Bulletproof Monk

The World Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow

Published on October 25, 2004 By geser nart In Politics

Synarchism: The Fascist Roots Of the Wolfowitz Cabal
by Jeffrey Steinberg
May 30 , 2003

In 1922, Count Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi launched the Pan European Union, at a founding convention in Vienna, attended by more than 6,000 delegates. Railing against the "Bolshevist menace" in Russia, the Venetian Count called for the dissolution of all the nation-states of Western Europe and the erection of a single, European feudal state, modeled on the Roman and Napoleonic empires. "There are Europeans," Coudenhove-Kalergi warned, who are "naïve enough to believe that the opposition between the Soviet Union and Europe can be bridged by the inclusion of the Soviet Union in the United States of Europe. These Europeans need only to glance at the map to persuade themselves that the Soviet Union in its immensity can, with the help of the [Communist] Third International, very quickly prevail over little Europe. To receive this Trojan horse into the European union would lead to perpetual civil war and the extermination of European culture. So long, therefore, as there is any will to survive subsisting in Europe, the idea of linking the Soviet Union with Pan Europe must be rejected. It would be nothing less than the suicide of Europe."

Elsewhere, Coudenhove-Kalergi echoed the contemporaneous writings of British Fabian Roundtable devotees H.G. Wells and Lord Bertrand Russell, declaring: "This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic.... The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions."

The launching of the Pan European Union was bankrolled by the Venetian-rooted European banking family, the Warburgs. Max Warburg, scion of the German branch of the family, gave Coudenhove-Kalergi 60,000 gold marks to hold the founding convention. Even more revealing, the first mass rally of the Pan European Union in Berlin, at the Reichstag, was addressed by Hjalmar Schacht, later the Reichsbank head, Economics Minister and chief architect of the Hitler coup. A decade later, in October 1932, Schacht delivered a major address before another PanEuropa event, in which he assured Coudenhove-Kalergi and the others, "In three months, Hitler will be in power.... Hitler will create PanEuropa. Only Hitler can create PanEuropa."

According to historical documents, Italy's Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini was initially skeptical about the PanEuropa idea, but was "won over" to the scheme, following a meeting with Coudenhove-Kalergi, during which, in the Count's words, "I gave him a complete harvest of Nietzsche's quotes for the United States of Europe.... My visit represented a shift in the behavior of Mussolini towards PanEuropa. His opposition disappeared."

At the founding congress of the Pan European Union in Vienna, the backdrop behind the podium was adorned with portraits of the movement's leading intellectual icons: Immanuel Kant, Napoleon Bonaparte, Giuseppe Mazzini, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Bankers' Fascism

The pivotal role of Schacht in the Hitler coup and in the Pan European Union, highlights a critical dimension of the universal fascist scheme: the top-down role of the financial "overworld" and its banking technocrats. By all historical accounts, Schacht was the architect, in 1930, of the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), along with the Bank of England's Montagu Norman. Historian Carroll Quigley, in his epic book, Tragedy and Hope—A History of the World in Our Time (New York: MacMillan Company, 1966), described the BIS scheme to establish a dictatorship over world finance:

"The powers of financial capital had another far-reaching aim, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. This system was to be controlled in a feudalist fashion by the central banks of the world acting in concert, by secret agreements arrived at in frequent private meetings and conferences. The apex of the system was to be the Bank for International Settlements in Basle, Switzerland, a private bank owned and controlled by the world's central banks which were themselves private corporations. Each central bank, in the hands of men like Montagu Norman of the Bank of England, Benjamin Strong of the New York Federal Reserve Bank, Charles Rist of the Bank of France, and Hjalmar Schacht of the Reichsbank, sought to dominate its government by its ability to control Treasury loans, to manipulate foreign exchanges, to influence the level of economic activity in the country, and to influence cooperative politicians by subsequent economic rewards in the business world."

Quigley highlighted the role of Schacht's closest ally in the BIS scheme, Bank of England Governor Norman, who headed the privately owned British institution for an unprecedented 24 years (1920-44). "Norman was a strange man," Quigley reported, "whose mental outlook was one of successfully suppressed hysteria or even paranoia. He had no use for governments and feared democracy. Both of these seemed to him to be threats to private banking, and thus to all that was proper and precious in human life. Strong-willed, tireless, and ruthless, he viewed his life as a kind of cloak-and-dagger struggle with the forces of unsound money which were in league with anarchy and Communism."

Montagu Norman and Hjalmar Schacht personified the banking overworld, that bankrolled and installed Hitler and the Nazis in power, in pursuit of their larger, universal fascist scheme.

Even more damning were the profiles of Schacht and Norman and their role in the Hitler project, in The Hitler Book, by a Schiller Institute research team, headed by Helga Zepp-LaRouche (New York: New Benjamin Franklin House, 1984):

"The BIS, nominally set up after the breakdown of 'normal' international financial relations in order to prevent a downward spiraling of international payments, in fact finished off the hapless Weimar Republic by its stern refusal to come to the help of a virtually bankrupt Germany in the crucial summer of 1931, after the Danat Bank collapse had brought the whole nation to its knees. Schacht, who had been a member of the original BIS team and was to return to its board from 1933 through 1938, had been campaigning since his 1930 resignation as head of the Reichsbank, for Anglo-American support for a takeover by the NSDAP [Nazi Party] and its leader, Herr Hitler. He had resigned on March 7, 1930 and the BIS was formally established in June. In September, he was off to London and the United States, to 'sell' the Nazi option to the Anglo-American leadership, notably Bank of England governor and BIS director Montagu Norman, and the already influential Dulles brothers of Sullivan & Cromwell law firm, one of America's most influential—and the attorneys for IG Farben, and many other large German companies and provincial governments. Schacht's Hamburg friend and colleague, patrician Nazi Gerhard Westrick, ran the correspondent law firm to Dulles's in Germany."

On March 16, 1933, a grateful Hitler brought Schacht back as head of the Reichsbank, explained The Hitler Book. A year later, Schacht was made Economics Minister. "Now, the BIS was going to help the Third Reich—by 1939 it had no less than several hundred million Swiss gold francs invested in Germany. On the BIS board were Baron Kurt von Schröder, by now a general in the SS Death's Head Brigade; Dr. Hermann Schmitz of IG Farben—whom Schacht had trained at the imperial economics ministry from 1915 on—and, later, Hitler's two personal appointees, Walter Funk and Emil Puhl of the Reichsbank."

File: 'Synarchist/Nazi-Communist'

The larger universal fascist schema, into which the Norman-Schacht "Hitler project" fit, was well known to leading American intelligence, military, and diplomatic figures of the Franklin Roosevelt era, who maintained exhaustive files under such headings as "Synarchist/Nazi-Communist."

U.S. government archives from the FDR era, which were made available to EIR researchers, feature extensive intelligence reports on the international fascist plots, from the files of the U.S. State Department; U.S. Army Intelligence and Navy Intelligence; and the Coordinator of Information (COI), and its successor, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). These files are of immediate relevance today, given the ongoing coup d'état in Washington by the disciples of Leo Strauss, Alexandre Kojève, and Carl Schmitt inside the George W. Bush Administration. Kojève and Schmitt were leading figures in the wartime "Synarchist" conspiracy, and they personified the perpetuation of that universal fascist plan and apparatus into the postwar period.

Already, following EIR's lead, major American and European newspapers have identified such putschists as Paul Wolfowitz, Abram Shulsky, William Kristol, John Ashcroft, Steve Cambone, and Gary Schmitt as the offspring of the late University of Chicago Prof. Leo Strauss; Strauss, in turn, was the life-long collaborator and promoter of Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt, official Nazi philosopher and Nietzsche revivalist Martin Heidegger, and French Synarchist Alexandre Kojève—all unabashed advocates of tyranny as the only appropriate form of government. Although the May 4 Sunday New York Times feature off-handedly mentions Kojève as Strauss's colleague, without further identification, all of the major media coverage has been sanitized of any discussion of the overtly fascist/Synarchist roots of the Straussian creed.

Nevertheless, there are growing indications that some elements within the U.S. political institutions—particularly the military and intelligence communities, which comprise an important element of what Lyndon LaRouche refers to as "the institution of the U.S. Presidency"—are waking up to the cruel reality that a small group of universal fascists has seized the reins of power and is steering an ill-equipped President George W. Bush, the United States, and the rest of the world into a maelstrom of perpetual war and chaos.

A timely review of the history of the 20th-Century Synarchists is, therefore, in order, to enable those political circles already shocked into action, to understand the nature of the enemy, and exploit the greatest weakness of these Straussian would-be putschists—their open embrace of universal fascism, otherwise known as "Synarchism."

The Langer Study

As EIR reported on May 9 ("Dick Cheney Has a French Connection—To Fascism"), in 1947, OSS veteran and Harvard Prof. William L. Langer assembled the official history of the Roosevelt Administration's dealings with Vichy France. Our Vichy Gamble was based on an exhaustive review of wartime archives, buttressed by interviews with top American officials, including OSS head Gen. William Donovan and President Franklin Roosevelt himself.

Langer minced no words in discussing the Synarchist circles in Vichy France. Referring to Adm. Jean François Darlan, who, along with Pierre Laval, was among the most notorious of the Vichy collaborationists with the Nazis, Langer wrote: "Darlan's henchmen were not confined to the fleet. His policy of collaboration with Germany could count on more than enough eager supporters among French industrial and banking interests—in short, among those who even before the war, had turned to Nazi Germany and had looked to Hitler as the savior of Europe from Communism.... These people were as good fascists as any in Europe.... Many of them had long had extensive and intimate business relations with German interests and were still dreaming of a new system of 'synarchy,' which meant government of Europe on fascist principles by an international brotherhood of financiers and industrialists."

EIR is in possession of many of the documents that Langer reviewed, in preparing Our Vichy Gamble. They offer an in-depth study of a fascist apparatus, whose European-wide tentacles extended into France, Germany, Britain, Spain, Italy, the Netherlands—and, across the Atlantic, inside the United States. One particularly revealing document, prepared by the Coordinator of Information in November 1940, focussed on the Synarchist strategy towards England and America. The document was called, "Synarchie and the Policy of the Banque Worms Group."

The unnamed author began, "In recent reports there have been several references to the growing political power of the Banque Worms group in France, which includes amongst its members such ardent collaborationists as Pucheu, Benoist-Mechin, Leroy-Ladurie, Bouthillier, and representatives of big French industrial organizations." Under the subtitle, "Similarity of aims of 'Synarchie' and Banque Worms," the report continued, "The reactionary movement known as 'Synarchie' has been in existence in France for nearly a century. Its aim has always been to carry out a bloodless revolution, inspired by the upper classes, aimed at producing a form of government by 'technicians,' under which home and foreign policy would be subordinated to international economy. The aims of the Banque Worms group are the same as those of 'Synarchie,' and the leaders of the two groups are, in most cases, identical."

The "Banque Worms group" was closely allied with the Lazard banking interests in Paris, London, and New York, and with Royal Dutch Shell's Henri Deterding. Hippolyte Worms, the bank's founder, was one of 12 initial Synarchist Movement of Empire (SME) members, according to other French police and intelligence reports.

The report itemized the aims of the Synarchists, as of August 1940: "to check any new social schemes which might tend to weaken the power of the international financiers and industrialists; to work for the ultimate complete control of all industry by international finance and industry; to protect Jewish and Anglo-Saxon interests; ... to take advantage of Franco-German collaboration to conclude a series of agreements with German industries, thereby establishing a solid community of interests between French and German industrialists, which will tend to strengthen the hands of international finance and industry; ... to effect a fusion with Anglo-Saxon industry after the war."

The author of the COI study reported, "There is reason to believe that both [Hermann] Göring and Dr. [Walther] Funk are in sympathy with these aspirations," and that "Some headway is claimed to have been made in securing the adhesion of big U.S. industry to the movement."

Beaverbrook and Hoare

The COI study's segment regarding "Policy in regard to Great Britain," elaborated the following Synarchist plan: "To bring about the fall of the Churchill Government by creating the belief in the country that a more energetic government is needed to prosecute the war; it is recognized that an effective means of creating suspicion of the Government's efficiency would be to induce the resignation of Lord Beaverbrook; to bring about the formation of a new Government including Sir Samuel Hoare, Lord Beaverbrook and Mr. Hore-Belisha. (Note. The source has added that in the Worms group it is believed that those circles in Great Britain who are favorably disposed to their plan, are most critical of Mr. Churchill, Lord Halifax and Captain Margesson.); through the medium of Sir Samuel Hoare to bring about an agreement between British industry and the Franco-German 'bloc'; to protect Anglo-Saxon interests on the continent; to reach an agreement for the cessation of the reciprocal bombing of industrial centers. (Note. The source has added that Göring is reputed to have signified his entire approval of this project.)"

The naming of Lord Beaverbrook and Sir Samuel Hoare, two leading figures in the British Roundtable group, as Synarchist collaborators is of great significance, indicating that American intelligence, from no later than 1940, was tracking the high-level British involvement in the scheme for a postwar universal fascist "Europe of the oligarchs," along precisely the lines spelled out in Count Coudenhove-Kalergi's "Synarchist" manifesto, founding the Pan European Union. Indeed, other U.S. intelligence wartime documents identified the PEU as a project of the European Synarchist secret brotherhood. The Synarchist Movement of Empire (SME), according to various accounts in the wartime U.S. files, was founded in 1917 or 1922, and the first two major "projects" of the Synarchists were Mussolini's March on Rome and the launching of the Pan Europa movement.

Back on the British front: Sir Samuel Hoare was a leading figure in British intelligence, having been posted to Russia during the period of the Bolshevik Revolution, where he had a personal hand in the assassination of Grigori Rasputin, after Rasputin had warned that Russian participation in World War I would surely lead to the fall of the Romanovs. Hoare was the leading British military intelligence case-officer for instigating the overthrow of the Tsar and the Russian Revolution. He personified the upper echelons of what U.S. intelligence files characterized as the "Synarchist/Nazi-Communist" group. In his capacity as Foreign Secretary in 1935, he had negotiated the Hoare-Laval agreement, by which Great Britain and France mutually accepted Mussolini's conquest by invasion of Abyssinia, a major act of appeasement. He later served as British ambassador to Francisco Franco's Spain, and, according to several biographical accounts, remained secretly on Lord Beaverbrook's payroll as a policy advisor. Hoare, later "Lord Templewood," was also a leading British promoter of Frank Buchman and the Moral Rearmament Movement, the antecedent to Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church (see EIR, Dec. 20, 2002).

The case of Lord Beaverbrook (Max Aitken) has even more profound and enduring implications, given that two of the leading financial-political propagandists for today's neo-conservative revolution in Washington—press magnates Lord Conrad Black and Rupert Murdoch—are Beaverbrook protégés. The Australian Murdoch, on graduating Oxford, did an apprenticeship at Beaverbrook's London Daily Express, which Murdoch referred affectionately to as "Beaverbrook's brothel."

For Black, the connection ran deeper—through the wartime British secret intelligence high command. Conrad Black's father, George Montagu Black, worked directly under the Beaverbrook chain of command during World War II, when Beaverbrook was Minister of Aircraft Production, and when Black and Edward Plunkett Taylor ran the Canadian front company War Supplies, Ltd. out of the Willard Hotel in Washington, coordinating all British-American-Canadian military procurement arrangements. The $1.3 billion garnered by Taylor and Black from their wartime "private" arms deals provided the seed money for G.M. Black's postwar launching of the Argus Corp., which, today, is the Hollinger Corp. media cartel of Conrad Black.

Beaverbrook's transformation, from a leading promoter of an Anglo-German alliance following Hitler's takeover, to a leading war cabinet official, following Hitler's attack on Britain, was nothing short of miraculous. In 1935, when Hoare had conducted the secret negotiations with Laval, Beaverbrook had accompanied the Foreign Secretary on the trip and conducted his own back-channel work to assure positive media coverage of the deal in both England and France. That year, Beaverbrook traveled to Rome and Berlin for personal meetings with Mussolini and Hitler. A year later, Beaverbrook was the guest of Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop, at the Munich Olympic Games.

But the most famous part that Beaverbrook played in the Hitler saga, had to do with the 1933 Reichstag fire—the arson attack on the Weimar Republic's parliament—which consolidated Hitler's death grip on absolute power. Beaverbrook had posted a trusted aide, Sefton Delmer, in charge of his Daily Express press bureau in Berlin, and Delmer had become a confidant of Hitler, traveling with him on the campaign trail during the 1933 elections. Delmer was one of the first "journalists" to arrive as the Reichstag burned, and his dispatch from the scene—complete with exclusive interviews with Hitler, Göring, and others—established the cover for the actual Nazi authors of the terror attack, which sealed Hitler's dictatorship. Delmer, in a 1939 article recounting the incident, stuck to his story, which countered the majority of the world media coverage, and blamed the fire on a communist—not on the Nazis.

Beaverbrook—even after his "Damascus road conversion" to war cabinet minister—retained his ties to the Nazi machine. When Nazi leader Rudolph Hess parachuted into Scotland, in a final vain effort to maintain the Anglo-Nazi alliance against the Soviet Union, Beaverbrook arranged a private prison interview with Hess. Details of the session are still sketchy, but one quote to emerge from the meeting, was Hess telling Beaverbrook: "Hitler likes you a great deal."

'Synarchism' Defined

Among the thousands of documents that EIR obtained from the U.S. wartime archives was an 18-page French military intelligence report, summarizing a 100-page dossier on the French Synarchist groups, dated July 1941. The report dealt with the Synarchist Movement of Empire (SME), the Synarchist Revolutionary Convention (SRC) and the Secret Committee of Revolutionary Action (SCRA), the military leadership arm of the SME, also known as the "Cagoulards" (the "hooded ones").

The report provided a brief history: "The Synarchist movement is an international movement born after the Versailles Treaty, which was financed and directed by certain financial groups belonging to the top international banking community. Its aim is essentially to overthrow in every country, where they exist, the parliamentary regimes which are considered insufficiently devoted to the interests of these groups and therefore, too difficult to control because of the number of persons required to control them.

"SME proposes therefore to substitute them by authoritarian regimes more docile and more easily manueverable. Power would be concentrated in the hands of the CEOs of industry and in designated representatives of chosen banking groups for each country. In a word, the idea is to give to each country a political constitution and an appropriate national economic structure organized for the following purposes:

"1. Place the political power directly into the hands of chosen people and eliminate all intermediaries. 2. Establish a maximum concentration of industries and suppress all unwarranted competition. 3. Establish an absolute control of prices of all goods (raw materials, semi-finished or finished goods). 4. Create judicial and social institutions that would prevent all extremes of action."

The dossier reported that, following failed Cagoulard insurrections in 1934 and 1937, the SME infiltrated all the economic and related ministries of the French government, conducted sabotage from within the regime, and set the basis for the Vichy government of 1940, which was dominated, from top to bottom, by Synarchist secret society members. The report named 40 top officials of the government of Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain, who were all SME members.

The dossier repeatedly emphasized that the French SME was but one component of an international Synarchist apparatus, "organized and financed in all countries by certain elements of industrial CEOs and high banking circles. Its objective on the international level is to subvert all of the democratic regimes in the world, and substitute them with stronger governments, more docile and whose leaders of command in each nation are centralized in the hands of a number of affiliates belonging to big business and international banking interests which coordinate their activities around the world." In France, under the Vichy regime, noted the dossier, "the main administrations of the country, have become the arms of Bank Worms whose administrative council controls all of the top administrators of the state."

The Synarchists did not concentrate all their efforts on infiltrating and controlling the Vichy regime. A U.S. military intelligence report, dated July 27, 1944, from the military attaché in Algiers, warned of Synarchist penetration of the upper echelons of the Free French government of Gen. Charles de Gaulle, headquartered in Algeria. "Some of the oldest and formerly most faithful supporters of General de Gaulle are worried by what they call a tendency to let 'Synarchism' penetrate even the highest brackets of the Algiers Administration," the report began. "It is believed that General de Gaulle up to recently, opposed Synarchism, which is a strongly reactionary movement, financed by the Haute Banque. He has even ordered a confidential study to be made on the subject, a copy of which has been seen by American officers." The report concluded, "If it is a fact that many individuals who are holding positions of importance in the cabinet and the immediate entourage of General de Gaulle, are also closely associated with political ideas alien to the program which de Gaulle and his government publicly endorse, then far-reaching political inferences may be drawn." Of course, a decade later, leading wartime "Gaullist" Jacques Soustelle would launch the Secret Army Organization (OAS), which would be responsible for repeated assassination attempts against de Gaulle, and would be implicated in the Permindex assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

While it is not certain that Soustelle was a wartime member of the Synarchist plot, it is certain, from French and American government records, that one leading Synarchist operative infiltrated into the de Gaulle Free French camp was Robert Marjolin, one of Alexandre Kojève's prize student/protégés of his 1933-39 courses on Hegel, Nietzsche, and the "end of history." Marjolin became Minister of Economy in the first de Gaulle postwar government, and he immediately brought Kojève into the ministry.

The Cult of Napoleon

At its core, the Synarchist international—like its front group Pan European Union—sought to create a one-world tyranny, modeled on the reign of Napoleon Bonaparte. The first "Synarchist" text was written in the 1860s by Joseph Alexandre Saint-Yves d'Alveydre (1842-1909), an occultist and follower of Napoleon Bonaparte's own mystical advisor, Antoine Fabre d'Olivet (1767-1825). Fabre d'Olivet had started out as a leading member of the Jacobins, participating personally in the foiled assassination plot against King Louis XVI in 1789. He later served as a top official of the Interior and War Ministries under Napoleon Bonaparte. His occult writings about "purgative violence" and the "will to power"—antecedents of the works of Nietzsche—were adopted by Saint-Yves d'Alveydre, who launched the idea of Synarchism as a counter to the anarchy that had destabilized all of Europe, from 1648.

Saint-Yves' successor, Gerard Vincent Encausse ("Papus"), founded the Saint-Yves School of Occult Sciences, and began a recruiting drive for a secret society, which he called the Synarchy Government. In his 1894 book Anarchie, Indolence & Synarchie, Papus spelled out an ambitious scheme to recruit all of the leaders of industry, commerce, finance, the military, and academia, to a single power scheme, aimed at destroying the "internal microbe" of society, anarchy.

Both Saint-Yves and Papus envisioned a global Synarchist empire, divided into five geographic areas: 1. the British Empire; 2. Euro-Africa; 3. Eurasia; 4. Pan-America; 5. Asia. Indeed, Alexandre Kojève is identified in Russian sources as a leader of the so-called "Eurasians," a group of Russian emigrés in the 1920s Berlin and Paris, led by Sir Samuel Hoare's Guchkov and tied into the Soviet secret service project called "the Trust." The "Eurasians" welcomed the Russian Revolution as a purgative force to wipe out corrupt Western civilization. Kojève's own cosmology of great tyrants counted Josef Stalin and Adolf Hitler as second only to Napoleon, in achieving the "end of history" goal of a true global tyranny.

Strauss, Kojève, Schmitt, and Schacht

While none of the American archive documents reviewed to date by EIR identify Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt as a Synarchist, circumstantial evidence points to that conclusion. Schmitt was an emissary to Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, during the height of fascism, turning out a series of juridical documents, justifying the jackboot tyrannies. Schmitt was a protected asset of Göring, the leading Synarchist figure in Nazi Germany. Like the banker Hjalmar Schacht, Schmitt was cleared of war crimes by the Nuremberg Tribunals.

In effect, as documented in The Hitler Book, Schacht blackmailed the Tribunal, by aggressively asserting that he was only acting on behalf of the international financial establishment, represented by the Bank for International Settlements, in his incarnation as a top Nazi official. If backed against a wall, he threatened, he would provide evidence of the international financial cabal behind the "Hitler project." Schacht was acquitted, over the strenuous objections of both the American and Soviet judges.

In effect, the perpetrators of the Nazi Holocaust were brought to justice at Nuremberg, while the architects of the larger Synarchist scheme, like Schacht and Leo Strauss' mentor Carl Schmitt, were given a safe conduct, and, through the efforts of postwar occupation figures like John J. McCloy and Gen. William Draper, were vetted for future service.

A final note: In 1955, Schmitt was corresponding with Kojève, arranging for the Paris-based Russian emigré to address the Düsseldorf industrialists' association—which had been a focal point of Franco-German "Synarchist" collaboration between the Nazi and Vichy governments—and meet, during that visit, with Schmitt's close friend Schacht.

It was this Kojève who maintained the closest collaboration with Leo Strauss, and who promoted his theories of purgative violence and universal tyranny with such leading Strauss disciples as Allan Bloom (the mentor of Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz) and Francis Fukuyama. This Synarchist stew remains Vice President Dick Cheney's gang's "French Connection."

Comments

on Oct 25, 2004

Someone kill this guy.

Misleading titles.
Very long crap stolen from somewhere.
Wrong subject area.

geser nart

on Oct 25, 2004

Economic Fascism
by Thomas J. DiLorenzo

When most people hear the word "fascism" they naturally think of its ugly racism and anti-Semitism as practiced by the totalitarian regimes of Mussolini and Hitler. But there was also an economic policy component of fascism, known in Europe during the 1920s and '30s as "corporatism," that was an essential ingredient of economic totalitarianism as practiced by Mussolini and Hitler. So- called corporatism was adopted in Italy and Germany during the 1930s and was held up as a "model" by quite a few intellectuals and policy makers in the United States and Europe. A version of economic fascism was in fact adopted in the United States in the 1930s and survives to this day. In the United States these policies were not called "fascism" but "planned capitalism." The word fascism may no longer be politically acceptable, but its synonym "industrial policy" is as popular as ever.

The Free World Flirts With Fascism

Few Americans are aware of or can recall how so many Americans and Europeans viewed economic fascism as the wave of the future during the 1930s. The American Ambassador to Italy, Richard Washburn Child, was so impressed with "corporatism" that he wrote in the preface to Mussolini's 1928 autobiography that "it may be shrewdly forecast that no man will exhibit dimensions of permanent greatness equal to Mussolini. . . . The Duce is now the greatest figure of this sphere and time." Winston Churchill wrote in 1927 that "If I had been an Italian I am sure I would have been entirely with you" and "don the Fascist black shirt." As late as 1940, Churchill was still describing Mussolini as "a great man."

U.S. Congressman Sol Bloom, Chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, said in 1926 that Mussolini "will be a great thing not only for Italy but for all of us if he succeeds. It is his inspiration, his determination, his constant toil that has literally rejuvenated Italy . . ."

One of the most outspoken American fascists was economist Lawrence Dennis. In his 1936 book, The Coming American Fascism, Dennis declared that defenders of "18th-century Americanism" were sure to become "the laughing stock of their own countrymen" and that the adoption of economic fascism would intensify "national spirit" and put it behind "the enterprises of public welfare and social control." The big stumbling block to the development of economic fascism, Dennis bemoaned, was "liberal norms of law or constitutional guarantees of private rights."

Certain British intellectuals were perhaps the most smitten of anyone by fascism. George Bernard Shaw announced in 1927 that his fellow "socialists should be delighted to find at last a socialist [Mussolini] who speaks and thinks as responsible rulers do." He helped form the British Union of Fascists whose "Outline of the Corporate State," according to the organization's founder, Sir Oswald Mosley, was "on the Italian Model." While visiting England, the American author Ezra Pound declared that Mussolini was "continuing the task of Thomas Jefferson."

Thus, it is important to recognize that, as an economic system, fascism was widely accepted in the 1920s and '30s. The evil deeds of individual fascists were later condemned, but the practice of economic fascism never was. To this day, the historically uninformed continue to repeat the hoary slogan that, despite all his faults, Mussolini at least "made the trains run on time," insinuating that his interventionist industrial policies were a success.

The Italian "Corporatist" System

So-called "corporatism" as practiced by Mussolini and revered by so many intellectuals and policy makers had several key elements: The state comes before the individual. Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary defines fascism as "a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized, autocratic government." This stands in stark contrast to the classical liberal idea that individuals have natural rights that pre-exist government; that government derives its "just powers" only through the consent of the governed; and that the principal function of government is to protect the lives, liberties, and properties of its citizens, not to aggrandize the state.

Mussolini viewed these liberal ideas (in the European sense of the word "liberal") as the antithesis of fascism: "The Fascist conception of life," Mussolini wrote, "stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only in so far as his interests coincide with the State. It is opposed to classical liberalism [which] denied the State in the name of the individual; Fascism reasserts the rights of the State as expressing the real essence of the individual."

Mussolini thought it was unnatural for a government to protect individual rights: "The maxim that society exists only for the well-being and freedom of the individuals composing it does not seem to be in conformity with nature's plans." "If classical liberalism spells individualism," Mussolini continued, "Fascism spells government."

The essence of fascism, therefore, is that government should be the master, not the servant, of the people. Think about this. Does anyone in America really believe that this is not what we have now? Are Internal Revenue Service agents really our "servants"? Is compulsory "national service" for young people, which now exists in numerous states and is part of a federally funded program, not a classic example of coercing individuals to serve the state? Isn't the whole idea behind the massive regulation and regimentation of American industry and society the notion that individuals should be forced to behave in ways defined by a small governmental elite? When the nation's premier health-care reformer recently declared that heart bypass surgery on a 92-year-old man was "a waste of resources," wasn't that the epitome of the fascist ideal-that the state, not individuals, should decide whose life is worthwhile, and whose is a "waste"?

The U.S. Constitution was written by individuals who believed in the classical liberal philosophy of individual rights and sought to protect those rights from governmental encroachment. But since the fascist/collectivist philosophy has been so influential, policy reforms over the past half century have all but abolished many of these rights by simply ignoring many of the provisions in the Constitution that were designed to protect them. As legal scholar Richard Epstein has observed: "[T]he eminent domain . . . and parallel clauses in the Constitution render . . . suspect many of the heralded reforms and institutions of the twentieth century: zoning, rent control, workers' compensation laws, transfer payments, progressive taxation." It is important to note that most of these reforms were initially adopted during the '30s, when the fascist/collectivist philosophy was in its heyday.

Planned industrial "harmony." Another keystone of Italian corporatism was the idea that the government's interventions in the economy should not be conducted on an ad hoc basis, but should be "coordinated" by some kind of central planning board. Government intervention in Italy was "too diverse, varied, contrasting. There has been disorganic . . . intervention, case by case, as the need arises," Mussolini complained in 1935. Fascism would correct this by directing the economy toward "certain fixed objectives" and would "introduce order in the economic field." Corporatist planning, according to Mussolini adviser Fausto Pitigliani, would give government intervention in the Italian economy a certain "unity of aim," as defined by the government planners.

These exact sentiments were expressed by Robert Reich (current U.S. Secretary of Labor) and Ira Magaziner (current federal government's health care reform "Czar") in their book Minding America's Business. In order to counteract the "untidy marketplace," an interventionist industrial policy "must strive to integrate the full range of targeted government policies-procurement, research and development, trade, antitrust, tax credits, and subsidies-into a coherent strategy . . . ."

Current industrial policy interventions, Reich and Magaziner bemoaned, are "the product of fragmented and uncoordinated decisions made by [many different] executive agencies, the Congress, and independent regulatory agencies . . . There is no integrated strategy to use these programs to improve the . . . U.S. economy."

In his 1989 book, The Silent War, Magaziner reiterated this theme by advocating "a coordinating group like the national Security Council to take a strategic national industrial view." The White House has in fact established a "National Economic Security Council." Every other advocate of an interventionist "industrial policy" has made a similar "unity of aim" argument, as first described by Pitigliani more than half a century ago.

Government-business partnerships. A third defining characteristic of economic fascism is that private property and business ownership are permitted, but are in reality controlled by government through a business-government "partnership." As Ayn Rand often noted, however, in such a partnership government is always the senior or dominating "partner."

In Mussolini's Italy, businesses were grouped by the government into legally recognized "syndicates" such as the "National Fascist Confederation of Commerce," the "National Fascist Confederation of Credit and Insurance," and so on. All of these "fascist confederations" were "coordinated" by a network of government planning agencies called "corporations," one for each industry. One large "National Council of Corporations" served as a national overseer of the individual "corporations" and had the power to "issue regulations of a compulsory character."

The purpose of this byzantine regulatory arrangement was so that the government could "secure collaboration . . . between the various categories of producers in each particular trade or branch of productive activity." Government-orchestrated "collaboration" was necessary because "the principle of private initiative" could only be useful "in the service of the national interest" as defined by government bureaucrats.

This idea of government-mandated and -dominated "collaboration" is also at the heart of all interventionist industrial policy schemes. A successful industrial policy, write Reich and Magaziner, would "require careful co-ordination between public and private sectors. Government and the private sector must work in tandem. Economic success now depends to a high degree on coordination, collaboration, and careful strategic choice," guided by government. The AFL-CIO has echoed this theme, advocating a "tripartite National Reindustrialization Board-including representatives of labor, business, and government" that would supposedly "plan" the economy. The Washington, D.C.-based Center for National Policy has also published a report authored by businessmen from Lazard Freres, du Pont, Burroughs, Chrysler, Electronic Data Systems, and other corporations promoting an allegedly "new" policy based on "cooperation of government with business and labor." Another report, by the organization "Rebuild America," co-authored in 1986 by Robert Reich and economists Robert Solow, Lester Thurow, Laura Tyson, Paul Krugman, Pat Choate, and Lawrence Chimerine urges "more teamwork" through "public-private partnerships among government, business and academia." This report calls for "national goals and targets" set by government planners who will devise a "comprehensive investment strategy" that will only permit "productive" investment, as defined by government, to take place.

Mercantilism and protectionism. Whenever politicians start talking about "collaboration" with business, it is time to hold on to your wallet. Despite the fascist rhetoric about "national collaboration" and working for the national, rather than private, interests, the truth is that mercantilist and protectionist practices riddled the system. Italian social critic Gaetano Salvemini wrote in 1936 that under corporatism, "it is the state, i.e., the taxpayer, who has become responsible to private enterprise. In Fascist Italy the state pays for the blunders of private enterprise." As long as business was good, Salvemini wrote, "profit remained to private initiative." But when the depression came, "the government added the loss to the taxpayer's burden. Profit is private and individual. Loss is public and social." The Italian corporative state, The Economist editorialized on July 27, 1935, "only amounts to the establishment of a new and costly bureaucracy from which those industrialists who can spend the necessary amount, can obtain almost anything they want, and put into practice the worst kind of monopolistic practices at the expense of the little fellow who is squeezed out in the process." Corporatism, in other words, was a massive system of corporate welfare. "Three-quarters of the Italian economic system," Mussolini boasted in 1934, "had been subsidized by government."

If this sounds familiar, it is because it is exactly the result of agricultural subsidies, the Export-Import Bank, guaranteed loans to "preferred" business borrowers, protectionism, the Chrysler bailout, monopoly franchising, and myriad other forms of corporate welfare paid for directly or indirectly by the American taxpayer.

Another result of the close "collaboration" between business and government in Italy was "a continual interchange of personnel between the. . . civil service and private business." Because of this "revolving door" between business and government, Mussolini had "created a state within the state to serve private interests which are not always in harmony with the general interests of the nation." Mussolini's "revolving door" swung far and wide.

Signor Caiano, one of Mussolini's most trusted advisers, was an officer in the Royal Navy before and during the war. When the war was over, he joined the Orlando Shipbuilding Company. In October 1922, he entered Mussolini's cabinet, and the subsidies for naval construction and the merchant marine came under the control of his department. General Cavallero, at the close of the war, left the army and entered the Pirelli Rubber Company. In 1925 he became undersecretary at the Ministry of War. In 1930 he left the Ministry of War, and entered the service of the Ansaldo armament firm. Among the directors of the big companies in Italy, retired generals and generals on active service became very numerous after the advent of Fascism.

Such practices are now so common in the United States-especially in the defense industries-that it hardly needs further comment.

From an economic perspective, fascism meant (and means) an interventionist industrial policy, mercantilism, protectionism, and an ideology that makes the individual subservient to the state. "Ask not what the State can do for you, but what you can do for the State" is an apt description of the economic philosophy of fascism.

The whole idea behind collectivism in general and fascism in particular is to make citizens subservient to the state and to place power over resource allocation in the hands of a small elite. As stated eloquently by the American fascist economist Lawrence Dennis, fascism "does not accept the liberal dogmas as to the sovereignty of the consumer or trader in the free market.... Least of all does it consider that market freedom, and the opportunity to make competitive profits, are rights of the individual." Such decisions should be made by a "dominant class" he labeled "the elite."

German Economic Fascism

Economic fascism in Germany followed a virtually identical path. One of the intellectual fathers of German fascism was Paul Lensch, who declared in his book Three Years of World Revolution that "Socialism must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism." The philosophy of German fascism was expressed in the slogan, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz, which means "the common good comes before the private good." "The Aryan is not greatest in his mental qualities," Hitler stated in Mein Kampf, but in his noblest form he "willingly subordinates his own ego to the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it." The individual has "not rights but only duties."

Armed with this philosophy, Germany's National Socialists pursued economic policies very similar to Italy's: government-mandated "partnerships" between business, government, and unions organized by a system of regional "economic chambers," all overseen by a Federal Ministry of Economics.

A 25-point "Programme of the Party" was adopt-ed in 1925 with a number of economic policy "demands," all prefaced by the general statement that "the activities of the individual must not clash with the interests of the whole. . .but must be for the general good." This philosophy fueled a regulatory assault on the private sector. "We demand ruthless war upon all those whose activities are injurious to the common interest," the Nazis warned. And who are these on whom "war" is to be waged? "Common criminals," such as "usurers," i.e., bankers, and other "profiteers," i.e., ordinary businessmen in general. Among the other policies the Nazis demanded were abolition of interest; a government-operated social security system; the ability of government to confiscate land without compensation; a government monopoly in education; and a general assault on private-sector entrepreneurship (which was denounced as the "Jewish materialist spirit"). Once this "spirit" is eradicated, "The Party . . . is convinced that our nation can achieve permanent health from within only on the principle: the common interest before self-interest."

Conclusions

Virtually all of the specific economic policies advocated by the Italian and German fascists of the 1930s have also been adopted in the United States in some form, and continue to be adopted to this day. Sixty years ago, those who adopted these interventionist policies in Italy and Germany did so because they wanted to destroy economic liberty, free enterprise, and individualism. Only if these institutions were abolished could they hope to achieve the kind of totalitarian state they had in mind.

Many American politicians who have advocated more or less total government control over economic activity have been more devious in their approach. They have advocated and adopted many of the same policies, but they have always recognized that direct attacks on private property, free enterprise, self-government, and individual freedom are not politically palatable to the majority of the American electorate. Thus, they have enacted a great many tax, regulatory, and income-transfer policies that achieve the ends of economic fascism, but which are sugar-coated with deceptive rhetoric about their alleged desire only to "save" capitalism.

American politicians have long taken their cue in this regard from Franklin D. Roosevelt, who sold his National Recovery Administration (which was eventually ruled unconstitutional) on the grounds that "government restrictions henceforth must be accepted not to hamper individualism but to protect it." In a classic example of Orwellian doublespeak, Roosevelt thus argued that individualism must be destroyed in order to save it.

Now that socialism has collapsed and survives nowhere but in Cuba, China, Vietnam, and on American university campuses, the biggest threat to economic liberty and individual freedom lies in the new economic fascism. While the former Communist countries are trying to privatize as many industries as possible as fast as they can, they are still plagued by governmental controls, leaving them with essentially fascist economies: private property and private enterprise are permitted, but are heavily controlled and regulated by government.

As most of the rest of the world struggles to privatize industry and encourage free enterprise, we in the United States are seriously debating whether or not we should adopt 1930s-era economic fascism as the organizational principle of our entire health care system, which comprises 14 percent of the GNP. We are also contemplating business-government "partnerships" in the automobile, airlines, and communications industries, among others, and are adopting government-managed trade policies, also in the spirit of the European corporatist schemes of the 1930s.

The state and its academic apologists are so skilled at generating propaganda in support of such schemes that Americans are mostly unaware of the dire threat they pose for the future of freedom. The road to serfdom is littered with road signs pointing toward "the information superhighway, health security, national service, managed trade," and "industrial policy."

Dr. DiLorenzo is Professor of Economics at Loyola College, Baltimore, Maryland
June 1994

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