John T. Flynn Quotes

Probably one of the most completely misunderstood of all modern institutions is militarism. While military organizations take their origin in man's lust for war, militarism is something more than a mere war machine. By militarism I mean that institution in which the nation maintains large national armies and navies in time of peace, usually raised on the principle of conscription.

It would of course be a grave injustice to Mr. Roosevelt to say that he is a militarist in the sense that Mussolini is a militarist. Mussolini is a lover of war. Mr. Roosevelt is not. But he is a lover of the instruments of war. There was a time when he favored universal military training-the corrosive curse of Europe.

So that we find the Reconstruction Finance Corporation (RFC), one government bureau, borrowing money from the banks and appropriating to other government bureaus. Of course this practice brings to an end the ‘power of the purse’ by which parliaments in free democracies control executives. And so you find these bureaus supplying one another with money as part of this new system of eliminating Congress from its historic role of controlling the purse strings.

You may hear any day angry discussions of the course of events in Washington. You will hear ardent New Dealers assert that the government is building a great buttress around the crumbling walls of democracy. Others tell you, with equal assurance, that the order being fashioned there is obviously National Socialism, while still others are quite as sure that it is communistic.

Why is the Communist so deeply stirred about the Negro? Is he trying to correct injustices suffered by the Negro in order to improve his lot here and make him love America more? We know that the Communist has one supreme interest and that is to excite and stimulate the hatreds of every class in the country.

Fascism has departed from Germany, but a hybrid system of socialism and capitalism in chains has come to England, which is called social democracy but is on its way to Fascism with all the controls without which such a system cannot exist. And in America the price of the war is that fatal deformity of our own economic and political system which Roosevelt effected under the impact of the war necessities.

But the ringleaders in that organization are the men who must be identified as infinitely more dangerous to the civilization of this country than the small group of Red birds of passage against whom they were fulminating. For it is they who are plotting to wipeout the traditional political and economic civilization of this country and to supplant it with a system of organized social life on the Fabian model. They wrap themselves in a mantle they call anti-communism. But they are pro-Socialist. They are not willing, of course, publicly to concede that. They are Planners. That is, they are Socialist Planners—and unless they are identified, recognized for what they are and are stopped they will destroy this country.

Indeed to my mind the great, decisive factor in the choice between socialism and capitalism is that the system of production by private enterprise in a severely restrained republican-government is the only one in which men can enjoy the inestimable blessing of freedom. Socialism is impossible under any condition, but if it can be made to work at all it must be under an all-powerful State with the vast powers necessary to enforce its decrees governing every sector of our lives.

Military men, when confronted with the mutterings of disaffected taxpayers, always pointed out how good these government military expenditures were for business.

Hitler liked to think that he was ‘making a front against the entire public opinion’ and that national socialism must never become the bailiff of public opinion, never its slave but its ruler. But actually Hitler was forever feeling around for the pulse of the great controlling minorities. He played with them all, coddled them all, promised all, and lied to everyone. He courted the old nationalist Hugenberg while he pampered the socialist Gregor Strasser. He cajoled his old comrade Feder, the enemy of the ‘bond slavery of interest,’ while he made terms with Schacht the banker. He made ambiguous promises to labor while he dealt with Thyssen for funds. He sent Goering to Rome to assure the Vatican that national socialism was rooted in Christianity while Rosenberg attacked religion and preached his weird forms of paganism. He played every card, worked every side of every street until he was able to put his finger on what may be called the great mass pulse and say: here lies power.

It is born in crisis, lives on crisis, and cannot survive the era of crisis. By the very law of its nature it must create for itself, if it is to continue, fresh crisis from year to year. Mussolini came to power in the postwar crisis and became himself a crisis in Italian life. . . . Hitler's story is the same. And our future is all charted out upon the same turbulent road of permanent crisis.

Norman Thomas, in particular, has won a unique place for himself in the good opinion of the American people because of his courage, his complete honesty and his great power on the platform as a champion not merely of the Socialist philosophy but of many fine human causes. At one time it had built a considerable propaganda ma-chine. It had the People's House in New York with its large Socialist library and the Rand School which was the center of its educational activity. But it was an honest movement run by honest men who offered socialism to the people and called it by its true name. But Americans made it plain they did not want that. In England the old Fabians, as we have seen, never offered socialism as such. They peddled one product at a time, always omitting the Socialist label.

Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing billions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society. There is your fascist. And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy.

We have, as a consequence, been making war on the Communists. This has had one very serious by-product. It has dramatized the American Communist Party and its dupes as the chief internal enemy of our economic system and our form of government. And it is widely feared that a crisis here would present our native Communists with their great opportunity.

This odd effect was due to the fact that a new Socialist enterprise entered the market. It took over Fabian socialism as its product, but it found a new and attractive brand name for its goods. It was called the Planned Economy.