The commonly accepted theory that fascism originated in the conspiracy of the great industrialists to capture the state will not hold. It originated on the Left. Primarily it gets its first impulses in the decadent or corrupt forms of socialism—from among those erstwhile socialists who, wearying of that struggle, have turned first to syndicalism and then to becoming saviors of capitalism, by adapting the devices of socialism and syndicalism to the capitalist state.
American journalist (1882-1964)
The old socialists had argued for the taking over of the instruments of production by the state which would manage them for the benefit of the people. Sorel saw in this an evil worse than capitalism. It was, in fact, state capitalism or statism. The tools of industry should be owned, not by the state, but by the workers.
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.
When the fountains of government abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to [Public works |public works]], then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world.
There is a difference between a fifth columnist working in America for Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin , and an American who would give his life for his country but would also like to see its social and economic life changed in the direction of the fascist pattern. You will get no such American to admit that what he believes in is fascism. He has other and more agreeable names for it. He would be provoked to knock you down if you called him a fascist. That is because he does not know what fascism is and makes the mistake of supposing that a fascist is one who is on the side of the Führer or the Duce. Dollfuss was a fascist and so was Schuschnigg, but neither of them was noticeably on the side of Hitler and one was assassinated and the other seized and imprisoned by Hitler.
The test is—how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life? When you can put your finger on the men or groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchical corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism... and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world... and proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach... absolute government—then you will know you have located the authentic fascist.
They think that to be a Fascist you must have some sort of shirt uniform, must drill and goose-step, must have a demonstrative salute, must hate the Jews, and believe in dictatorship. Fascism is not the result of dictatorship. Fascism is the consequence of economic jam and dictatorship is the product of Fascism, for Fascism cannot be managed save by a dictator.
We may seem to be a long way from the kind of Fascism which we behold in Italy today, but we are not so far from the kind of Fascism which Mussolini preached in Italy before he assumed power and we are slowly approaching the conditions which made Fascism there possible. All that is needed to set us definitely on the road to a Fascist society is a war. It will of course be a modified form of Fascism at first. But Fascism cannot continue in a modified form… Thus, though Hitler will never come here to impose his Fascist abomination upon us, we may go to him to impose it upon ourselves.
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.
We're going to talk about billions and we might just as well know what a billion is. To begin with, it's a lot of money… If you were to save a dollar a day every day and had been doing this every day since Adam was created in the Garden of Edin, you wouldn't have a billion dollars. In fact, to have a billion dollars you would have had to start saving 2,735,726 years before Adam was born.
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.
Regimentation of American life means forming society into regiments, subjecting it to orders, drills, commanders… Regimentation of business means, in the minds of those who use the term, forming businessmen into regiments, bringing business under regulation, controlling production, prices, trade practices, the rules of the game. For seventy years at least business men have been, in varying degrees, in favor of this. The government has been against it.