None Dare Call It Fascism
Dr. Jack Wheeler
June 6, 1997

What I'm going to tell you is a true story. The German Foreign Ministry in Bonn recently received a report from its Embassy in Moscow on air safety in Russia. As an example, the report told of a group of wayward Russian soldiers in Siberia that used a large transport plane to steal some cattle. Airborne of the Siberian coast, the cattle began moving about uncontrollably - so to avoid crashing, the soldiers drove the cows out of the loading bay at the tail of the airplane. One of the falling cows hit a Japanese fishing boat and sank it. A Russian patrol boat rescued the fishermen but arrested them because nobody believed their story. Later, Russian authorities learned it was true. So help me, I'm not making this up; It actually happened. And to think, the world was once afraid of the Red Army.

Perhaps you remember those days that seem so long ago. I became a member of the Center for National Policy, at the invitation of Howard Phillips and Woody Jenkins, in 1984. My first speech to CNP back then was entitled "How to Collapse the Soviet Colonial Empire." We talked about the freedom fighters in Nicaragua, Afghanistan, and other Soviet colonies, about how we could develop a strategy to rid the world of the Soviet Union, a strategy that was to become know as the Reagan Doctrine. It seemed an impossible dream at the time for many. But the conservative movement embraced the cause of freedom fighters and the Reagan Doctrine became reality.

I remember one time at a CNP meeting in the mid-80s, 10-12 years ago, when I was standing in the back of the main meeting room talking to Paul Weyrich. It was a friendly talk until I said something that caused Paul to snap his head around and look at me. Those of you who have been the recipient of the Weyrich Look know what I am talking about. I said to myself, "Uh Oh..." and prepared to get rhetorically wasted. But instead, Paul broke into a quizzical smile and said, "You really don't know, do you?" Well, I was still not sure if I had escaped unscathed, so I cautiously asked, "Know what?" "You don't know what you've done for the conservative movement, do you?" he said. "You have given these people," pointing to the folks in the room, "hope. Before, they thought it was no use, that the Soviets were going to win, that we would never defeat them. But after you told us about the freedom fighters, about the ways in which the Soviets are weak an vulnerable, conservatives have hope, and now I think that we are going to win and the Soviets are going to lose because of it. You should know that, Jack."

While I have never forgotten what Paul told me back then, I've never told him how much what he said meant to me. So let me say now "thanks, Paul."

So here we are today with the Soviet Union off the map, Eastern Europe joining NATO, America the world's only superpower - and we never got to celebrate. We never got to have a party. Instead of champagne, caviar, and a victory party, we got... Bill Clinton. What a bummer. We, from the noble, heroic presidency of Ronald Reagan to the sleaziest, most criminal presidency in American history. And worse, all the sleaze and corruption doesn't seem to matter. Bill Clinton could put a.44 magnum to the head of Mother Teresa and blow her away on national television, and the media would say, "everybody does it, the Republicans do this too, he didn't mean to do it, he promises never to do it again." and that would be that. So no wonder that conservatives once again think that things are hopeless, that they are never going to win.

But it isn't hopeless. Let's face it: if we could take care of the Soviet Union, we can take care of Bill Clinton and all he represents.

Boiling the Frog

How do we do this? First, we need to draw a clear picture of where America is politically right now - and understand how it got there. To learn how to regain our freedom, it is imperative to learn how we lost it in the first place. Just how did America go from being the freest land history had ever known to being run by amoral crooks? Basically by what I call "boiling the frog."

If you place a frog in a pot of cool water -- an open pot, so that it could jump out at any time -- and start to slowly heat the water up, you can heat the water to boiling and kill the frog.

The trick is to make each incremental increase in water temperature small enough to be below the frog's threshold of awareness. Do it right and the frog will remain in the open pot of water and not notice until it is all the way to boiling and it's too late: he is dead. But should the temperature increases be too large or come too quickly to exceed the frog's awareness threshold, he immediately jumps out of the pot.

This is the process by which the Oligarchies of Washington have been boiling our freedoms to death. But it is very important to understand that this process has not been socialist, as so many conservatives contend. The political direction of America over the last sever decades has not been socialist - it has been fascist.

Fabian Facism

As Ludwig von Mises observed, Fascism, Nazism, and Socialism are varying versions of the same old conviction, summed up in the slogan of the Nazis: "Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz"; (the public good ranks above private profit.) All three assert that "profit-seeking business harms the vital interests of the immerse majority, and that it is the sacred duty of popular government to prevent the emergence of profits by public control of production and distribution."

What distinguishes Fascism and Nazism form Socialism in economic theory is how they translate "public control" into reality.

For the socialist, it means outright nationalization -- government ownership -- of private business. In a socialist state, the government own and operates the airlines, railroads, banks, phone companies, and any other business you can think of. Everyone is an employee of the State. Until recently in Fidel Castro's Cuba, even shoeshine boys worked for a government cooperative.

For the fascist, public or government control is just that -- control, not nationalized ownership, via complete bureaucratic regulation of ostensibly private business. As an ardent admirer of Marx, Mussolini created the term, Fascism, for his brand of authoritarian, patriotic Marxism.

As a social theory, fascism operates under the principle of "Might Makes Right," the exercise of raw, naked governmental police power. In America today, the increasingly rough shed violation of constitutional rights by government agents in the name of "Protecting the environment" or the "war on drugs" (just two of many current rationales) is an indication of how we are proceeding in this direction.

But fascism is also an economic theory, intellectually; fascism is far more dishonest than socialism, which at least has the courage to assert legal ownership of the economy and thus assume legal responsibility for it’s functioning. Fascism places responsibility for the economy on business, which is rendered Potemkinly private, a Hollywood set facade of private ownership.

The result of both socialism and fascism is the same: the destruction of economic freedom, replace the individual's choice of how to make a peaceful, honest living with State edicts. Fascism accomplishes this, however, more insidiously. Instead of being a straightforward employee of the government, you and I are told our lives and businesses are still private, while any attempt to act as such is proscribed by some regulation -- until we are trapped and immobilized in Washington's web.

We have become enmeshed in this web because it was spun around us so slowly. If the welter of government controls that Washington has enacted over the past sixty-six years (i.e., since the New Deal) had been attempted in one fell swoop -- say, in one Congressional term of two years instead of thirty- three terms -- the effort would, of course, have failed.

Instead, it has been spun right before our eyes - yet so slowly, strand by strand over many years, that we have barely noticed. We could call this slow spinning of the fascist web "Fabian Fascism."

Advocacy of what became know as Fabian Socialism was in vogue in the early part of the 20th Century, particularly among British socialists, such as Sydney and Beatrice Webb and George Bernard Shaw. They argued that socialism could best be achieved by not frightening the horses, that is, not through immediate revolutionary action, but in small, incremental steps.

The gargantuan growth of governmental power in the United States over the last sixty years has not been in a socialist direction, towards nationalization and governmental ownership of industry. Clearly, it has been in the direction of ever more bureaucratic, regulatory control - that is, in a fascist direction. Since this growth has not been sudden, but slowly accumulative, we can accurately and aptly call the process Fabian Fascism.

Manufactured Crises

How did this happen? How did Americans relinquish so much independence and allow the federal government to gain so much control over their lives? Can we identify a mechanism or method by which Fabian Fascism succeeds?

We should first observe that this process - the progressive loss of personal freedom and growth of government - has not moved steadily in a continuum, but in burst and jumps. Now observe that many people are willing to trade freedom for security. When they feel threatened, they will grant government or police emergency powers to remove the threat. Then all the government has to do is somehow make the temporary or emergency powers permanent.

Thus, it is in times of social crisis that governments can most easily seize more power. The method of Fabian Fascism is the utilization or creation of a crisis as a rationale to progressively expand power.

The explosion of governmental growth in America and the development of Fabian Fascism began with the crisis of the Great Depression and the resultant passage of FDR's New Deal. Right on its heels came the crisis of World War II and then the on-going and just-ended crisis of the Cold war, allowing for fantastic increases in defense spending.

There crises were real, not imaginary. Advocates of bigger government utilized them, but did not make them up. One of the fundamental purposes of government, after all, is to protect its citizens from such clear and present dangers as Nazi and Soviet imperial aggression.

But the preservation of freedom requires that the expansion of governmental authority and financing necessary to deal with a crisis be granted only on an emergency basis and must be dissolved when the crisis is over. This is what the Washington Oligarchy always struggles to avoid.

Nonetheless, after the initial advance of Fabian Fascism made possible by the Depression and the New Deal, government growth was held in check fairly well through the 1950s and early 60s. But after defeating Barry Goldwater in 1964, Lyndon Johnson began an orgy of eleuthericide that continues to this day.

LBJ is the progenitor of Fabian Fascism, not FDR - for he realized that crises were the path to power and if one was not at hand, you had to create one. FDR did not create the Depression, he just took advantage of it. LBJ had no real crisis at hand so he made one up: Poverty.

Not the poverty didn't exist in America back then - in what society in history hasn't it? But it wasn't by any stretch of a bleeding heart's imagination some kind of societal crisis. Yet Johnson masterfully whipped up a media frenzy over his manufactured crisis, which he used to gain passage of his proposed "solution" - the most massive expansion of government power since the New Deal, a collection of government social programs called "The Great Society."

Notice that thirty years and hundreds of billions of taxpayer's dollars later, we don't have any less poverty, but we have a lot less freedom, because Johnson's programs have never gone away. This is because the purpose of the Great Society had nothing to do with poverty. There is a big difference between an excuse and a purpose. "Curing poverty" was only the excuse for Great Society welfare schemes; the purpose was to trick the American people into letting the Washington Oligarchy expand its power.

This formula for the advance of Fabian Fascism has worked ever since. After Johnson's Poverty Crisis and the War on Poverty came Nixon's Drug Crisis and the War on Drugs; then Carter's Energy Crisis; then the premier liberal crisis of modern times, the Environmental Crisis. It was only thanks to Hillary Clinton's hubris that the latest fashion in crisis mongering failed, the Clinton Health Care Crisis.

All of these manufactured crises offered one and only one type of solution to the alleged crisis: vast government programs at taxpayer's expense. None ever offered free market solutions, or were used to expand individual freedom, rather than restrict it. All of them either took a problem or set of problems, and hyperbolized it to the moon until it became a self-made "crisis" - or created problems out of thing air as an outright hoax, like "Global Warning." (like "Global Freezing" scare of 15 years ago claiming man's pollutants were participating the next Ice Age)

The media merrily plays an enthusiastic accomplice in the scheme not just because its members are mostly liberal, but because more importantly, crises generate more readers, viewers and listeners. This is why the principal product American media sells to its customers is crises, not information.

Certainly there are problems in our society, often severe, regarding poverty, drugs, the environment, et al. But the last thing these situations need is massive government intervention, which just makes them worse. They are not crises requiring emergency powers. They require people freely motivated to solve them without government coercion.

And that's the catch. If these problems were actually solved, all these government programs and bureaucrats wouldn't be needed. Thus the crises must be perpetual, never solved, always requiring another program, another intervention and more taxpayers' money. For the game is not to solve the problems but to use them to control people more through regulations or subsidies (or both), making them dependent on those writing and enforcing the regs and providing the handouts. People who are dependent on you are people who vote for you. The result is a form of fascist rule imposed upon a citizenry not by a dictator who seized power by force, but by freely elected leaders.

Democratic Fascism

We could call it Democratic Fascism whereby a people's freedom is not taken away from them by dictatorial force, but is voluntarily surrendered.

Just as a socialist government can be unelected dictatorship (like Cuba) or a freely elected democracy (like Sweden), so can a fascist government. Democratic fascism, or a fascist democracy is not more of an oxymoron than democratic socialism or a socialist democracy Instead, it is the most accurate description of what America's political system has become. A patient Fabian strategy taking many years has persuaded the American people persuaded, unwittingly and almost unconsciously, to voluntarily chain themselves to their colonial masters in Washington.

Americans have imposed the tyranny of Washington upon ourselves. No longer innocently oppressed, America has become of nation of belligerent beggars, demanding with insufferable arrogance an endless cornucopia of government handouts, subsidies, and "entitlements." Refusing to pay for them themselves, they demand that others pick up the multi-trillion dollar tab - most especially and contemptibly, their children and grandchildren.

This is, indeed, America's real drug crisis. Forget smack and crack. By orders of magnitude, the most addictive and destructive drug in America is welfare, government subsidies. Once people are shooting up the dole into their veins, be they farmers on farm price supports, artists on NEA grants, businessmen on protective tariffs and quotas, fourth generation welfare moms, or well-to-do greedy geezers on Medicare and Social Security, they're hooked far more than any heroin addict. And any threat to cut off or even diminish their drug supply makes them go berserk. So any attempt to really cut the federal budget deficit, much less balance the budget, is completely hopeless because so many millions of Americans want government goodies and don't want to pay for them.

None Dare Call It Fascism

So - how do we, you and I, help America restore its freedom by helping it to kick the fascist drug of the dole?

We must begin by breaking the great taboo, by using the forbidden word - fascism - in every public forum at our disposal. The left has always know that control of language was the key to political success - just look at the "political correctness" movement as a clear example. We must get the term of democratic fascism out into public discourse, widely debate, and ultimate accepted as an apt description of our current political system. That is requirement Number Uno.

Second, we must challenge the Brezhnev Doctrine of the Democratic Part: that once any area of people's lives or businesses becomes subject to bureaucratic control, it must stay that way; that any elimination or reduction of government intrusion and control is "turning back the clock" and is thus a return to immoral primitivism.

We must therefore abandon any strategy of containment, as we did in the pre-Reagan Cold War. With Reagan, we changed the goal of containment of the Soviets to rollback, and that's what we must do now. But rollback to what? Rollback to constitutional government, that's what. That's what our mantra should be, that's our goal, that's what we say when asked what we want, what we demand from America's constitutional government - literally acting outside the law - and all we are asking is for a government that isn't an outlaw, that obeys the founding laws of our country.

The Treaty Trap

The purpose of the Constitution is specify what the Federales are permitted to do. That they are not supposed to do anything not specifically authorized is made clear by the 10th Amendment. The Constitution is a sort of Indian reservation for the Feds - and if they ever escaped and started running amok, the courts were supposed to be our cavalry, the round them up and herd them back where they belong. But somehow, they got loose, and simply trashed the great border of the Constitution, the 10th Amendment.

Just how did the Federal Government escape from the Constitutional reservation? It happened during America's most disastrous presidency, in which more freedoms were lost before or since - nope, not FDR's but that of Woodrow Wilson. Not only did Wilson give us the IRS and the Fed, and get us into the most idiotic war of the century, he destroyed the 10th Amendment as well. He did it with treaties - and it started with birds. In 1913, Wilson got Congress to pass a Migratory Bird Act. When a fellow in Arkansas shot some geese out of "season" the Feds busted him for breaking this new law. His lawyer said Congress had no authority under the 10th Amendment to pass such a law and the judge agreed; the fellow walked. So Wilson got a Migratory Bird Act to implement the provisions of the treaty. So when a hunter got busted for "illegally" shooting birds and his lawyer used the unconstitutionality argument, this time the judge disagreed. Since the Federal Government does have the clear Constitutional authority to make treaties with foreign governments, the judge ruled that federal legislation to implement a treaty's provisions was constitutional; the fellow was found guilty. So since 1916, just about every time Congress has made an end run around the 10th Amendment, in the legislation's preamble it will say this is to implement legislation for the Chemical Weapons Convention, the scandalous treaty on chemical weapons, simply trashes the Constitution. Under it, CWC authorities need no search warrant nor show probable cause to an American judge to search a location suspected of violating the treaty.

I call this the "Treaty Trap." And folks, unless we find a way out of it, we'll never have constitutional government. But if the trap could be sprung open, it wouldn't just mean the death of the Chemical Weapons Convention, it would mean the as much as 90% or more of what the federal Government does could be declared unconstitutional. A bright constitutional lawyer named Larry Becraft may have found an escape hatch. He has compiled a history of case law where courts have ruled that private domestic US citizens cannot sue one another for violating the provisions of an international treaty - because treaties only apply to governments and their citizens residing in each other's country. On this basis, Becraft is preparing a challenge to all implementing legislation that would be unconstitutional if it weren't for some treaty. Further, he has also compiled a history of Supreme Court rulings that clearly state that treaties cannot be used to supersede or amend the constitution. Becraft, by the way, along with a group of other investors including, I believe, CNP member Larry Pratt, have just purchased Media By-Pass magazine. So you'll be able to follow or learn how to assist their efforts in Media By-Pass (1-812-477-8670).

Here's another road to constitutional government. John Shadegg of Arizona has cleverly inserted into the House Rules that any proposed bill has to specify just where in the Constitution such legislation is authorized. He and Sam Brownback in the Senate want to see this codified into law. We could encourage them to include in the legislation a provision for granting "standing" to any citizen who wishes to challenge the constitutionality of any given federal law or regulation. The only way one can do so now is to be prosecuted for criminally violating a law and face jail if the challenge fails. Further, in granting such standing, Congress could require the courts to consider the challenge de novo - that is, on the basis of the Constitution's original intent only, and thus not to consider 200 years of bad precedents.

As Phyllis Schlafly points out, Congress has the constitutional authority to specify how the Supreme Court is to interpret the Constitution. Phyllis is currently embarked on a wonderful effort to get Congress to use its Constitutional authority to restrict the jurisdiction of federal judges, of federal courts in general. This is infinitely preferable to efforts to get certain liberal federal judges impeached, a real bad idea. Withdrawing jurisdiction from the federal courts on such things as abortion or "same sex marriage" or affirmative actions is an excellent path congress can take to constitutional government. I'd like to encourage you all to work with Phyllis on this project.

We can all work on the local level as well, and more effectively that on the national. One way is to become involved with the Sheriff Education Program created by Juris Advocates, a legal activist group one of whose founders is Wayne Paul, Congressman Ron Paul's brother. The highest judicial office in your county, superior in power and authority to any agent in the federal bureaucracy, is your local Sheriff. IRS agents, for example, can do nothing to seize property or conduct an arrest without the approval and assistance of local state law enforcement officers. A Sheriff Education Program is available from Juris Advocates ($125, 1-901-680-9901), enabling citizen and business groups to educate and encourage their local law enforcement to protect and defend their property and liberty from the EPA, ERA, IRS, FDA, EEOC, OSHA and other fascist federal bureaucracies. Tip O'Neill was right; all political power really is local.

As a matter of fact, those of you who would like to make money fighting for freedom might consider buying a Juris Advocates franchise. You can set up an office in your home town to protect your neighbors and their businesses from IRS agents and other federal predators.

The T-word

These are a few ways to get into the fight for constitutional government, a fight which we all must join, for the consequences of us giving up are severe. OK, folks, here it comes, and it's not going to make you happy. Guess what Slick Willie wants to do with the rest of his life? When he finishes his second term, he'll be 54 years old - do you think he's going to shuffle off into the Arkansas sunset, or build homes for the homeless like Jimmy Carter? Yeah, right. Have you noticed the extent to which the Clintonistas have been enthusiastically transferring our sovereignty to the United Nations whenever they can get away with it - such as the "World Heritage" sites over which the UN has jurisdiction? For any normal politician, being President of the United States is the ultimate crowning achievement. But for Slick, it's just a stepping-stone to being President of the World. Yes, Bill Clinton intends to be Secretary General of the United Nations - and permanently.

Come on, you didn't really think that he was going to go away and leave us alone after eight short years in the White House, did you? Oh, no - he's just getting started with his life... and running yours. The nightmare is going to continue indefinitely and worldwide. There's one way to put a stop to this - and that's the T-word.

A friend of mine's cousin from Germany visited him recently. When the talk turned to politics in America, she informed him that people in Germany were utterly mystified by something. "We understand that your president is an amoral crook - but how unusual is that for a politician?" she observed. "Yet everyday our newspapers are full of stories like Clinton refusing to sell F-16 fighter jet technology to Germany while selling it to China, and all the spy deals he's made with Beijing. So everyone in Germany is asking now: why isn't your President Clinton being tried for treason?"

Congressman Bob Barr (R-GA) has asked his fellow members of the Subcommittee on the Constitution of the House Judiciary Committee to Draw up Articles of Impeachment against Mr. Clinton. A conservative activist group just delivered 20,000 petitions to Barr's office supporting his request. There is a web site, http://www.impeachclinton.com, devoted to efforts to impeach both Clinton and Gore. All of these cite numerous instances of "obstruction of justice" and a legion of other examples of "Bribery, High Crimes and Misdemeanors" for which the Constitution says are grounds for impeachment. But so far, none of them accuse Mr. Clinton of the ultimate cause for impeachment listed in Article II, Section 4 of the Constitution: Treason.

But it is not simply Bill Clinton who has committed treason against this country. The leadership of the Democratic Party and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) are his willing accomplices.

For 64 years, since 1930 with two short and irrelevant interruptions, the Democrats ruled Congress as their private kingdom. Their corruption was only matched by their arrogance. Losing their control of Congress in 1994 drove them insane - so criminally insane they were willing to do anything to get their power back: unequaled demagoguery with the Mediscare campaign; massive vote-buying and cheating to win numerous elections (such as Hernandez-Dornan in California and Landrieu/Jenkins in Louisiana); and raising money with wholesale disregard for campaign finance laws. But that's not all. What they did to insure Slick's reelections and to try and regain control of Congress was to sell classified military secrets to the Chinese government in exchange for donations to the Democratic National Committee. That, folks, is treason.

Clinton's bag man to the Chinese was, of course, John Huang, long time employee of Mochtar Riady (both are from China. He raised $5 million for the DNC, most of which the DNC has pledged to return as it came from "illegal foreign sources." What the DNC is desperate to hide, however, is that one of those sources was Chinese military intelligence.

Huang's conduit was Wei Guioqiang, the Washington bureau chief of Xinhua, the Chinese news agency. Wei was also the Chinese military intelligence officer in Washington channeling money into DNC coffers. In late march, Wei was summoned to Beijing on the pretext of receiving an award. Instead, he got a bullet in the back of his head from an officer of China's Ministry of State Security. Someone (John Huang?) had tipped Beijing off that Wei was about to request asylum in the U.S., and go public with what he had done to reelect Bill Clinton. Dan Burton's investigators on the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee are examining the connections between Huang and Wei. Their findings may show that not only is the President guilty of treason but the Democratic Party is as well.

So here's the in-your-face bottom line now: If Clinton continues to get away with everything, if he survives his presidency intact and unimpeached, he will become Secretary General of the United Nations, he will convert the U.N. into something approaching a world government, and he will shmooze his way into becoming the U.N.'s permanent leader - just like his idol, FDR, became permanent President until he died.

Now... are we going to let this happen? The answer is inside ourselves. Are we going to bequeath to our children an outlaw government or a constitutional government? Are we going to resign ourselves to the fascist corruption of Bill Clinton and the Washington Oligarchy or are we going to start kicking in doors on Capitol Hill and demand impeachment proceedings? Are we going to let conservatives who reach vast audiences like Limbaugh and Liddy continue to slip deeper into mush, or are we going to relentlessly push them to talk about democratic fascism and an outlaw government?

The goal is clear and direction is clear. The obstacles in the way will remain there only if we do not remove them. With our insistence and perseverance, we can enable the American people to unchain themselves, bolt out of the boiling water, reclaim their liberty, and transfigure their country into a land the Founding Fathers would recognize and be proud of. This can be our legacy to America, if we have the will to achieve it.