The Death of the American Republic, Circa 1936

[DivinBreuvage]

I sometimes get as depressed as anyone about how hopeless the cause of freedom seems, not just here at home but everywhere. In fact it might not be so hard to take if the news were bad only here at home, because then one would still be able to find comfort in the knowledge that liberty thrives elsewhere, that its flame burns strong and brightly though night has fallen here; and the time, I think, is not far off when a united Europe will laugh at American power pretensions as at the obnoxious antics of a belligerent but cowardly drunk.

But unfortunately the disturbing stories leak not just from the Washington-Crawford axis but from Moscow, from Rome, from London, and, occasionally, from Paris, Berlin, and even Ottawa.

As bad as the situation sometimes seems, however, I find that history can give me hope. Is our condition really more critical today than it was in the late 1930s-early 1940s, when radical expansionist dictatorships wielded power throughout nearly the entire land mass of Europe and Asia combined and won plenty of sympathy and support from wealthy and powerful men (as the Nazis did) or from the dispossessed multitudes (as the Soviets did) in Britain and America? Only the weak sister of Japan, it would seem, lacked her admirers among the democracies of the world.

Furthermore, despite what we like to believe, as a whole neither the people nor the government of the United States were champions of international democracy then. Southeast Asia was raped, Europe was allowed to burn, little Britain was left to fend off the Nazi warlord by herself for an entire year, although Roosevelt was doing what he could to help her to defend herself at least. If Hitler had been able to get enough grip on his megalomania to keep his mouth shut after Pearl Harbor he might not have had to worry about a two-front war until well beyond November 1942. When the United States entered the war its army was insignificant, smaller than Portugal's. Yet three of the dictatorships went down; the fourth, which had itself became a superpower, was gradually contained and bankrupted; and the United States entered one of the most prosperous and progressive eras in its history. Even Stalin found himself forced to suppress dangerous and shocking new realizations that Russian soldiers had begun to hammer out for themselves in the death and horror of the Great Patriotic War.

This is not to dismiss the danger of the present, or to deny the gravity of it, for the danger exists and is very real. It's simply to say that the victory of the corporate-run state is not inevitable, not foreordained. The very triumph of greed, brutality and oppression sometimes forges the sword that kills them. History can give us hope when we come to feel that it's pointless to keep fighting.

In conclusion, I'd like to reinforce my opinion with some examples that don't require blood and suffering: four statements written to or about Franklin Roosevelt. Read them, if you're interested, and decide for yourself if you haven't heard them before right here on DU -- but not about Franklin Roosevelt.

Now, this isn't to say that there aren't profound and fundamental differences between Bush and FDR as men, between their policies and agendas, and between the financial, political, social and cultural circumstances of Depression America and Millenial America, because there most certainly are. But it does serve to illustrate my point that things might not always be quite as bad as they may seem. Enjoy!

.....

Mr. President:
If you could get around the country as I have and seen the distress forced upon the American people, you would throw your damn NRA and AAA, and every other God-Damn A into the sea, before you and your crooked crowd are taken out as they are in Germany, and that is just what you and the rest deserve. You are not for the poor nor the middle class, but for the rich, the monopolies, Jewry, and perhaps Communism.

.....

Confidence that President Roosevelt will be reelected pervades the headquarters of the communist party. Based on that confidence is the high optimism of communist leaders that another four years of the New Deal will bring them within striking distance of the overthrow of the American form of government and the substitution therefor of a communist state. -Arthur Sears Henning, Chicago Tribune, October 29, 1936

.....

Dear Pres. Roosevelt
How's our dandy little quarterback tonight? Our happy little "planner that wayer", eh? What's become of the "happy days are here again" boys? F. Depression Roosevelt. They tell me that you have no brains or mind of your own -- that you are just a "Charlie McCarthy" for a couple of smarties called Cohen and Corcoran or Kelly or something. That's a terrible blow -- to find out that our big, noble savior of the common peepul (sic) is nothing but a stooge.

.....

If the New Deal goes on to the only destination it can have, this may be the last presidential election America will have. It is tragic that America fails to see that the New Deal is to America what the early phase of Nazism was to Germany and the early phase of Fasicm to Italy. -Mark Sullivan, Buffalo Evening News, November 16, 1935 (emphasis mine; apparently the word "sheeple" hadn't yet been coined in 1935)

.....

(These four excerpts were taken from This Fabulous Century: 1930-1940 by "The Editors of Time-Life Books". Scoff if you like, but there are sometimes good things in them.)

Francoise

[JanMichael]

1. Nice post.

It's always interesting to look back at earlier tense times, it can help bring things into focus. That said I think our current predicament is in it's own league.

Why? The gradual concentration of Wealth and the Television. Mass control, and manipulation, is much easier now and one doen't need to be so sophisticated to twist the news up.

I hope though that this is just a brief step back.

[DivinBreuvage]

2. JanMichael, you raise a very good point about TV...

I'd disagree about the concentration of wealth, however. That certainly is nothing new, and I'd be interested to see how today compares to Depression-era America or to France and Russia before their respective revolutions. These examples at least would serve to show that overcentralization of wealth can actually serve, at least indirectly, as a goad to change.

I'd agree it's true that television does, or could, allow would-be propagandists an opportunity to saturate the public consciousness to a degree previously impossible in America. It seems to me that this is one of the biggest obstacles we face today, because it has allowed the suppression or spinning of stories that would probably have sunk this administration long ago if America still had the press of the 1960s, 70s, or even 80s.

But even here there is hope. Part of the reason television propaganda is so effective here, as other posters have pointed out, is that Americans haven't yet learned the scale on which they're being lied to. But eventually the time must come when the realization seeps into nearly everyone that the happy stories they hear on TV have no resemblance to the miserable reality they see around them or hear reflected in the muttered comments of their friends and family. The Soviets and especially the Nazis practiced mass control and manipulation perfectly well without the use of television, yet even they reached the point where almost no one believed what they had to say.

Nor does it take into account the existence of the Internet or the fact that people can always succeed in forming an underground. The czarist secret police infiltrated revolutionary groups for years and even learned how to use revolutionaries to further their own political agenda (for example, inciting or allowing revolutionaries to assassinate politicians the right wing wanted out of the way). Revolutionaries were imprisoned and killed and mass demonstrations were fired upon or dispered with clubs and knouts. But in the end the aristocrats went down (albeit to be replaced by another dictatorship, which itself collapsed in time). Some German officers, when they had had enough, organized a conspiracy to kill Hitler that went on for months and involved dozens of people, yet the Gestapo apparently heard nothing about it until the bomb went off under Hitler's conference table.

These examples are violent and extreme, but they're the ones I'm familiar with; they're certainly not offered to suggest that people should turn violent or riot in the streets but simply to show that even the most agressive dissent can and does flourish under the watchful eye of a dictatorship. And America, despite its flaws, is no dictatorship, at least not yet; nor do we have the centuries-old cultural instinct of submission to authority that afflicted the German or Russian people.

Francoise

[rman]

3. maybe i'm missing the point..

It seems as though you're trying to say that President Roosevelt was a bad guy and the New Deal was a bad thing ("early phase of nazism").

Maybe Roosevelt had a hidden agenda, but the New Deal in and by itself can hardly be called a bad thing. For one, it seems to me that the "First 100 Days" of intensive legislation was not exactly pointless, but rather did help the US to recover from the Depression.

also consider this:
"Alarmed by Roosevelt's plan to redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor, a group of millionaire businessmen, led by the Du Pont and J.P. Morgan empires, plans to overthrow Roosevelt with a military coup and install a fascist government. The businessmen try to recruit General Smedley Butler, promising him an army of 500,000, unlimited financial backing and generous media spin control. The plot is foiled when Butler reports it to Congress."
http://mirrors.korpios.org/resurgent/Timeline.htm

Before and during the great depression there was confiscation of wealth by the rich (which caused the depression), Roosevelt reversed that to a great extent.

All in all it seems far-fetched to me to say that "the New Deal is the early phase of Nazism". More likely it is what saved the US from the nazism/fascism that accompanied the confiscation of wealth and the depression.

[Terwilliger]

4. you misread

These were excerpts from a book...the poster didn't make the conclusion