FDR, Obama, and Congress - Fascism Then and Now

Despite the continual calls from Progressives for fundamentally changing American culture, there's nothing new about the type of Fascism they're trying to bring to America.

If you watch enough WWII-era films on DVD you'll soon become exposed to a great many film shorts that played in the theaters at the time. Many of them are inspiring. Hollywood could considerably raise its dreadful reputation by emulating a few with regard to America's current military efforts. But some of them are instructional in another way.

A percentage of those documentaries and mini-dramas are decidedly Fascist in nature, showing how the FDR administration tried mightily to urge citizens to "sacrifice for the nation." It sounds scarier in the original German ("Du bist nicht! Dein Volk ist alles!") but the meaning is the same in any language. ("You are nothing. Your people is all!")

Shorts on the WWII: Homefront DVD and others like them did much more than ask Americans to work hard and support the war effort morally and materially. They tried, with obtuse economic explanations and blatant collectivist propaganda, to get individuals to surrender their own well being for the sake of the group.

One particularly egregious example, Skirmish on the Home Front, has Alan Ladd and Susan Hayward arguing over whether they should buy a better house. Ladd puts his foot down and refuses, arguing that the war effort will be better served by them continuing to live in what the man and wife agree is a dump.

His argument is too silly to bother repeating, a complete line of non-sequiturs, ending with a post-war fantasy of the couple living in a 1950s version of a high-tech dream house because they held their war bonds to maturity.

Another, almost as bad, is Letter From Bataan, in which the ghost of a recently dead soldier writes home to his wife and family, unaware at that point of his demise. He declares "no other young soldier should die because the folks at home don't want to do without."

He then goes on to demonstrate how not screeching the family auto's tires (a sin performed in the opening by the teen son) saves rubber that can be used to build a battleship, along with other, equally myopic assertions. He makes no mention, no surprise, of how it was coercive war-time rationing (not to mention a decade of prior Progressive-inspired economic controls) that led to the need to make such trade-offs in the first place.

Both these moral and logical absurdities are closely paralleled in the arguments of today's Green fascists. They assert that if we all collectively sacrifice — use less gasoline, pay over-free-market prices for solar panels and hybrid cars, destroy dams for the sake of salmon, hobble coal-consuming power plants, convert useful agricultural land to producing material for ethanol, etc., etc. (the list of hectoring is endless) — we will in the future all be better off.

All this should sound very familiar, and depressingly so. Good people are as individual as there are individuals. Evil people are all the same. That is, after all, why the villain in romanticized dramas always has to be given a few heroic virtues, like extreme cleverness and flair. Otherwise, he would be as dull as dishwater, like all real-life villains. Not for nothing have several journalists, even those in love with Obama, candidly reported, "He's very boring." Henry Waxman is worse.

It could hardly be otherwise. A dictator is hardly the sort of man who develops his creativity. It he did, he would run from being a dictator as fast as the bullet trains we might actually have if we lived in a free country. That's a lesson it's worthwhile to keep in mind as Congress debates the Waxman-Malarky Cap and Trade (otherwise known as Hobble and Dictate) legislation, along with the panoply of fascist regulation Obama and his fellow thugs are pushing.