FASCISM VERSUS POLITICAL CORRECTNESS

Conventional wisdom holds that what is past is prologue.  In that regard, the West’s long-running battle with islamo-fascism has a similar clash still in living memory.

The geopolitical clock was running in 1934.  Despite a Europe wracked by the lingering effects of the 1914-1918 Great War, that summer the five-year countdown to another conflagration ran inexorably onward.  The sands of time draining in history’s hourglass were pressed from above by the weight of an emerging political philosophy: fascism.  It was bound to collide with Western democracies.

Fascism is usually seen as an extreme right-wing, one-party state.  However, fascism shared much with communism since both were highly authoritarian philosophies—presumably populist but in fact antidemocratic--in which national priorities prevailed over rights of the individual. 

A chart of the political spectrum frequently portrays fascism on the far right and communism on the far left, but that is a skewed depiction.  In fact, both belong on the left—communism at the far end--with anarchy properly laid on the far right.  Democracies fall somewhere in between.

Historically, both philosophies are outgrowths of 19th century socialism.  A distinguishing feature is that communism is ostensibly international socialism, while fascism is national socialism.  The best example of such philosophical overlap is the Nazis in Germany—the National Socialist Workers’ Party.

The roots of fascism were Italian national “syndicalism,” evolved from a form of French socialism.  In the turbulent political, economic and social aftermath of WW I, fascism gained strength in Europe.  In Italy around 1920, future dictator Benito Mussolini drew upon both sides.  He denigrated the traditional right as backwards and the left as destructive.  In order to avoid constant turmoil, fascists believed in an extremely strong central government, yielding Mussolini’s “century of authority.” 

After fighting among communists, socialists and anarchists, at least nominally fascist movements took power in Mussolin's Italy in 1922, Adolf Hitler's Germany in 1933, and Francisco Franco's Spain in 1939.

Fascism’s appeal was widespread among many nationalist factions: at least ten other nations followed the Italian and German paths by 1939, in Europe, Asia, and South America.  Other countries sprouted significant fascist movements, including much of the British Commonwealth.  Their emergence reflected growing disaffection with the naiveté and pacifism still evident two decades after the armistice of 1918.

The international “peacekeeping” body, the League of Nations established in1920, had no means of enforcing peace, and quickly descended into irrelevancy. Including civil wars and revolts, more than 40 conflicts on four continents arose during the 1930s, though only about a dozen lasted a year or more.  The most significant were the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) with heavy foreign involvement, and Japan-China (1937-45.) 

Other notable conflicts involved Paraguay-Bolivia (1932-35), Italy-Ethiopia (1935-36), Palestinians versus the British (1936-39), and Finland-Russia (1939-40).

Adolf Hitler came to power as chancellor in 1933 and immediately began expanding the armed forces.  In July 1934 parliament passed legislation making the National Socialists the only legal political party, and the next month President Paul Hindenburg died, leaving Chancellor Hitler as head of state.

Hitler wasted little time proceeding with his agenda.  In October 1934, only nine months after becoming chancellor, he withdrew from the League of Nations by demanding military equality with France and Britain.  After secretly forming the Luftwaffe (partly in Russia) Hitler announced its existence in 1935.

Fascism’s advance did not occur in a vacuum.  In 1933 members of the Oxford Union voted that they would “in no circumstances fight for king and country” because presumably nothing was worth another Great War.  The vote came six years after Cambridge students easily passed a resolution for pacifism.

In March 1936 Hitler seized the Rhineland, a demilitarized zone between France and Germany established after World War I. In two days the crisis passed: Germany remained free to pursue its wider goals.  The upshot set a deadly pattern: the democracies’ perennial unwillingness to challenge aggression. 

Thus emboldened, in 1938 Hitler renounced the Versailles Treaty signed after WW I and ordered his general staff to prepare for full-scale war by 1940.

A native Austrian, Hitler wanted his homeland in German Reich, but the Vienna government declined.  Faced with possible invasion in 1938, Austria sought assistance from Britain and France, who refused. Hitler invaded in March.

Next Hitler set his sights on Czechoslovakia.  He insisted that the Sudetenland—heavily ethnic German—join the Reich.  The Czech government was willing to fight, however poor its chances, but again France and Britain opted for “peace,” declining to support the Czechs.  Naïve Europeans believed Hitler’s previous statement that Sudentenland was “the last territorial demand I have to make in Europe.”  The seal was set in September, and in March 1939 Hitler seized the rest of the nation.

Then in August 1939 Hitler and Stalin astonished the world by signing a mutual nonaggression pact, only three years after the anti-Comintern alliance. The path was clear for Germany to direct its attention against traditional enemies: France and Britain.  Neither had demonstrated any willingness to oppose fascist aggression, convincing Adolf Hitler that pacifism had stripped the democracies of their courage.

Unlike Italy and Germany, Japanese fascism did not produce a dominant individual.  But an amalgam of army, government, and industry leaders pushed an anti-democratic agenda that led to a de-facto fascist state from 1931.

Japan had ten prime ministers through the 1930s, only four being elected.  Emperor Hirohito had ascended the throne in 1926 but sat as head of state rather than head of government.  It was a time of extreme unrest, with army and right-wing factions resorting to assassination on occasion.

In 1931 Japanese forces invaded Manchuria and established a puppet state, Manchukuo.  The League of Nations was incapable of resolving the dispute, though held Tokyo responsible.  Consequently, Japan pressed its military advantage while withdrawing from the league. 

Increasingly aggressive in eastern China, Japan pressed ahead with full-scale war from 1937.  Japan seized Shanghai and Nanking, the Nationalist capital.  In December the rape of Nanking began with an estimated 300,000 Chinese killed or raped.

Thus was set the stage for the Second World War, which conceivably could have been averted had the democracies displayed some intestinal fortitude. 

In the 1930s fascism was ascendant in Europe and Asia.  Today, Islamo-fascism continues its march toward the global caliphate.  Yet in the West, even the phrase “radical Islam” draws venomous responses from the American president and a chorus of liberal feel-gooders.  The West lacks a 21st century Churchill, let alone a Charles Martel, the French leader who repelled Islam’s hordes at Tours in 732.

We live in historic times: we are witness to the decline of Western Civilization, a victim of the virus of political correctness.

AFTER ORLANDO

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If facts matter to you, please read on.

Otherwise, turn to Rolling Stone.

The smoke had barely cleared at the Pulse club in Orlando before the predictable yammering began: blame the tool rather than the perpetrator. 

The call to ban “assault weapons” and inflict other restrictions upon people who have broken no laws was absolutely predictable.  Yet every year we incur 30,000 motor vehicle deaths while nobody advocates banning automobiles—except some extreme Greenies.  So what’s the difference?

Well, first things first:

“Assault weapon” is a phrase used by liberals to delegitimize semi-automatic firearms.

Here’s the fact:

The United States Department of Defense has one gadget officially designated an Assault Weapon.  It’s called SMAW, the Shoulder-Launched Multipurpose Assault Weapon.

It’s a rocket launcher.  Enough said? 

Meanwhile, Rolling Stone just published an article listing methods of addressing The Assault Weapon Problem.  Two focused on objects rather than human behavior: reinstituting the largely ineffective Clinton semi-auto ban, and prohibiting “high capacity” magazines.

To quote an attorney friend: “I trust that Rolling Stone has done a cost-benefit analysis, calculating how many lives would be saved by confiscating all those magazines versus how many lives would be lost in the attempt.

“I also have to admire the folks at Rolling Stone for believing so strongly in a principle that they are prepared to die for it.”

National schemes to ban or confiscate stuff have a terrible success record, starting with places like Lexington and Concord in 1775.  Few people still living remember Prohibition, which spurred violent crime sprees in the 1930s, but currently we have the 40-year War On Drugs.  How is that working for you?

Fact is: magazines are simple devices: a metal or plastic box with a spring and a follower.  Ignoring the millions already legally owned, the rapidly evolving 3-D printing technology easily could fill the gap.

Meanwhile, we keep hearing that the Pulse atrocity is “the worst shooting in U.S. history.”   (That’s a lie—the U.S. Army murdered 297 Sioux at Wounded Knee, South Dakota, in 1900, using small arms and artillery.)  Note, however, that Pulse is far from the worst “killing” or the worst “act of terrorism.”

Non-Gun Mass Murders

For readers who still favor facts over rhetoric:

In 1910 a disgruntled union organizer killed 21 and injured 100 by blowing up the Los Angeles Times building with dynamite. 

Ten years later, on Wall Street, suspected anarchists killed 38 and wounded 143 using a horse-drawn wagon loaded with dynamite. 

Then in 1927 the Bath School bombing in Michigan killed 38 children and six adults—a worse toll than the Sandy Hook shooting.

In an incident bearing similarities to Orlando, in 1990 Julio Gonzalez killed 87 people at a club in New York City, mostly Hondurans celebrating Carnival.  Julio Gonzalez used a plastic bucket with $1 worth of gasoline, and a match.

On April 19,1995, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols blew up the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168  and injuring 680.  The weapon was a truck loaded with diesel fuel and fertilizer.

On September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorists flew airplanes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing 2,996 and injuring more than 6,000.  No guns were involved; hijackers used boxcutters to seize the planes.

That was not the first attack on the World Trade Center, though.  In 1993, some Islamists tried to blow up the north tower, killing “only” six, but injured more than 1,000.  The weapon was a fertilizer bomb.

In 2013 the Tsarnaev brothers murdered three people in Boston but injured, maimed, or disfigured 264.  Their weapons were two pressure cookers containing homemade “kitchen table” explosives, ball bearings and nails.

We needn’t limit our survey to the United States.  In 1993 radical islamists killed 33 Turkish intellectuals and others by setting fire to a hotel.

During a largely-forgotten atrocity in barely three months of 1994, at least half a million Rwandans were murdered by tribal rivals mostly wielding machetes.

In 2003 an unemployed South Korean taxi driver started a fire in a South Korean subway, killing 198 people with nearly 150 injured.

In 2014, 33 Chinese were knifed to death in a train station.  Last year fifty were killed in a multi-attacker knife incident in a coal mine.

Do you see a pattern?

People who want to ban guns need to be careful what they wish for.  They think that the basic economic Law of Substitution will lead psychos who cannot get guns to use knives or sticks or rocks or something less lethal.  History shows otherwise.  Psychos without guns kill and injure far more people than those who use firearms.  They substitute things that are impossible to regulate, like gasoline, diesel fuel, plant fertilizer, household bleach, nails and pressure cookers.  

Foreign Firearms Mass Murders

After the June 2015 church attack in Charleston, S.C., Barack Obama said that mass shootings “just don’t happen in other countries.”

That’s a lie—not a mistake—it’s a lie.  And he said it in Paris five weeks after the shooting-bombing attacks that killed 130.

Furthermore…

Between 2009 and 2013, the U.S. ranked sixth in fatal rampage shootings per million population.

In 2004, Chechen separatists seized a Russian Federation school and killed 375 people with over 700 wounded.

Near Oslo in 2011 an assassin killed eight people by explosives and 67 by gunfire, injuring over 300.

The two Muslim attacks in Paris killed 147 people in 2015.  The combined toll of wounded was 380. 

If, somehow, authoritarians could confiscate every gun and “high-capacity magazine” in the country, mass violence would get worse, not better, because the substitute for guns is fire and explosives.  It sounds counter-intuitive, but when we hear about mass shootings, we probably should be thinking, “Thank God they only used guns; otherwise it would have been much worse.”

And consider this: if even half of gun-owners have a semi-auto firearm, banning "assault weapons" could turn about 35 million law-abiding, tax-paying Americans into criminals overnight.  Are police officers going to enter the homes of suspected illegal gun-owners to arrest them and confiscate their offending firearms?

Assuming that a semi-auto ban were passed, then what?  Consider that Great Britain and Australia are islands, both with strong gun laws.  Yet firearms still are brought ashore.  In the U.S., boatloads of AKs and ammo from around the world would land on remote stretches of Mexican coastline and reach the U.S. through the same methods used by drug smugglers.

We’ll barely mention the systemic problems that plague any government bureaucracy.  Last year in a test of TSA airport security, over 90 percent of imitation guns and bombs got through.  Furthermore, prohibited individuals purchased guns because of faulty paperwork, including the Virginia Tech and the Tucson killers.

So what’s the answer?

It’s the same as always: armed citizens adequately trained in safety and defensive shooting.  Three Saturday Night Specials could have saved nearly 3,000 people on 9-11.  And it doesn’t require armed citizens—it requires people willing to fight.  On the Belgian train in 2015, four unarmed passengers (three Americans) stopped a mass shooting though the islamist had an AK and a pistol.  Apparently there was no such resistance inside Pulse at 2 a.m. on June 16, although a variety of improvised weapons were available, from pool cues to fire extinguishers.

That noted firearms authority Bill Clinton declared that armed citizens would not stop mass shootings because concealed carriers would hit bystanders.  (Incidentally, soldiers state that Clinton expanded Bush 41’s ban on carrying loaded weapons on base—then came Fort Hood.  That policy has not changed.)  Aside from the fact that cops shoot vastly more bystanders than armed citizens do (New York City budgets millions to compensate NYPD victims every year), consider this: the world’s militaries acknowledge that 1 to 15 percent of battlefield casualties are caused by friendly fire.  The official term is “fratricide.”  So if in stopping a mass murder, a responder hits one or more potential victims —SO WHAT?  That’s vastly better than losing 13 at Fort Hood, 23 at Luby’s, 32 at Virginia Tech, or 49 in Orlando.

In nearly every instance, the survivors of mass shootings had one thing in common—they waited for men with guns to come solve the problem.  Think about that.  Twice.

And specifically for the anti-gunners: Imagine a world with no guns.  Wouldn’t that be wonderful?  The world was like that once.  Physical strength ruled the planet, and women were grapes to be plucked. 

It was called the Dark Ages. 

Be careful what you wish for.

MEMORIAL DAY FOR HELLCATS

In 1996 Brassey's published my novel Hellcats, the second installment in my still uncompleted "Dauntless Trilogy."   For the dedication I wanted to represent ten Grumman F6F pilots who perished in helping win the Second World War, with pilots from ten squadrons on ten carriers who died from different causes.   It took some doing, but I met my criteria. 

One of the aviators had special significance to me: Ensign Paul Spradling of Buhl, Idaho, had been one of my father's room mates in Civilian Pilot Training before proceeding to the Navy.  Sometimes I wonder how many folks in Buhl still remember him.

There's another sentiment worth recording, the essence of today's message:

One of the epigrams is from the late Elvin Lindsay, an ace of VF-19 aboard Lexington (CV-16).  He said, "The one thing that bothers me 50 years later is when people say that all those young guys 'gave their lives' like my best friend Roger Boles.  He didn't 'give' his life--it was torn from him at an early age.  I never will forget that."

Boles was 27 years old: here is a tribute to him: 
http://www.cannon-lexington.com/Personal%20Stories/Roger%20Boles.html

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Dedicated to these ten, to the squadronmates they represent, and to those who still remember them as forever young.

Lieutenant Karl B. Satterfield (age 28)

VF-5, USS Yorktown CV-10

Killed in air combat over Kwajalein Atoll, 4 December 1943

Lieutenant George Formanek, Jr. (24)

VF-30, USS Monterey CVL-26

Struck trees while strafing over New Guinea, 23 April 1944

Lieutenant Commander Ernest W. Wood, Jr. (28)

CVLG-27, USS Princeton CVL-23

Lost to structural failure in combat near the Marianas, 19 June 1944

Ensign Frank T. Vitkusky (27)

VF-14, USS Wasp CV-18

Lost in water landing, Western Pacific, 12 July 1944

Ensign Joseph Kelley (24)

VF-19, USS Lexington CV-16

Murdered by Japanese cannibals in the Bonin Islands, 5 August 1944

Ensign Kenneth “C” Chase (20)

VF-11, USS Hornet CV-12

Killed by Japanese AA fire near Okinawa, 10 October 1944

Ensign Jack S. Berkheimer (20)

VF(N)-41, USS Independence CVL-22

Killed in night intercept over the Philippines, 16 December 1944

Ensign Paul K. Spradling (22)

VF-82, USS Bennington CV-20

Killed by US AA gunners off Japan, 16 February 1945

Lieutenant (jg) Irl “V” Sonner (25)

VF-29, USS Cabot CVL-28

Killed in flight-deck crash, Western Pacific, 22 March 1945

Lieutenant (jg) John J. Sargent, Jr. (26)

Formerly VF-18, USS Bunker Hill CV-17

Killed in kamikaze attack off Okinawa, 11 May 1945