Warnings from the World War II era

I recently purchased and have been reading an interesting old book which has gone down the memory hole.  A study of fascism and a warning to America, it contains insights about how societies can be shaped by crises and also about the growth and power of what has been called "the military-industrial complex."  It is "As We Go Marching" by John T. Flynn, a journalist and author, written in 1944.  Flynn divides his book in three sections, one tracing how fascism arose in Italy and helping define the term, and one about the rise of Nazi fascism in Germany, and a final section in which he tries to show parallels  in America elucidated from the first two sections showing the U.S. has set itself on the same path.  This last section focuses on certain innovations of the Roosevelt administration.  Back then, you were basically considered a "right-wing" author for being critical of the Roosevelt administration the way Flynn was, and it's interesting to see how these political categories have changed---Flynn was critical of militarism and imperialism, so he might be called a "left-winger" today.  The overall theme of the book is that as we were marching off to fight fascism in Europe, the seeds of an American brand of fascism were being planted back at home.                                                                                             

"...The test of fascism is not one’s rage against the Italian and German war lords.  The test is – how many of the essential principles of fascism do you accept and to what extent are you prepared to apply those fascist ideas to American social and economic life?  When you can put your finger on the men or the groups that urge for America the debt-supported state, the autarchial corporative state, the state bent on the socialization of investment and the bureaucratic government of industry and society, the establishment of the institution of militarism as the great glamorous public-works project of the nation and the institution of imperialism under which it proposes to regulate and rule the world and, along with this, proposes to alter the forms of our government to approach as closely as possible the unrestrained, absolute government – then you will know you have located the authentic fascist. ... 

"But let us not deceive ourselves into thinking that we are dealing by this means with the problem of fascism.  Fascism will come at the hands of perfectly authentic Americans, as violently against Hitler and Mussolini as the next one, but who are convinced that the present economic system is washed up and that the present political system in America has outlived its usefulness and who wish to commit this country to the rule of the bureaucratic state; interfering in the affairs of the states and cities; taking part in the management of industry and finance and agriculture; assuming the role of great national banker and investor, borrowing millions every year and spending them on all sorts of projects through which such a government can paralyze opposition and command public support; marshaling great armies and navies at crushing costs to support the industry of war and preparation for war which will become our greatest industry; and adding to all this the most romantic adventures in global planning, regeneration, and domination all to be done under the authority of a powerfully centralized government in which the executive will hold in effect all the powers with Congress reduced to the role of a debating society.  There is your fascist.  And the sooner America realizes this dreadful fact the sooner it will arm itself to make an end of American fascism masquerading under the guise of the champion of democracy."----As We Go Marching, pgs. 252-253.                                                                     

Flynn treats the emergence of fascism partly as a response to a certain kind of crisis of capitalism (He differentiates communism as being more purely socialistic than fascism).  He ends the book on this note:

If national socialism is not the answer to the troubles of the capitalist system—then what is?  The question is a fair one.  My own answer is that as between the troubles of the capitalist system and national socialism I will take the present system no matter how great and difficult its troubles.  Anything rather than the degenerate, the degrading forms of existence which fascism requires.  However, I know that the difficulties of the capitalist society are such—weighing as they do upon the least favored elements of the population—that some intelligent and rational solution must be found or the fraudulent messiahs will have their way.  I am convinced that it is possible to formulate a program for the regeneration and salvation of the present system of society and for the preservation of our essential political liberties.  But it must be in a wholly different direction from national socialism toward which we now move.  This system of society cannot possibly be saved by men who do not believe in it, who are convinced that it is washed up, and who are contriving plans that have been tried over and over again in Europe and always with the same result—despotism and disaster.  I did not undertake this book in order to outline a program of action, so that this is not the place to indicate such a program.  My only purpose is to sound a warning against the dark road upon which we have set our feet as we go marching to the salvation of the world and along which every step we now take leads us farther and farther from the things we want and the things that we cherish.  ---As We Go Marching, pgs. 257-258.

The following is quoted from the first chapter of economist F.A. Hayek's 1944 book, "The Road To Serfdom," another warning to us written in the atmosphere of world war and depression---

“How sharp a break not only with the recent past but with the whole evolution of Western civilization the modern trend towards socialism means, becomes clear if we consider it not merely against the background of the nineteenth century, but in a longer historical perspective.  We are rapidly abandoning not the views merely of Cobden and Bright, of Adam Smith and Hume, or even of Locke and Milton, but one of the salient characteristics of Western civilization as it has grown from the foundations laid by Christianity and the Greeks and Romans.  Not merely nineteenth- and eighteenth-century liberalism, but the basic individualism inherited by us from Erasmus and Montaigne, from Cicero and Tacitus, Pericles and Thucydides is progressively relinquished.

The Nazi leader who described the National-Socialist revolution as a counter-Renaissance spoke more truly than he probably knew.  It was the decisive step in the destruction of that civilization which modern man had built up from the age of the Renaissance and which was above all an individualist civilization.  Individualism has a bad name today and the term has come to be connected with egotism and selfishness.  But the individualism of which we speak in contrast to socialism and all other forms of collectivism has no necessary connection with these.  Only gradually in the course of this book shall we be able to make clear the contrast between the two opposing principles.  But the essential features of that individualism which, from elements provided by Christianity and the philosophy of classical antiquity, was first fully developed during the Renaissance and has since grown and spread into what we know as Western European civilization the respect for the individual man qua man, that is the recognition of his own views and tastes as supreme in his own sphere, however narrowly that may be circumscribed, and the belief that it is desirable that men should develop their own individual gifts and bents.  "Freedom" and "liberty" are now words so worn with use and abuse that one must hesitate to employ them to express the ideals for which they stood during that period.  Tolerance is, perhaps, the only word which still preserves the full meaning of the principle which during the whole of this period was in the ascendant and which only in recent times has again been in decline, to disappear completely with the rise of the totalitarian state.

The gradual transformation of a rigidly organized hierarchic system into one where men could at least attempt to shape their own life, where man gained the opportunity of knowing and choosing between different forms of life, is closely associated with the growth of commerce.  From the commercial cities of Northern Italy the new view of life spread with commerce to the west and north, through France and the southwest of Germany to the Low Countries and the British Isles, taking firm root wherever there was no despotic political power to stifle it.  In the Low Countries and Britain it for a long time enjoyed its fullest development and for the first time had an opportunity to grow freely and to become the foundation of the social and political life of these countries.  And it was from there that in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries it again began to spread in a more fully developed form to the West and East, to the New World and the center of the European continent where devastating wars and political oppression had largely submerged the earlier beginnings of a similar growth.

During the whole of this modern period of European history the general direction of social development was one of freeing the individual from the ties which had bound him to the customary or prescribed ways in the pursuit of his ordinary activities.  The conscious realization that the spontaneous and uncontrolled efforts of individuals were capable of producing a complex order of economic activities could come only after this development had made some progress.  The subsequent elaboration of a consistent argument in favor of economic freedom was the outcome of a free growth of economic activity which had been the undersigned and unforeseen byproduct of political freedom.

Perhaps the greatest result of the unchaining of individual energies was the marvelous growth of science which followed the march of individual liberty from Italy to England and beyond.  That the inventive faculty of man had been no less in earlier periods is shown by the many highly ingenious automatic toys and other mechanical contrivances constructed while industrial technique still remained stationary, and by the development in some industries which, like mining or watchmaking, were not subject to restrictive controls.  But the few attempts towards a more extended industrial use of mechanical inventions, some extraordinarily advanced, were promptly suppressed, and the desire for knowledge was stifled, so long as the dominant views were held to be binding for all: the beliefs of the great majority on what was right and proper were allowed to bar the way of the individual innovator.  Only since industrial freedom opened the path to the free use of new knowledge, only, since everything could be tried--- if somebody could be found to back it at his own risk and, it should be added, as often as not from outside the authorities officially entrusted with the cultivation of learning, has science made the great strides which in the last hundred and fifty years have changed the face of the world.

 As is so often true, the nature of our civilization has been seen more clearly by its enemies than by most of its friends: "the perennial Western malady, the revolt of the individual against the species", as that nineteenth-century totalitarian, Auguste Comte, has described it, was indeed the force which built our civilization.  What the nineteenth century added to the individualism of the preceding period was merely to make all classes conscious of freedom, to develop systematically and continuously what had grown in a haphazard and patchy manner and to spread it from England and Holland over most of the European Continent.

The result of this growth surpassed all expectations.  Wherever the barriers to the free exercise of human ingenuity were removed man became rapidly able to satisfy ever widening ranges of desire.  And while the rising standard soon led to the discovery of very dark spots in society, spots which men were no longer willing to tolerate, there was probably no class that did not substantially benefit from the general advance.     We cannot do justice to this astonishing growth if we measure it by our present standards, which themselves result from this growth and now make many defects obvious.  To appreciate what it meant to those who took part in it we must measure it by the  hopes and wishes men held when it began: and there can be no doubt that its success surpassed man's wildest dreams, that by the beginning of the twentieth century the working man in the Western world had reached a degree of material comfort, security, and personal independence which a hundred years before had seemed scarcely possible.

What in the future will probably appear the most significant and far-reaching effect of this success is the new sense of power over their own fate, the belief in the unbounded possibilities of improving their own lot, which the success already achieved created among men.  With the success grew ambition and man had every right to be ambitious.  What had been an inspiring promise seemed no longer enough, the rate of progress far too slow; and the principles which had made this progress possible in the past came to be regarded more as obstacles to speedier progress, impatiently to be brushed away, than as the conditions for the preservation and development of what had already been achieved.”