-Caveat Lector- From http://www.orlingrabbe.com/american_fascism.htm
}}}>Begin American Fascism Revisited by Russell Madden Nearly forty years ago, in 1962, Ayn Rand delivered a speech at the Ford Hall Forum entitled, "The Fascist New Frontier." Her speech harshly criticized the administration of John F. Kennedy for its violation of rights. She intended to include a copy of this speech in her second nonfiction collection, but Random House Books editor, Bennett Cerf, would have none of it. Rand claimed that Cerf initially touted the idea, even endorsing the notion of titling the collection after the talk. Angry at what she viewed as an unprincipled change of mind, she severed ties with Random House. While the speech was printed in pamphlet form, it did not receive publication in a Rand book collection until the second edition of The Ayn Rand Column, published in 1998 by Second Renaissance Books. Given the impulse of recent events involving the creation of a "Homeland Defense Agency" to combat terrorism and the plethora of fresh assaults on privacy, self-defense, and the Constitution, a reassessment of Rand's observations and conclusions can shed light on where our nation is headed. Rand began her speech by quoting from a work endorsed by that noted collectivist and mystic, Adolf Hitler. In the 1920s, der Fuhrer laid out his program for achieving social justice. Rand intended to shock her audience by demonstrating just how many of his ideas matched those supported by the average citizen. Remember: this was before the introduction of Medicare, Medicaid, HMO's, Headstart, drugs for seniors, and the "Great Society" of Lyndon Johnson, that wondrous president who brought us the joys of Vietnam in 3-D and living Technicolor. Check it out: 1. State guarantees "for employment and earning a living." 2. Promotion of the community over the individual. 3. "Profit sharing in big business." 4. Special favors for "small business in the purchases of . . . governments." 5. State "improvement of public health" and the protection of "mother and child." 6. State provided "enlargement of our entire system of public education." 7. Prohibition of child labor. 8. Promoting "physical education of youth." 9. Attacks on the "materialistic spirit." 10. "The Common Good Before the Individual Good." Sounds familiar, huh? You'd almost have to think these points uncontroversial if you examined how society has progressed in the eight decades since Hitler's exhortations and the four decades since Rand's commentary. Today, we have: 1. State-mandated unemployment insurance; makeshift work to "remove" people from welfare; minimum wage laws; living wage laws; endless government programs to subsidize or provide grants to freeloaders unable to earn a living in a free market, i.e., unable to find consumers to pay them for what they do. 2. "Communitarianism" promoted by such academic stalwarts as Robert Bellah and Amitai Etzioni; Hillary Clinton's It Takes a Village; and "community standards" brought to us by the Black-Robed Nine, a.k.a., the Supreme Court. 3. Confiscatory tax rates — approaching fifty-percent — that redistribute the wealth produced by the most productive individuals in our country to those least creative and productive; death and estate taxes that force many small businesses to sell off their assets to pay their bills; and tax codes that steal the same money multiple times as it trickles down to you. 4. A Small Business Administration that provides loans to businesses too risky or poorly organized to obtain loans from banks or investments from individuals; and governmental rules favoring "minority owned businesses" in the rewarding of State contracts; 5. The expansion of State funding and regulation to include virtually all aspects of our health care and insurance system; tax rules favoring third-party-payers; cabinet-level positions dedicated to overseeing health issues; Medicare, Medicaid, and state-funding for the "uninsured," especially children; state-dictates for coverage of various medical conditions, for coverage pools, for portability, and for reimbursement; and the coming drug coverage for retired folks. 6. The shift from 90% private schools and10% state schools at the beginning of the Twentieth Century to the reverse by the start of the Twenty-First; Headstart; suggestions for publicly-funded preschools and the first two years of college; mandatory attendance policies; State dictatorship of educational content, procedures, and testing; State-guaranteed student loans and State provided grants; and the promotion of tax-funded vouchers. 7. Limits on when a child can begin to work; dictates regarding how many hours and under what conditions children can be employed; minimum wage laws that kill employment opportunities for many unskilled young people; mandatory school attendance; and outright prohibitions for many jobs. 8. A presidential commission dedicated to ensuring our youngsters are physically fit. 9. Sin taxes designed to discourage consumption of "undesirable" goods such as alcohol, tobacco, guns and ammunition, and various luxury items. 10. The exaltation of collectives, whether racial, sexual, or ethnic; endless appeals to a myriad of special-interest groups in voting: gays, women, blacks, union members, WASPs, Jews, Catholics, and on and on and on; affirmative action with its notion of "group" justice; calls for "slave reparations"; pitting the "rich" against the "poor," the "old" against the "young"; racial profiling; and endless calls for the altruistic "sacrificing" of individuals and their unique lives for the edification of the State, the Country, or some other nonexistent entity. Who Won the War? Remind me again: who exactly won World War II? Despite the hesitancy of Mr. Cerf in acknowledging the fact, most, if not all, presidents of the past eighty years subscribed in part or in whole to these fascist ideas. "Ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country" is hardly an example of viewing the State as a tool and servant of the individual, of subordinating government to its citizens. Hermann Goering said, "Common good comes before private good." Who is telling us now that we must "sacrifice" or "trade" some of our private freedom so the State can achieve its goal of "protecting" us by prohibiting weapons on planes, conducting warrantless searches and seizures, increasing use of secret courts, roving wiretaps, and spying on our financial and other private affairs? All for "the good of the nation," of course. Many people recoil whenever someone suggests that the American State is a fascist one; that our country is more fascist than free. The attitudes and emotional connotations such evaders bring to the concept of "fascism," do not, however, alter in the least our fascist reality. A government does not have to reproduce the trappings of Mussolini or Hitler to be classified as "fascist." Fear and indignation on the part of the squeamish do not alter that fact. As Rand defined the term in her speech: "Under fascism, men retain the semblance or pretense of private property, but the government holds total power over its use and disposal . . . . "Under fascism, citizens retain the responsibilities of owning property, without freedom to act and without any of the advantages of ownership . . . .the government officials hold the economic, political and legal power of life or death over the citizens." (The Ayn Rand Column, revised edition, p. 98.) Freedom and property rights no longer exist in any fundamental sense in this country. They haven't for a long time. (See my essay, "One Freedom," for a discussion of the fact that the essence of liberty is an either/or proposition. Or, in the words of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack, "The way he saw it, once you surrendered sovereignty over part of your life, even a tiny part, you've already lost the war. After that it becomes an issue not of whether you have a right to your life but of how big a chunk of your life you're going to surrender. And no one asks the giver. The decision is made by the takers." [All the Rage, p. 83.]) The Politician's Right to Interfere I defy anyone to name a single area of life in America today where politicians do not believe they have the power, the authority, the right to interfere. In a land in which the amount of water in toilets is as regulated as your ability to carry a weapon, our slavery is merely a matter of degree. Compare this description by Rand of Kennedy's approach to "dialogues" to George W. Bush's "reaching out" to his opposition: "The style of their public communications . . . is a carefully calculated mesh of equivocations, approximations and generalities which are slightly off-focus, which are not clear enough for them to be accused of saying what they do say, but just enough to register a certain suggestion, as if they intended to condition the listener, not by means of words, but by means of the unsaid between the lines." (Rand, ibid., p. 99.) Consider that "Kennedy was denouncing . . . all those who raise the obstacle of principles in the path of governmental action" (p. 100) and Bush's criticism of "ideologues," i.e., people who actually act according to what they believe. Then there's a quote from JFK that we must "combine the strength of public and private agencies, public and private purposes — public and private interests," (p. 102) that eerily echoes GW's push for the federalization of the airline industry and the continuation of corporativist policies of protectionism and control in the steel, education, and farm industries that stretch back to FDR's day. The thirst for a "partnership" between government and business has not exactly diminished since 1962. As Rand said, "Government control over 'all sectors of a society' is the essence of the totalitarian state . . . " (p. 103.) Even if the State does not choose to exercise that control in all instances, and, like a parent, permits its wards to romp about on their own for awhile, there is no doubt but that control — that leash — exists and can be yanked whenever the parent deems it proper and necessary. For the Nazis, witness the words of Hermann Messerschmidt: "The economy serves the state . . . .It is a national economy . . . whose tasks and goals are determined by national events." (p. 103.) For us, witness the State's actions during last spring's electric power "crisis" or the subordination of the economy to the undeclared war the State is currently waging against "terrorism." The Nazis' odd notion that the economy is "controlled and free at the same time" (p. 103) is no odder than the words of our politicians now who state that we should not and will not give up our freedoms because of the World Trade Center attack even as they rush pell mell to curtail that very liberty. As the State busily forces ISPs to delete websites it deems unacceptable (such as one defending the Irish Republican Army), we should remember Rand's admonition that " . . . the establishment of censorship is the tombstone of a free country." (p. 105.) No, the State is not censoring me or you . . . yet. But as long as that line has been crossed without meaningful opposition, no one is safe. If the ISP's with their greater economic and political resources do not stand up for the First Amendment, how much harder will the struggle be for the increasing number of individuals whose voices will eventually be silenced? " . . . [N]o dictatorship . . . has ever abolished freedom of speech at a single sudden stroke: it has always been done by a series of gradual steps . . . " (p. 109.) Those "gradual steps" are echoing eerily around us as the State stalks its next victim. " . . . [H]uman rights cannot exist without property rights, and . . . the destruction of property rights leads to the destruction of all rights and all freedom." (p. 107.) The wedge opening the door to dictatorship is "'the public interest'; the concept of a "public interest" that demands the sacrifice of individual rights and lives." (p. 109.) Keep those thoughts in mind as we drown in an orgy of calls for "sacrifice" in the coming months and years, all in the name of "security" and "freedom." Rand's identification of the essence of JFK's approach as a species of "fascism" did not set well with the publishers of her time. Those who hear that word applied to our country today likewise take offense. To twist a phrase from Lenny Bruce: I just said it. What about the people who are actually doing it? Too many citizens presently waving flags in the streets value form over substance. They want to be able to say they support freedom without actually dealing with its messier aspects. Their attitudes and actions are akin to how someone with a notorious uncle might respond. He wants to be associated with the uncle's fame and the favorable attention it garners. Yet he doesn't want to sully his home with the uncle's actual presence since he finds the stark reality of who the uncle is to be distasteful and unpleasant. Is the American slide deeper into fascism inevitable? No. No human directed action is "inevitable." Is it likely? You be the judge. But if you support the kinds of political programs promoted by the Nazis in 1920s and 30s, you, my friend, are a fascist, whether you want to be or not. See Russ Madden's articles, short stories, novel excerpts, and items of interest to Objectivists, libertarians, and sci-fi fans at http://home.earthlink.net/~rdmadden/webdocs/. -30- from The Laissez Faire City Times, Vol 5, No 45, November 5, 2001 End<{{{ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Forwarded as information only; no endorsement to be presumed + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this material is distributed without charge or profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this type of information for non-profit research and educational purposes only. + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + The only real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes. -Marcel Proust + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + + "Do not believe in anything simply because you have heard it. Do not believe simply because it has been handed down for many generations. 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