Life in Central America

Corporatism in Fascism

Fascism is interesting, and revelant to our world today. I subscribed to the Encyclopedia Brittanica online just so I would have access to their excellent article on this. Fascsim is new version of plain old depotism, but it has adapted to modern times, and corporations are an important part of the modern scene. The fascists did not overlook them, and indeed, they made sure Fascism was compatible with Capitalism.
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In the fascist economic theory corporatism called for organizing each of the major sectors of industry, agriculture, the professions, and the arts into state- or management-controlled trade unions and employer associations, or “corporations,” each of which would negotiate labour contracts and working conditions and represent the general interests of their professions in a larger assembly of corporations, or “corporatist parliament.”

Corporatist institutions would replace all independent organizations of workers and employers, and the corporatist parliament would replace, or at least exist alongside, traditional representative and legislative bodies. In theory, the corporatist model represented a “third way” between capitalism and communism, allowing for the harmonious cooperation of workers and employers for the good of the nation as a whole. In practice, fascist corporatism was used to destroy labour movements and suppress political dissent.

In 1936, for example, the economic program of the French Social Party included shorter working hours and vacations with pay for “loyal” workers but not for “disloyal” ones, and benefits were to be assigned by employers, not the government. The Nazi “Strength Through Joy” program, which provided subsidies for vacations and other leisure activities for workers, operated on similar principles.

Extensive corporatist legislation was passed in Italy beginning in the late 1920s, creating several government-controlled unions and outlawing strikes. The Salazar regime in Portugal, using the Italian legislation as its model, outlawed the Trade Union Federation and all leftist unions, made corporatist unions compulsory for workers, and declared strikes illegal—all of which contributed to a decline in real wages. Croatian, Russian, Argentine, Brazilian, and Chilean fascism also proposed corporatist solutions to labour-management strife.

We abandoned the Philippines to the Japanese

This was right at the start of WWII, right after Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor got a lot attention in the history books, but our abandonment of the Philippines, which was far more damaging to us, got hardly any attention at all. This is not surprising, because this was one of the most disgraceful episodes in our history.

We not only abandoned the Filipinos, we abandoned our own troops. MacArthur, after he escaped on a submarine, did return, with great publicity, but none of the troops he left behind returned, because most of them were dead. And they didn’t die pretty deaths either.

We have forgotten the atrocities committed by the Japanese troops, just as the Japanese themselves have chosen to forget. But the way the Japanese treated their prisoners of war, and their occupied countries, made the Germans look like angels.

I found out about this by accident. I was reading 'The Good War', an oral history of World War Two, by Studs Terkel. If you want to find out what really happened in WWII, read this book, but be prepared to be disillusioned.

In Part One, the section entitled, Tales of the Pacific, is an interview of Anton Bilek. He became a recluse after his experiences in the Philippines, and as a prisoner of war in Japan, but he was glad to talk to Studs Terkel, in 1984; because most people didn’t want to hear his stories.
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A lotta friends I lost. We had 185 men in our squadron then the war started. Three and a half years later, we were 39 left. It’s them I think about. Men I played ball with, men I worked with, men I associated with. I miss ‘em. [He was stationed at Clark Field, about sixty miles North of Manila.]
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Just then the sergeant ran in, shouting ‘It’s the real thing. Here they come.’ They leveled the whole field. Tremendous bombing. They didn’t miss anything. All our planes had just come in and were being refueled. We look around and see all this devastation, airplanes burning, hangers burning, gas trucks burning. Men yelling and screaming. Wounded and dead all over the place. After it was over, we were kinda in shock.
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We could never believe that the Japanese would attack the United States of America. That was out of the question. We were told they always wore glasses and they didn’t have decent bombsight. And they didn’t have a navy to amount to anything. You always thought that way, Jesus Christ, how the hell’d this happen?
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One thing that hurt us, we knew of Pearl Harbor, we had eight hours to do something and we didn’t. We had airfields were we could have dispersed our craft.
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We heard of a convoy that was coming with fifty-fours A-24 dive bombers. We didn’t have a single dive bomber. We heard artillery was comin’ over. That was the war plan, see? Battleships and everything. The navy would protect a convoy to come to the Philippines.
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We’re still waiting for the convoy. MacArthur’s telling us it’s on the way. President Quezón of the Phillippines was told personally by President Roosevelt that the United States will do anything to assist. All the time, they knew nothing was coming.
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Christmas Eve, we get orders: retreat to the Battan peninsula. American troops were still at Corregidor. We had tremendous artillery, and the Filipino scouts were terrific. We had them back for three months.
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The next morning we got orders to get rid of all our arms and wait for the Japanese to come. First thing they did was line us up and started searching us. Anyone who had pair of gold-rimmed spectacles, they’d through them on the floor and break them, then put the gold rims in their pockets.
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That was the start of the Death March. That was a sixty mile walk. Here we were, three, four months on half-rations, less. We lost somewhere between six hundred and seven hundred Americans in the four days of the march. The Filipinos lost close to ten thousand. We buried close to 2.000 Americans at Camp O’Donnell. They buried between 28,000 and 30,000 Filipinos.
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There was one ward in the hospital at Cabanatuan which we called St. Peters’s Ward. In this room were guys who were on their last legs. They were down to seventy, eighty pounds and unable to control themselves. They were stripped down, laid on the floor, and the medics would come and swab ‘em off, move ‘em over, and swab down the area they soiled. This was still ’42. In the first six months of capitivity we lost about four thousand men, almost one third of the force we had on Bataan.
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Now they started shippin’ men to Japan. The needed laborers there. So they got sixteen hundred men in an old freighter. The ship that left right behind ours was torpedoed by one of our own submarines. We lost close to five thousand killed by our US Navy, on freighters being transported to Japan. None of the ships were marked, so our Navy people didn’t know this.
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We worked in a coal mine in Omuta, about twenty-five east of Nagasaki, across the bay.
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The B-29s bombed our town. They burned it down. Two of our fighter planes dropped two bombs inside our compound, and strafed one corner of the hospital. They didn’t know it was a hospital, they were after a gun emplacement.
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To this day, I won’t own a Datsun or a Toyota.
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Later in the book, in the section entitled Rosie, Dellie Hahne had this to say:

‘We read stories of the generals, like MacArthur taking food right out of our guys mouths when he was in the Philippines, to feed his own family.’

America has fallen away from God

I got a stern lecture on this, this morning at breakfast, from Javier and Maria. Javier has taken an interest in religion, now that he is involved with Maria, and he takes her to church frequently – to some kind of evangelical protestant church where much of the literature is translated from red-hot preachers of the American Christian Right.

This is a scary situation. Christian fundamentalism was a part of Fascism and I can see it coming back. See my posting Fascists identified with Christianity, for more on this. The way the religious right see it, the reason for America’s decline is the decline in our religious faith. They want a return to strict religious values (and military values), very much like the militant followers of Mohammed.

I don’t think the liberals in the US take these guys seriously enough. Maybe they think they are just some kind of harmless nuts. They are not harmless, they are dangerous, and they ought to be treated that way. America’s importance in the world has declined, it is true, but God had nothing to do with it.

Fascists identified with Christianity

I got this info from the Encylopedia Brittanica

Most fascist movements portrayed themselves as defenders of Christianity and the traditional Christian family against atheists and amoral humanists. This was true of Catholic fascist movements in Poland, Spain, Portugal, France, Austria, Hungary, Croatia, Bolivia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil. In Romania, Codreanu said he wanted to model his life after the crucified Christ of the Orthodox church, and his Legion of the Archangel Michael, a forerunner of the Iron Guard, officially called for “faith in God” and “love for each other.”

In France, Valois, Taittinger, Renaud, Bucard, and La Rocque were all Catholics, and Doriot, previously an atheist, appealed to Catholic sentiments after he became a fascist. Although Maurras was an agnostic, he defended the Catholic church as a pillar of social order, and there were many Catholics among his followers. The fascist intellectual Robert Brasillach described the Spanish Civil War as a conflict between Catholic fascism and atheistic Marxism. Drieu La Rochelle rejected liberal Catholicism but praised the “virile, male Catholicism” of the Middle Ages and the “warrior Christianity of the Crusades.”

Although fascists in Germany and Italy also posed as protectors of the church, their ideologies contained many elements that conflicted with traditional Christian beliefs, and their policies were sometimes opposed by church leaders. The Nazis criticized the Christian ideals of meekness and guilt on the grounds that they repressed the violent instincts necessary to prevent inferior races from dominating Aryans. Martin Bormann, the second most powerful official in the Nazi Party after 1941, argued that Nazi and Christian beliefs were “incompatible,” primarily because the essential elements of Christianity were “taken over from Judaism.” Bormann's views were shared by Hitler, who ultimately wished to replace Christianity with a racist form of warrior paganism. Although Hitler was cautious about dangerously alienating Christians during World War II, he sometimes permitted Nazi officials to put pressure on Protestant and Catholic parents to remove their children from religious classes and to register them for ideological instruction instead. In the Nazi schools charged with training Germany's future elite, Christian prayers were replaced with Teutonic rituals and sun-worship ceremonies.

Despite the many anti-Christian elements in Nazism, the vast majority of Nazis considered themselves to be religious, and most German anti-Semites supported Christianity purged of its “Jewish” elements. The pro-Nazi German Christians, who were part of the Lutheran church in Germany, held that Christ had been a blond-haired, blue-eyed Aryan, and male members called themselves “SS men for Christ.” In many German families children began their prayers before meals with the phrase, “Führer, my Führer, bequeathed to me by the Lord.”

In Italy, Mussolini signed a concordat with the papacy, the Lateran Treaty (1929), which, among other things, made Roman Catholicism the state religion of Italy and mandated the teaching of Catholic doctrine in all public primary and secondary schools. Later, many practicing Catholics joined the conservative wing of the Fascist Party. In 1931, however, Pope Pius XI issued an encyclical, Non abbiamo bisogno, that denounced fascism's “pagan worship of the state” and its “revolution that seduces the young from the Church and from Jesus Christ and that inculcates in [them] hatred, violence, and irreverance.” Although many Italian fascists remained Catholic, the regime's mystique contained pagan elements that glorified the spirit of ancient Rome and the military virtues of its soldiers.

New technology is dangerous

This is true on many levels, but especially true for security issues. Let me give you the perfect example. Just before WWII, the Germans developed a new encryption device, and they called it the Enigma Machine. This was a devilishly clever device, and they had complete confidence in it. They did a mathematical analysis that proved that the Enigma code could not be broken. This was just pure arrogance, there is not such thing as unbreakable encryption, and Enigma was no exception.

The British got their best brains to crack the code. Some of these guys were downright weird, but they were bright, no doubt about it. And they cracked the code. The Germans were a big help. In messages to their submarines, for example, they always had a standard header: From Subcommandpak, and so on. This was blatantly bad encryption practice. And they only made minor variations in their coding, and kept using the same machine. And what’s more, they sold the machine to the Japanese, and the Japanese were just as arrogant (and ignorant ) as the Germans. The Americans improved on the British work, and even designed machines to help break the Japanese code. This was a big help in winning WWII.

Nowadays, the biggest new technologies are personal computers and the Internet. These were not designed with security issues in mind (or a lot of other issues), and they will probably be replaced completely some time in the future. Meanwhile, we have to recognize their limitations, and not use them where high-security is required – electronic voting, for example. We have to remember the Enigma Machine.

Fascism in Japan and China

I'm obsessed by this subject. I had heard of Japanese fascism before, but I thought this was just an analogy. Evidently, it was more than that, and WWII was really a war against three fascist governments.

It looks like the situation in Japan was complicated, and probably hard for a westerner like me to understand. Our ally, Chiang Kai-shek, evidently was involved with them too. From the Encyclopædia Britannica:
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Several rival protofascist and fascist movements operated in Japan after 1918, and their activities helped to increase the influence of the military on the Japanese government. Among the most important of these groups were the Taisho Sincerity League (Taisho Nesshin'kai), the Imperial Way Faction (Kodo-ha), the Greater Japan National Essence Association (Dai Nippon Kokusui-kai), the Anti-Red Corps (Bokyo Gokoku-Dan), the Great Japan Political Justice Corps (Dai Nippon Seigi-Dan), the Blood Brotherhood League (Ketsumei-Dan), the Jimmu Association (Jimmu-Kai), the New Japan League (Shin-Nihon Domei), the Eastern Way Society (Towo Seishin-Kai), and the Great Japan Youth Party (Da-nihon Seinen-dan).

Following the Mukden Incident and the wider invasion of Manchuria by Japanese troops in 1931, several fascist-oriented patriotic societies were formed in China; the largest of these groups, the Blue Shirts, formed an alliance with the Kuomintang (National People's Party) under Chiang Kai-shek. At Chiang's order in 1934, the Blue Shirts were temporarily put in charge of political indoctrination in the army and given limited control of its educational system.

American Fascism

Huey Long once said 'When fascism comes to the US, it will be wrapped in the American flag.'. He was right, of course, fascism always wraps itself in the flag. At one time it was wrapped in the flags of Japan, Italy, and Germany, all at the same time.

But if Huey were back today, he would be amazed. In the Thirties, fascists were not adverse to publicity, and they were well-known figures. Modern fascists vigorously deny they exist, and the majority of Americans agree with them. Our leaders are good guys, and America is protecting the world. Fascism couldn't happen here. The people who insist on talking about fascism are the dangerous guys, and they should not be tolerated.

However the basics are simple: Either the common individuals in a country are in control (democracy), or only the powerful people are in control. The second condition is the most common one by far. Democracy is unusual, and, historically it has been difficult to maintain. Ancient Greece is the prime example.

The natural state of civilized man is despotism. This is even shown in the Old Testament, where the people wanted a king, like all their neighbors. God didn’t think that would be a good idea, but he yielded and gave them a king anyway. And all the bad things he said would happen did happen.

Eventually, in the 18th century, some of the people in Northern Europe began to resent being exploited. This was nothing new, of course, independence movements are as old as history. But this time the upstarts were able to get their act together and help each other out. This was a plain flat-out miracle.

The result was a wide variety of governments in Northern Europe and North America that could be labeled democratic. And a wide variety of governments in the rest of the world who sometimes claimed to be democratic. Germany was a borderline case.

Then came fascism, which was a reaction to Democracy, and the Depression. The fascist governments got squashed in WWII, by the West - and by Russia. And then, somewhat later, Russia collapsed. This was not due to a conflict of ideologies, like everybody claimed, but a conflict of economies.

And now the world economy is in trouble, and fascism is rising again – and for the same reason. The government is perceived to be impotent. And the people, instead of getting in control of the situation themselves (which would be a lot of work), want someone else to do the job for them. The rule of the powerful is returning, history is repeating itself.

Self-destruction

I consider myself an expert on this subject, because I am so self-destructive myself. (I don't want to argue with some of you that you are more self-destructive than me, let's just say there is plenty to go around.)

There has been a lot said about our noble opposition in the Second World, but I want to make my own contribution to this subject. All of these countries self-destructed - dramatically. They were all their own worst enemies, and that is the worst kind. I also saw many companies in Silicon Valley self-destruct during my career as a technical writer, and I got to observe this curious activity at close range. It was an interesting experience, but I wouldn't want to do it again.

I saw four characteristics of this action:

1. Grandiosity. They were the perfect people. They were going to do nothing less than change the whole world, and they were going to do this with a simple magic formula. This is also called magical thinking, and it will get you into trouble every time.
2. Militant Authoritarianism. This government was in total control, and they were going to war.
3. Cutthroat political infighting. This so common it’s hardly worth commenting on. It's never a good thing.
4. A divine leader: Hitler, Mussolini, or The Emperor. Reverend Moony might be an example for our own time

I am tempted to add another category: an Enemy. This is useful, but not mandatory, the Italians didn’t have one (to my knowledge), and I don’t know enough about the Japanese to say.

Let me judge another organization by these criteria: the Puritans. Their influence on United States history has been greatly overstated, but they were an interesting bunch. Grandiosity? Definitely. Militant Authoritarianism? Authoritarian, definitely, that's what the witch trials were all about. But they didn't have an army, or a navy, or an air force. Vigorous infighting? Certainly. A divine leader? They had lots of leaders, but no one was dominant. An Enemy? Maybe, but their enemy was the Devil, and in these modern times we need something more definite.

It is true the Puritans self-destructed, but this was a mild process, and not too many people died. They didn't meet all the criteria. They had a good start, but fortunately for the US, they didn't follow through on it.

What did the Christian churches do to prevent the Holocaust?

This can be summarized briefly: they did nothing. But it is more accurate to say that they helped it along. Again let me quote from the book Hitler’s Willing Executioners:
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In sum, in the face of the persecution and annihilation of the Jews, the churches, Protestant and Catholic alike, as corporate bodies exhibited an apparent, striking impassiveness. Moreover, in the ranks of the clergy at all levels, numerous voices could be heard vilifying the Jews in Nazi-like terms, hurling imprecations at them, and acclaiming their persecution at the hands of their country’s government. No serious historian would dispute the anti-Nazi theologian Karl Barth’s verdict contained in his parting letter before leaving Germany in 1935: ‘For the millions that suffer unjustly, the Confessing Church does not yet have a heart’. …

Perhaps the most impassioned, the bluntest, the most detailed and most damning of the protests against the silence of the Christian churches came from the pen of comparatively obscure officer of one of its auxiliary organizations, the chair of the Evangelical Welfare Service of the Berlin-Zehlendorf district, Marga Meusel. It consisted of a lengthy memorandum prepared for the synod of the Confessing Church which met at Steglitz between September 26 and 29, 1935. The memorandum vividly describes the manner in which the Jews have been persecuted, giving examples of the indignities, torments, and brutalities to which the Germans subjected them. It shows the even German children, nourished in the anti-Semitic culture, had taken to defaming and abusing Jews. ‘It is Christian children who do that, and Christian parents, teachers, and clergymen who allow it to happen.’… Particularly telling was Meusel’s denunciation of the Churches warm welcome of Nazi rule, and the Church’s avowal of fealty to Hitler’s regime. She quotes and concurs with the verdict of a Swedish report ‘that the Germans have a new God, and it is The Race, and to this God they bring human sacrifices.’ ‘How can it again and again profess loyalty to the National Socialist state?’ wondered Meusel.

Cardinal Adolf Bertram of Breslau paid a final homage to the man who was the mass murder of the Jewish people and who had for twelve years served as the beacon of the German nation. Upon learning of Hitler’s death in the first days of May 1945 he ordered ‘a solemn requiem mass be held in commemoration of the Fuhrer’… So that his and Hitler’s flock could pray to the Almighty in accordance with the requiem’s liturgy, that the Almighty’s son, Hitler, be admitted to paradise.

The perpetrators of the Holocaust took pride in their accomplishments

From Hitler's Willing Executioners, Part VI
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The perpetrators of the Holocaust took pride in their accomplishments, in their genocidal vocation, to which they were dedicated. They expressed this again and again, in their actions, in the endless stream of choices that made to tread the killing fields - and while they were there. They also expressed this in their words and actions while they were not on their killing forays. If they indeed disapproved of the genocide, then why would they have taken obviously approving photographs of their killing operations and their lives while executioners - and then circulate them and permit copies to be made for others?

The following photograph of a German solder killing a Jewish mother and child was sent home though the mail. On the back of it was penned: Ukraine 1942, Jewish Aktion, Ivangorad. (Ivangorod was the name of a town in the Ukraine). Why would the perpetrators have their wives and girlfriends, even their children, bear witness to their slaughters and cruelties? Why have celebrations to mark significant massacres, killings, or events?