Sen. John Cornyn: MUSSOLINI Quote & 'Fascism Is Socialism'?!
'Forgive John Cornyn: Quoting Mussolini to Own the Libs Is Just What the Right Does,' The Observer, Feb. 25, 2019. *EXCERPTS:
John Cornyn, the Republican senior U.S. senator from Texas, spent Sunday in the ratio barrel. His offense: tweeting a quote from the well-known and respected thought genius Benito Mussolini.
-> TWEET: 'We were the first to assert that the more complicated the forms assumed by civilization, the more restricted the freedom of the individual must become .” Benito Mussolini. 3,864 8:17 AM - Feb 24, 2019 -
Il Duce, Italy’s far-right fascist dictator (whose poster Hitler had on his dorm-room walls) is as famous for getting Italy’s trains to run on time as he is for imprisoning and murdering his leftist opponents. He was pretty “good” at both! It wasn’t immediately clear which of Mussolini’s qualities it was that Cornyn most admired or why, exactly, he was tweeting nuggets of wisdom from right-wing dictators in order to own the libs. A few hours later, after a well-known Texas journalist kindly demanded to know exactly what the senator meant by posting pearls from a fascist dictator out of context, Cornyn clarified that he did in fact mean that fascism is socialism, or whatever.
In a modern-day American context, with socialism on the rise and with the right increasingly McCarthyist in its open redbaiting, posting a Mussolini quote is either a tone-deaf move from an applesauce-brained ninny or the opening act for a Pinochet revival.
That Mussolini quote appears, in English, in recent writings from conservative thought leaders in praise of the Austrian political philosopher Friedrich Hayek. And, turns out, quoting Mussolini in this way in order to own the libs—in order to show that authoritarian fascism is the same thing as socialism. Hayek, a 1974 Nobel laureate, was a lifelong skeptic of state-run markets, and argued in a 1944 book called The Road to Serfdom that tyranny is the inevitable result of a state-run planned economy. (Hayek was also a starry-eyed fan of Pinochet, the brutal Chilean dictator who toppled a democratically-elected socialist government in a U.S.-backed coup and who, like Mussolini, murdered his political opponents.)
For this, and for his bonus argument that fascism was not a capitalist reaction to socialism but in fact socialism and fascism were very similar things, Hayek and his ideas have been elevated to cult status among conservative and libertarian free-marketers. Margaret Thatcher, for example, absolutely loved Hayek, and used Hayek as the intellectual cudgel to dismantle Great Britain’s Keynesian-style social welfare state. Ronald Reagan absolutely loved Margaret Thatcher and used her policies as a model for his own great era of deregulation and privatization.
It’s important to note that in the interpretation of modern-day American conservatives, anything that is not the free market is automatically socialist. National parks? Socialist. Privatize them. Universal health care? Socialist. Hayek loved the market so much that he once suggested that democracy could be dispensed with as long as there were no limits on capitalist activity. Cornyn might not have known any of this before posting his applesauce-brained tweet. All you need to know is that the conservatives have a guy who thinks socialism and fascism are the same thing. This is not the first time a conservative free-marketer has invoked right-wing dictatorship to own the left, and it will not be the last.
https://observer.com/2019/02/john-cornyn-quotes-mussolini-fascism-socialism-rhetoric/
- Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini strung up after execution, Milan, Italy, April 28, 1945. *GRAPHIC WARNING*
(Hanging bodies upside down in public was customary treatment for treasonous acts/traitors).
WIKI. Benito Amilcare Andrea Mussolini (Italian: 29 July 1883 – 28 April 1945) was an Italian politician and journalist who was the leader of the National Fascist Party. He ruled Italy as Prime Minister from 1922 to 1943; he constitutionally led the country until 1925, when he dropped the pretense of democracy and established a dictatorship.
Known as IL DUCE ('The Leader'), Mussolini was the founder of Italian Fascism. In 1912, Mussolini had been a leading member of the National Directorate of the Italian Socialist Party/PSI, but was expelled from the PSI for advocating military intervention in World War I, in opposition to the party's stance on neutrality. Mussolini served in the Royal Italian Army during the war until he was wounded and discharged in 1917.
Mussolini denounced the PSI, his views now centering on nationalism instead of socialism and later founded the fascist movement which came to oppose egalitarianism and class conflict, instead advocating "revolutionary nationalism" transcending class lines. Following the March on Rome in October 1922, Mussolini became the youngest Prime Minister in Italian history until the appointment of Matteo Renzi in February 2014.
After removing all political opposition through his secret police and outlawing labor strikes, Mussolini and his followers consolidated their power through a series of laws that transformed the nation into a one-party dictatorship. Within five years, Mussolini had established dictatorial authority by both legal and extraordinary means and aspired to create a totalitarian state. More..., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benito_Mussolini
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