PJ, first I want to say that was a really good find.  I realize I'm probably preaching to the choir when it comes to the writers on NB.  It amazes me the wealth of historical documentation that is out there and easily available to those of us that are merely history buffs as opposed to historians.  Yet the progressives have managed to infiltrate and strongly influence every high and low level institution in this country using our openness, generosity, and the constitution to bring us further and further along the road to serfdom.  Many of them actually believe the twaddle that is being spewed.  It is as if they have blinders on or refuse to see things as simple as the fact that tax cuts increase spending because it puts more money in the pockets of those that earn it, wether rich or poor.  Or that the Nazis were actually socialists and admired influential American eugenicists like Margaret Sanger, or E. A. Ross.

A disciple of the anarchist Emma Goldman — another eugenicist — Sanger became the nation’s first “birth control martyr” when she was arrested for handing out condoms in 1917. In order to escape a subsequent arrest for violating obscenity laws, she went to England, where she fell under the thrall of Havelock Ellis, a sex theorist and ardent advocate of forced sterilization. She also had an affair with H. G. Wells, the self-avowed champion of “liberal fascism.” Her marriage fell apart early, and one of her children — whom she admitted to neglecting — died of pneumonia at age four. Indeed, she always acknowledged that she wasn’t right for family life, admitting she was not a “fit person for love or home or children or anything which needs attention or consideration.”

Under the banner of “reproductive freedom,” Sanger subscribed to nearly all of the eugenic views discussed above. She sought to ban reproduction of the unfit and regulate reproduction for everybody else. She scoffed at the soft approach of the “positive” eugenicists, deriding it as mere “cradle competition” between the fit and the unfit. “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control,” she frankly wrote in her 1922 book The Pivot of Civilization. (The book featured an introduction by Wells, in which he proclaimed, “We want fewer and better children...and we cannot make the social life and the world-peace we are determined to make, with the ill-bred, ill-trained swarms of inferior citizens that you inflict on us.” Two civilizations were at war: that of progress and that which sought a world “swamped by an indiscriminate torrent of progeny.”

A fair-minded person cannot read Sanger’s books, articles, and pamphlets today without finding similarities not only to Nazi eugenics but to the dark dystopias of the feminist imagination found in such allegories as Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale. As editor of The Birth Control Review, Sanger regularly published the sort of hard racists we normally associate with Goebbels or Himmler. Indeed, after she resigned as editor, The Birth Control Review ran articles by people who worked for Goebbels and Himmler. For example, when the Nazi eugenics program was first getting wide attention, The Birth Control Review was quick to cast the Nazis in a positive light, giving over its pages for an article titled “Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need,” by Ernst Rüdin, Hitler’s director of sterilization and a founder of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. In 1926 Sanger proudly gave a speech to a KKK rally in Silver Lake, New Jersey.

One of Sanger’s closest friends and influential colleagues was the white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, author of The Rising Tide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. In the book he offered his solution for the threat posed by the darker races: “Just as we isolate bacterial invasions, and starve out the bacteria, by limiting the area and amount of their food supply, so we can compel an inferior race to remain in its native habitat.” When the book came out, Sanger was sufficiently impressed to invite him to join the board of directors of the American Birth Control League.

Sanger’s genius was to advance Ross’s campaign for social control by hitching the racist-eugenic campaign to sexual pleasure and female liberation. In her “Code to Stop Overproduction of Children,” published in 1934, she decreed that “no woman shall have a legal right to bear a child without a permit...no permit shall be valid for more than one child.”47 But Sanger couched this fascistic agenda in the argument that “liberated” women wouldn’t mind such measures because they don’t really want large families in the first place. In a trope that would be echoed by later feminists such as Betty Friedan, she argued that motherhood itself was a socially imposed constraint on the liberty of women. It was a form of what Marxists called false consciousness to want a large family...

In 1939 Sanger created the above-mentioned “Negro Project,” which aimed to get blacks to adopt birth control. Through the Birth Control Federation, she hired black ministers (including the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell Sr.), doctors, and other leaders to help pare down the supposedly surplus black population. The project’s racist intent is beyond doubt. “The mass of significant Negroes,” read the project’s report, “still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes...is [in] that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.” Sanger’s intent is shocking today, but she recognized its extreme radicalism even then. “We do not want word to go out,” she wrote to a colleague, “that we want to exterminate the Negro population, and the minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.”

Or that the fascists we are ad-nauseum being accused of being, were actually an offshoot of the progressive/socialist side of the political spectrum.

 In 1923 the journalist Isaac F. Marcosson wrote admiringly in the New York Times that “Mussolini is a Latin [Teddy] Roosevelt who first acts and then inquires if it is legal. He has been of great service to Italy at home.” (4) The American Legion, which has been for nearly its entire history a great and generous American institution, was founded the same year as Mussolini’s takeover and, in its early years, drew inspiration from the Italian Fascist movement. “Do not forget,” the legion’s national commander declared that same year, “that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.” (5)

In 1926 the American humorist Will Rogers visited Italy and interviewed Mussolini. He told the New York Times that Mussolini was “some Wop.” “I’m pretty high on that bird.” Rogers, whom the National Press Club had informally dubbed “Ambassador–at–Large of the United States,” wrote up the interview for the Saturday Evening Post. He concluded, “Dictator form of government is the greatest form of government: that is if you have the right Dictator.” (6) In 1927 the Literary Digest conducted an editorial survey asking the question: “Is there a dearth of great men?” The person named most often to refute the charge was Benito Mussolini—followed by Lenin, Edison, Marconi, and Orville Wright, with Henry Ford and George Bernard Shaw tying for sixth place. In 1928 the Saturday Evening Post glorified Mussolini even further, running an eight–part autobiography written by Il Duce himself. The series was gussied up into a book that gained one of the biggest advances ever given by an American publisher.

And why shouldn’t the average American think Mussolini was anything but a great man? Winston Churchill had dubbed him the world’s greatest living lawgiver. Sigmund Freud sent Mussolini a copy of a book he co–wrote with Albert Einstein, inscribed, “To Benito Mussolini, from an old man who greets in the Ruler, the Hero of Culture.” The opera titans Giacomo Puccini and Arturo Toscanini were both pioneering Fascist acolytes of Mussolini. Toscanini was an early member of the Milan circle of Fascists, which conferred an aura of seniority not unlike being a member of the Nazi Party in the days of the Beer Hall Putsch. Toscanini ran for the Italian parliament on a Fascist ticket in 1919 and didn’t repudiate Fascism until twelve years later. (7)

Mussolini was a particular hero to the muckrakers—those progressive liberal journalists who famously looked out for the little guy. When Ida Tarbell, the famed reporter whose work helped break up Standard Oil, was sent to Italy in 1926 by McCall’s to write a series on the Fascist nation, the U.S. State Department feared that this “pretty red radical” would write nothing but “violent anti–Mussolini articles.” Their fears were misplaced. Tarbell was wooed by the man she called “a despot with a dimple,” praising his progressive attitude toward labor. Similarly smitten was Lincoln Steffens, another famous muckraker, who is today perhaps dimly remembered for being the man who returned from the Soviet Union declaring, “I have been over into the future, and it works.” Shortly after that declaration, he made another about Mussolini: God had “formed Mussolini out of the rib of Italy.” As we’ll see, Steffens saw no contradiction between his fondness for Fascism and his admiration of the Soviet Union. Even Samuel McClure, the founder of McClure’s Magazine, the home of so much famous muckraking, championed Fascism after visiting Italy. He hailed it as “a great step forward and the first new ideal in government since the founding of the American Republic.” (8)

That Mussolini and Lenin were intimate associates, just like Obama and Ayers.

Mussolini's own summary of the Fascist philosophy: "Tutto nello Stato, niente al di fuori dello Stato, nulla contro lo Stato" (Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State)

So, how many people today are aware that Mussolini, that great Fascist ogre, was in his youth an incandescent revolutionary socialist, a labor-union agitator who was jailed for his pains (Hibbert, 1962)? He was as radical as any student radical of today. Even in his childhood, he was expelled from two schools for his rebellious behaviour.

After that he became one of Italy's most prominent Marxist theoreticians and an intimate of Lenin. He in fact first became well-known as "Il Duce" (the Leader) when he was a member of Italy's (Marxist) Socialist Party and between 1912 and 1914 he was the editor of their newspaper, "L'Avanti". After his split with the Socialist Party he started his own Leftist newspaper "Il Popolo d'Italia" ("The people of Italy").

When he broke with the Socialist party in 1914, it was over whether or not Italy should enter World War I. Following Marx's internationalist doctrines, the "Socialist" (Marxist) party was neutralist and anti-patriotic but Mussolini soon became uncomfortable with that for two reasons: 1). It had already become fairly clear even before the war that the workers were nationalistic and patriotic rather than class-conscious -- so the Marxist vision of the workers of the world uniting regardless of nationality was just not going to happen. And all that was thoroughly confirmed when the mainstream Leftist parties of the various European countries lined up behind their respective national governments in World War I. So it was nationalism and patriotism rather than class-struggle that would most move the workers. And, as the aspiring leader of the workers, Mussolini had to follow that! 2). Mussolini correctly foresaw that the Austro/German forces would not win the war and therefore wanted Italy to join the Allied side and thus get a slice of Austrian territory at the end of the war. Italians had suffered many humiliations at the hands of the Austrians and there must have been very few Italians who did not share Mussolini's desire to seize historically Italian territory from them. Like many Leftists then and since Mussolini did not have any principles that he allowed to stand in the way of a grab for power.

It should be noted that Mussolini's views in this matter did not at all disqualify him from continuing as a Marxist. Like many other Marxists of his time (See Gregor, 1979), Mussolini tempered his view of the importance of class-solidarity with the recognition that both Marx and Engels had in their lifetimes lent their support to a number of wars between nations (Engels in particular was a pretty virulent German nationalist!). He looked, in other words, not only at broad Marxist theory but also at how Marx and Engels applied their theories. Such "pragmatism" was, of course, a hallmark of Mussolini's thinking. And, like the Communists, Mussolini had no aversion to war. 
 

 The fact that all this and more is easily available, yet seems not to be widely known is what motivates me to keep posting information like this.  I find it amazing that they are still able to get away with "pathologizing the right" as a strategy to, so far, effectively turn wide swaths of the populace against a philosophy of thought and reason.   

"The future is not set.  There is no fate but what we make for ourselves."

michaelyon-online.com

a true pleasure reading your posts my friend. Educational and spot on. Well done.  

I'd be willing to bet that you are already familiar with this material, but if not, add it too your arsenal. 

http://www.modernhis...

Take care,

HBK

If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you.

Don Marquis 1878-1937