"Controversies over Italian Fascism's Political Placement"

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"Controversies over Italian Fascism’s political placement"
(Banned) From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Posted 2014
Since the end of World War II, the conventional view held by most historians concerning Mussolini’s political and social creed was that he exhibited features that would place him on the right side of the political spectrum. But this view has come under closer scrutiny in recent years. A number of historians and political scientist argue that fascism is a doctrine which mixes the philosophies of the Left and Right into a confusing maze.[1]
Some political sociologists, like Seymour Martin Lipset, argued that fascism is actually "extremism of the center". Lipset contended that fascism was not on the Right because Mussolini did not plan to restore monarchical or aristocratic privilege.[2]
Others like Israeli historian Zeev Sternhell regarded fascism as an anti-Marxist form of
socialism.”[3] In Fascism: Theory and Practice, author Dave Renton agrees with Sternhell’s assertions, writing that “One of Sternhell’s consistent themes is the meaninglessness of left-right distinctions. Fascism, he says, emerged on the left while claiming to be anti-left.”[4]

What makes this subject even more controversial is Jane Soames’ English translation of Mussolini’s “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism.”[5] In her 1933 translation (authorized by Italy’s fascist government), she has Mussolini writing: “…it may rather be expected that this will be a century of authority, a century of the Left, a century of Fascism,” which would indicate that Mussolini thought of himself and his movement as belonging on the left side of the political spectrum. Compounding this controversy, Mussolini wrote in “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism” in Jane Soames’s 1933 authorized translation, “For if the 19th century was the century of individualism (Liberalism always signifying individualism) it may be expected that this will be the century of collectivism, and hence the century of the State.”[6]
Most scholars have identified collectivism as synonymous with the idea that the group’s goal should be superior to the individual’s so as to advance the “greater good.” The German economist Herbert Giersch contends that, “collectivism is on the left, individualism is on the right.”[7]

Contents:
* 1 The Doctrine of Fascism
* 2 The Controversy
* 3 Right-Wing Socialism and Petty-Bourgeoisie Socialism
* 4 Pejoratives and Marxist Terminology
* 5 The Politics of Mussolini
* 6 What Contemporaries Thought of Mussolini
* 7 The Church and the Monarchy
* 8 Left and Right Criticism
* 9 References

The Doctrine of Fascism -
Although written in 1927 by Mussolini with the help of Giovanni Gentile, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism” was first published in 1932 in the fourteenth volume of the Enciclopedia Italiana, of which supposedly all copies were destroyed before the end of World War II. Jane Soames’ 1933 translation was published as a 26-page booklet by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London. The booklet was one in a series of booklets printed by Hogarth Press, labeled “Day to Day Pamphlet No. 18”. It is the first authorized English translation of Benito Mussolini’s “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism.” A number of other books and publications of the era also used parts of Jane Soames’ translation, including President Herbert Hoover in his 1934 book Challenge to Liberty.[8] Hoover went on to describe Mussolini’s Fascism as having features in common with Socialism, Communism and Nazism.[9]

The Controversy -
Most historians agree that historical Italian Fascism was a mixed bag of right-wing and left-wing socio-economic policies. But recent evidence has shed new light on the underpinnings of Italian Fascism, discovering that this totalitarian state had embodied a far more collectivistic, socialist and progressive ideology.
In “The Manifesto of the Fascist Struggle” (June 1919) of the Revolutionary Fascist Party (Partito Fascista Rivoluzionario, PFR), Mussolini’s party called for radical policies including a strong progressive tax on capital that will truly expropriate a portion of all wealth; the seizure of all the possessions of the religious congregations and the abolition of all the bishoprics; the nationalization of all the arms and explosives factories; reduction of retirement age from 65 to 55; women suffrage; a minimum wage; eight-hour workday; participation of workers’ representation in the functions of industry commissions; and pro-labor policies.[10] In addition, the manifesto advocated “forcing landowners to cultivate their land or have them expropriated and given to veterans and farmers cooperatives.”[11] The Manifesto was written by national syndicalist Alceste De Ambris and Futurist movement founder Filippo Tommaso.[12]
A former member of Socialist Party of Great Britain, David Ramsey Steele described Mussolini in his early years as “the Che Guevara of his day, a living saint of leftism. Handsome, courageous, charismatic, an erudite Marxist, a riveting speaker and writer, a dedicated class warrior to the core, he was the peerless duce of the Italian Left. He looked like the head of any future Italian socialist government, elected or revolutionary.”[13] According to Steele, “Fascism began as a revision of Marxism by Marxists…”[14]
Political scientist James Gregor, known for his research on fascism and Marxism, asserted that Fascism is a Marxist heresy, that “Mussolini was a Marxist ‘heretic’”.[15] In Young Mussolini, Gregor attempts “to establish that Fascism was a variant of classical Marxism, a believe system that pressed some themes argued by both Marx and Engels until they found expression in the form of ‘national syndicalism’ that was to animate the first Fascism.” [16]
One of the world's leading experts on Fascism, Israeli historian, Zeev Sternhell came to the conclusion that “Fascist ideology represented a synthesis of organic nationalism with the antimaterialist revision of Marxism.”[17] Historian Richard Pipes succinctly summed up fascism’s affinity to socialism by arguing that both "Bolshevism and Fascism were heresies of socialism."[18]
In Gregors’ discussion of the origins of Fascism, he wrote: “Fascism's most direct ideological inspiration came from the collateral influence of Italy's most radical 'subversives' -- the Marxists of revolutionary syndicalism.”[19] And that “by the early 1930s, the 'convergence' of fascism and Stalinism struck Marxists and non-Marxists alike.... By the mid-1930s, even Trotsky could insist that 'Stalinism and fascism, in spite of deep difference in social foundations, are symmetrical phenomena'....”[20]
Other writers have come to the same conclusion, including Italian historian, Renzo De Felice, who is best known for his 6,000 page, seven volume biography of Benito Mussolini. He contended that Mussolini was a revolutionary modernizer in domestic issues, writing that “Mussolini’s fascism shared considerable affinity with the traditional and revolutionary left.”[21] Discussing the work of M. Agurksy, Stanley G. Payne, one of the most famous modern theorists of fascism, commented that “Fascism was sometime perceived not inaccurately as more of a heresy from, rather than a mortal challenge, to revolutionary Marxism.”[22] Other scholars have referred to both National Socialism and Fascism as “right-wing socialism”, or “petty-bourgeoisie socialism.”

Right-Wing Socialism and Petty-Bourgeoisie Socialism -
Murray Rothbard considered Bismarckism and later Fascism and National Socialism as examples of "right-wing socialism."[23] Rothbard further wrote: “there were from the beginning two different strands within Socialism: one was the Right-wing, authoritarian strand, from Saint-Simon down, which glorified statism, hierarchy, and collectivism…”[24] Karl Radek, a Marxist theoretician and international Communist leader, also described fascism as the “socialism of the petty bourgeoisie.”[25]
Economist Friedrich van Hayek conjectured that within the socialist movement there were rivaling right-wing and left-wing factions. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek wrote: “There are bound to arise rival socialist movements that appeal to the support of those whose relative position is worsened. There is a great deal of truth in the often heard statement that Fascism and National Socialism are a sort of middle-class socialism – only that in Italy and Germany the supporters of these new movements were economically hardly a middle class any longer.”[26]
In his essay “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” George Orwell may have been the first to coin the term “right-wing Socialism”, in his story about his days fighting General Franco’s forces in Spain.[27] During the Spanish Civil War, Orwell had found himself caught in the middle of street-fighting waged between left-wing Communists and right-wing Communists. In his book Home to Catalonia, Orwell documented how “The Communists had gained power and a vast increase of membership partly by appealing to the middle classes against the revolutionaries…”[28] He also noted that the “Communist viewpoint and the Right-wing Socialist viewpoint could everywhere be regarded as identical.”[29] Orwell’s fighting unit, the POUM (Workers' Party of Marxist Unification), was accused by the Communist press the world over of both being fascist and collaborating with the fascist.[30][31]
According to Jonah Goldberg, author of Liberal Fascism, “From the moment Mussolini declared himself in favor of the war, Italian Socialists smeared him for his heresy. ... 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).”[32]
Another description of right-wing socialism has come from economist Jesús Huerta de Soto, who referred to this anti-market, paternalistic ideology as a type of socialism “in which institutional aggression is employed to maintain the social status quo and the privileges certain people or groups enjoy.” Soto continues, “In this sense, conservative socialism and democratic socialism differ only in the motivations behind them and in the social group each aims to favor.”[33]
Both Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were highly critical of those who would ignore orthodox Marxism and embrace a form of “petty-bourgeois socialism.” In Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels attempted to distinguish their version of socialism and communism from other versions of socialism, including “petty-bourgeois socialism” and “conservative or bourgeois socialism.”[34]
Engels was particular concerned with avowed socialists who deviated from Marxist theory, writing in 1877: “Even in the Social-Democratic Party, petty bourgeois Socialism has its defenders.”[35]

Pejoratives and Marxist Terminology -
The word fascist or right-wing fascist is sometimes used to denigrate people, institutions, or groups that have no connection with historical or ideologically Fascism. Many of these claims are historically meaningless. Near the end of World War II, George Orwell, author of 1984 and Animal Farm, attempted to define Fascism. He found it difficult. He wrote that the word “fascism” is almost entirely meaningless, arguing that it is recklessly flung around in every direction.[36] Historian Richard Griffiths has argued that "fascism" is the "most misused, and over-used word, of our times."[37]
Marxists have employed the terms reactionary, counter-revolutionary, bourgeoisie, fascist, or right-wing to clarify ideological differences and identify common denominators. In other cases, right-wing designations and other pejoratives have been used to disparage both non-Marxist opponents and pro-Marxist heretics. Historically, Marxists who stray from classical Marxism or have been caught up in a political power struggle or ideological disputes have resorted to using pejorative terms less for clarification and more for defaming.
Such pejorative adjectives were bantered about during the 1920s when a power struggle erupted between Trotsky and Stalin after the death of Vladimir Lenin. In 1924, the ruling communist triumvirate denounced “Trotksyism” as “petty bourgeois deviation.”[38] Soon after Trotsky was stripped of his authority, a wider schism developed between the left-wing Bolsheviks and right-wing Bolsheviks—referred to as the Left Opposition and the Right Opposition. In those years both Stalin and Trotsky hurtled charges of fascism or “Bonapartism” at each other.[39]
In response to Stalin’s power plays, the Left Opposition within the Bolshevik Party fought back from 1923 to 1927, headed de facto by Leon Trotsky. It was destroyed by Stalin when he aligned himself with right-wing Bolsheviks who wanted to continue Lenin’s New Economic Polices (NEP) and restore “concessions to the capitalist system favored by the party’s right wing,” which included opening up the Russian economy to private capital and foreign investment.[40] In short order, Stalin then “demolished” the right-wing communists.[41]
The pejorative war escalated during the 1937 Moscow show trial. Trotsky responded sarcastically to charges of collaboration with fascism, espionage and capitalism. Trotsky wrote: “How could these Old Bolsheviks, who went through the jails and exiles of Tsarism, who were the heroes of the civil war, the leaders of industry, the builders of the party, diplomats, turn out at the moment of the ‘the complete victory of socialism’ to be saboteurs, allies of fascism, organisers of espionage, agents of capitalist restoration.”[42] Stalin and other Marxist leaders habitually used pejoratives to slanderously attack opponents. “Charges of rightism, fascism and Nazism were leveled at countless victims of Stalin’s purges.”[43] Other accusations leveled against supporters of Trotsky and Stalin centered on the pejorative “Red fascism.” But even some non-Marxists found the term appropriate to describe Stalin’s regime. The New York Times dubbed Stalinism "red fascism”.[44]

The Politics of Mussolini -
As a union organizer and agitator, Mussolini organized strikes and riots when the Italian government invaded Ottoman Libya in 1911–1912, which got the attention of various Marxist, syndicalist and socialist leaders. A self-avowed Marxist in his early years, Mussolini prestige grew as an influential leader in the Italian Socialist Party.  In 1912 he was elected to the National Executive Committee of the Italian Socialist Party and appointed editor of their party newspaper, Avanti! (Forward).[45][46] Mussolini’s election and appointment was considered a victory by the hard-line Marxist left.[47] When he took an interventionist stand for Italy’s involvement in the First World War, he was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party at a 1914 meeting in Milan, shouting, "You cannot get rid of me because I am and always will be a socialist. You hate me because you still love me."[48]  “Mussolini joined with pro-war leftists outside the Socialist party and launched a new socialist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (People of Italy),” which became the official newspaper of the fascist movement.  (David Ramsey Steele, “The Mystery of Fascism,” Liberty, Vol. 15, no. 11, Nov. 2001.)
Mussolini got the nickname “Il Duce” after he was released from jail for organizing violent workers’ revolts during protests over Italy’s “imperialistic” invasion of Ottoman Libya. To celebrate Mussolini’s release, a Marxist comrade proclaimed: “From today you, Benito, are not only the representative of Romagna Socialists, but Il Duce of all revolutionary Socialists in Italy.[49]
After his decision to begin supporting  his nation’s involvement in World War I, “Mussolini joined with pro-war leftists outside the Socialist party and launched a new socialist newspaper, Il Popolo d’Italia (People of Italy),” which was to become the official journal of the fascist movement.[50]
After Mussolini’s expulsion from the Italian Socialist Party, he joined a splinter group of revolutionary syndicalists who spoke in favor of having Italy join the war on the side of the Allies. This labor-union movement soon became the backbone of the Marxist–inspired Fasci d’Azione Rivoluzionaria Internazionalista—known as the Fascists. Mussolini’s switch to a pro-war position which resulted in a hostile split among pro-war socialists and anti-war socialists.[51] All across Europe, communist and socialist organization were breaking with Marx’s Proletarian internationalism and supporting the war.
Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov in their book, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War, maintained that “The Socialists of France and Germany and even of Russia supported World War I as a war between nation-states.”[52] “Four days after Germany declared war on France, Section Française de l’Internationale Ouvrière (SFIO) which eventually morphed into the French Communist Party, ceased its antimilitary, internationalist stand and decided to support French patriotism and the war against the Central Powers. Established as a Marxist party in 1875, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) also came out in support of World War I.” [53]
The Encyclopedia of World War I: A Political, Social, and Military History maintain that, “Once the war began, Austrian, British, French, German, and Russian socialists followed the rising nationalist current by supporting their country's intervention in the war.”[54] In their first election, Italian fascists boasted to voters that they were a political party squarely on the Left. “In the 1919 parliamentary elections, fascist candidates presented themselves as part of the Left not only in their beliefs, but also in their willingness to ally with other leftist parties.”[55] Musolini’s party fared poorly in the elections, due to a confusing mess of left-wing ideology and nationalism that the voters found unacceptable.
Later in 1919, Mussolini had adopted the black shirts of the anarchist to create paramilitary armed squads.[56] With his blackshirts in tow, Mussolini seized control of the 1919 factory in a “creative strike.” Mussolini proposed getting the factory workers to rise up and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat.[57] He advocated a proposal to march on Rome and violently overthrow the central government as had the Bolsheviks in Russia. But conservative and non-violent labor leaders balked at his idea, which forced Mussolini to cooperate with industrialists. Such pragmatism was the hallmark of Mussolini's thinking when opportunities arose to gain political power. As Peter Neville wrote: “Mussolini [was] always the pragmatic, when it suited him, …”[58] Calling himself the “Lenin of Italy,” Mussolini started up a theoretical Marxist journal, Utopia. Three of his collaborators on Utopia went on to found the Italian Communist Party and the German Communist Party.[59]
Mussolini’s relationship with the Soviet Union was considerable. In spite of the worldwide outrage over the Red Army’s invasion of Poland after World War I (the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921), Mussolini’s National Fascist Party welcomed the Bolsheviks with open arms, making Italy the first western nation to recognize the Soviet Union in 1924.  To further cement relationships with the Soviet Union, Fascist Italy in 1933 signed the “Treaty of Friendship, Nonaggression, and Neutrality” which helped to provide technical assistance and supplies to Moscow from a number of industries, including aviation, automobile and naval industries.[60]   Italy received oil in exchange. A number of authors have contended that this treaty with Italy was essential to Russia’s ability to develop it oil resources, and later to its industrialization and armament capabilities.
Mussolini was deeply impressed by the avowed Marxist and revolutionary syndicalist, Georges Sorel, who helped him formulate the core principles of Italian fascism.[61] To most revolutionary socialists, syndicalism represented a form of collective economic corporatism that would replace capitalism with socialism through trade-union organizations.
In front of big crowds, “Mussolini frequently claimed to advocate a kind of “socialism of the trenches,” in which the final victors would be workers, peasants, or veterans (depending on his audience).”[62]
Fascist Italy’s official recognition of the Soviet Union opened the flood gates to tremendous trade, making Italy a major supplier of arms to the Soviet Union, especially after the signing of the 1933 Russo-Italian “Treaty of Friendship, Nonaggression, and Neutrality.” A number of scholars contend that Italy’s industry and banks were responsible for the military industrialization of the Soviet Union, greatly contributing to Russia’s development of its oil and armament industries.[63] The bustling trade between Fascist Italy and Soviet Russia lasted until 1941.
As Mussolini’s administration continued to centralize the economy into twenty-two state-operated corporations, Mussolini proclaimed in 1935 that he had nationalized three-fourths of Italian companies. According to Patricia Knight in Mussolini and Fascism, a few years later in 1939, Italy saw the highest rate of state–owned enterprises in the entire world, outside of the Soviet Union.
Mussolini attempted to create a totalitarians state which are considered extreme version of authoritarian rule. Under totalitarianism, the state apparatus relies on centrally-planned strategies to control almost every facet of human existence, including the economy. Mussolini’s totalitarian corporate state lent itself to the wholesale nationalization of Italian industry in an effort to
politicize everything spiritual and human under his creed: "Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.”
Just before the end of World War II, Mussolini spoke to a socialist journalist and complained bitterly about the bourgeoisie, declaring in the interview: “I bequeath the republic to the republicans and not to the monarchists, and the work of social reform to the socialist and not to the middle class.”[67]
When Mussolini was shot by partisans in 1945, one of his long-term aides, Nicola Bombacci, a long-time friend of Lenin, shouted out “Long live Mussolini! Long live socialism!”[68]

What Contemporaries Thought of Mussolini -
After Mussolini’s purge from the Italian Socialist Party, Vladimir Lenin sent his heart-felt regrets. He said “that Mussolini was the only true revolutionary in Italy.”[69] According to Margherita Sarfatti, a well-known Jewish socialist, journalist and feminist, who became Mussolini’s mistress, Lenin had also remarked, "Mussolini? A great pity he is lost to us! He is a strong man, who would have led our party to victory."[70] Upon learning of Mussolini’s ascent to Prime Minister of Italy, “Stalin supplied Mussolini with the plans of the May Day parades in Red Square, to help him polish up his Fascist pageants.”[71]
Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, a leading member of the socialist Fabian Society, heaped praise on Mussolini in 1927. He said that fellow “socialists should be delighted to find at last a socialist who speaks and thinks as responsible rulers do.”[72] Shaw further noted that he found Mussolini appealing because he was “farther to the Left in his political opinions than any of his socialist rivals.”[73]
The founder of the British Union of Fascists (BUF), Sir Oswald Mosley, had been the Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster in the left-wing Labor Government of 1929–1931.  A committed member of the socialist Fabian Society during the 1920s and 1930s, Mosley called for state nationalization of the larger industries, and a public works program to solve unemployment during his Labor Party days.
When the labor party ignored Mosley’s recommendations, he resigned and found the New Party. After traveling to Italy at the behest of Mussolini during a study tour of “new movements,” Mosley returned to England and launched the BUF in 1932. Opposed to the impacts of free-trade, Mosley favored the protectionism of high tariffs in order to prevent "cheap slave competition from abroad.” (Oswald Mosley, Tomorrow We Live – British Union Policy 3d , 1938. ) As for his economic policies, Mosley was enamored with economist John Maynard Keynes. “Mosley created the British Union of Fascists as a vehicle for his economic vision of Britain as a Keynesian economic state, with an emphasis on deficit spending.” According to Bret Rubin,  in, “The Rise and Fall of British Fascism: Sir Oswald Mosley and the British Union of Fascists.”
Other Fabian Society members embraced not only Mussolini’s fascism, but Hitler’s National Socialism and communism, including socialist and science fiction writer H.G. Wells.  In a speech before the Young Liberals at Oxford in July 1932, Wells told the audience that young people should have the “foresight for enlightened Nazis.” He continued with a proposal that they “consider the formation for a greater Communist Party; a western response to Russia.”
Although Mussolini criticized other socialists and Marxists, he regularly told friends and foreign visitors that Fascism and Bolshevism were dear brethren. Many books of the era provided evidence for Mussolini’s devotion to both socialism and bolshevism.
The former Prime Minister of Italy, Francesco Saverio Nitti (1919-1920), who considered himself as a prominent leftist, but an opponent of fascism, authored a book in 1927 entitled Bolshevism, Fascism and Democracy. Inside, he stated that, “There is little difference between the two, and in certain respects, Fascism and Bolshevism are the same.”[75] Nitti continued this theme with his chapter "Bolshevism and Fascism are Identical.” In that chapter Nitti penned: “In Italy today one finds that greater tolerance is shown toward Communists affiliated with Moscow than to Liberals, democrats, and Socialists.”[76]
When the son of a U.S. Republican Senator, Alfred Bingham, arranged an audience with Mussolini, he recounted that Mussolini had attempted to make the point that “Fascism is the same thing as Communism.”[77]
Edmondo Rossoni, the first leader of the Italian Fascist labor confederation and professor at the University of Florence, described Benito Mussolini as a “revolutionary Socialist of the extreme left.” [78]
In another book published in 1930, Il Duce: The Life and Work of Benito Mussolini, by pro-fascist L. Kemechey, the author fervently argued that Mussolini was a Socialist and a Leninist and a revolutionary. [79]
Besides being an admirer of Lenin, Mussolini looked kindly towards Stalin as a “fellow Fascist.” Many Italian fascist leaders believed that Stalin’s bolshevism was evolving into fascism. Poet and journalist Gabriele D’Annunzio, considered a folk hero to fascists, characterized fascism as a Latinized form of National Bolshevism. [82] In 1939 Benito Mussolini highly praised Stalin for transforming Soviet Bolshevism into “a sort of Slavic Fascism.” [81]

The Church and the Monarchy -
Originally, the left-right political spectrum referred to seating arrangements in the French parliament after the French Revolution (1789–1799). At the time, those on the left of the aisle represented John Lockean classical liberals, artisans, merchants, capitalists and bourgeois middle class. The right side was occupied by the autocratic elites of the Monarchy and the hierarchical authority of the Church.
During his years as a young man, Mussolini was an avowed anti-cleric who "proclaimed himself to be an atheist and several times tried to shock an audience by calling on God to strike him dead.”[82] According to English historian Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini believed that any socialist who was Christian or who accepted religious marriage should be expelled from the party, condemning the Catholic Church for "its authoritarianism and refusal to allow freedom of thought ..."[83]
Referring to himself as an “outright disbeliever” Mussolini once “told a startled cabinet that Islam was perhaps a more effective religion than Christianity.”[84] Mussolini attempted to substitute the state for a spiritual god, considering “the state as the creator of the nation, the Italian Fascist discourse aimed at the construction of a new man, a man of the future: 'the Homo fascistus'.”[85]
Mussolini displayed his irreligious nature in his “Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” writing, “The fascist concept of the state…is all embracing, and outside of the state no human or spiritual values can exist, let alone be desired.”
Embracing a form of secular religion, Mussolini sought his people to make self-sacrifices to an omnipotent State. Sociologist George Ritzer noticed this behavior in Mussolini, contending that the Italian dictator viewed the “state as an institution on whose behalf its people should sacrifice themselves.”[86] Not long after his truce with the Vatican, Mussolini relationship with the Church turned turbulent, especially after he instituted his new anti-Semitic policy in 1938.[87] Pope Pius XI condemned both Mussolini and Hitler as adherents of “stupid
racialism” and “barbaric Hitlerism.”[88] The Church was also “wary of the claims by some Fascists to be creating a new religion and morality, …”[89]
During the mid to late 1930s, Mussolini repeatedly chided the Catholic Church, declaring that the “papacy was a malignant tumor in the body of Italy and must 'be rooted out once and for all,’ because there was no room in Rome for both the Pope and himself.” Historian Denis Mack Smith in Mussolini revealed that during one round of anticlerical rants against the papacy, Mussolini announced that he hoped that the death would soon overtake the Pope.
Mussolini had similar disrespect for the weak Italian monarchy and the more powerful Hapsburgs. In order to win Caesarian glory, Mussolini thought he “would gain him the prestige necessary to abolish the monarchy and create a truly totalitarian state.”[92] On July 24, 1943, not long after Allies launched an attack on the Italian mainland, Mussolini was arrested by the King. Soon Italy announced an armistice and declared war on Germany.
Mussolini was so enamored with the greatest of the Roman Empire that he considered reintroducing ancient Roman paganism. In Roads and Ruins, Paul Baxa revealed “Mussolini's 'pagan' view of history” led him to “retrieve what had been lost in the intervening centuries.” Baxa contended that Mussolini’s fascination with uncovering pagan Roman temples “was an attack on the Christian heritage of the city.”[93]

Left and Right Criticism -
Many political commentators view the conventional left–right spectrum problematic. Contending that the “Right-Left spectrum is increasingly useless as a way of talking about many issues,” Professor David McKnight writes that it is also confusing and “inadequate” and “has changed dramatically.”
They point to the Communist hereditary monarchy in North Korea where authority has been passed down through three generations of the same family line, starting with Kim ll-sung in 1948. Many consider Mussolini’s nationalistic overtones as evidence of right-wing extremism, even though Stalin had no qualms about utilizing Russian nationalism during the Great Patriot War of WWII. “Political reality motivated Stalin to exploit Russian Nationalism”.[94] Political Scientist Cheng Chen argues that “Slavic solidarity, instead of proletarian internationalism, was invoked to fight against the Germans.”[95] He continues, “During the 1920s, a series of episodes heralded the forthcoming marriage of nationalism and Marxism.”[96]
Some have claimed that the works of Karl Marx tacitly supported proletarian nationalism or “left-wing nationalism” as a means to develop a proletarian rule over a nation, which would evolve in stages towards a true revolutionary communist society.[97] This was often expressed by Stalin’s famous dictum –“Nationalist in form; socialist in context.”[98] Historically, Marxist leaders have supported nationalist movements if they adhere to socialism and class struggle.[99] Joseph Stalin, who promoted a civic patriotic concept called "revolutionary patriotism", supported the use of proletarian nationalism when nationalistic movements fought for class struggle within an internationalist framework.[100][101]
Left-wing nationalism has been described as a form of nationalism centered upon equality, popular sovereignty, and national self-determination with origins dating back to Jacobinism of the French Revolution.[102][103] Another form of left-wing nationalism is known as “National Bolshevism”, which incorporates elements of extreme nationalism (especially Russian nationalism) and Bolshevism.[104] As for Mussolini’s militaristic and authoritarian behavior, there seems to be little distinction between left-wing and right-wing regimes. As Stanley Milgram’s experiment contended concerning obedience to authority figures, people simply doing their jobs, without any particular hostility, can become agents in a terrible destructive process.[105]
Some psychologists have argued that most authoritarians have similar attributes despite varying ideological differences. Hans Jürgen Eysenck, a British psychologist, found little differences between authoritarians on different places on the political spectrum. He studied the political opinions associated with Communists and National Socialists (Nazis). This study was important because the political left-right axis after World War II had parked Communists and National Socialists at polar opposites. But this notion was problematic according to Eysenck’s research findings. He found that these two ideologies have distinctive links; both have a tough-minded aggressive behavior based on an authoritarian framework.[106] Eysenck suggested that Communists and National Socialists, like most collectivist-leaning groups, are analogous to ruffians in the streets competing for exclusive rights to territory and power.
The Nolan Chart, a political view assessment diagram, shows a left-right convergence at the bottom of their diamond-shaped chart with those who oversee authoritarian and totalitarian regimes.[107] Under this interpretation of the political spectrum, those who advocate almost total government control over the economy and over personal lifestyles generally display similar practices, goals and ideologies, causing the left and right to melt into one another.
Many contend that corporatism has a traditional right-wing component. In the case of Italy’s corporatist political system, the economy at the national level was collectively managed from the top down.[108] According to the fascists, the economy was centralized to bring harmony among social classes.[109] Mussolini wrote in “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism” that “Fascism recognizes the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonized in the unity of the State.”[110]
Generally, fascist corporatism was dissimilar to America’s independently-operated, shareholder-driven corporations.[111] In 1932 Mussolini fashioned twenty-two state-run holding corporations headed by a top official of the government or by members of the National Fascist Party. They were completely controlled and operated by the Italian state in Mussolini’s effort to move beyond capitalism and socialism. Mussolini’s “corporatism borrowed heavily from Georges Sorel's theories of revolutionary syndicalism”, an ideology that promoted the virtues of trade unionism and socialism.[112]
The Italian government had developed a strict worker-state corporate structure where trade unions and employer associations were subordinate to the state. In doing so, Mussolini’s administration also made strikes illegal as had Lenin and Stalin in the Soviet Union.  Both the Soviet Union and Fascist Italy had similar policies to prevent independent labor unions while making membership in state-run unions mandatory. “Unlike labor unions in the West, Soviet trade unions were, in fact, actually governmental organizations whose chief aim was not to represent workers but to further the goals of management, government, and the CPSU.”[113] Leon Trotsky was particularity adamant that the State should fully control the unions and when the Bolsheviks broke up factory worker
strikes in Petrograd, the conflict lead to the Kronstadt rebellion of 1921. The Kronstadt insurrectionists, called for, among other things, “the right of assembly, and freedom for trade union and peasant associations.” Russian Bolsheviks, German National Socialists and Italian Fascists took the position that the workers were now in charge of the government, making strikes and independent labor unions unnecessary.[114]

References:

1. Roger Griffin: "The Palingenetic Core of Fascism", Che cos'è il fascismo? Interpretazioni e prospettive di ricerche, Ideazione editrice, Rome, 2003 AH.Brookes.ac.uk) (Aristotle A. Kallis, editor, The Fascism Reader, Roger Eatwell, Chapter 4, "A Spectral-Syncretic Approach to Fascism,” London; New York: Routledge, 2003, pp. 71–80 Books.google.com.

2. Seymour Martin Lipset, Political Man: The Social Bases of Politics, Chapter 5, “Fascism: Left, Right, and Center," Doubleday and Company, Inc., Garden City: New York, 1960. This award-winning book was highly influential.

3. Stephen D. Shenfield, Russian Fascism: Traditions, Tendencies, Movements, M.E. Sharpe, Inc., Armonk: New York, 2001, p.14.

4. Dave Renton, Fascism: Theory and Practice, London: Pluto Press, 1999, p. 20.

5. Benito Mussolini, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” first authorized translation into English by Jane Soames, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London W.C. in 1933, 26 page booklet, quote on p. 20 (Day to Day Pamphlets No. 18).
Other sources include: Fascism: An Anthology, Nathanael Greene, ed., N. York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968, pp. 41, 43–44, and Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography with “The Political and Social Doctrines of Fascism,” published by Dover Publications, Mineola, New York, p. 236, 2006. Although written in 1927 by Mussolini, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, it was first published in 1932 in Italian. Jane Soames’ translation was also published in The Living Age, November, 1933, New York City, entitled “The Doctrine of Fascism.”
http://www.pauladaunt.com/books/Banned%20books%20and%20conspiracy%20theories/The%20Doctrine%20of%20Fascism%20-%20by%20Benito%20Mussolini%20%28Printed%201933%29.pdf

6. Benito Mussolini, “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism,” first authorized translation
into English by Jane Soames, published by Leonard and Virginia Woolf at the Hogarth Press, London W.C. in 1933, 26 page booklet, quote on p. 20 (Day to Day Pamphlets No. 18).
Other sources include: Fascism: An Anthology, Nathanael Greene, ed., N. York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968, pp. 41, 43–44, and Benito Mussolini, My Autobiography with “The Political and Social Doctrines of Fascism,” published by Dover Publications, Mineola, New York, p. 236, 2006. Although written in 1927 by Mussolini, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, it was first published in 1932 in Italian. Jane Soames’ translation was also published in The Living Age, November, 1933, quote on page 241, New York City, entitled “The Doctrine of Fascism.” http://www.pauladaunt.com/books/Banned%20books%20and%20conspiracy%20theories/The%20Doctrine%20of%20Fascism%20-%20by%20Benito%20Mussolini%20%28Printed%201933%29.pdf

7. Robert Backhouse and Roger Middleton, Exemplary Economists: Europe, Asia and Australasia, Volume II, Edward Elgar Publishing, Limited, UK, 2000, Herbert Giersch, chapter 3, “Preliminary Reflections on Economics as a Public Good,” p. 80.

8. Herbert Hoover, The Challenge to Liberty, New York/London, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1934, p. 66. Source cited in book is from The Political Quarterly, London, volume 4, issue 3, pages 341–356, July 1933.

9. Ibid., Herbert Hoover, page 74.

10. Vox Day, "Flunking Fascism 101". WND.com. 8 January 2008, http://www.wnd.com/2004/06/25291/#AuwLAbW5twBvO0cz.99

11. Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Change, Three Rivers Press, 2009, p. 46.

12. Dahlia S. Elazar, The Making of Fascism: Class, State, and Counter-Revolution, Italy 1919–1928, first pub. ed., 2001), Westport, Conn (u.a.): Greenwood Publishing Group. p. 73.

13. David Ramsey Steele, “The Mystery of Fascism,” Liberty, Vol. 15, no. 11, Nov. 2001.

14. Ibid., David Ramsey Steele.

15. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979, p. xi.

16. Ibid., James Gregor, p. xi.

17. Roger Griffin and Matthew Feldman, editors, Fascism: Critical Concepts in Political Science, London: Routledge, 2004, p. 334.

18. Richard Pipes, Russia Under The Bolshevik Regime, New York: Vintage Books/Random House 1985, p. 253.

19. James Gregor, The Faces of Janus: Marxism and Fascism in the Twentieth Century, Chelsea, Michigan: Sheridan Books, 2000, p. 130.

20. Arnold Beichman, “The Surprising Roots of Fascism,” Policy Review #102, Hoover Institution, Aug. 1, 2000.

21. Renzo De Felice, Fascism: An Informal Introduction to its Theory and Practice, New Brunswick, N.J. Transactions, 1976, pp67ff.

22. Stanley G. Payne, A History of Fascism 1914–1945, University of Wisconsin Press, 1996, p.126.

23. Murray Rothbard, “Left and Right: The Prospects for Liberty,” Left and Right, Spring, 1965, pp. 4-22.

24. Ibid., Murray Rothbard.

25. Cyprian P. Blamires, editor, World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2006, p. 136.

26. Friedrich van Hayek, The Road to Serfdom, New York: George Routledge and Sons, 1944, p. 120.

27. George Orwell, “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” New English Weekly, 29 July and 2 September 1937.)

28. George Orwell, Home to Catalonia, first published in 1938, p. 57.

29. Ibid., George Orwell, Home to Catalonia, p. 38.

30. John Newsinger "Orwell and the Spanish Revolution" International Socialism Journal, Issue 62, Spring 1994. Pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk. Retrieved 21 October 2010.

31. Jeffrey Meyers, edit., George Orwell, Routledge, New Ed edition, 1997, chapter 36, Geoffrey Gorer, Time and Tide, April 30, 1938, pp. 599-600.

32. Ibid., Jonah Goldberg, p. 44.

33. Jesús Huerta de Soto. Socialism, Economic Calculation and Entrepreneurship, Glos, England, UK; Northampton, Massachusetts, US: Edward Elgar Publishing Limited 2010, pp. 79-80.

34. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Communist Manifesto, ed. D. Ryazanoff, New York: Russell and Russell, Inc., 1963, Part III, pp. 54–68.

35. Friedrich Engels, “Preface to The Housing Question,” Selected Works, Moscow Edn., Vol. I. p.498.

36. George Orwell, “What is Fascism,” first published: Tribune — GB, London, 1944.

37. Griffiths, Richard. An Intelligent Person's Guide to Fascism, Duckworth, 2001, p. 1.

38. Ibid., Richard Pipes, p. 486, occurred in May of 1924 at the Thirteenth Party Conference.

39. Leon Trotsky, “The Workers’ State, Thermidor and Bonapartism,” February 1935.

40. Donald C. Hodges, The Bureaucratization of Socialism, University of Massachusetts Press, 1981, p. 131.

41. Ibid., Donald C. Hodges.

42. David Evans, Understand Stalin’s Russia, McGraw-Hill; 1 edition, Teach Yourself series, 2012, p. 89.

43. Ibid. Jonah Goldberg, p. 77.

44. Richard M. Fried, Nightmare in Red: The McCarthy Era in Perspective, Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 50.

45. A. James Gregor, Young Mussolini and the Intellectual Origins of Fascism, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979, p.53.

46. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini, Vintage Books, 1983, p. 8.

47. Ibid, David Ramsay Steele.

48. Ibid., Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini, p. 8.

49. Ibid., James Gregor, 1979, p. xi.

50. Patrizia Acobas, “Margherita Sarfatti 1880–1961 Bibliography,” Jewish Women’s Archive, posted at http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/sarfatti-margherita.

51. Zeev Sternhell with Mario Sznajder and Maia Asheri, trans. by David Maisel, The Birth of Fascist Ideology, From Cultural Rebellion to Political Revolution, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ. 1994, pp. 140, 214.

52. Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin's Cold War From Stalin to Khrushchev, Harvard University Press, Chapter One: Erich Fromm, 1997.

53. Lawrence Sondhaus, World War I: The Global Revolution, Cambridge University, 2011, p.177.

54. Spencer Tucker and Priscilla Roberts, editors, Encyclopedia of World War I: A Political, Social, and Military History, 5 vol. set, Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO. Tucker 2005, p. 884.

55. Pamela D. Toler, Phd., The Everything Guide to Understanding Socialism: The political, social, and economic concepts behind this complex theory, section: “Mussolini: Socialist ‘Heretic,’” Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2011.

56. Ibid., David Ramsey Steele.

57. Bruce Walker, “Fascists and Bolsheviks as friends,” Canada Free Press, posted, Jan. 31, 2008.)

58. Peter Neville, Mussolini, London: Routledge, 2001, p. 47.

59. Ibid., David Ramsey Steele. The future Communist leaders were Amadeo Bordiga, Angelo Tasca, and Karl Liebknecht.

60. Donald J. Stoker Jr. and Jonathan A. Grant, editors, Girding for Battle: The Arms Trade in a Global Perspective 1815–1940, Westport CT: Praeger Publishers, 2003, page 180.

61. Mediterranean Fascism 1919–1945, edited by Charles F. Delzel, Harper Rowe 1970, page 3.

62. Cyprian P. Blamires, editor, World Fascism: A Historical Encyclopedia, Vol. 1, Santa Barbara: ABC-CLIO, Inc., 2006, p. 136.

63. Ibid., Donald J. Stoker Jr. and Jonathan A. Grant.

64. Carl Schmidt, The Corporate State in Action, London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1939, pp. 153–76.

65. Patricia Knight, Mussolini and Fascism (Questions and Analysis in History), New York: Routledge, 2003.

66. Ibid., Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime, pp. 240–281.

67. Joshua Muravchik, Heaven on Earth: The Rise and Fall of Socialism, New York: Encounter Books, 2002, p. 170.

68. Ibid., Joshua Muravchik, p. 171.

69. Ibid., Jonah Goldberg p. 34.

70. Margherita Sarfatti, The Life of Benito Mussolini, England, 1925.

71. Ibid., David Ramsey Steele.

72. Richard Griffiths, Fellow Travellers of the Right: British Enthusiasts for Nazi Germany, 1933-39. London: Trinity Press, 1980, p. 259.

73. Gareth Griffith, Socialism and Superior Brains, Taylor and Francis e-Library, 2003, p. 253. Shaw made this statement in the Manchester Guardian in 1927.

74. John S. Partington, “H. G. Wells: A Political Life", Journal article in Utopian Studies, Vol. 19,
2008.

75. Francesco Saverio Nitti; Bolshevism, Fascism and Democracy, translated by Margaret M. Green, New York, Macmillan Co., 1927.

76. Bruce Walker, “Fascists and Bolsheviks as friends,” Canada Free Press, posted, Jan. 31, 2008.

77. Ibid., Bruce Walker.

78. Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Axe of Fascism, New York: Viking Press, 1936.

79. L. Kemechey, author, Magda Vamos, translator, Il Duce: The Life and Work of Benito Mussolini, Kessinger Publishing, LLC, 2008, first published in London: Williams & Norgate, 1930.

80. Bruce Walker, “Fascists and Bolsheviks as friends,” Canada Free Press, posted, Jan. 31, 2008.

81. MacGregor Knox. Mussolini Unleashed, 1939–1941: Politics and Strategy in Italy's Last War, Cambridge University Press, 1982, pp. 63-64. Also, noted in MacGregor Knox book To The Threshold of Power 1922/33, vol. 1, Cambridge University Press, 2007 page 11. Knox original source cited is Galeazzo Ciano Diario, 1937–1943 (Milan, 1980), entry for Oct. 16, 1939.

82. Dennis Mack Smith, Modern Italy: A Political History, Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, p. 8.

83. Denis Mack Smith, Mussolini: A biography, Borzoi Book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1982, p. 15.

84. Ibid., Denis Mack Smith, pp. 222–223.

85. Montserrat Guidbernau, Nationalisms: The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Chapter 4 “Nationalism, Racism and Fascism,” Polity; 1 edition, 1996.

86. Montserrat Guidbernau, Nationalisms: The Nation-State and Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, Chapter 4 “Nationalism, Racism and Fascism,” Polity; 1 edition, 1996.

87. Encyclopaedia Britannica Online: Pius XI; web Apr. 2013.

88. The Pius War: The Response to the Critics of Pius XII, editors, Joseph Bottum and David G. Dalin, Lexington Books, 204, p. 118, in chapter of “An Annotated Bibliography of Works on Pius XII, the Second World War and the Holocaust” by William Doino Jr., original source: Tablet, February 18, 1939, p. 205, a catholic weekly published in Great Briton.

89. Patricia Knight, Mussolini And The Fascist State, New York: Routledge, 2003, p. 49.

90. Denis Mack Smith, pp. 222–223.

91. Ibid., Denis Mack Smith, pp. 222-223.

92. Robert Cowley and Geoffrey Parker, editors, The Reader's Companion to Military History, New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. 1996, p. 316.

93. Paul Baxa, Roads and Ruins: The Symbolic Landscape of Fascist Rome, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Inc., 2010, p. 130.

94. Cheng Chen, The Prospects for Liberal Nationalism in a Post-Leninist States, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007, p. 61.

95. Ibid., Cheng Chen, p 63.

96. Ibid., Cheng Chen, p. 18.

97. Erik van Ree, The political thought of Joseph Stalin: a study in twentieth-century revolutionary patriotism, London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002, p. 49.

98. Lenore A. Grenoble, Language Policy in the Soviet Union, New York: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2003, p. 41.

99. Ephraim Nimin, Marxism and nationalism: theoretical origins of a political crisis. London: Pluto Press, 1991, p. 4.

100. Ibid., Erik van Ree, p. 49.

101. Ibid., Ephraim Nimin, p. 14, p. 16.

102. Anne Sa'adah, Contemporary France: a democratic education, Lanham: Rowman Littlefield & Publishers, 2003, pp. 17-2.

103. Angel Smith; Stefan Berger, Nationalism, labour and ethnicity 1870–1939, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1999, p. 30.

104. Klemens Von Klemperer, "Towards a Fourth Reich? The History of National Bolshevism in Germany". Review of Politics 13 (2): 1951, pp. 191–210.

105. Eva Fogelman, Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust, New York: Anchor, 1995.

106. Hans Jürgen Eysenck, Sense and Nonsense in Psychology, Baltimore: Penguin Books, London, 1957.

107. The Advocates for Self-Government version of the Nolan Chart.

108. Peter Jonathan Davies and Derek Lynch, The Routledge Companion to Fascism and the Far Right, UK: Routledge, 202, p. 143.

109. Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe's 20th Century, Penguin; New Ed edition, 1999, p. 29.

110. Ibid., “The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism.”

111. L.K. Samuels, “Hitler and Mussolini: History’s Dirty Little Secret,” L.K. Samuels Bibliography, 2013, p. 8, posted at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L.K._Samuels

112. Pamela D. Toler, Phd., The Everything Guide to Understanding Socialism: The political, social, and economic concepts behind this complex theory, section: “Mussolini Rises to Power,” Avon, MA: Adams Media, 2011.

113. Soviet Union (former) Trade Unions, The Library of Congress Country Studies; CIA World Factbook. http://www.photius.com/countries/soviet_union_former/society/soviet_union_former_society_trade_unions.html

114. Ida Mett, The Kronstadt Commune, Chapter 2, “Petrograd on the Eve of Kronstadt,” written in 1938, published in Solidarity Pamphlet 27, November 1967, posted: http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/russia/mett/petro_eve.html.
===*===*===


Below is a letter-to-the-editor on Donald Trump and Mussolini, by Lawrence Samuels
Published in the Monterey Herald, Dec. 12, 2015
Trump’s fascist overtones not level with Mussolini -
Concerning Dana Milbank’s “Donald Trump becoming America’s modern Mussolini” [archive.is/IiXc0], he is partially correct that Trump epitomizes certain aspects of Italian fascism.
Yes, Trump mimics Mussolini with his boisterous, cocky and self-assured demeanor, along with a heavy dose of demagoguery, fear-mongering and violent imagery.
But historically, Mussolini had far more disturbing baggage. In his early years he was an avowed Marxist with ties to Lenin and Trotsky. He led the Italian Socialist Party where he purged moderate socialists.
When he switched to a pro-war stand in 1914, the Italian Socialist Party purged him. And yet, when Mussolini ran under his new Fascist Revolutionary Party, he referred to himself as the “Lenin of Italy.”
As for racial issues, a high proportion of the Jewish population joined his fascist party, which included several Jewish ministers. His mistress, Margherita Sarfatti, was not only Jewish, but a feminist. Only after allying with the Nazis in 1938 did Mussolini reluctantly support Hitler’s National Socialist policies of racial purity.
As for the Muslim faith, Mussolini once stated to his cabinet that Islam was perhaps a more effective religion than Christianity.
Nonetheless, Trump indeed has fascist overtones and everyone should be aware of exactly what that means.
[signed] Lawrence Samuels, Carmel

"A Disappeared Book on Wall Street History Provides a Dead Serious Warning"

(2014-06-11, by Pam Martens, wallstreetonparade.com) [archive.is/QKPOl]:
Wall Street On Parade has been reporting for some time now that much of Wall Street’s past and current history has up and disappeared – either at the hands of high speed shredders on orders from the SEC, or through Courts sealing documents, or Wall Street’s private justice system preventing access to hearings, non-disparagement contracts when you change your job on Wall Street, or critical pieces of Wall Street history just go missing and no one can find out exactly why. Now we learn that a vital book on Wall Street’s history had vanished until an NYU Professor made it his mission to return it to the public’s hands.
In 2011, Darcy Flynn, an SEC lawyer, told Congressional investigators and the SEC Inspector General that for at least 18 years, the SEC had been shredding documents and emails related to its investigations — documents that it was required under law to keep. Flynn explained to investigators that by purging these files, it impaired the SEC’s ability to see the connections between related frauds on Wall Street.
In 2010, we reported at CounterPunch that not only was it next to impossible to find on line the original text of the historic Glass-Steagall Act which had protected the U.S. economy from the ravages of Wall Street’s recklessness for seven decades until its repeal in 1999, but the National Archives wanted to charge me $1505 to obtain a copy of this public legislation. After much sleuthing, we obtained a copy from the St. Louis Fed and made it available to the Internet Archive which has kindly kept it alive on its web site.
In March of this year we reported that former Fed Chairman, Ben Bernanke, will not turn over the details of who he met with and why on 84 occasions during the height of the financial crisis in 2007 and 2008. The information is sealed.
Now, in his quest to return disappeared books to inquiring minds, NYU Media Studies Professor, Mark Crispin Miller, has stumbled upon a potential landmine for Wall Street. In conjunction with Open Road Media, Miller has unearthed and is bringing back to life important vanished books under the imprint “Forbidden Bookshelf.” One of those books is The Lords of Creation: The History of America’s 1 Percent by Frederick Lewis Allen [archive.is/aHSO9].
The only thing to change about the book is a new forward by Miller and an introduction by business writer, Gretchen Morgenson, of the New York Times. And, of course, that second half of the title has been added. In 1935 when the book was originally published, Wall Streeters were still called banksters. We can thank Occupy Wall Street for successfully marketing the 1 percent brand.
We asked Miller to explain why this book was selected. His response: “The Lords of Creation is a brilliant early history of the plutocratic fix we’re in today; and so, rather than slip out of print, it should have been a steady seller all these years — required reading in our schools, and maybe even dramatized on PBS.
“That that book disappeared, while Allen’s other, lighter histories are still in print, relates to what we might call the financial takeover of American culture since the Sixties.”
Allen is not exactly Edward Snowden or Glenn Greenwald. Allen worked on the editorial staffs of the Atlantic Monthly and Century magazines and was Editor in Chief of Harper’s magazine from 1941 until his death in 1954.
What makes the disappearance of The Lords of Creation particularly suspicious is that Allen was born in 1890. That made him 17 years old at the time of the 1907 Bankers’ Panic on Wall Street, when reckless speculation led to bank runs and bankruptcies across America. Allen tells us that the New York Times described the event as “an exhibition of the use of vast power for private ends unrestrained by any sense of public responsibility,” and said the men on Wall Street behaved ‘like cowboys on a spree…shooting wildly at each other in entire disregard of the safety of the bystanders.”
Allen was 22 years old when the House of Representatives formed the Pujo Committee hearings to investigate the concentration of wealth and power in unclean hands on Wall Street; and Allen was 39 years old when Wall Street had its worst crash in its history in 1929 and ushered in the Great Depression.
Allen’s book is dangerous because he had a front row seat and thus could personally document the calamitous crashes that Wall Street bestowed on the country before the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act in 1933, which barred banks holding insured deposits from owning or affiliating with firms that underwrote or traded securities, removing the possibility of bank runs and the looting of small savers’ money.
Allen gives a detailed accounting of each of these eras and the Wall Street men who ruled the Street. One quickly realizes that the very same hubris and approaching dangers exist today, just the names have changed. John Pierpont Morgan of the House of Morgan stands in today in the flesh of Jamie Dimon, Chairman and CEO of the successor firm, now called JPMorgan Chase. Last year JPMorgan paid a fine of $920 million for using hundreds of billions of dollars in bank deposits to gamble in high risk derivatives. It lost at least $6.2 billion in this speculative binge. Its bank regulator, the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, said the bank had engaged in “recklessly unsafe and unsound practices” which were “part of a pattern of misconduct.”
The powerful Charles Mitchell of National City Bank (now Citigroup) detailed in Allen’s book had a modern era equivalent in Sanford (Sandy) Weill who sucked close to $1 billion in compensation from the bank and then walked away two years before the bank crashed into the arms of the taxpayer.
Allen’s book becomes even more dangerous to Wall Street in pointing out that it was the fact that these high-risk, Wall Street stock speculators were also allowed to own banks and hold bank deposits that made each crash so debilitating to the general economy. The book maps out a ringing endorsement and siren call for restoring the Glass-Steagall Act immediately. In July of last year, Senator Elizabeth Warren dropped the bombshell in the Senate that she was introducing bipartisan legislation to do just that.
Equally important, the book’s exquisite detailing of the unending hubris and calamitous crashes of these Wall Street titans of yesteryear before the passage of the Glass-Steagall Act annihilates the preposterous platform unleashed on a naïve, financial-history-deprived nation by former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan who helped push through the deregulation of Wall Street in the late 90s and early 2000s. That flaky theory, completely debunked by historical fact when you can find it, was that upstanding men on Wall Street would look out for the good of the country because it was in their own interests to do so. After the economy crashed at the hands of these greed-obsessed men in the Great Recession, Greenspan offered a scarred nation these words of apology: “I got it wrong.”
Another inconvenient truth that today’s corporate suite might wish to bury along with this book is Allen’s inclusion of the theory behind Henry Ford more than doubling most workers’ wages in 1914 at the Ford Motor Company by boosting pay to $5 a day to reduce employee turnover and build productivity. Allen tells us: “The answer which Ford gave was of course familiar in economic theory and in the oratory of men like Schwab, but not in practice. It was that the benefits of increased efficiency must be deliberately passed on to the consumers – and that the employer’s own workmen are consumers.”
As corporations and conservatives attempt to beat back an increase in minimum wage, this is not a theory to which one wants to draw attention – especially with Robert Reich out on the stump with his documentary showing that in both 1928 and 2007 – the years before the two greatest Wall Street crashes in history – income inequality in the U.S. reached new peaks.

Purchase Lords of Creation at [feedyourneedtoread.com/ebook/the-lords-of-creation]
More from the Forbidden Bookshelf [feedyourneedtoread.com/series/forbidden-bookshelf]

Book covers to "The Lords Of Creation: The Story Of The Great Age Of American Finance"
1st edition, Hardcover (1935) (ASIN: B00088TE6K)

Quadrangle Books; Reprint Edition Paperback (1966) (ASIN: B000855FPC)

The Obama "New World Order" speech, released 2014-05-29

"...and for the international order that we have worked for generations to build... ... ...ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all powerful sovereign..."

posted 2014-05-29 by "Don't Tread On Me" [https://www.facebook.com/donttreadonamerica]:
WHAT DID HE JUST SAY? WATCH, SHARE, and COMMENT. An Emergency Message For All American Patriots. Click Here Or You'll Hate Yourself Later: www.dont-tread.info
#politicalears
5,284 people like this. 75,212 shares.



Here's the full speech on You Tube. The key phrase about men and women governing their own affairs occurs at about 3:15. His speech is completely opposite of what the obviously edited version would imply.
President Obama EU-US Summit Speech Brussels Belgium (March 26, 2014) [1-3] [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5aspqHG-mMU]:
Leaders and dignitaries of the European Union, representatives of our NATO alliance, distinguished guests, we meet here at a moment of testing for Europe and the United States and for the international order that we have worked for generations to build. Throughout human history, societies have grappled with fundamental questions of how to organize themselves, the proper relationship between the individual and the state, the best means to resolve the inevitable conflicts between states.
[ ... ]
And those ideas eventually inspired a band of colonialists across an ocean, and they wrote them into the founding documents that still guide America today, including the simple truth that all men, and women, are created equal.
But those ideals have also been tested, here in Europe and around the world. Those ideals have often been threatened by an older, more traditional view of power. This alternative vision argues that ordinary men and women are too small-minded to govern their own affairs, that order and progress can only come when individuals surrender their rights to an all-powerful sovereign. Often this alternative vision roots itself in the notion that by virtue of race or faith or ethnicity, some are inherently superior to others and that individual identity must be defined by us versus them, or that national greatness must flow not by what people stand for, but what they are against.

1989 Occupation of Tiananmen Square in Shanghai, PR China

"Tiananmen: the massacre that wasn't; What really happened 25 years ago in Tiananmen Square?"
2014-06-04 by Brian Becker from "Liberation News" [http://www.pslweb.org/liberationnews/news/what-really-happened-in.html]:
Tank set on fire by protesters outside of Tiananment Square, June 4, 1989

Twenty-five years ago today, every U.S. media outlet, along with then President Bush and the U.S. Congress were whipping up a full scale frenzied hysteria and attack against the Chinese government for what was described as the cold-blooded massacre of many thousands of non-violent “pro-democracy” students who had occupied Tiananmen Square for seven weeks.
The hysteria generated about the Tiananmen Square “massacre” was based on a fictitious narrative about what actually happened when the Chinese government finally cleared the square of protestors on June 4, 1989.
The demonization of China was highly effective. Nearly all sectors of U.S. society, including most of the “left,” accepted the imperialist presentation of what happened.
At the time the Chinese government's official account of the events was immediately dismissed out of hand as false propaganda. China reported that about 300 people had died in clashes on June 4 and that many of the dead were soldiers of the Peoples Liberation Army. China insisted that there was no massacre of students in Tiananmen Square and in fact the soldiers cleared Tiananmen Square of demonstrators without any shooting.
The Chinese government also asserted that unarmed soldiers who had entered Tiananmen Square in the two days prior to June 4 were set on fire and lynched with their corpses hung from buses. Other soldiers were incinerated when army vehicles were torched with soldiers unable to evacuate and many other were badly beaten by violent mob attacks.
These accounts were true and well documented. It would not be difficult to imagine how violently the Pentagon and U.S. law enforcement agencies would have reacted if the Occupy movement, for instance, had similarly set soldiers and police on fire, taken their weapons and lynched them when the government was attempting to clear them from public spaces.
In an article on June 5, 1989, the Washington Post described how anti-government fighters had been organized into formations of 100-150 people. They were armed with Molotov cocktails and iron clubs, to meet the PLA who were still unarmed in the days prior to June 4.
What happened in China, what took the lives of government opponents and of soldiers on June 4, was not a massacre of peaceful students but a battle between PLA soldiers and armed detachments from the so-called pro-democracy movement.
“On one avenue in western Beijing, demonstrators torched an entire military convoy of more than 100 trucks and armored vehicles. Aerial pictures of conflagration and columns of smoke have powerfully bolstered the [Chinese] government's arguments that the troops were victims, not executioners. Other scenes show soldiers' corpses and demonstrators stripping automatic rifles off unresisting soldiers,” admitted the Washington Post in a story that was favorable to anti-government opposition on June 12, 1989.
The Wall Street Journal, the leading voice of anti-communism, served as a vociferous cheerleader for the “pro-democracy” movement. Yet, their coverage right after June 4 acknowledged that many “radicalized protesters, some now armed with guns and vehicles commandeered in clashes with the military” were preparing for larger armed struggles. The Wall Street Journal report on the events of June 4 portrays a vivid picture:
“As columns of tanks and tens of thousands soldiers approached Tiananmen many troops were set on by angry mobs … [D]ozens of soldiers were pulled from trucks, severely beaten and left for dead. At an intersection west of the square, the body of a young soldier, who had beaten to death, was stripped naked and hung from the side of a bus. Another's soldier corpse was strung at an intersection east of the square.”

The massacre that wasn't -
In the days immediately after June 4, 1989, the New York Times headlines, articles and editorials used the figure that “thousands” of peaceful activists had been massacred when the army sent tanks and soldiers into the Square. The number that the Times was using as an estimate of dead was 2,600. That figure was used at the go-to number of student activists who were mowed down in Tiananmen. Almost every U.S. media reported “many thousands” killed. Many media outlets said as many 8,000 had been slaughtered.
Tim Russert, NBC's Washington Bureau Chief, appearing later on Meet the Press said “tens of thousands” died in Tiananmen Square.
The fictionalized version of the “massacre” was later corrected in some very small measure by Western reporters who had participated in the fabrications and who were keen to touch up the record so that they could say they made “corrections.” But by then it was too late and they knew that too. Public consciousness had been shaped. The false narrative became the dominant narrative. They had successfully massacred the facts to fit the political needs of the U.S. government.
"Most of the hundreds of foreign journalists that night, including me, were in other parts of the city or were removed from the square so that they could not witness the final chapter of the student story. Those who tried to remain close filed dramatic accounts that, in some cases, buttressed the myth of a student massacre,” wrote Jay Mathews, the Washington Post's first Bureau Chief in Beijing, in a 1998 article in the Columbia Journalism Review.
Mathews' article, which includes his own admissions to using the terminology of the Tiananmen Square massacre, came nine years after the fact and he acknowledged that corrections later had little impact. "The facts of Tiananmen have been known for a long time. When Clinton visited the square this June, both The Washington Post and The New York Times explained that no one died there [in Tiananmen Square] during the 1989 crackdown. But these were short explanations at the end of long articles. I doubt that they did much to kill the myth.”
At the time all of the reports about the massacre of the students said basically the same thing and thus it seemed that they must be true. But these reports were not based on eyewitness testimony.

What really happened -
For seven weeks leading up to June 4, the Chinese government was extraordinarily restrained in not confronting those who paralyzed the center of China's central capital area. The Prime Minister met directly with protest leaders and the meeting was broadcast on national television. This did not defuse the situation but rather emboldened the protest leaders who knew that they had the full backing of the United States.
The protest leaders erected a huge statue that resembled the United States' Statue of Liberty in the middle of Tiananmen Square. They were signaling to the entire world that their political sympathies were with the capitalist countries and the United States in particular. They proclaimed that they would continue the protests until the government was ousted.
With no end in sight the Chinese leadership decided to end the protests by clearing Tiananmen Square. Troops came into the Square without weapons on June 2 and many soldiers were beaten, some were killed and army vehicles were torched.
On June 4, the PLA re-entered the Square with weapons. According to the U.S. media accounts of the time that is when machine gun toting PLA soldiers mowed down peaceful student protests in a massacre of thousands.
China said that reports of the “massacre” in Tiananmen Square were a fabrication created both by Western media and by the protest leaders who used a willing Western media as a platform for an international propaganda campaign in their interests.
On June 12, 1989, eight days after the confrontation, the New York Times published an “exhaustive” but in fact fully fabricated eyewitness report of the Tiananmen Massacre by a student, Wen Wei Po. It was full of detailed accounts of brutality, mass murder, and heroic street battles. It recounted PLA machine gunners on the roof of Revolutionary Museum overlooking the Square and students being mowed down in the Square. This report was picked up by media throughout the U.S.
Although treated as gospel and irrefutable proof that China was lying, the June 12 “eyewitness” report by Wen Wei Po was so over the top and would so likely discredit the New York Times in China that the Times correspondent in Beijing, Nicholas Kristoff, who had served as a mouthpiece for the protestors, took exception to the main points in the article.
Kristoff wrote in a June 13 article, “The question of where the shootings occurred has significance because of the Government's claim that no one was shot on Tiananmen Square. State television has even shown film of students marching peacefully away from the square shortly after dawn as proof that they were not slaughtered.”
“The central scene in the [eyewitness] article is of troops beating and machine-gunning unarmed students clustered around the Monument to the People's Heroes in the middle of Tiananmen Square. Several other witnesses, both Chinese and foreign, say this did not happen,” Kristoff wrote.
“There is also no evidence of machine-gun emplacements on the roof of the history museum that were reported in the Wen Wei Po article. This reporter was directly north of the museum and saw no machine guns there. Other reporters and witnesses in the vicinity also failed to see them.
“The central theme of the Wen Wei Po article was that troops subsequently beat and machine-gunned students in the area around the monument and that a line of armored vehicles cut off their retreat. But the witnesses say that armored vehicles did not surround the monument - they stayed at the north end of the square - and that troops did not attack students clustered around the monument. Several other foreign journalists were near the monument that night as well and none are known to have reported that students were attacked around the monument,” Kristoff wrote in the June 13, 1989 article.
The Chinese government's account acknowledges that street fighting and armed clashes occurred in nearby neighborhoods. They say that approximately three hundred died that night including many soldiers who died from gunfire, Molotov cocktails and beatings. But they have insisted that there was no massacre.
Kristoff too says that there were clashes on several streets but refutes the “eyewitness” report about a massacre of students in Tiananmen Square, “... Instead, the students and a pop singer, Hou Dejian, were negotiating with the troops and decided to leave at dawn, between 5 A.M. and 6 A.M. The students all filed out together. Chinese television has shown scenes of the students leaving and of the apparently empty square as troops moved in as the students left.”

Attempted counter-revolution in China -
In fact, the U.S. government was actively involved in promoting the “pro-democracy” protests through an extensive, well-funded, internationally coordinated propaganda machine that pumped out rumors, half-truths and lies from the moment the protests started in mid-April 1989.
The goal of the U.S. government was to carry out regime change in China and overthrow the Communist Party of China which had been the ruling party since the 1949 revolution. Since many activists in today's progressive movement were not alive or were young children at the time of the Tiananmen incident in 1989, the best recent example of how such an imperialist destabilization/regime change operation works is revealed in the recent overthrow of the Ukrainian government. Peaceful protests in the downtown square receive international backing, financing and media support from the United States and Western powers; they eventually come under the leadership of armed groups who are hailed as freedom fighters by the Wall Street Journal, FOX News and other media; and finally the government targeted for overthrow by the CIA is fully demonized if it uses police or military forces.
In the case of the “pro-democracy” protests in China in 1989 the U.S. government was attempting to create a civil war. The Voice of America increased its Chinese language broadcasts to 11 hours each day and targeted the broadcast “directly to 2,000 satellite dishes in China operated mostly by the Peoples Liberation Army.” (New York Times June 9, 1989)
The Voice of America broadcasts to PLA units were filled with reports that some PLA units were firing on others and different units were loyal to the protestors and others with the government.
The Voice of America and U.S. media outlets tried to create confusion and panic among government supporters. Just prior to June 4 they reported that China's Prime Minister Li Peng had been shot and that Deng Xiaoping was near death.
Most in the U.S. government and in the media expected the Chinese government to be toppled by pro-Western political forces as was starting to happening with the overthrow of socialist governments throughout Eastern and Central Europe at the time (1988-1991) following the introduction of pro-capitalist reforms by Gorbachev in the Soviet Union in 1991.
In China, the “pro-democracy” protest movement was led by privileged, well-connected students from elite universities who were explicitly calling for the replacement of socialism with capitalism. The leaders were particularly connected to the United States. Of course, thousands of other students who participated in the protests were in the Square because they had grievances against the government.
But the imperialist-connected leadership of the movement had an explicit plan to topple the government. Chai Ling, who was recognized as the top leader of the students, gave an interview to Western reporters on the eve of June 4 in which she acknowledged that the goal of the leadership was to lead the population in a struggle to topple the Communist Party of China, which she explained would only be possible if they could successfully provoke the government into violently attacking the demonstrations. That interview was aired in the film the “Gate of Heavenly Peace.” Chai Ling also explained why they couldn't tell the rank and file student protestors about the leaders' real plans.
"The pursuit of wealth is part of the impetus for democracy,” explained another top student leader Wang Dan, in an interview with the Washington Post in 1993, on the fourth anniversary of the incident. Wang Dan was in all the U.S. media before and after the Tiananmen incident. He was famous for explaining why the elitist student leaders didn't want Chinese workers joining their movement. He stated "the movement is not ready for worker participation because democracy must first be absorbed by the students and intellectuals before they can spread it to others."

Twenty-five years later – U.S. still seeks regime change and counter-revolution in China -
The action by the Chinese government to disperse the so-called pro-democracy movement in 1989 was met with bitter frustration within the United States political establishment.
The U.S. imposed economic sanctions on China at first, but their impact was minimal and both the Washington political establishment and the Wall Street banks realized that U.S. corporations and banks  would be the big losers in the 1990's if they tried to completely isolate China when China was further opening its vast domestic labor and commodities market to the direct investment from Western corporations. The biggest banks and corporations put their own profit margins first and the Washington politicians took their cue from the billionaire class on this question.
But the issue of counter-revolution in China will rear its head again. The economic reforms that were inaugurated after the death Mao opened the country to foreign investment. This development strategy was designed to rapidly overcome the legacy of poverty and under-development by the import of foreign technology. In exchange the Western corporations received mega profits. The post-Mao leadership in the Communist Party calculated that the strategy would benefit China by virtue of a rapid technology transfer from the imperialist world to China. And indeed China has made great economic strides. But in addition to economic development there has also developed a larger capitalist class inside of China and a significant portion of that class and their children are being wooed by all types of institutions financed by the U.S. government, U.S. financial institutions and U.S. academic centers.
The Communist Party of China is also divided into pro-U.S. and pro-socialist factions and tendencies.
Today, the United States government is applying ever greater military pressure on China. It is accelerating the struggle against China's rise by cementing new military and strategic alliances with other Asian countries. It is also hoping that with enough pressure some in the Chinese leadership who favor abandoning North Korea will get the upper hand.
If counter-revolution were to succeed in China the consequences would be catastrophic for the Chinese people and for China. China would in all likelihood splinter as a nation as happened to the Soviet Union when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was toppled. The same fate befell the former Yugoslavia. Counter-revolution and dismemberment would hurtle China backwards. It would put the brakes on China's spectacular peaceful rise out of under-development. For decades there has been a serious discussion within the U.S. foreign policy establishment about the dismemberment of China which would weaken China as a nation and allow the United States and Western powers to seize its most lucrative parts. This is precisely the scenario that cast China into its century of humiliation when Western capitalist powers dominated the country.
The Chinese Revolution has gone through many stages, victories, retreats and setbacks. Its contradictions are innumerable. But still it stands. In the confrontation between world imperialism and the Peoples Republic of China, progressive people should know where they stand – it is not on the sidelines.


"Troops 'laughing' in Tiananmen crackdown: US document"
2014-06-03 from "AFP" [www.afp.com], published at [www.sinodaily.com/reports/Eyewitness_Tiananmen_the_night_dreams_became_nightmares_999.html]:
Washington -
Troops deployed from China's provinces laughed as they shot randomly at pro-democracy protesters in Tiananmen Square, according to a US account declassified Tuesday for the 25th anniversary.
The US documents, released by the National Security Archive at George Washington University which obtained them under the Freedom of Information Act, showed chaos and confusion sweeping across China as authorities crushed the student movement on the night of June 3-4, 1989.
A classified US military report quoted an unnamed source, who observed Tiananmen Square from a hotel room, as calling the crackdown "brutal" with an intention to inflict high casualties.
Troops belonging from the 27th Army, who did not speak the Beijing dialect, "were laughing and shooting at random at any assembly of persons they encountered," the document quoted the source as saying.
The cable also quoted the source as witnessing plainclothes police seizing individuals in a restaurant as part of a "one-by-one crackdown" in Beijing ahead of the main offensive in Tiananmen Square.
But the documents showed that information was sketchy. One US intelligence cable the day after the crackdown quoted a source -- implied to be an official from a foreign government close to China -- as saying that supreme leader Deng Xiaoping had died. In reality, Deng died in 1997.
Another US cable, showing the feeling of crisis spreading through China, said that the military flew foreign currency into the Shanghai branch of the state-run Bank of China as customers raced to withdraw cash following the Tiananmen violence.
Soldiers killed hundreds of unarmed civilians in Tiananmen Square, with some estimates putting the death toll at more than 1,000.
China's government has tried to quash public memories of the crackdown and has stepped up surveillance, censorship and detentions of activists ahead of the 25th anniversary.


"A government without a future"
2014-06-03 from "AFP" [www.afp.com], published at [www.sinodaily.com/reports/Taiwan_urges_China_to_face_up_to_history_of_Tiananmen_999.html]:
Chen Guangcheng, one of China's most prominent activists who dramatically escaped from house arrest in 2012 for the safety of the US embassy, urged commemorations of the Tiananmen Square movement as he addressed a think tank in Washington.
Speaking in English in public for the first time, the blind-since-birth self-taught lawyer hailed Hong Kong -- which is part of China but autonomous -- for its annual June 4 vigils and for recently opening the first museum on the Tiananmen crackdown.
"Every candlelight vigil makes the perpetrators shudder in fear. It gives people courage to think and speak aloud again," Chen said, speaking forcefully in clear but careful English as he read his speech in Braille at the conservative American Enterprise Institute.
"A government that cannot face its own history is a government without a future," Chen said, asking how a government that disrespects its citizens can be expected to "treat other countries any better."
Chen said he was 17 years old at the time of the Tiananmen crackdown and was not enrolled in school due to his blindness. But Chen said he sympathized as he listened to the radio and would have joined the protests if he were a student.


"H.K. rallies for Tiananmen 25th anniversary as Beijing clamps down"
2014-06-04 from "AFP" [www.afp.com], published at [www.sinodaily.com/reports/HK_rallies_for_Tiananmen_25th_anniversary_as_Beijing_clamps_down_999.html]:
Beijing -
China on Wednesday imposed smothering security in central Beijing on the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown, as tens of thousands gathered in Hong Kong for potentially the biggest commemoration yet seen in honour of the student protesters killed in 1989.
The White House called for China's Communist authorities to account for those killed, detained or missing in connection with the June 1989 assault, which remains a taboo topic for a nation that refuses to allow political reform in line with its dramatic economic transformation.
Evening candlelit vigils were due to take place in Macau and Taipei as well as Hong Kong, where organisers said a record crowd as large as 200,000 people would attend a vast gathering in a downtown park.
Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou, whose democratically elected government still proclaims itself to be the true representative of China, described the events of 25 years ago as an "enormous historical wound".
Ma called on Beijing to "speedily redress the wrongs to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again".
Likewise, the United States will continue to "urge the Chinese government to guarantee the universal rights and fundamental freedoms that are the birthright of all Chinese citizens", a White House statement said.
Hundreds of unarmed civilians -- by some estimates, more than 1,000 -- were killed during the June 3-4 crackdown of 1989, when soldiers on foot and in tanks crushed months of peaceful protests by students who were demanding political liberties to match China's nascent economic opening up.
Thousands of police and other security forces, some armed with automatic rifles, have been deployed across the Chinese capital this week. There were numerous police trucks on and around Tiananmen Square Wednesday, with fire engines and ambulances also visible.
Some security officers had fire extinguishers placed ready nearby. Security has also been heightened recently after a spate of attacks that authorities blame on separatists from the far-western region of Xinjiang.
Tourists and vendors criss-crossed the vast public square in the heart of the city, but uniformed and plainclothes officers were stationed at every corner and checking the ID cards of passers-by.
An AFP journalist was ordered to delete photos of scuffles between police and frustrated pedestrians waiting to enter the main part of the square Wednesday morning.

- 'Serious consequences' -
In 1989 the demonstrations and subsequent crackdown played out on television screens across the world, and Beijing briefly became a pariah in the West.
But 25 years later, the ruling Communist Party's authority is intact and its global clout continues to rise in line with the country's rapid growth, which has taken China to second place in the global economic rankings behind only the United States.
UN human rights chief Navi Pillay on Tuesday called on China to "finally establish the facts surrounding the Tiananmen Square incidents".
Hong Lei, a Chinese foreign ministry spokesman, condemned both Pillay's statement and earlier remarks by the US government as interference in China's "internal affairs".
Since 1989, China has worked hard to erase public memories of the bloodshed, censoring any mention of the incident from online social networks and detaining scores of activists, lawyers, artists and relatives of victims in recent weeks.
Among those detained ahead of this year's anniversary is prominent human rights lawyer Pu Zhiqiang, who along with four others was taken away by authorities last month after attending a private seminar discussing the crackdown.
Around 80 academics from 12 countries -- including some of the world's foremost China experts -- penned an open letter to President Xi Jinping on Wednesday pressing for the release of the five.
Many foreign news outlets have received warnings from police and the foreign ministry against newsgathering related to the anniversary -- or risk "serious consequences" including the possible revocation of their visas.

- Social networks scrubbed -
Under pressure from authorities, Chinese online social networks quickly deleted any perceived references to the crackdown, banning terms including "Tiananmen", "student movement", "6/4" and "25th anniversary".
A handful of mentions managed to slip past the censors, however, including one posting that showed an image of a candle and the date June 4, 1989.
Asked about the anniversary, university students declined to be interviewed or suggested they did not know much about it.
"I know about it but I don't really understand what it is," said a student near Peking University. "At this time, we were not even born!" she added.
The state-run Global Times on Wednesday made references to the anniversary in an editorial in its English-language edition, but the Chinese-language version only alluded to it.
"Chinese society has never forgotten the incident 25 years ago but not talking about it indicates the attitude of society," the English-language editorial said.


"US calls on China to account for Tiananmen on anniversary"
2014-06-04 from "AFP" [www.afp.com], published at [www.sinodaily.com/reports/HK_rallies_for_Tiananmen_25th_anniversary_as_Beijing_clamps_down_999.html]:
Washington -
The United States on Wednesday called on China to account for those killed, detained, or missing in the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, as Washington marked the 25th anniversary of the pro-democracy revolt.
"Twenty-five years ago, the United States deplored the use of violence to silence the voices of the peaceful demonstrators in and around Tiananmen Square," the statement from the White House said.
It comes as tensions simmer between the two countries on issues ranging from alleged hacking by the Chinese military into private US firms to displeasure in Washington with what it calls Beijing's aggressive behavior in the South China Sea.
"Twenty-five years later, the United States continues to honor the memories of those who gave their lives in and around Tiananmen Square and throughout China, and we call on Chinese authorities to account for those killed, detained, or missing in connection with the events surrounding June 4, 1989," it added.
The US government and people welcome China's economic progress over the past decades, and want to maintain good relations, the White House said. But America will not be shy about airing its differences with China, it added.
The United States, it said, will "urge the Chinese government to guarantee the universal rights and fundamental freedoms that are the birthright of all Chinese citizens."


"Taiwan leader urges China to redress Tiananmen wrongs"
2014-06-04 from "AFP" [www.afp.com], published at [www.sinodaily.com/reports/HK_rallies_for_Tiananmen_25th_anniversary_as_Beijing_clamps_down_999.html]:
Taipei -
Taiwanese President Ma Ying-jeou on Wednesday described the Tiananmen crackdown as "an enormous historical wound", urging China to redress the wrongs of the crushed pro-democracy protests 25 years ago.
Ma made the call in his annual statement marking the anniversary of the 1989 crackdown but was not scheduled to make an appearance at a candle-lit vigil in Taipei later Wednesday, his office said.
"Facing such an enormous historical wound, I sincerely hope that the mainland authorities will seriously consider and speedily redress the wrongs to ensure that such a tragedy will never happen again," the leader said in his yearly statement.
Ma reiterated calls on Beijing to treat its dissidents well and to tolerate different opinions.
He also urged Beijing to continue carrying out political reforms such as abolishing the forced labour camps last year and to make more efforts to promote democracy and human rights protection.
"We hope to see it take more actions to realise democracy and the rule of law and protect human rights," said Ma.
Taiwan's government has repeatedly urged China to learns lessons from the 1989 crackdown on pro-democracy protesters when troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians -- by some estimates more than 1,000.
The Mainland Affairs Council, Taiwan's top China policy-making body, on Tuesday renewed calls on China to face up to history and protect the rights of dissidents.
Reacting to Ma's statement, Yang Jianli, a prominent US-based Chinese dissident who fled China after the protests, offered praise for his call "for a speedy redress of the wrong of the June 4th incident".
The vigil in downtown Taipei is expected to attract some 2,000 people, according to organisers.
Ties between Taiwan and China have improved markedly since Ma took office in 2008 on a Beijing-friendly platform, following eight years of tensions under the previous pro-independence government. He was reelected in 2012 for a final four-year term.
Beijing however still claims the island as part of its territory awaiting reunification by force if necessary although they have been governed separately since the end of a civil war in 1949.

"The Secret Relations Between Blacks and Mexicans"

By Diogenes Muhammad (2014-05-28, finalcall.com) [https://archive.today/xZcZ4].
Diogenes Muhammad is a “Latino” Muslim pioneer and a contributing writer for The Final Call and its forerunner Muhammad Speaks.

One-Drop Classification: one people forever united against oppression -
Colonial Mexico had the highest numbers of African slaves. Of the over one million casualties during the Mexican war of independence, most of them were Afro-Mexicans. Mexico’s commitment to harbor Black fugitive slaves triggered the Mexican-American war; she lost nearly 50 percent of her territory. After the war, Mexico undeterred, included in her constitution and continued her commitment to harbor fugitive slaves.
Not long ago, Mexican-American TV host and comedian George Lopez was handed his DNA ancestry results by Mariah Carey – after the question was posed as to whether he would fall under the proverbial one-drop (African) racial classification. Lopez’s results showed a 4 percent African blood.
(See Photo) “Texican” actress Eva Longoria’s 3 percent African ancestry surfaced in DNA taken by PBS series Faces of America (Henry Louis Gates, Jr.).
And National Geographic’s Genographic Mexican-American reference population attributes a 4 percent African contribution to the “La Raza” pool. The “Mestizo” – the proverbial “La Raza” Mexicano – customarily extols his Indian roots, and laments and or praises his Spanish roots – but rarely is the African part acknowledged.
The period of African slavery in Mexico began following devastation brought about by the inherent diseases of the Europeans, which infected and almost completely wiped out indigenous Mexicans. Having no natural immunity against smallpox, measles, typhoid, venereal diseases and other infectious maladies, natives were victims of ferocious epidemics in 1520, 1548, 1576-1579, and 1595-1596.
It is estimated that when Hernan Cortes arrived in Mexico in 1519, the indigenous population was about 27.6 million inhabitants. By 1605 only 1.7 million indigenous people had survived, a population decrease mulattoes; 15,000 Spaniards, and 80,000 Indians. Gemelli Careri, in his 1698 visit, concluded, “Mexico City contains about 100,00 inhabitants, but the greatest part of them are Blacks and Mulattoes by reason of the vast number of slaves that has been cessation of the slave trade the enslaved population steadily declined. However, the numbers of free Blacks grew and by 1810 comprised 10 percent of the population or roughly 624,000 people.
The African population had a 3 male to 1 female ratio and since children born from Indigenous mothers carried their “free” status, African men married Native women to ensure that their descendants would be born free. According to the Mexican caste system imposed by Spain, the Indigenous population was considered citizens and could not be made slaves. At the bottom of the caste system were the Black slaves. Escaped slaves resorted to establishing settlements or palenques in Mexico’s inaccessible mountains to preserve their freedom.
In 1591 Viceroy Don Luis de Velasco reported the existence of a group of cimarrones (Maroons) who had resided for the previous 30 years on a mountain called Coyula who “live as if they were actually in Guinea.” He referred to the famous case of Yanga, the Muslim maroon leader, who after fi ghting 30 years against the Spanish crown signed a peace accord and founded San Lorenzo de Los Negros, establishing the fi rst “freedom enclave” in Mexico.
Mule driving, one of the lowest and frowned upon occupations, was almost completely carried out by Blacks and Afro-Indians. Mule drivers were plentiful in Mexico, thanks in part to the lack of roads for carts and carriages. Although considered unpleasant rowdies by the rich, Muleteers were welcomed in rural villages for bringing the latest news, songs and the hottest jokes about authority fi gures; moreover, mule trains traditionally carried contraband. From this occupation came many a fi ghter for Mexico in the war with Spain, including Vicente Guerrero, the Afro-Indian who became the second President of Mexico. Guerrero was a descendant of enslaved Africans brought to Mexico during colonial times. He was raised in the mountain town of Tixtla and spoke many indigenous languages.
It is estimated that by the end of the Spanish domination, the Mestizo population was 40 percent, which included a large number of Afro-Mestizos.
Who is the Mestizo?
One scholar declared the Mestizos were the “revolutionary class.” McLaughlin and Rodriguez in “Forging of the Cosmic Race” identifi ed the mestizo as the “arch-typical Mexican.” These statements, however, really fail to defi ne the Mestizo. The word Mestizo is applied to mixed races, people who are darker than White.
During the war of independence 1810- 1821, about 30 to 40 percent of mixed race Mexicans had African in their mix and were more likely to be militant. The Afro-Mestizo was placed between a rock and a hard place—and his inclination toward militancy came from the racist laws limiting jobs, places of residence, and marriage that set Blacks apart. Moreover, slavery was reserved for Africans only, be they mixed or pure. Census data reveal that “from Southern Talisco to Southern Michoacán and through the sugar plantations near Cuautla in Morelos 37% of the population was Afro-Mexican in 1810. The Huasteca uphill region behind the port of Tampico, census data shows the Tampico coast as much as 78 percent Afro Mexican, and in the highlands only 17 percent, the other 83 percent was comprised of Huasteca Indians. West of the Cuautla Valley, 50 percent of the population was Afro Mexican” and it was there that the longest battle of the independence war was fought.
Photo: Emiliano Zapata appears in this undated photo. Zapata is widely renowned as the voice of the Mexican Revolution, which began in 1910 because peasants were angry with the government for stealing their land. Photo: AP/Wide World photos
Emiliano Zapata, the Afro-Indian revolutionary hails from the Cuautla Valley. Rarely seen or acknowledged today, the current estimated Afro-Mexican population in Mexico is 450,000.
Another indication of the importance of the Afro-Mexican during the war of independence is the decree abolishing slavery by priest Miguel Hidalgo, Mexico’s Founding Father, as enticement to attract Afro-Mexicans to the fighting ranks. Likewise, the vital importance of the Afro-Mexican soldier was evident in an incident that took place when Blacks were disgruntled because Jose Maria Morelos, a mestizo himself and Founding Father of Mexico, refused to recognize General Rayon’s appointment on their behalf.  “Disappointed and despondent, they retired to El Veladero and made plans to incite the Negroes in Morelos’s army to slaughter the Whites. When Morelos heard about this activity, he struck hard and fast. Taking a small escort with him, he rushed southward to ‘remove the cancer,’ crushed the revolt before it could be launched, and caught and shot the leaders.”
The Afro-Mestizo was predominant in Morelos’ independence army, which was another reason for targeting, otherwise Morelos would not have viewed this threat as a cancer.
The Mexican war of independence claimed as many as one million lives, many of them Afro-Mexicans. The tragic massacre that took place during Mexico’s war of independence is vividly recounted by one scholar: “The Creole officers, faithful to their gachipin (Spaniard) generals, were willing to massacre the insurgents, and the mestizos and mulattos who formed the rank and file of the army were blindly obedient … when they met the Spaniards in battle, some of them tried to put the Spanish cannon out of action by throwing sombreros over their mouths.”
Where is the Afro-Mexican? Hundreds of thousands died in the war of independence fertilizing Mexican soil, the rest has been absorbed in the genetic pool of the Mexican mestizo.
By 1827 hardly any “Negro” slaves were left in Mexico. The whole slavery issue would have been history were it not for the fact that Texas, in the Northern part of Mexico, was being encroached upon by slave holding Anglos who brought slaves with them to settle unoccupied areas of Texas.
Mexico’s effort to end slavery throughout her territory met with opposition and by the fall of 1825 almost one out of five persons in Texas was a “Negro” slave.
Since Mexico was hospitable to any fugitive slave, and hundreds had fled to Mexican territories, the U.S. proposed a Treaty of Amity, Commerce and Navigation between Mexico and the United States to stop the trend. Both parties signed the treaty on July 10, 1826 – however it had to be ratified by the Mexican Congress and was met with staunch opposition. The Committee of Foreign Relations of the Mexican Chamber of Deputies, had a major problem with Article 33 of the proposed treaty, which dealt with fugitive slaves. The Committee ultimately recommended its rejection.
After the Mexican American War wherein Mexico lost nearly 50 percent of its territory, fugitive slaves still crossed the border seeking refuge from the merciless oppression of their masters. Mexico once more reaffirmed her protection of fugitive slaves recommitting in the Constitution of 1857 to freedom for all fugitive slaves who set foot on Mexican soil.
Mexico also constitutionally banned any intentional extradition treaty-covering individuals who had been slaves.
When in 1857 James Frisby, a “Negro” seaman jumped ship in Veracruz and claimed to have been a slave in New Orleans “whose master had signed him on board the Metacomet as crew;” the port captain refused to turn him over. U.S. Representative in Mexico John Forsyth resorted to arm-twisting Mexico even to the point of declaring that Mexico extended a privilege to the seaman because of the “ebony color of his skin.” Forsyth berated Mexico for letting a Black get away with what those of  “pure white blood … the master blood of the earth … blood which has conquered and civilized and Christianized the world.” Forsyth in his rage declared, “If Mexico is so deeply imbued with the mania of negrophilism [love of “Negroes”] … imprisoning our White Citizens and making free our Slaves, as fast as they put foot on Mexican soil, cannot long endure consistently with peace and harmony between the two countries.” Forsyth failed to intimidate Mexico, and she remained adamant in her defense and protection of fugitive Black slaves.
Despite all threats and the loss of 50 percent of its territory, Mexicans continued to extend a helping hand to escaping Black slaves from the United States, the imperialist power to the North.
Continuing that tradition, this new millennium shall witness the Unity and Oneness of Blacks and Mexicans in order to strengthen our common goal towards freedom, justice and equality under the Creator of the heavens and the earth, our true and common origin.

"Seven Decades of Nazi Collaboration: America’s Dirty Little Ukraine Secret: An interview with Russ Bellant, author of 'Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party' "

2014-03-18 by Paul H. Rosenberg [http://fpif.org/seven-decades-nazi-collaboration-americas-dirty-little-ukraine-secret/]:
Photo: Yaroslav Stetsko, an OUN leader during World War II, meets George H.W. Bush.

As the Ukrainian crisis has unfolded over the past few weeks, it’s hard for Americans not to see Vladimir Putin as the big villain. But the history of the region is a history of competing villains vying against one another; and one school of villains—the Nazis—have a long history of engagement with the US, mostly below the radar, but occasionally exposed, as they were by Russ Bellant in his book Old Nazis, The New Right And The Republican Party (South End Press, 1991). Bellant’s exposure of Nazi leaders from German allies in the 1988 Bush presidential campaign was the driving force in the announced resignation of nine individuals, two of them from the Ukraine, which is why he was the logical choice to turn to illuminate the scattered mentions of Nazi and fascist elements amongst the Ukrainian nationalists, which somehow never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. Of course most Ukranians aren’t Nazis or fascists—all the more reason to illuminate those who would hide their true natures in the shadows…or even behind the momentary glare of the spotlight.

Paul H. Rosenberg: Your book, Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party exposed the deep involvement in the Republican Party of Nazi elements from Central and Eastern Europe, including Ukrainian, dating back to World War II and even before. As the Ukrainian crisis unfolded in the last few weeks there have been scattered mentions of a fascist or neo-fascist element, but somehow that never seems to warrant further comment or explanation. I can’t think of anyone better to shed light on what’s not being said about that element. The danger of Russian belligerence is increasingly obvious, but this unexamined fascist element poses dangers of its own. What can you tell us about this element and those dangers?
Russ Bellant: The element has a long history, of a long record that speaks for itself, when that record is actually known and elaborated on. The key organization in the coup that took place here recently was the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists [OUN], or a specific branch of it known as the Banderas [OUN-B]. They’re the group behind the Svoboda party, which got a number of key positions in the new interim regime. The OUN goes back to the 1920s, when they split off from other groups, and, especially in the 1930s began a campaign of assassinating and otherwise terrorizing people who didn’t agree with them.
As World War II approached, they made an alliance with the Nazi powers, they formed several military formations, so that when Germany invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941, they had several battalions that went into the main city at the time, where their base was, Lvov, or Lwow, it has a variety of spellings [also 'Lviv']. They went in, and there’s a documented history of them participating in the identification and rounding up Jews in that city, and assisting in executing several thousand citizens almost immediately. There were also involved in liquidating Polish group populations in other parts of Ukraine during the war.
Without getting deeply involved in that whole history, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists to this day defend their wartime role, they were backers of forming the 14th Waffen SS Division, which was the all-Ukrainian division that became an armed element on behalf of the Germans, and under overall German control. They helped encourage its formation, and after the war, right at the end of the war, it was called the First Ukrainian division and they still glorify that history of that SS division, and they have a veterans organization, that obviously doesn’t have too many of members left but they formed a veterans division of that.
If you look insignia being worn in Kiev in the street demonstrations and marches to the SS division insignia still being worn. In fact I was looking at photographs last night of it and there was a whole formation marching, not with 14th Division, but with the Second Division, it was a large division that did major battle around the Ukraine, and these marchers were wearing the insignia on the armbands of the Second Division.
So this is a very clear record, and the OUN, even in its postwar publications has called for ethno-genetically pure Ukrainian territory, which of course is simply calling for purging Jews, and Poles, and Russians from what they consider Ukrainian territory. Also, current leaders of Svoboda have made blatantly anti-Semitic remarks that call for getting rid of Muscovite Jews and so forth. They use this very coarse threatening language that anybody knowing the history of World War II would tremble at. If they were living here, it would seem like they would start worrying about it.
Obviously these people don’t hold monopoly power in Ukraine, but they stepped up and the United States has been behind the Svoboda party and these Ukrainian nationalists. In fact the US connections to them go back to World War II and the United States has had a long-standing tie to the OUN, through the intelligence agencies, initially military intelligence, and later the CIA.

Paul H. Rosenberg: Your book discusses a central figure in the OUN, Yaroslav Stetsko, who was politically active for decades here in America. What can you tell us about his history?
Russ Bellant: Yaroslav Stetsko was the number two leader of the OUN during World War II and thereafter. In 1959, Stefan Bandera, who was head of the OUN, was killed and that’s when Stetsko assumed the leadership. Stetsko in 1941 was the guy who actually marched into Lvov with the German army June 30, 1941 and the OUN issued a proclamation at that time under his name praising and calling for glory to the German leader Adolf Hitler and how they’re going to march arm in arm for the Ukraine and so forth. After the war, he was part of the key leadership that got picked up by the Americans.
There’s a number of accounts I’ve seen, at least three credible up reports, on how they were in the displaced person camp, the Allied forces set up displaced persons camp and picked up tens of thousands of these former allies of Hitler from countries all over the East, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania – there weren’t Polish collaborators I think most people know the Germans heavily persecuted and murdered millions of Polish residents – but Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, and so forth, Belorussia. They had them in these camps they built and organized them, where the Ukrainians were assassinating their Ukrainian nationalist rival so that they would be the undisputed leaders of Ukrainian nationalist movement, so they would get the sponsorship of the United States to continue their political operation, and they were successful in that regard. So when Bandera was out of the picture, Stetsko became the undisputed leader of Ukrainian nationalists.
The Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists in 1943 under German sponsorship organized a multinational force to fight on behalf of the retreating German army. After the battle of Stalingrad in ’43 the Germans felt a heightened need to get more allies, and so the Romanian Iron Guard, the Hungarian Arrow Cross, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists and others with military formations in place to assist came together and formed the united front called the Committee of Subjugated Nations and again worked on behalf of of the German military. In 1946, they renamed it the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations, ABN. Stetsko was the leader of that until he died in 1986.
I mention this in part because the OUN tries to say well during the war we fought the Germans and the communists. The fact of the matter is that they were the leadership of this whole multinational alliance on behalf of the German the last two years of the war and in the war thereafter. All the postwar leaders of the unrepentant Nazi allies were all under the leadership of Yaroslav Stetsko.

Paul H. Rosenberg: What happened when Stetsko, and others like him from other German allied forces came to the United States?
Russ Bellant: In the United States, when they came, his groups organized ‘captive nations’ committees, they became, supposedly, the representatives of people who are being oppressed in Eastern Europe, the Baltic countries, by the Soviet. But they were, in fact, being given an uncritical blank check to represent the voices of all these nations that were part of the Warsaw Pact when in fact they represented the most extreme elements of each of the national communities.
The Captive Nations Committee in Washington DC for instance was run by the person who headed the Ukrainian organization of nationalists, that was true in a number of places. In my hometown area near Detroit as well, they played a major role. In the early 50s, when they were resettled in the United States, there was at least 10,000 of them that were resettled, when you look at all the nationalities. They became politically active through the Republican national committee, because it was really the Eisenhower administration that made the policy decision in the early 1950s, and brought them in. They set up these campaign organizations, every four years they would mobilize for the Republican candidate, whoever it would be, and some of them like Richard Nixon, in 1960, actually had close direct ties to some of the leaders like the Romanian Iron Guard, and some of these other groups.
When Richard Nixon ran for president in 1968, he made a promise to these leaders that they would if he won the presidency he would make them the ethnic outreach arm of the Republican National Committee on a permanent basis, so they wouldn’t be a quadrennial presence, but a continuing presence in the Republican Party. And he made that promise through a guy named Laszlo Pasztor, who served five years in prison after World War II for crimes against humanity. He was prosecuted in 1946 by non-Communist government that actually had control of Hungary at the time. There was a period from ’45 to ’48 when the Hungarian Communist Party didn’t run Hungary. They were the ones who prosecuted him. He had served as a liaison between the Hungarian Nazi party and Berlin; he served in the Berlin embassy of the Hungarian Arrow Cross movement. This is the guy that got picked to organize all the ethnic groups, and the only people that got brought in were the Nazi collaborators.
They didn’t have a Russian affiliate because they hated all Russians of all political stripes. There were no African Americans or Jewish affiliates either. It was just composed of these elements, and for a while they had a German affiliate but some exposure of the Nazi character of the German affiliate caused it to be quietly removed, but other [Nazi] elements were retained.

Paul H. Rosenberg: Your book was researched and published in the 1980s. What was happening by that point in time, after these groups had been established for more than a decade?
Russ Bellant: I went to their meetings in the 1980s, and they put out material that really make clear who they were there 1984, one of their 1984 booklets praised the pro-Nazi Ustashi regime in Croatia, and these Ustashi killed an estimated 750,000 people and burned them alive in their own camp in Croatia. And here they are praising the founding of this regime, and acknowledging that it was associated with the Nazis, and it was signed by the chairman of the Republican National Committee. You couldn’t make this stuff up. It was just crazy.
I interviewed the Kossack guy, he showed me his pension from service in the SS in World War II, and how he was affiliated with free Nazi groups in the United States, and he was just very unrepentant. These are the umbrellas that were called ‘Captive Nations Committees’ by these people that Stetsko was over, and was part of, too. The Reagan White House brought him in, and promoted him as a major leader and did a big dinner—[UN Ambassador] Jeane Kirkpatrick was part of it, George Bush as Vice President, of course Reagan—and Stetsko was held up as a great leader., And proclamations were issued on his behalf.
When Bush was running for president in 1988, Bush Senior, he came to these basically one of the leading locations of the Ukrainian nationalists in North America, which is in just outside of Detroit, a suburb of Detroit to their cultural center, and one of their foremost leaders in the world is headquartered out of their, at the time, he got Bush to come there and they denounced the OSI and Bush just shook his head, he wouldn’t say anything about it.
The OSI was the Offices of Special Investigations, it was investigating the presence of Nazi war criminals in the United States, and deporting those that were found to have lied on their history when they applied to come into the United States after the war. They had deported a number of people from all over the United States. They had a lot of open investigations, and all these émigré Nazis were trying to bring all the political pressure they could to stop these investigations, including the Ukrainian nationalists ones.
So they denounced them, the OSI investigations, in front of Bush, Bush nodded his head, but he wouldn’t say anything because he didn’t want to sound like he was sympathetic to the Nazi war criminals, but at the same time he didn’t want to offend his hosts by disputing the issue with them. So, the issue of World War II was still being played out over four decades later, in the politics of the presidency, and unfortunately Bush and Reagan continued to be on the side that we tried to defeat in World War II.

Paul H. Rosenberg: What was the response when your book came out, with all this information? How was the information received, and what was the political reaction?
Russ Bellant: Prior to the book’s publication, Washington Jewish Week had done a story about some of the ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign and their history, like denying the Holocaust, or being involved with these émigré Nazi groups. They named a couple of them that weren’t part of the Heritage Groups Council, but they were part of the Bush campaign.
Then when I published the book, it brought out a lot more names, and the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Boston Globe did stories on them. It got to the point where when reporter from the Philadelphia Inquirer would call them about one of their ethnic leaders of the Bush campaign the standard response was he’s no longer part of the campaign, and they’d say that almost as soon as the name would get mentioned. So that they would call that person, and I’ll give the example of Florian Galdau, he was, he ran the Rumanian Iron Guard in New York City. He had wartime record. [Romanian Archbishop Valerian] Trifa himself was implicated in the mass killing of Jews in Bucharest in 1941, I believe. Galdau’s record is clear, because when Trifa was prosecuted he was one of the people targeted by the Office of Special Investigations, and he was forced into deportation in the 1980s, but in those records, they identify Florian Galdau is one of his operatives, so his history is known, except apparently to the Bush campaign.
So when he was identified by the Philadelphia Inquirer, they immediately said he wasn’t part of it, so the Philadelphia Inquirer called Florian Galdau, and he said, “No, I’m part of it. They never said anything to me. As far as I know I’m still part of the campaign.” And that was the pattern.
The Republican National Committee said after the election that they were going to put a blue ribbon committee together and do an investigation of the charges in my book. I was never contacted, nobody affiliated with the book project, the publisher wasn’t contacted none, none of the sources I worked with was contacted. And after about a year, with nobody raising any issues or questions about it they just folded it up and they said well we have not had the resources to investigate this matter.
I did publish an op-ed in the New York Times about two weeks after the election was over, and I think that was the last time anybody said anything publicly about it that got any kind of forum. I think they were allowed to just die and wither away, that is those leaders. The Republican idea was probably to bring in another generation of people who were born in the United States as these émigré’s died off, but they never did anything about this history that Richard Nixon had bequeathed them with. The Reagan White House had really made deep political commitments and alliances with them, they didn’t want to look like they turned their back on them; and Bush wanted them for his reelection campaign, so he wasn’t going to turn his back on them either.
If you want an anecdote, I know that 60 Minutes was working on a piece that Bradley’s team was working on, and Nancy Reagan herself called the executive producer and said that we would really like it if you would wouldn’t do this story, and they killed it. Because, basically, it’s not just about Nazis and the Republican national committee were Nazis in the White House, it inevitably raises the question of who are they how did they get here, who sponsored them and it goes back to the intelligence agencies at that point. And some people don’t like treading there, if it’s tied to an intelligence agency, they prefer to just stay away from the subject. So, some people at 60 Minutes were frustrated by it, but that’s what happened. I think that they were able to effectively kill the story when people tried to cover it. They were able to persuade news managers to not delve into it too much.

Paul H. Rosenberg: What’s happened since you wrote your book, and most of the World War II generation died off? What have the OUN and its allies been up to since then that we should be aware of?
Russ Bellant: Once the OUN got sponsored by the American security establishment intelligence agencies, they were embedded in a variety of ways in Europe as well, like Radio Free Europe which is headquartered in Munich. A lot of these groups, in the ABN were headquartered in Munich under the sponsorship of Radio Free Europe. From there they ran various kinds of operations where they were trying to do work inside the Warsaw Pact countries. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, a number of them moved back into the Ukraine as well as the other respective countries, and began setting up operations there, and organizing political parties. They reconstituted the veterans group of the Waffen SS, they held marches in the 1990s in the Ukraine, and organized political parties, in alliance with the United States, and became part of what was called the Orange Revolution in 2004, when they won the election there.
The prime minister was closely allied with them. They worked with the new government to get veterans benefits for the Ukrainian SS division veterans, and they started establishing the statues and memorials and museums for Stepan Bandera, who was the leader of the OUN, and who I should say was despised by other Ukrainian nationalists because of their methods, because they were extreme and violent toward other rival Ukrainian nationalist groups as well. So Bandera wasn’t a universal hero, but this group was so influential, in part because of its US connections, that if you go online and you Google ‘Lviv’ and the word ‘Bandera’ you’ll see monuments and statues and large posters and banners of Bandera’s likeness and large monuments permanent erected monuments on behalf of Bandera so they made this guy like he’s the George Washington of the Ukraine.
That government was in power until 2010, when there was another election, and a new regime was elected with a lot of support from the East. Ukrainian nationalist groupings around the Orange Revolution were sharply divided against each other, and there was rampant corruption, and people voted them out. The United States was very aggressive in trying to keep the nationalists in power, but they lost the election. The United States was spending money through the National Endowment for Democracy, which was pumping money into various Ukrainian organizations, and they were doing the same thing in Russia and many other countries around the world as well. We’re talking about many millions of dollars a year to affect the politics of these countries.
When the occupations came in Independence Square in Kiev late last year, you can see Svoboda’s supporters and you can hear their leaders in the parliament making blatant anti-semitic remarks. The leader of the Svoboda party went to Germany to protest the prosecution of John Demjanjuk, who was the Ukrainian who was settled in the United States, who was implicated as a concentration camp guard in the killing of innocent people. The German courts found him guilty and Svoboda leadership went to Germany to complain about convicting this guy. The reason they said they didn’t want any Ukrainian tainted with it because they live a lie that no Ukrainian had anything to do with the German Nazi regime, when history betrays them, and their own affiliations betray them. But they don’t like that being out there publicly, so they always protest their innocence of any Ukrainian being charged with anything, regardless of what the evidence is.

Paul H. Rosenberg: Your book was an important revelation but was not alone. Your book notes that Jack Anderson reported on the pro-Nazi backgrounds of some of the ethnic advisors as far back as 1971, yet when your report came out almost two decades later, everyone responded with shock, surprise, and even denial. What lessons should we draw from this history of buried history? And how should it influence our thinking about the unfolding crisis in the Ukraine?
Russ Bellant: I don’t believe it’s ever too late to become familiarized and educated about the history of this phenomenon both the wartime history and our postwar collaboration with these folks. There were a number of exposés written about the émigré Nazis. There was a 1979 book called Wanted and it did a number of case stories of these people being brought in to the United States, including the Trifa story. Christopher Simpson did a book called Blowback that discussed the policy decisions, it’s an incredible book. He’s a professor at American University and he did years of research through the Freedom of Information Act and archives, and got the policy documents under which the decisions were made to bring these folks together, and not just into the United States but to deploy them around the world.
Like my book, it didn’t get the attention it deserved. The New York Times book reviewer was negative toward the book. There are people that really don’t want to touch this stuff. There’s a lot of people who don’t want it touched. I think it’s really important for people who believe in openness and transparency and democratic values, who don’t want to see hate groups come back to power in other parts of the world to know what happened.
There’s not very many Americans that really even know that the Waffen SS was a multinational force. That’s been kind of kept out of the received history. Otherwise people would know that there were Ukrainian Nazis, Hungarian Nazis, Latvian Nazis, and they were all involved in the mass murder of their fellow citizens, if they were Jewish, or even if they were co-nationalists that were on the other side of the issue of the war. They were just mass murderers, across Eastern Europe. And that history, those facts aren’t even well-known. A lot of people didn’t even know this phenomenon even existed.
I think all Americans have a responsibility to know what their government is doing in the foreign policy in Europe as well as elsewhere around the world, as well as Latin America as well as Africa. Since our policy was to uphold apartheid in South Africa why weren’t Americans challenging that more? They began challenging that in the 80s, but the apartheid regime was run by the Nazi party. They were allied with Germany in World War II, they were the Nationalist party and they took power in 1948 and the United States backed that for decades. We backed the death squads in Latin America, even though they massacred tens of thousands of people – 30,000 people in Chile alone. Americans aren’t being attentive to what their government is doing abroad, even though it’s been doing done with their tax dollars and in their name, and I think we just have a general responsibility.
I went to these meetings, I went to these conferences, I went over a period of years. I met with them directly, most of the people I wrote about, I met with them personally or in group meetings. People can’t afford to do that on their own, timewise, but there’s enough literature out there they can read and pursue it, they will get enough enough of a handle to get what the real picture is, to demand change. I’m not totally partisan in this, but I think the Republican Party was extreme on this, but the Democrats folded and didn’t challenge this when they knew it was going on.
There is an old Roman poet that once said truth does not say one thing and wisdom another. I’m a believer in that. Tell the truth and wisdom will follow.

Declassified CIA Study Finds Ethiopia Racist

Originally posted 2014-01-27 at [https://web.archive.org/web/20140131034415/http://natna.wordpress.com/2014/01/27/ethiopia-declassified-cia-study-finds-ethiopia-racist/]:
A 2006 declassified internal CIA document of a “Study Submitted to the National Security Council in April 1958″  finds Ethiopian attitude towards “Negros” peculiar. The Study states: “Ethiopians generally consider themselves to be of the Caucasian race and tend to look down and resent the American Negro.”

Problems Peculiar to Ethiopia -
“Among some Ethiopians there is a feeling a prejudice against Negroes.
“Practice. Civilian agency personnel officers are aware that there is some Ethiopian racial prejudice. The assignment of Negro personal to Ethiopia is not precluded by the agencies as a matter of policy. The need for the services of the individual are weighed carefully, however, in relation to the possible embarrassment of the employee, limitations on the effectiveness of the employee in accomplishing program objectives, and the possibility of the assignment presenting a further cause of the possible friction with the Ethiopians.”

It should be recalled that Marcus Garvey also found the Ethiopia Emperor to be racist and “white slave hero worshiper”. Marcus Garvey on Racist Ethiopia and its Emperor writes:
“It is a pity that a man of the limited intellectual calibre & weak political character like Haile Selassie became Emperor of Abyssinia at so crucial a time in the political history of the world. Unfortunately, Abyssinia lost the controlling influence of a political personality of patriotic racial character like the late Menelik, whose loyalty to his race and devotion to his country excelled all his other qualities, to the extent that he was able to use that very strength to continuously safeguard the interests of the Ethiopian Empire. What he did so well to preserve, a cringing, white slave hero worshiper, visionless and disloyal to his country, threw away. This is the impression the serious minded political student forms of the conduct of the ex-Emperor of Abyssinia… Every Negro who is proud of his race must be ashamed of the way in which Haile Selassie surrendered himself to the white wolves of Europe. …It was black men fighting black men, and this was made possible in Abyssinia because the regime of Haile Selassie had given a bad taste to the mouth, not only of the blacks of Abyssinia but of those of the surrounding territories. They felt that they had a cause against the Amharic white loving Emperor who liked to chain and flog black men”.