never.
WELCH: Right. Or July?
COHN: I communicated--
WELCH: Or July?
COHN: No, sir--
SENATOR MUNDT: I think we have covered July.
WELCH: I think it is really dramatic to see how these Communist hunters will sit on this document when they could have brought it to the attention of Bob Stevens in 20 minutes, and they let month after month go by without going to the head and saying, "Sic 'em Stevens."

***

COHN: May I answer the last statement?
WELCH: I only said you didn't say, "Sic 'em Stevens," and you didn't, did you?...You did not say "Sic 'em Stevens." Is that right?
COHN: Sir--
WELCH: Is that right?
COHN: Mr. Welch, if you want to know the way things work, I will tell you.
WELCH: I don't care how it works. I just want to know if it is right that you did not say, "Sic 'em Stevens."
COHN: No, sir, you are right.
WELCH: I am at long last right once, is that correct?
COHN: Mr. Welch, you can always get a laugh...
WELCH: Mr. Cohn, we are not talking about laughing matters. If there is a laugh, I suggest to you, sir, it is because it is so hard to get you to say that you didn't actually yell, "Sic 'em Stevens."

When McCarthy finally objected to this burlesque, the discussion wandered off to other topics. However, Welch was soon back in "Sic 'em Stevens" mode, arguing that Cohn was at fault for not having personally rushed to inform Stevens the instant that data on security problems at Monmouth surfaced. This recapped what had gone before, but with additional Welchian furbelows:

WELCH: ...you didn't tug at his lapel and say, "Mr. Secretary, I know something about Monmouth that won't let me sleep nights?" You didn't do it, did you?
COHN: I don't, as I testifed, Mr. Welch, I don't know whether I talked to Mr. Stevens about it then [in September 1953] or not...
WELCH: Don't you know that if you had really told him what your fears were, and substantiated them to any extent, he could have jumped in the next day with suspensions?
COHN: No, sir.

***

WELCH: Mr. Cohn, tell me once more: Every time you learn of a Communist or a spy anywhere, is it your policy to get them out as fast as possible?
COHN: Surely, we want them out as fast as possible, sir.
WELCH: And whenever you learn of one from now on, Mr. Cohn, I beg of you, will you tell somebody about them quick?
COHN: Mr. Welch, with great respect, I work for the committee here. They know how we go about handling situations of Communist infiltration and failure to act on FBI information about Communist infiltration...
WELCH: May I add my small voice, sir, and say whenever you know about a subversive or a Communist spy, please hurry. Will you remember these words?

This hectoring of Cohn, be it noted, came from the small voice whose clients had been pressuring General Lawton to restore asserted security risks at Monmouth. Even more ironic, if possible, it was premised on the selfsame "purloined letter" Welch had dismissively treated as a "carbon copy of precisely nothing." Now he was contending that Cohn was grievously to blame for not hand-delivering this copy of "precisely nothing" to Robert Stevens by the fastest possible method.

After sitting through these Welch sermonettes about exposing every subversive or Communist suspect Cohn had ever heard of, and being extra quick about it, McCarthy at last broke in by raising the issue of Fred Fisher. Having brought Fisher to D.C. to help out with the hearings, McCarthy opined, Welch had little standing to lecture others about proper methods of Red-hunting. In a tone heavy with disdain, McCarthy stated:

...in view of Mr. Welch's request that information be given once we know of anyone who might be performing work for the Communist Party, I think we should tell him that he has in his law firm a young man named Fisher, whom he recommended incidentally to do work on this committee, he has been for a number of years a member of an organization which was named, oh years and years back, as the legal bulwark of the Communist Party...We are now letting you know that this young man did belong to this organization for either 3 or 4 years, belonged to it long after he was out of law school...

And subsequently:

Jim [Juliana], will you get the news story to the effect that this man belonged to this Communist front organization?

This drew from Welch a much-celebrated answer, featured in all the usual write-ups and replayed innumerable times in video treatments of the hearings. It was the distilled essence of Joe Welch, worth studying in detail to get context and flavor. Along with certain other statements on Fred Fisher, Welch assailed McCarthy as follows:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never fully grasped your cruelty or your recklessness. Fred Fisher is a young man who went to Harvard Law School and came with my firm and is starting what looks like a brilliant career with us...Little did I dream you could be so reckless and so cruel as to do an injury to that lad...I fear that he shall always bear a scar needlessly inflicted by you. If it were in my power to forgive you for your reckless cruelty I would do so. I like to think I am a gentlemean, but your forgiveness will have to come from someone other than me. (Emphasis added.)

When McCarthy then attempted to give some background on the National Lawyers Guild, plus a strong tu quoque about the harm done to the reputations of Frank Carr and other young McCarthy staffers by the charges Welch had signed his name to, the Army counsel again lamented the injury to Fisher:

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you left no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

And, finally:

Mr. McCarthy, I will not discuss this with you further. You have been within six feet of me, and could have asked me about Fred Fisher. You have brought it out If there is a God in Heaven, it will do neither you nor your cause any good. I will not discuss it with you further. (emphasis added.)

Subsequently, we're told, Welch broke into tears and the audience in the Senate chamber responded with sustained applause. Thus the incident most remembered from the hearings, and generally viewed as the moral Waterloo of Joe McCarthy. The reckless evildoer had exposed young Fred Fisher and his former membership in the National Lawyers Guild, thus scarring the innocent lad forever, and the good, decent Welch had protested this shameful outing of a youthful indiscretion.

All of which seems very moving, and is invariably so treated. It looks a little different, however, when we note that, well before this dramatic moment, Fred Fisher had already been outed, in conclusive fashion, as a former member of the National Lawyers Guild--by none other than Joe Welch. This had occurred in April, some six weeks before the McCarthy-Welch exchange, when Welch took it upon himself to confirm before the world that Fisher had indeed been a member of the Guild, and for this reason had been sent back to Boston. As the New York Times reported, in a story about the formal filing of Army allegations against Cohn-McCarthy:

The Army charges were signed by its new special counsel, Joseph N. Welch. Mr. Welch today [April 15] confirmed news reports that he had relieved from duty his original second assistant, Frederick G. Fisher, Jr., of his own Boston law office because of admitted previous membership in the National Lawyers Guild, which has been listed by Herbert Brownell, Jr. the Attorney General, as a Communist front organization. Mr. Welch said he had brought in another lawyer, John Kimball, Jr., from his Boston office to take Mr. Fisher's place. (Emphasis added.)

Giving this news item further impact, the Times ran a sizable photograph of Fred Fisher, plus a caption noting he had been relieved of duty with the Army's legal forces. Having caused this story to appear in the nation's most prestigious daily and reputed paper of record, Joe Welch would seem to have done a pretty good job of outing the innocent lad from Boston. (it was undoubtedly this news story, or an equivalent, that McCarthy was asking Jim Juliana to bring him.) It thus develops that Welch himself had already done the very thing for which he so fervently denounced McCarthy. So the suspicion once more dawns...that something was unspeakably evil when, and only when, done by McCarthy, but perfectly proper when done by Welch and/or his clients.

---

Counterpoint? Find it here. And yes, if you're wondering, I did go back and change two words in my introduction, two words which may, in retrospect, have been over the top. That's the beauty of the "edit posts" function of blogger...

---

Liberal Fascism Quote #6

Emphasis, where present, is mine and in bold:

This is the monumental fact of the Nazi rise to power that has been slowly airbrushed from our collective memories: the Nazis campaigned as socialists. Yes, they were also nationalists, which in the context of the 1930s was considered a rightist position, but this was at a time when the "internationalism" of the Soviet Union defined all nationalisms as right-wing. Surely we've learned from the parade of horribles on offer in the twentieth century that nationalism isn't inherently right-wing--unless we're prepared to call Stalin, Castro, Arafat, Chavez, Guevara, Pol Pot, and, for that matter, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, and John F. Kennedy, right-wingers. Stalin himself ruled as a nationalist, invoking "mother Russia" and dubbing World War II the "great patriotic war." By 1943 he had even replaced the old Communist anthem ("The Internationale") with one that was thoroughly Russian. Moreover, historically, nationalism was a liberal-left phenomenon. The French Revolution was a nationalist revolution, but it was also seen as a left-liberal one for breaking with the Catholic Church and empowering the people. German Romanticism as championed by Gottfried Herder and others was seen as both nationalistic and liberal. The National Socialist movement was part of this revolutionary tradition.

But even if Nazi nationalism was in some ill-defined but fundamental way right-wing, this only meant that Nazism was right-wing socialism. And right-wing socialists are still socialists. Most of the Bolshevik revolutionaries Stalin executed were accused of being not conservatives or monarchists but rightists--that is, right-wing socialists. Any deviation from the Soviet line was automatic proof of rightism. Ever since, we in the West have apishly mimicked the Soviet usage of such terms without questioning the propagandistic baggage attached.

The Nazi ideologist--and Hitler rival--Gregor Strasser put it quite succinctly: "We are socialists. We are enemies, deadly enemies, of today's capitalist economic system with its exploitation of the economically weak, its unfair wage system, its immoral way of judging the worth of human beings in terms of their wealth and their money, instead of their responsibility and their performance, and we are determined to destroy this system whatever happens!"

Hitler is just as straightforward in Mein Kampf. He dedicates an entire chapter to the Nazis' deliberate exploitation of socialist and communist imagery, rhetoric, and ideas and how this marketing confused both liberals and communists. The most basic example is the Nazi use of the color red, which was firmly associated with Bolshevism and socialism. "We chose red for our posters after particular and careful deliberation...so as to arouse their attention and tempt them to come to our meetings...so that in this way we got a chance of talking to the people." The Nazi flag--a black swastika inside a white disk in a sea of red--was explicitly aimed at attracting communists. "In red we see the social idea of the movement, in white the nationalistic idea, in the swastika the mission of the struggle for the victory of Aryan man."

The Nazis borrowed whole sections from the communist playbook. Party members--male and female--were referred to as comrades. Hitler recalls how his appeals to "class-conscious proletarians" who wanted to strike out against the "monarchist, reactionary agitation with the fists of the proletariat" were successful in drawing countless communists to their meetings. Sometimes the communists came with orders to smash up the place. But the Reds often refused to riot on command because they had been won over to the National Socialist cause. In short, the battle between the Nazis and the communists was a case of two dogs fighting for the same bone.

Nazism's one -nation politics by its very definition appealed to people from all walks of life. Professors, students, and civil servants were all disproportionately supportive of the Nazi cause. But it's important to get a
sense of the kind of person who served as the rank-and-file Nazi, the young, often thuggish true believers who fought in the streets and dedicated themselves to the revolution. Patrick Leigh Fermor, a young Briton traveling in Germany shortly after Hitler came to power, met some of these men in a Rhineland workers' pub, still wearing their night-shift overalls. One of his new drinking buddies offered to let Fermor crash at his house for the night. When Fermore climbed the ladder to the attic to sleep in a guest bed, he found "a shrine to Hitleriana":

The walls were covered with flags, photographs, posters, slogans and emblems. His SA uniforms hung neatly ironed on a hanger...When I said that it must be rather claustrophobic with all that stuff on the walls, he laughed and sat down on the bed, and said: "Mensch! You should have seen it last year! You would have laughed! Then it was all red flags, stars, hammers, sickles, pictures of Lenin and Stalin and Workers of the World Unite!...Then, suddenly when Hitler came to power, I understood it was all nonsense and lies. I realized Adolf was the man for me. All of a sudden!" He snapped his fingers in the air. "And here I am"...Had a lot of people done the same, then? "Millions! I tell you, I was astonished how easily they all changed sides!"

[snip]

What distinguished Nazism from other brands of socialism and communism was not so much that it included more aspects from the political right (though there were some). What distinguished Nazism was that it forthrightly included a worldview we now associate almost completely with the political left: identity politics. This was what distinguished Nazism from doctrinaire communism, and it seems hard to argue that the marriage of one leftist vision to another can somehow produce right-wing progeny.

[snip]

...what Hitler hated about Marxism and communism had almost nothing to do with those aspects of communism that we would consider relevant, such as economic doctrine or the need to destroy the capitalists and bourgeoisie. In these areas Hitler largely saw eye to eye with socialists and communists. His hatred stemmed from his paranoid conviction that the people calling themselves communists were in fact in on a foreign, Jewish conspiracy. He says this over and over again in Mein Kampf He studied the names of communists and socialists, and if they sounded Jewish, that's all he needed to know. It was all a con job, a ruse, to destroy Germany. Only "authentically" German ideas from authentic Germans could be trusted. And when those Germans, like Feder or STrasser, proposed socialist ideas straight out of the Marxist playbook, he had virtually no objection whatsoever.

[mother of all snips]

The communist ideologue Karl Radek...noted as early as 1923 that "Fascism is middle-class Socialism and we cannot persuade the middle classes to abandon it until we can prove to them that it only makes their condition worse."

Of all the things that I occasionally write about, few seem to elicit the negative reaction that noting that fascism is just a variety of socialism does. Leftists seem reluctant, for some reason, to embrace the idea that they own, ideologically speaking, both the murderous monstrosities of the twentieth century, communism and fascism. They'll continually tell you that communism is of the far left, but conservatives shouldn't get all cocky, as fascism/Nazism is conservatism run amok. I guess this makes them feel better, but it is ahistorical nonsense all the same.

Liberal Fascism Quote #5

If you can read this material and not understand that fascism is a variety of socialism, I honestly think that you must have blinders on. Not trying to be rude, but that's what I think. Emphasis, where present, is mine and in bold. Read all the way to the end of the post. It'll be worth it.

Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini was named after three revolutionary heroes. The name Benito--a Spanish name, as opposed to the Italian equivalent, Benedetto--was inspired by Benito Juarez, the Mexican revolutionary turned president who not only toppled the emperor Maximilian but had him executed. The other two names were inspired by now-forgotten heroes of anarchist-socialism, Amilcare Cipriani and Andrea Costa.

Mussolini's father, Alessandro, was a blacksmith and ardent socialist with an anarchist bent who was a member of the First International along with Marx and Engles and served on the local socialist council. Alessandro's "[h]eart and mind were always filled and pulsing with socialistic theories," Mussolini recalled. "His intense sympathies mingled with [socialist] doctrines and causes. He discussed them in the evening with his friends and his eyes filled with light." On other nights Mussolini's father read him passages from Das Kapital. When villagers brought their horses to Alessandro's shop to be shod, part of the price came in the form of listening to the blacksmith spout his socialist theories. Mussolini was a congenital rabble-rouser. At the age of ten, young Benito led a demonstration against his school for serving bad food. In high school he called himself a socialist, and at the age of eighteen, while working as a substitute teacher, he became the secretary of a socialist organization and began his career as a left-wing journalist.

[snip]

Because Mussolini trifled with men's wives, owed money, enraged the local authorities, and was approaching the age of conscription, he found it wise to flee Italy in 1902 for Switzerland, then a European Casablanca for socialist radicals and agitators. he had two lire to his name when he arrived, and, he wrote to a friend, the only metal rattling in his pocket was a medallion of Karl Marx. There he fell in with the predictable crowd of Bolshevists, socialists, and anarchists, including such intellectuals as Angelica Balabanoff, a daughter of Ukrainian aristocrats and a longtime colleague of Lenin's. Mussolini and Balabanoff remained friends for two decades, until she became the secretary of the Comintern and he became a socialist apostate, that is, a fascist.

Whether Mussolini and Lenin actually met is the subject of some controversy. However, we know that they were mutual admirers. Lenin would later say that Mussolini was the only true revolutionary in Italy, and according to Mussolini's first biographer, Margherita Sarfatti (a Jew and Mussolini's lover), Lenin also later said, "Mussolini? A great pity he is lost to us! He is a strong man, who would have led our party to victory."

While in Switzerland, Mussolini worked quickly to develop his intellectual bona fides. Writing socialist tracts wherever he could, the future Duce imbibed the lingo of the international European left. He wrote the first of his many books while in Switzerland, Man and Divinity, in which he railed against the Church and sang the praises of atheism, declaring that religion was a form of madness. The Swiss weren't much more amused with the young radical than the Italians had been. He was regularly arrested and often exiled by various cantonal authorities for his troublemaking. In 1904 he was officially labeled an "enemy of society." At one point he considered whether he should work in Madagascar, take a job at a socialist newspaper in New York, or join other socialist exiles in the leftist haven of Vermont (which fills much the same function today).

[snip]

After Mussolini's return to Italy (and a time in Austria) his reputation as a radical grew slowly but steadily until 1911. He became the editor of La lotta di classe (Class War), which served as the megaphone of the extremist wing of the Italian Socialist party. "The national flag is for us a rag to be planted in a dunghill," he declared.

[snip]

Mussolini was sentenced to a year in prison, reduced on appeal to five months. He emerged from prison as a socialist star. At his welcoming banquet a leading socialist, Olindo Vernocchi, declared: "From today you, Benito, are not only the representative of the Romagna Socialists but the Duce of all revolutionary socialists in Italy." This was the first time he was called "Il Duce" (the leader), making him the Duce of Socialism before he was the Duce of Fascism.

Using his newfound status, Mussolini attended the Socialist congress in 1912 at a time when the national party was bitterly split between moderates who favored incremental reform and radicals who endorsed more violent measures. Throwing in his lot with the radicals, Mussolini accused two leading moderates of heresy. Their sin? They'd congratulated the king on surviving an attempted assassination by an anarchist. Mussolini could not tolerate such squishiness. Besides, "What is a king anyway except by definition a useless citizen?" Mussolini joined the formal leadership of the party and four months later took over the editorship of its national newspaper, Avanti!, one of the most plum posts in all of European radicalism. Lenin, monitoring Mussolni's progress from afar, took note approvingly in Pravda.

Had he died in 1914, there's little doubt that Marxist theorists would be invoking Mussolini as a heroic martyr to the proletarian struggle. He was one of Europe's leading radical socialists in arguably the most radical socialist party outside of Russia. Under his stewardship, Avanti! became close to gospel for a whole generation of socialist intellectuals, including Antonio Gramsci. He also launched a theoretical journal, Utopia, named in tribute to Thomas More, whom Mussolini considered the first socialist. Utopia clearly reflected the influence of Georges Sorel's syndicalism on Mussolini's thinking.

[great big hairy snip]

From the moment Mussolini declared himself in favor of the war, Italian Socialists smeared him for his heresy. "Chi paga?" became the central question of the anti-Mussolini whisper campaign. "Who's paying him?" He was accused of taking money from arms makers, and it was hinted darkly that he was on France's payroll. There's no evidence for any of this. From the beginning, fascism was dubbed as right-wing not because it necessarily was right-wing but because the communist left thought this was the best way to punish apostasy (and, even if it was right-wing in some long forgotten doctrinal sense, fascism was still right-wing socialism). It has ever been thus. After all, if support for the war made one objectively right-wing, then Mother Jones was a rabid right-winger, too. This should be a familiar dynamic today, as support for the war in Iraq is all it takes to be a "right-winger" in many circles.

Mussolini on occasion acknowledged that fascism was perceived as a movement of the "right," but he never failed to make it clear that his inspiration and spiritual home was the socialist left. "You hate me today because you love me still," he told Italian Socialists. "Whatever happens, you won't lose me. Twelve years of my life in the party ought to be sufficient guarantee of my socialist faith. Socialism is in my blood." Mussolini resigned his editorship of AVanti! but he could never resign his love of the cause. "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."

Nevertheless, Mussolini was forced to quit the party organization. He joined up with a group of pro-war radicals called the Fascio Autonomo d'Azione Rivoluzionaria and quickly became their leader. Again, Mussolini had not moved to the right. His arguments for entering the war were made entirely in the context of the left and mirrored to no small extent the liberal and leftist arguments of American interventionists such as Woodrow Wilson, John Dewey, and Walter Lippman. The war, he and his fellow apostates insisted, was against the reactionary Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a war to liberate foreign peoples from the yoke of imperialism and advance the cause of socialist revolution in Italy, a true "proletarian nation."

Mussolini founded a new newspaper, Il Popolo d'Italia. The name itself--The People of Italy--is instructive because it illustrates the subtle change in Mussolini's thinking and the first key distinction between socialism and fascism. Socialism was predicated on the Marxist view that "workers" as a class were more bound by common interests than any other criteria. Implicit in the slogan "Workers of the world, unite!" was the idea that class was more important than race, nationality, religion, language, culture, or any other "opiate" of the masses. It had become clear to Mussolini that not only was this manifestly not so but it made little sense to pretend otherwise. If Sorel had taught that Marxism was a series of useful myths rather than scientific fact, why not utilize more useful myths if they're available? "I saw that internationalism was crumbling," Mussolini later admitted. It was "utterly foolish" to believe that class consciousness could ever trump the call of nation and culture. "The sentiment of nationality exists and cannot be denied." What was then called socialism was really just a kind of socialism: international socialism. Mussolini was interested in creating a new socialism, a socialism in one state, a national socialism, which had the added benefit of being achievable. The old Socialist Party stood in the way of this effort, and thus it was "necessary," Mussolini wrote in Il Popolo, "to assassinate the Party in order to save Socialism." In another issue he implored, "Proletarians, come into the streets and piazzas with us and cry: 'Down with the corrupt mercantile policy of the Italian bourgeoisie'...Long live the war of liberation of the peoples!"

My word, that's a lot of typing. I don't think I'll do it again; my aged eyes are feeling the strain. But it was necessary, I think. Too many people, when told that fascism is only national socialism and not a thing of the right at all, not conservatism run amok, respond by suggesting that perhaps the fascists, claiming to be socialists, didn't know what they were talking about, or were just saying that they were socialists. Mussolini's life, I think, demonstrates otherwise. If Mussolini didn't know what a socialist was, probably nobody in Italy, perhaps no one in Europe, did. It is very clear: Mussolini did not believe that he'd abandoned socialism for a different political ideology. He believed he was championing a better, more practical, more achievable version of that same ideology. He was a socialist, a creature of the left, and fascism is a creature of the left. The word itself, "fascism," has its origins in this time frame, that is to say, this is when fascism, properly speaking, was born. It is not something that existed throughout the ages; it has a birthday and a birthplace. I know it seems to some like I am hammering the point too hard, but it must be done. Fascism has nothing to do with the political right, if by "political right" you mean all the varying stripes of conservatism. It was born out of socialism, most especially Italian socialism; it is socialism's child, socialism's mutant child, if you like. It is all yours, Leftists--and by "Left," I do not mean your run-of-the-mill slightly left-of-center liberal, but the hard-core Left--like it or not, you own the phenomenon, you spawned it, you defined it, and dadgummit, you champion its offspring to this very day. And all the while you try to fool yourselves and others into believing that it has something, anything to do with conservatism. You seem to compelled to blind yourself to the reality that it's not merely Stalin's murders that are on the Left's conscience, Hitler's are, too.

I don't blame you, in a way, but I don't appreciate my political philosophy's track record being inaccurately conflated with that of yours.

Sorry if that's hard for some of you to swallow. Order the book here

Liberal Fascism Quote #4

The idea that there are no hard choices--that is, choice between competing goods--is religious and totalitarian because it assumes that all good things are fundamentally compatible. The conservative or classical liberal vision understands that life is unfair, that man is flawed, and that the only perfect society, the only real utopia, waits for us in the next life.

I said in my definition of liberalism that it is characterized by the willingness to try enormously and foolishly risky things that fly in the face of human nature, history, etc. You could also--and accurately, in my opinion--say that it is often characterized by the refusal to make hard choices. They are forever insisting that somehow they can have their cake and eat it, too.

Order the book here.

Liberal Fascism Quote #3

Indeed, it is my argument that during World War I, America became a fascist country, albeit temporarily. The first appearance of modern totalitarianism in the Western world wasn't in Italy or Germany but in the United States of America. How else would you describe a country where the world's first modern propaganda ministry was established; political prisoners by the thousands were harassed, beaten, spied upon, and thrown in jail simply for expressing private opinions; the national leader accused foreigners and immigrants of injecting treason as "poison" into the American bloodstream; newspapers and magazines were shut down for criticizing the government; nearly a hundred thousand government propaganda agents were sent out among the people to whip up support for the regime and its war; college professors imposed loyalty oaths on their colleagues; nearly a quarter-million goons were given legal authority to intimidate and beat "slackers" and dissenters; and leading artists and writers dedicated their crafts to proselytizing for the government?

Mr. Goldberg goes into considerable detail about the excesses the Wilson administration indulged in, and I will be quoting a small portion of that material soon. I have to quote that material. Otherwise, you will simply think I'm a nut. All I can tell you here is that it is chilling reading, and it is Democrat history, and no, I haven't taken Democrat claims to be the party of freedom and liberty seriously for many years. They were once, back when Jefferson was leading them and for some decades thereafter. But sometime around the turn of the century, they started trending away from freedom and limited government and have now wound up a far-left monstrosity, a mockery of the party they once were.

You can order the book here. Go on, I dare ya.

Liberal Fascism Quote #2

We cannot easily recognize these similarities and continuities today, however, let alone speak about them, because this whole realm of historical analysis was foreclosed by the Holocaust. Before the war, fascism was widely viewed as a progressive social movement with many liberal and left-wing adherents in Europe and the United States; the horror of the Holocaust completely changed our view of fascism as something uniquely evil and ineluctably bound up with extreme nationalism, paranoia, and genocidal racism. After the war, the American progressives who had praised Mussolini and even looked sympathetically at Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s had to distance themselves from the horrors of Nazism. Accordingly, leftist intellectuals redefined fascism as "right-wing" and projected their own sins onto conservatives, even as they continued to borrow heavily from fascist and pre-fascist thought.

Must of this alternative history is quite easy to find, if you have eyes to see it. The problem is that the liberal-progressive narrative on which most of us were raised tends to shunt these incongruous and inconvenient facts aside, and to explain away as marginal what is actually central.

For starters, it is simply a fact that, in the 1920s, fascism and fascistic ideas were very popular on the American left. "That Fascism stunk in the nostrils of the New Masses," John Patrick Diggins writes of the legendary hard-left journal, "may have been true after 1930. For the radicals of the twenties the whiff from Italy carried no foul ideological odor." There was a reason for this. In many respects, the founding fathers of modern liberalism, the men and women who laid the intellectual groundwork of the New Deal and the welfare state, thought that fascism sounded like a pretty good idea. Or to be fair: many simply thought (in the spirit of Deweyan Pragmatism) that it sounded like a worthwhile "experiment." Moreover, while the odor of Italian Fascism eventually grew rancid in the nostrils of both the American left and the American right (considerably later than 1930, by the way), the reasons for their revulsion did not for the most part stem from profound ideological differences. Rather, the American left essentially picked a different team--the Red team--and as such swore fealty to communist talking points about fascism. As for the non-communist liberal left, while the word "fascism" grew in disrepute, many fascistic ideas and iimpulses endured.

It was around this time that Stalin stumbled on a brilliant tactic of simply labeling all inconvenient ideas and movements fascist. Socialists and progressives aligned with Moscow were called socialists or progressives, while socialists disloyal or opposed to Moscow were called fascists. Stalin's theory of social fascism rendered even Franklin Roosevelt a fascist according to loyal communists everywhere. And let us recall that Leon Trotsky was marked for death for allegedly plotting a "fascist coup." While this tactic was later deplored by many sane American left-wingers, it is amazing how many useful idiots fell for it at the time, and how long its intellectual half-life has been.

Before the Holocaust and Stalin's doctrine of social fascism, liberals could be more honest about their fondness for fascism. During the "pragmatic" era of the 1920s and early 1930s, a host of Western liberal intellectuals and journalists were quite impressed with Mussolini's "experiment." More than a few progressives were intrigued by Nazism as well. W.E.B. DuBois, for example, had very complex and mixed emotions about the rise of Hitler and the plight of the Jews, believing that National Socialism could be the model for economic organization. The formation of the Nazi dictatorship, he wrote, had been "absolutely necessary to get the state in order." Hewing to the progressive definition of "democracy" as egalitarian statism, DuBois delivered a speech in Harlem in 1937 proclaiming that "there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past."

For years, segments of the so-called Old Right argued that FDR's New Deal was fascistic and/or influenced by fascists. There is ample truth to this, as many mainstream and liberal historians have grudgingly admitted. However, that the New Deal was fascist was hardly a uniquely right-wing criticism in the 1930s. Rather, those who offered this sort of critique, including the Democratic hero Al Smith and the Progressive Republican Herbert Hoover, were beaten back with the charge that they were crazy right-wingers and themselves the real fascists. Norman Thomas, the head of the American Socialist Party, frequently charged that the New Deal was fundamentally fascistic. Only Communists loyal to Moscow--or the useful idiots in Stalin's thrall--could say that Thomas was a right-winger or a fascist. But that is precisely what they did.

Even more telling, FDR's defenders openly admitted their admiration of fascism. Rexford Guy Tugwell, an influential member of FDR's Brain Trust, said of Italian Fascism, "It's the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious." "We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages," proclaimed the New Republic's editor George Soule, an enthusiastic supporter of the FDR administration.

You can buy the book here. You're just dying to read it, now, aren't you? Even if all you want to do is explain to me later how wrong Goldberg is.

Liberal Fascism Quote #1

The major flaw in all of this is that fascism, properly understood, is not a phenomenon of the right at all. Instead, it is, and always has been, a phenomenon of the left. This fact--an inconvenient truth if there ever was one--is obscured in our time by the equally mistaken belief that fascism and communism are opposites. In reality, they are closely related, historical competitors for the same constituents, seeking to dominate and control the same social space. The fact that they appear as polar opposites is a trick of intellectual history and (more to the point) the result of a concerted propaganda effort on the part of the "Reds" to make the "Browns" appear objectively evil and "other" (ironically, demonization of the "other" is counted as a definitional trait of fascism). But in terms of their theory and practice, the differences are minimal.

One of the things that continually amazes me is the easy characterization by those on today's political left of American conservatives as fascist, or trending towards fascism. It makes no sense, no sense at all. American conservatism is characterized by the championing of limited government, certainly less government than we have today. Today's political left is characterized by the desire for more government, always more. If fascism is closely intertwined with totalitarian government, then, it seems clear that it is today's political left that trends fascist, rather than American conservatism.

There'll be more quotes in the days ahead. I'm reasonably sure that Mr. Goldberg won't mind too much. If anything, they should help him sell a few more copies of his excellent book.

That book provokes some of the most entertaining reactions, by the way. Whenever I argue along these lines, someone will pipe up and say, "Oh, that's right out of Goldberg's Liberal Fascism," as though merely noting that constitutes a refutation. I note that as a rule, they don't bother trying to refute the book. My personal opinion is that they can't. It is well-researched and reasoned, and so far, none of the people who try a summary dismissal of the book give any evidence whatever of having actually read it. It does annoy me, though, that people act as though I never thought that fascism was a variety of socialism before I read this book. I read a pretty fair amount of Mein Kampf--not all of it, Hitler was a beastly bore of a writer--and to the best of my recollection, it was riddled with socialist claptrap, and, of course, the very name "Nazi" is an acronym standing for, in German, "National Socialist German Worker's Party." Kind of a dead giveaway, if you ask me, the sort of thing today's left keeps trying to explain away and just can't. At any rate, the ideas in this book weren't new to me, it's just handy to have all the material in one volume, and I'm glad the "used" price finally came down to where I didn't feel guilty for buying a copy.

This book, and Blacklisted by History, which came out in the same general time frame and details the enormous proof that Joe McCarthy was not a paranoid wingnut, but was in fact correct when he charged that the U.S. government at the time was riddled with communists and Soviet agents, are books that just aggravate the daylights out of the left. In the space of one year, the left was deprived of the ability--at least, if the audience is even a little informed--to call conservatives fascists and/or McCarthyites and keep a straight face.

If for nothing else, that was a glorious year.

Hitler on Socialism

There are, if you care to look for them, abundant evidences that Adolf Hitler was a socialist and, socialism being a thing of the political Left, it's fair, in my opinion, to point out that Leftists therefore have the honor of having most of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries' genocidal murderers to their credit. Just for giggles, start here, with Hitler himself, quoted, apparently, by John Toland:

We are socialists, we are enemies of today's capitalistic economic system for the exploitation of the economically weak, with its unfair salaries, with its unseemly evaluation of a human being according to wealth and property instead of responsibility and performance, and we are all determined to destroy this system under all conditions

No, I didn't go check the book out from the library to read the quote for myself. Feel free to doubt its veracity if you so choose. For me, I've seen far too many examples of this sort of thing to have any doubt whatsoever that it is representative.

Why write about this? Meh. Annoyance, really. Largely because I get a little tired of Leftists continually painting themselves as innocent of evil, when the reality is that Leftist ideology has been responsible for more war, death, and murder than you can shake a stick at. Will they take responsibility for Mao? No. For Lenin? No. For Stalin? No. Pol Pot? The Khmer Rouge? For Adolf Hitler? No. And yet to argue that these people weren't Leftists, died-in-the-wool Leftists, requires a break from reality of staggering proportions.

And yet they do argue this. Those people aren't real Leftists/Socialists/Communists, you will hear. Real Leftism/Socialism/Communism has never been tried.

So why do Leftists do this? In my opinion, it's because it would require admitting to themselves that their Leftist ideas contain the seed of more hate than just about anything else in the modern world, save, possibly, Islam. And this, they will never do.

Fascists, Fascism

Every ignorant fool out there who hollers "Fascist!" at people who oppose limitless welfare spending or homosexual marriage would love for you to forget this (or they don't know themselves), but fascism is just another variety of socialism; that is, it's not a right-wing or conservative thing at all, but rather a leftist phenomenon. It differs from other varieties of socialism chiefly in two ways: it is an explicitly nationalist socialism, whereas other varieties of socialism, especially communism, are more internationalist in their thinking, and it is more willing to tolerate private ownership of capital, as long as the state still directs everything.

I can't tell you how many people shout "Nazi!" or "Fascist!" without understanding--or perhaps deliberately forgetting--fascism's socialist nature. But it's glaringly obvious; the most infamous fascist state in history, Nazi Germany, made it plain: "Nazi" is just an acronym for Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei, or "National Socialist German Workers' Party."

So, no, fascism isn't right-wing totalitarianism after all; it's another variety of leftist, socialist totalitarianism. The fighting between Nazi Germany and Communist Russia in World War II was something of an internecine struggle between two competing varieties of socialism--and inescapably means that socialism of one variety or another is responsible for the murders and killing of almost inconceivably enormous numbers of people.

For more--and highly recommended--reading on this, see Jonah Goldberg's excellent Liberal Fascism.