You would be forcibly fed, clothed, lodged, taught, and employed whether you like it or not. If it were discovered that you had not character and industry enough to be worth all this trouble, you might possibly be executed in a kindly manner..
-- Fabian Socialist George Bernard Shaw
In the world wide theater where Marxists wage class war, the Communists can be regarded as front line troops; while the Socialists serve as the big guns in the rear, firing over the heads of the men in forward positions and enabling them at a well-chosen moment to seize their objective rapidly.
Politically, it was the pattern of events in Czechoslovakia, in the Hungary of Bela Kun, even· in Russia itself, where Socialist governments prepared the ground for a Communist seizure of power.
While Woodrow Wilson could not actually be named a Socialist, he was the first Chief Executive of the United States to accept Socialist minded intellectuals as aides and advisers and to present Fabian Socialist programs as his own.
Source: Fabian Freeway (1966) by Rose L. Martin.
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In fact, the scheme of government-business partnerships and economic regulation set up by FDR’s National Industrial Recovery Act (NIRA) could easily have served as a model for how Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were addressing the Great Depression in their countries. That’s why Hitler and Mussolini admired FDR. Mussolini put it well when he said that he admired FDR because he, like Mussolini, was a “social fascist.”
The NIRA empowered representatives from management and labor in industries all across America to set their own wages, prices, and working conditions within their respective industries. Once a code was established for a particular industry, it would be submitted to the president, whose signature on the code would give it the force of law. All the businesses within that industry were expected to abide by the terms of the code, on pain of criminal prosecution by the feds.
Financial manipulation by the federal government’s central bank, the Federal Reserve System, caused the stock-market crash in 1929. That led to the Great Depression. Rather than admit that government [my emphasis] was the root cause of the economic crisis, Roosevelt and his cohorts blamed it on “the failure of free enterprise.”*
Then, they used the economic emergency (that the feds caused) as an excuse to implement the most revolutionary change in American history — the adoption of an economic system that combined features of both socialism (such as Social Security, which originated among German socialists in the late 1800s) and fascism (such as government-business partnerships, which were important both in Nazi Germany and fascist Italy). And it was all sold to the American people as “saving free enterprise,” which obviously was an easier sell than “embracing socialism and fascism.”
Adding to the pressure to “go along” with the cartels and codes was a powerful political campaign led by a former U.S. army general named Hugh Johnson, whom FDR had appointed to serve as chairman of the National Recovery Administration, which put the NIRA into effect. The general immediately made it clear that those who opposed the NRA and its famous symbol “the Blue Eagle” were not true, patriotic Americans. Everyone was encouraged to display the Blue Eagle in their store windows, and consumers were expected to boycott unpatriotic Americans who refused to go along with the new scheme.
Source: Economic Liberty and the Constitution by Jacob G. Hornberger.
*Sounds like our current president. Then again most if not all Leftists think like this. They always believe gov’t can never do wrong. (Yea, another footnote. I am trying them out.)
