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Bibliography on Fascism
"Wittgenstein's
Vienna" by Allan Janik & Stephen Toulmin: describes the ideological roots of
Nazi ideology as they developed among the Austro-Hungarian élite in Vienna, where Hitler was educated.
Angelo Tasca: "Naissance du Fascisme", 1938, Éditions Gallimard: available in French and Italian
(don't know if translated into English or not): written by a man who went through the installation of Fascism in
Italy first-hand. Describes the strategies the Fascisti used to infiltrate and sabotage the press, cooperatives,
and the workers' unions. This book was of course banned by the Italian Fascisti and also by the Nazis. The same
techniques are being used by private corporations in the United States today.
"An Uncertain
Future : Thought Control and Repression During the Reagan-Bush Era" by Richard O.
Curry. How corporate interests have taken over our media and censored whatever doesn't feed their power and wealth.
"Control of
Information in the United States" by James R. Bennett. A comprehensive annotated
bibliography describing how and why we do NOT have a free press in the United States.
Crisis in Yugoslavia
and its Relationship
to Global Fascism
by Richard K. Moore
27 April 1999
Among the lies and hypocrisies which characterize media reportage on NATO's
aggression against Serbia is the absurd notion that NATO is somehow "fighting fascism". Ironically, the
exact opposite turns out to be the case.
Fascism was an invention of capitalism. Hitler was originally recruited by German military intelligence to infiltrate
a socialist labor party, which Hitler eventually tranformed into the Nazi party. Hitler and Mussolini were financed,
encouraged, and supported (mostly covertly) by Western industrialists, and Western governments, for the express
purpose of suppressing grass-roots democratic forces (labor, socialist, communist, and anarchist movements) which
were seeking to overcome capitalist exploitation. I looked up some Readers Digest articles from the thirties.
I found an "interview" with two young Germans, one male one female, in which they explained all about
the shiny new Germany, the virtues of eugenics, and about how Jews were like a cancer that had to be rooted out,
even if unfortunate human suffering might be necessary. The article was a sympathetic one, not a crtique.
In Hitler's Mein Kampf agenda was on the public record, and the extensive US investments and technology transfers
to Nazi Germany enabled Hitler to invade Russia, the avowed enemy of the capitalist system. General Motors and
Ford (along with other US firms) operated manufacturing plants in Germany both before and throughout the war -
the bombers which blitzed England were built in a General Motors plant. After the war, Allen Dulles made it his
mission to see that no US firm was punished for collaboration with the Nazis. In fact, far from denying their collaboration,
General Motors and Ford demanded and received something like $30 million in compensation from the US government
for damage to their plants from Allied bombing. More recently, when these facts reached public light, they were
again not disputed - instead Ford and GM offered the flimsy excuse that their "subsidiaries were outside their
control". This is all thoroughly documented history, and references are supplied at the end of this article.
(1,2,3,4)
The US and Britain withheld their invasion of Europe until Russia began to turn the tide against the Nazis. Only
then did Allied troops land in Italy and Normandy. This timing, along with other evidence, indicates a strategy
aimed at limiting the western advance of Russian forces, rather than a strategy of defeating Nazism as quickly
as possible. (5,15) In fact Truman said outright:
"If we see that Germany is winning we should help Russia and if Russia is winning we
ought to help Germany and that way let them kill as many as possible . . ."
- Harry S. Truman, 1941.
(I believe the original source was a local newspaper in Independence, Mo.)
The use of fascist governments by the West to suppress local democracy was
not abandoned after WW II, despite propaganda rhetoric about "free-world" democratization. Throughout
the Third World, by means primarily of covert and military US interventions, fascist military dictatorships were
installed in order to suppress local populations and facilitate exploitive capitalist operations. (11,12,13,15)
Racism and nationalism were both characteristic of German Nazism, but neither is characteristic of fascism in general.
Spain's fascism didn't share the Nazis' preoccupation with aggressive nationalism, and Italy's fascism didn't share
the Nazis' extreme version of racism. Furthermore, the presence of racism or nationalism is not evidence for fascism.
Racism has existed for millenia; nationalism has existed for centuries; fascism is a twentieth-century invention.
What characterizes fascism in all cases is police-state suppression of the population, and the delegation of economic
operations to capitalist interests. Mussolini was explicit about the relationship between fascism and capitalism,
and took pride in the fact that he "got the trains running on time"; Hitler was less explicit about the
association, given the pseudo-socialist component of Goebbel's propaganda line, but it was Herr Krupp who was made
Oberfuhrer of Industry for all Third Reich territories, and the majority of concentration camps were run as corporate
slave-labor operations rather than as death camps per se. Krupp had to argue this point with Hitler, finally convincing
him that it made more sense to work Jews to death rather than "wasting" them by killing them outright.
(3)
Fascism is thus not a phenomenon which can be usefully studied in terms of the isolated national context, and certainly
not in terms of the psychology of individual leaders. Power-mad leaders, charismatic or merely ruthless, can always
be recruited - you only need one per country. And any nation, if subjected to sufficient externally-driven destablization,
can fall prey to fascism. How and why fascism arises can only be understood from the larger perspective - in the
context of capitalist strategies to maintain global dominance.
Fascism is only one of many such strategies. Liberal pseudo-democracy is the strategy employed in the West, and
in some third world countries (eg, Phillipines) when the oppressiveness of the fascist strategy threatens to bring
about an autonomous, locally initiated, change of regime.
Theocracies (eg Iran) are another of the strategies. The Shah had faithfully played the fascist role, and when
a popular rebellion threatened to bring in an autonomous local regime - most likely socialist and non-aligned -
the Ayatolla was dusted off in his Paris sanctuary, transformed by the global corporate media into a manufactured
"peoples' choice", and installed by the US, France, and Britain just-in-time to prevent local autonomy
of an unapproved variety. Western rhetoric pretended to be disappointed when the Ayatolla turned out to be a tyrant,
but in fact he serves Western interests perfectly, both as "someone to hate" (justifying military expenditures
and all sorts of anti-Bill Of Rights, so called "anti-terrorist" legislation), and as a general destabilizing
force in the Arab world. Fear of Arab solidarity has been a central driving force in Western Mideast policy since
at least the end of WW I.
Destabilization and regional devololution is another general strategy for global capitalist dominance. In this
case, the goal is to break a region down into smaller, more manageable chunks.
US/NATO policy in Yugoslavia, or in Iraq, it seems to me, must be examined primarily in terms of the strategies
revealed. The "threat" posed by Iraq was to become a model of Arab modernization - a model based on the
reinvestment of oil profits to build a modern national infrastructure.
Such a modernization model is contrary to the Western model for managing the Mideast, which seeks to keep the oil-producing
states in a permanent state of medievalism. This is why Kuwait was encouraged to engage in provocative price cutting,
and why the US tricked Saddam into invading Kuwait. That sequence of orchestrated events provided the pretext for
the US military to go in and destroy the national infrastructure which had been developed contrary to the interests
of global capitalism. The fact that Saddam is a dictator was of no strategic significance, except for its propaganda
value. All the oil-producing states are dictatorships, mostly installed by the West, and any pretense that Saddam's
style of government was a reason for Desert Storm is transparent hypocrisy.
In Yugloslavia, the strategy obviously being deployed is that of destablization and devolution. Local fascism has
little strategic relevance to the situation, nor does the level-of-democracy in any of the local governments -
and most certainly US/NATO policy has never been organized around any intent to promote human rights in the region.
By encouraging the fragmentation of Yugoslavia, by secretly providing arms to militant factions, and by preventing
any useful attempts at negotiation or mediation, Western policies have led inevitably and predictably to what is
being called, at the level of individual episodes, "ethnic cleansing".
In fact ethnic cleansing, at the macro level, is precisely what Western policy is all about: the creation of several
small countries, each of which has its own ethnic identity, and each of which is in conflict with its neighbors.
This is a textbook example of Samuel Huntington's "Clash of Civilizations" model for global capitalist
domination. (16)
If one or the other local governments in the Balkans are fascist, that has little relevance to Western policy.
If any government there deserves to be painted with the fascist brush, Croatia would certainly be high on the list,
and Croatia is being treated as a friendly ally by the West. It was Croatia which took the fascist side in WW II,
and I recall reading a couple years back about a soccer match which was delayed so the Croatian fans could finish
their enthusiastic round of Nazi songs. I'm not trying to shift any finger of blame from Serbia to Croatia - they're
both victims in this scenario - I'm rather making the point that local fascism isn't strategically relevant to
the situation. The more relevant strategic factors, I submit, are -
(1) regional destabilization
(2) framentation along Huntington's "civilization boundaries"
(3) most of all - the establishment by de facto precedent of an end to territorial national
sovereignty and its replacement by a pseudo-legitimized, capitalist-controlled, corporate-media celebrated, global
military regime.
Thus, as we look deeper, fascism is indeed of primary relevance to what's going
on in the Balkans - but at the global level, not the national.
At the national level, the hallmarks of fascism are police-suppression of populations and the delegation of economic
affairs to capitalist interests.
At the global level, the US/NATO hi-tech military machine serves to suppress whole national populations at a time,
in order that economic affairs can be conveniently managed according to capitalism's globalization /TNC-world-governement
agenda.
Far from promoting human rights and fighting fascism, the US/NATO actions amount to the consolidation of a global
fascist regime - the military arm of globalization - the muscle that makes real the global sovereignty of those
institutions which manage the global economy on behalf of their TNC constituency - the WTO, IMF, World Bank, OECD,
WIPO, ad nauseum acronymium.
Human rights and human welfare, as we can see evidenced throughout the Third World, are of no concern to global
capitalism. In the calculus of transnational "market forces", as interpreted by the almighty IMF, maximizing
TNC profits is the only goal. Human welfare and human rights are not to interfere, even if that means mass starvation,
which is precisely what it does mean. (17,18,19)
There's one more of capitalism's oft-used strategies which deserves mention in this regard, and that is genocide.
In North America, Australia, and South Africa, to name three examples from the nineteenth century, wholesale genocide
against indigenous peoples was the method used to clear the land for expansion of the capitalist system. It seems
that some cultures don't domesticate well, from a capitalist perspective, and outright genocide is necessary to
free up the land and resources being "wasted" by people who live "outside the cash economy".
Local self-sufficiency is anathema to capitalism, as is economic sustainability. Both are fundamentally incompatible
with what capitalism calls economic growth and "development".
Sub-Sahara Africa is today's version of "Injun Territory" - a vast land occupied by semi-indigenous economies
and peoples which aren't particularly productive from the perspective of global capitalism. Against the American
"Injuns" the weapons were the US Cavalry, the destruction of the Bison herds, and media demonization
of "savage heathens"; against the people of Sub-Sahara Africa the weapons are covertly-sponsored civil
wars, the destruction of economies via IMF diktats, and media attribution of the civil wars to "primitive
tribalism". The predictable consequence, now as in the US Old West, is publicly tolerated genocide on a continental
scale. (17)
Of all the human rights - as enumerated by documents such as the US Constitution or the UN Delcaration of Human
Rights - the one least respected of all by global capitalism is that of democratic self-determination. Local autonomy,
democratic or otherwise, is the ultimate deadly sin in the eyes of global capitalism. The mechanisms for preventing
local autonomy, and for selling the prevention process to Western populations, have been steadily refined over
at least the past three centuries, and are recently enjoing an unfortunate renaissance of demonic inventiveness
- from free-trade treaties, to NATO blitzkrieg, to state-of-the-art wag-the-dog journalism.
by Richard K. Moore
cyberjournal.org
27 April 1999
Wexford, Ireland
Recommended References
(Please accept my apologies for not having at hand names of current publishers
and other details for some of these references.)
(1) George Seldes, "Facts and Fascism".
(2) James Pool, "Who Financed Hitler", 1978, Pocket Books, Simon & Schuster,
New York.
(3) William Manchester, "The Arms of Krupp 1587-1968".
(4) Charles Higham, "Trading with the Enemy".
(5) Holly Sklar, ed, "Trilateralism", 1980, South End Press, Boston.
(6) Zinn, Howard, "A Peoples History of the United States", 1980, Harper & Row,
New York.
(7) William Greider, "Who Will Tell the People, the Betrayal of American Democracy",
1992, Touchstone Press, Simon & Schuster, New York.
(8) Lederer, William J, "A Nation of Sheep", 1962, Fawcett World Library, Crest
Books, New York.
(9) Michael Parenti, "Inventing Reality", 1993, St. Martin's Press, New York.
(10) Parenti, "Make-Believe Media - The Politics of Entertainment", 1992, St. Martin's
Press, New York.
(11) Parenti, "The Sword and the Dollar - Imperialism, Revolution, and the Arms Race",
1989, St. Martin's Press, New York.
(12) William Blum, "Killing Hope, U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War
II", 1995, Common Courage Press, Monroe Maine.
(13) John Stockwell, "In Search of Enemies - A CIA Story".
(14) David Horowitz, editor, "Containment and Revolution", Beacon Press, Boston,
1967,
(15) John Bagguley, "The World War and the Cold War".
(16) Samuel P. Huntington, "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order",
1997, Simon and Schuster.
(17) Michel Chossudovsky, "The Globalization of Poverty", 1997, Third World Network,
Penang, Malaysia.
(18) Jerry Mander and Edward Goldsmith, ed, "The Case Against the Global Economy, and
For a Turn Toward the Local", 1996, Sierra Club Books, San Francisco.
(19) Frances More Lappé, "World Hunger, Twelve Myths", 1986, Grove Press,
New York.
 
 
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