History is brandished like an AR-15 by the American left when it appears to fit their narrow worldview, but shunned when it turns out to be less flexible than the talking points Barack Obama gives to Chris Matthews to cause that presidential “tingle.”
To be fair, many leftists have begun to feel the need to add a little spice to their routine spewing of the Hitler label, so a new favorite zinger has emerged: “Fascism” is the new debate-ending slur of choice employed by fashionable pseudo-historians everywhere.
Unfortunately for the left, it turns out that Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) and other key Democrats were actually fans of Adolf Hitler and his Italian fascist copycat Benito Mussolini. If that isn’t the pot calling the kettle…(well, you know).
Yes, it’s true. The architect of the modern left and the patriarch of neo-liberalism admitted to drawing considerable inspiration from the fascist uprisings led by both Hitler and Mussolini prior to the outbreak of WWII (when admission of Nazi sentiments became hazardous to one’s health.)
Even Joseph P. Kennedy and Prescott Bush were waist-deep in cash derived from shaking the bloody hand of Hitler, a fact these self-appointed ruling families continue to whisk away from public view at crucial moments of political determination.
FDR and his foremost cheerleaders at the time specifically espoused open support for the efficiency of Mussolini and Hitler, and welcomed fascism (minus the war) at home.
Roosevelt himself once called Mussolini “admirable,” adding that he was “deeply impressed by what he has accomplished.” Mussolini returned the compliment with adulatory praise, writing of Roosevelt’s many reforms, “Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices … Without question, the mood accompanying this sea change resembles that of Fascism.”
Leftists from academia, the media, and Roosevelt’s own administration were among those rallying around a brownshirt pipedream.
FDR adviser Rexford Guy Tugwell said of Italian fascism: “It’s the cleanest, neatest, most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I’ve ever seen. It makes me envious,” adding that, “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary … Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has.”
NAACP co-founder W. E. B. DuBois viewed the Nazi rise positively, saying that Hitler’s dictatorship had been “absolutely necessary to get the state in order.” In 1937, DuBois stated: “there is today, in some respects, more democracy in Germany than there has been in years past.”
New Republic editor George Soule, who avidly supported FDR, noted approvingly that the Roosevelt administration was “trying out the economics of fascism.” Now, New Republic pages are full of outright defamation accusing Trump of being a fascist.
New York Times reporter Anne O’Hare McCormick wrote fawningly in the aftermath of Roosevelt’s inauguration that Washington, D.C., is “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan … America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, she added, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.”
At the National Recovery Administration (NRA), which is a Roosevelt agency created under the New Deal, a report was published stating boldly, “The Fascist Principles are very similar to those we have been evolving here in America.”
A younger FDR even embraced a possible future where democracy would be abandoned and a personality cult installed in its place.
“They passed beyond the liberty of the individual to do as he pleased with his own property and found it necessary to check this liberty for the benefit of the freedom of the whole people,” Roosevelt said in a 1912 address to the People’s Forum of Troy, New York.
In fact, at his first inauguration address, Roosevelt practically adapted the verbiage of Europe’s ominous strong-men for the more ironic and irreverent American lexicon — but the anti-democratic substance is easy to identify all the same:
If we are to go forward, we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline, because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good. I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army … I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis — broad executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.
Words like this would work just as well in Nuremberg square.
Liberals are either delusional or willfully disingenuous when they conduct character assassinations of Republican standard-bearers based on flimsy comparisons to “Hitler.”
But it is infinitely better to be compared to a leftist caricature of Hitler than to vocally support the actual Hitler, as so many Democrats did when he was a living, breathing threat to humanity.
Where were TIME Magazine’s juvenile antics then? Ah yes, recognizing Adolf Hitler as “Person of the Year.”
