What is Fascism?

 

WHAT IS FASCISM?

From Webster’s Third International Unabridged Dictionary;

Fascism; “any program for setting up a centralized autocratic national regime with severely nationalistic policies, exercising regimentation of industry, commerce and finance, rigid censorship and forcible suppression of opposition”.

The Thousand-year Reich in Germany only survived for twelve years under fascism.

Here is what war correspondent Eric Sevareid had to say after total immersion in WWII from start to finish in his monumental book, Not So Will A Dream:

“Now our Military Government officers were sorting out the sick and the healthy at the entryway, bringing water for them and dispatching trucks for bread and meat. The Germans clustered in large groups, watching the Americans’ every move and gesture. The woman’s legs were smeared with coal dust, and their hair straggled down over their unwashed faces while children blinked their eyes and clung to their mothers’ skirts. Despite this familiar situation of misery and starvation, a thing I had seen many times before, the relationship was not the normal one. It was conqueror and conquered, of course, but there was something else besides. You could see in their eyes. There were the sullen expressions of suspicion which one suspected, but there were other expressions, which revealed a deep, fixed indignation, which said: “This cannot happen to us.” There seemed to be a sheep like desire to do exactly as they were told, and yet an air of outraged dignity. When their burgomaster announced in a loud voice that the Americans would be unable to move back into their homes until the next day, a muttering ran through the crowd, there were drooping sneers on the faces of some of the young men and women, and one white haired grandmother burst into shrieks of despair and anger. Human misery is human misery, but I could not avoid a sudden feeling of detestation and incredulity. Millions of people in many lands were in the same condition, and worse, because of what the Germans had done. The starving dehumanized foreign workers were just down the road. The homes of these Germans, as we had verified, were stocked with food, warm clothes, new furniture, and radios. One could tell at ounce merely by looking into their faces that they had not the faintest sense of having done anything wrong, that they were utterly unable to grasp what had happened to them and their country, that they had been, were now, and would continue to be concerned only with themselves, unable even to imagine the suffering of others.

It could have been self-deceptive, but I had a profound feeling of having seen at a flash into the minds of a people who were different. As we drove back across the river I realized that a contradiction had been introduced into what had been a basic belief of mine: that all people are essentially the same, that all are capable of democracy and peace, that given bread and security they will have no desire to aggress upon others, that if all people are given bread and security long enough, wars will be impossible. Now I felt entirely unsure of the economic interpretation of political events. Whatever the overpowering logic of Marx and others, I had an uneasy feeling that the structure broke down where the Germans were concerned. It was difficult to put into words, but somehow they were different. They were not quite rational or normal in the realm of human relationships, in the procedures of social existence. There was an inexplicable knot in their souls. Their spirit was an ingrown one, not an outgoing one. Perhaps, as some said there was a loneliness in them, but if so it was a loneliness which neither we nor they could assuage on this world, this side of death. Had this generation of breast-beating and mysticism alone done this to them? I was not sure; I was inclined to feel it was a basic and permanent matter, and how outsiders-conquerors and others- were to go about altering this state of affairs I had no idea. The war we had poured upon the country had certainly altered Germany; I had yet to believe that it had altered the Germans.”

(So, that is what Eric Sevareid had to say about the Germans directly after the war.)

A quote from my wife Jane: “No politician can exist without a Krupp behind them!”

The German people as a whole are honest, hard working, law abiding, dedicated, and loyal to their leadership. When compared to all nationalities world wide they stack up near the very top in all of the above attributes.

Now America: “The home of the brave”

“The land of the free, with Liberty and Justice for ALL”

is under the jackboot of fascism.

Will it survive the dynasty?

In addition, if so, how long?

As America entered WWII, the slogan was; “Kill the Nazis” and that soon became; “Kill the Germans”.

So, it went from kill Castro to kill the “Cubans”, then; “kill the Viet Cong became kill the gooks”. Recently this became kill Ben Laden and that soon moved on to “kill the rag-heads”.

Who are the insurgents now?

Who are the imperialists?

Where is the evil empire?

America needs to take a long look in the mirror!

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Not So Wild a Dream by Eric Sevareid - Book Review-Five Stars

BOOK REVIEW - FIVE STARS

Not So Wild a Dream by Eric Sevareid

I first read this amazing book for the first time more that 30 years ago. 

Since then I have read and reviewed more than 500 five-star books. I only review books worthy of a five star rating. 

Eric Sevareid is unquestionably a stand alone gifted writer, thinker, and analytical intellectual. Rereading his sensational masterpiece was again an enlightening and rewarding experience worthy of more than five stars.  

EXCERPTS:

I suspect I had a deeper and truer intuition for what would come to the world than I have today. And it seems to me my youthful judgments on the individual movers and shakers have held up well. By no means did I foresee every development; not the quick reemergence of Japan as an economic power; not the rapidity with which the Chinese Communists conquered that immensity of people; not the strange paralysis of Britain which I had implicitly assumed would lead Europe into a new way of life. But my sense of the innate strength of the culture of the individual in its historic basin, the West, seems justified now. Ed Murrow had speculated, as the lights came on again in London, that the British would be critically torn between the Russian way and the Western way, but I could not believe that, even then. It was the Germans at the heart of Europe whom I did not trust. This was partly a matter of the stomach as it was with so many Americans who saw and smelled the horrors, and partly the feeling that there was, indeed, a special knot in their spirit, a simmering self-hatred. For years afterwards I could not visit Germany and feel at ease. But in the spring of 1975 I traveled to Bonn to talk with Willy Brandt, the chancellor who had dropped to his knees before the monument to the slaughtered Jews of Warsaw.

He was the authentic “good German” I had known among the neighbors in my boyhood village. I found a freshness, a guiltlessness, even a rich humor in the new, young generation of Germans. I felt at ease among them. I believed in them, because there is a certain duty to believe, but the tiny remaining doubt will not go away.

We did very much to give Europe another chance, to push Japan and Germany and Italy off in new directions. We have touched a great many other places with economic modernity and their ordinary people are not the worse for this, and many are better. No great power ever tried harder or more generously and it does not matter so much in the long run that much of the effort was for private gain. I had been correct in my wartime guess that our most forceful extensions into the world would be those of military America and business America, not those of the evangelical minded. Military America made the greater blunders because business is flexible enough to take and to give, to advance and retreat. It does not want people’s souls, as do the intellectuals; it does not want their obedience as...

John Kennedy pledged that we, with their cooperation, would lift the load of poverty from Latin America’s people in ten years’ time, yet we have not lifted it from the people of Harlem, New York, nor from the Puerto Ricans, our intimate wards. I have come to agree with George Kennan: “To many this view may seem to smack of cynicism and reaction,” he said. “I cannot share these doubts. Whatever is realistic in concept and founded in an endeavor to see both ourselves and others as we really are cannot be illiberal.”

We were not born to be imperialists; we never learned the style, and the time for this is gone. We understand the concept of citizen, not that of subject. There is only one true imperium now, that of the Soviet Union.

I read all the exalting literature of the great struggle for a classless society; later, I watched at first hand its manifestations in several countries. It occurred to me then that what men wanted was Velva, on a national, on a world, scale. For the thing was already achieved, in miniature, out there, in a thousand miniatures scattered along the rivers and highways of all the West and Middle West. I was to hear the intelligentsia of eastern America, of England and France, speak often of our Middle West with a certain contempt, with a joke in their minds. They contemned its tightness, its dullness, its bedrock of intolerance. They have much to learn, these gentlemen. For we had, in those severely limited places, an intolerance also of snobbery, of callousness, of crookedness, of men who kicked other men around. The working of democracy is boring, most of the time, and dull compared with other systems, but that is a small price to pay for so great a thing.

They had no other standard by which to measure except the past. And what had the past been? It had been sod huts, a diet of potatoes and gruel. It had been the hot winds in summer that shriveled the crops, and the blizzards of winter that killed the cattle, that brought the pneumonia and influenza that killed their women and children, while the stricken men turned the pages of a home medical guide and waited for the doctor who lived twenty miles away. It had been the gnarled men who sweated beside a kerosene lamp to learn the grammar of their new country’s language. It had been the handing on from neighbor to neighbor of a few volumes of the classics, a few eastern newspapers three months old. It had been the one-room schoolhouse in a corner of my grandfather’s homestead, where a “bright” aunt could occasionally be prevailed upon to teach the rudiments to tired boys and girls, who had risen before dawn to lug the slops because the family could not afford a hired man.

They came together in villages and put paint on the boards of their houses. They planted green trees, made a park as best they could. They put their money together and hired for their children teachers who knew a little more. They sent some sons away to come back with the knowledge of medicine and the law. They built hospitals and colleges. The colleges were not Harvard nor Oxford, but they saw that the right books were there. They thought they had done well. Who, in his present comfort and easy knowledge, is now to sneer? They were of the men who built America; they are now of the men who keep America. They are America.

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Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid - book review

 

BOOK REVIEW – FIVE STARS

Canoeing with the Cree by Eric Sevareid

A once in a life time epic adventure brought to fruition by a young high school graduate of Norwegian extraction. Meticulously planned and spurned on by youthful exuberance this escapade would prove to be a dangerous undertaking.

I originally read the book over thirty years ago. This trip had been in my mind my whole life and as adventuresome as I am I was very happy that Eric Sevareid made the trip and documented it so exquisitely to satisfy my dreams of wanderlust.

The book is a real thriller even on the second read.

Excerpts:

Two young men about to graduate from high school, begins as do many youthful dreams. On the cusp of adulthood, with nothing ostensible to lose, Eric Sevareid and his friend Walt Port decide to leave the comforts of their homes to seek adventure—in a secondhand, eighteen-foot, voyageur-style canoe. While Minneapolis was already a mature city in 1930, the wilderness of the great north woods was as close as a train stop, or two, away. Early in the boys’ trip, just a few hundred into the eventual 2,500 miles, they look out over the Minnesota River from a tower at Fort Ridgely. From this high vantage Sevareid muses that there is much more river ahead! Their long trek north along many rivers, passing early trading posts and eventually reaching the great Hudson Bay and sea beyond, would be the first documented canoe trip along this historic route.

I am sure there were tears in his eyes, and I know there were tears in mine, and in Walt’s. Half a mile away, at the first bend, we turned and saw his tall figure at the water’s edge. He was still watching us. The doctor’s parting words repeated themselves in my brain continually during the rest of the day: “Don’t let anyone, no matter who he is, convince you that your trip can’t be completed.

"You have youth and strength, and courage too, I hope, and with a little common sense you can do it.”

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