Look, it's not as if I haven't studied that period of history -- EXTENSIVELY. And anyone who calls Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler peas in a pod is a nut job. My time is reasonably valuable to me, and I am not going to waste it wading through patently nonsensical ideas on your recommendation, which quite frankly is no recommendation at all.
Now, you want to make that case, don't refer me to someone's book, give me facts. I can show you many Social Democrats and Communists thrown into concentration camps and murdered by Adolf Hitler. Can you show me any Republicans, Socialists, or other non-Democratic politicians who were similarly imprisoned and executed by FDR? I can show you how Hitler built up an enormous military machine prior to going to war. Can you deny that the U.S. military was, in 1941, among the weakest in the world? I can show you how Hitler assumed dictatorial powers -- not some right-wing goofball's ridiculous metaphorical use of that word, either, but the real thing. Can you show how Roosevelt suspended elections, made himself the sole legislative authority, and made it a crime to criticize him? I can show you how Hitler started wars with Czechoslovakia, Poland, Holland, Norway, Belgium, and the Soviet Union. Can you show Roosevelt starting wars with anyone?
All of these represent Nazi behavior having nothing to do with the Holocaust, and so your implication above that the only difference between Hitler's Nazis and Roosevelt's Democrats involved the Holocaust is sheer drivel. Absolute bollocks. And anyone who claims to the contrary is a nut job. I don't care if you regard him as "scholarly." He's still a nut job, and definitely not worth my time.
Same is true, if less blatantly, regarding classical liberals and modern conservatives.
Now, try to be honest....
"And anyone who calls Franklin Roosevelt and Adolf Hitler peas in a pod..."
That's not what I said, is it.
Here is the original statement....and it is true.
"Should I point out that Mussolini's fascists, Hitler's National Socialists, and FDR's New Dealers were like three peas in a pod until the Holocaust was revealed....then, under cover of the media, they did a 'Dewey' and branded the Right as the fascists...."
The above is true, as opposed to the following:
" it's not as if I haven't studied that period of history -- EXTENSIVELY."
Baloney.
You simply mouth the Leftist "FDR was a saint" nonsense.
1. In 1933, Fascism was celebrating its eleventh year in power, in Italy, and the election of the National Socialists in Germany represented an unmitigated defeat for liberal democracy in EuropeÂ’s largest industrialized nation.
a. At the beginning of the same month, FDR was inaugurated as President. And before Congress went into recess it granted powers to Roosevelt unprecedented in peacetime. From Congressional hearings, 1973: “Since March 9, 1933, the United States has been in a state of declared national emergency.”
Emergency Powers Statutes (Senate Report 93-549)
2. The National Socialists hailed these ‘relief measures’ in ways you will recognize:
a. May 11, 1933, the Nazi newspaper Volkischer Beobachter, (People’s Observer): “Roosevelt’s Dictatorial Recovery Measures.”
b. And on January 17, 1934, “We, too, as German National Socialists are looking toward America…” and “
Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies” comparable to Hitler’s own dictatorial ‘Fuhrerprinzip.’
c. And “[Roosevelt], too demands that
collective good be put before individual self-interest. Many passages in his book ‘Looking Forward’
could have been written by a National Socialist….one can assume that he feels considerable affinity with the National Socialist philosophy.”
d. The paper also refers to “…
the fictional appearance of democracy.”
3. English and French commentators
routinely depicted Roosevelt as akin to Mussolini. A more specific reason why, in 1933, the
New Deal was often compared with Fascism was that with the help of a massive propaganda campaign, Italy had transitioned from a liberal free-market system to a state-run corporatist one. And corporatism was considered by elitists and intellectuals as the perfect response to the collapse of the liberal free-market economy, as was the national self-sufficiency of the Stalinist Soviet Union.
The National Recovery Administration was comparable to MussoliniÂ’s corporatism as both had state control without actual expropriation of private property.
a. Mussolini wrote a book review of Roosevelt’s “Looking Forward,” in which he said “…[as]
Roosevelt here calls his readers to battle, is reminiscent of the ways and means by which Fascism awakened the Italian people.” Popolo d’Italia, July 7, 1933.
b. In 1934, Mussolini wrote a review of “New Frontiers,” by FDR’s Sec’y of Agriculture, later Vice-President, Henry Wallace: “Wallace’s answer to what America wants is as follows:
anything but a return tyo the free-market, i.e., anarchistic economy. Where is America headed? This book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism, the economic system of the current century.” Marco Sedda, Il politico, vol. 64, p. 263.
4.
Comparisons of the New Deal with totalitarian ideologies were provided from all sides. A Republican senator described the NRA as having gone “too far in the Russian direction,” and a Democrat accused FDR of trying “to transplant Hitlerism to every corner of this country.” Schivelbusch, “Three New Deals,” p. 27.
5. “The
similarities of the economics of the New Deal to the economics of Mussolini’s corporative state or Hitler’s totalitarian state are both close and obvious.” Norman Thomas, head of the American Socialist Party.
