Mussolini – National-Socialist Worldview

Maurice Bardèche on Mussolini

Hadding — Sun, 05 Nov 2017 04:18:00 +0000

The broad outline of Bardèche’s view of Mussolini is intuitively obvious. Clearly, Mussolini accomplished good things for Italy, and then, at some point, became unrealistically ambitious. How much more fortunate Fascist Italy would have been if the temptation of an opportunistic entry into the Second World War, at a moment when France was already on the verge of defeat, had been resisted.

Since I know little about Mussolini, I can only accept what Bardèche says about him. Regarding the next section, about Hitler, I shall have some points of contention.

I omit the first few paragraphs of this chapter, where Bardèche argues that he as a fascist does not have to approve everything that a fascist has ever done. That point should be self-evident.

The Caesarism of Mussolini

Maurice Bardèche
From Qu’est-ce que le FASCISME? (1961)

… The first version of fascism that contemporary history presents to us is Italian Fascism. Originally, it is a movement of socialist activists and veterans that saves Italy from Bolshevism.

Mussolini’s mother was a schoolteacher, and his father was a blacksmith who was an activist for the Communist International. Mussolini was imprisoned at the age of twenty for having fomented a general strike. He is initially defiant, takes up exile in Switzerland, translates Kropotkin; the first periodical that he founds is called La Lotta di Classe (The Class-Struggle); the first daily newspaper that he manages is a socialist newspaper. The beginnings of Fascism are consistent with this origin. The speech at San Sepulcro, which is the birth-certificate of the fascio, proclaims the confiscation of the property of the newly wealthy (nouveax riches), the dissolution of the large secret societies, the redistribution of land, the participation of workers in the management of businesses, and the suppression of titles of nobility.

In twenty years, what from this program did Fascism fulfill? What we can say, what we must say, is that it was something else. Very quickly, Fascism forgot a large part of its revolutionary program in order to accomplish a work of practical efficiency and unity. It had come to power to avert anarchy, chaos, civil war. It acted with great urgency to reestablish order, work, peace. Then it organized and constructed. Italy became again the nation of builders. The Roman sap once again flowed in the old tree-trunk. Mussolini was initially a proconsul. Fascism produced roads, hospitals, schools, aqueducts; it drained marshes; it increased the harvests. “Asfaltar no es gubernar” ^[1], was one reaction. But it also governed. Mussolini established corporatism, an achievement requiring much more finesse than an Autobahn. The Charter of Labor was certainly not the echo of the speech at San Sepulcro. But it realistically laid the foundations of a socialist city that the future could expand: the replacement of parliamentary assemblies with union-meetings (instances syndicales), the representation of workers, collective contracts, social security, organization of leisure-activities, were so many beginnings that a will for socialist management could develop and transform. There was however one essential condition. Since Fascism wanted to maintain private property while imposing its will on the selfishness of liberal capitalism, it was necessary to know that the Fascist state found itself faced at every moment with surreptitious opposition, and that it was committed to perpetual vigilance.

This was thus the youth of Fascism and I confess that I cannot think of it without nostalgia. There were black shirts and boots, lictors and raised arms, but without anything raucous and colossal. Mussolini was barely guarded. He loved the people, the children, informality. He was easily accessible. Sometimes, he took his red car — which he drove, it was said, quite badly — and departed alone to wander in his province of Italy more simply than a Laelius or a Scipio ever had. He was beloved. “You are all of us,” was said to him. The slogans had not appeared on the walls and it was not an article of faith that Mussolini was always right. It was a “popular dictatorship,” said the Fascists themselves, words with a bizarre resonance today. It was the time when Mussolini wore white gaiters and a bowler hat. I quite love this touching period.

The Fascist style came only later, with its uniforms, its emblems, its inscriptions, its heel-clickings, and its chief portrayed with fists on hips and chin high. These military forms of discipline symbolize the unity of the nation. They make the nation feel its own strength; they intoxicate it with effectiveness, with energy; they promise to it manly action; they speak to it about honor and sacrifice. Through them, man escapes his mediocre and routine life, from the joyless function that he humbly performs in the city; he becomes a soldier at his post; his life has a meaning; he is united with the other men of his nation as a soldier is united with his comrades. Traditional Fascism recognizes itself in the parades of these young heroes who are quite hard, quite uncompromising, who can also furnish at once, as blind destiny demands, martyrs or butchers, brutes or saints. The struggle against power, the struggle to prevent nations from dying, cannot do without these phalanxes, I know. Always the suit of lights.

But if the very life of the nation is based on this military civic-mindedness, how

dangerous it becomes! Mussolini, having become Duce, declared infallible, no longer appearing except on the balcony like a pope, accompanied by dignitaries who come to a halt six paces in front of him, loses in my eyes all the charm of the little socialist

schoolteacher who had become his people’s guide. And above all, he is no longer the people’s guide that he was. The splendor of majesty, the habit of performance, separate him from men. He no longer knows Italy except through spectacular tours and the reports of prefects. This consul, in the midst of ovations, condemns himself to being no more than a bureaucrat. The dignitaries of Fascism are his eyes, his hand, his lictors. And if these men are idiots? If the distance becomes greater each day between the real country and the idea that the helmeted army maintains in the mind of the dictator as it passes under his windows singing?

The catastrophe of Italian Fascism had perhaps no other origin. Mussolini, irritated by the sanctions, was dreaming of an Italy that would be military, Roman, helmeted, invincible. He heard the footstep of the legions. And the footstep of the legions echoed, in fact, under his windows; his praetors were showing the locations of his camps to him on maps. He spoke of the “warrior nation” and, as a consequence of speaking about it, he believed in the “warrior nation.” He forgot the charming Italian people and the mandolins of Naples and the hardworking craftsmen of Italy and its immense poor lands and the steaming soup on the table of the family that awaits the children in the evening. He was beholding a dictator’s dream instead of the face of Italy. And he was forgetting also that social justice is a battle that is won each day, that it demands an infinite love and infinite attention, that there is need of constant monitoring to defend the workers against the rich, and that one cannot rely on the reports of prefects.

Lost in his dream of grandeur, he played with the shadow and forgot the essential. As emperor of a phantom nation, he presses buttons that activate nothing. But finally, as Lieutenant Bonaparte at Montereau and Champaubert^[2] nearly saved the success of Napoleon, it is the little socialist schoolteacher who miraculously came to the aid of Mussolini the dictator.

Nothing is more moving in the history of Italian Fascism than the return to roots accomplished under the iron fist of defeat. The program of the Salò Republic in 1944 is that upon which Mussolini ought, twenty years earlier, to have staked his power and his life. That is the true Fascism. But, like the battles of the French countryside, it came too late. There is a moment when no wisdom can any longer stop the avalanches caused by mistakes. Mussolini died of his caesarism, of the isolation that caesarism brings, of the delusions that it allows to develop, of the optimism and the easy satisfactions with which it contents itself, of the stardust that it casts into the eyes of others, and that finally blinds it. Italian Fascism was possessed by the ghost of Rome: in this intoxication with history, it lost touch with reality. We must learn that fascism cannot content itself with being a caesarism.
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[1] To pave is not to govern. This was actually said, not about Mussolini but about Franco, by Salvador de Madariaga, a Spanish expatriate who lived in England and enjoyed high status there as a proponent of liberalism.
[2] These were among Napoleon’s last battles, in February 1814, wherein he made efficient use of his small force against much greater numbers. The performance in these last battles, although excellent, was not sufficient to win the war and prevent Napoleon’s exile to Elba.

Maurice Bardèche on what is and is not “fascism”

Hadding — Fri, 03 Nov 2017 00:43:00 +0000

The term fascism is problematic.

Before the rise of Hitler, and even before the rise Mussolini, there was a concept of national-socialism. National-Socialism was a general term. Anne Morrow Lindbergh (wife of the aviator) used national-socialism as a general term as late as 1940 in her book, The Wave of the Future.

But because Hitler’s was by far the most famous movement to call itself national-socialist, the concept became specifically identified with his development of it, which includes certain ramifications of Darwinism that distinguish the German movement from its Italian analog.

Therefore, if our use of words were more logical, we should say that Fascism was the Italian form of national-socialism, instead of saying that National-Socialism was a type of fascism.

The name Fascism is rooted in specifically Italian history. On that basis alone, it seems odd to apply the term to any movement outside of Italy.

But what happened is this. Fascism became world-famous before many people heard about national-socialism. Consequently, just as Xerox, the preeminent maker of photocopy-machines, saw “xerox machine” and “xeroxes” become general terms for copiers and the copies that they produce, “fascism” (with a small f) superseded “national-socialism” as the general name for nationalist movements that guard the interests of workers.

Nowadays, when one wishes to refer to such a movement while avoiding resonance with the specific movements of Mussolini and Hitler, one can use the term “social-nationalist” — which is obviously just another way to say national-socialist.

Nonetheless, for better or worse, “fascism” remains prevalent as the general term for such movements. Instead of properly categorizing Fascism as Italian national-socialism we bizarrely categorize Hitler’s movement as “German fascism.”

This is very convenient for Communists, because, unlike “national-socialism,” which is descriptive, “fascism” has a meaning that is not readily apparent, and is thus easily misrepresented. (You will also notice that the descriptive term National-Socialism is rarely used even in regard to Hitler’s movement, replaced almost always by the nondescriptive “Nazism”: there is a purpose in this.)

If we cannot do away with this generalized use of “fascism,” we should at least insist that it be applied only to movements that Mussolini or Hitler would recognize as what they represent.

The problem that Maurice Bardèche identifies in this introduction to his 1961 book, Qu’est-ce que le fascisme? (What is fascism?), is the reckless and hypocritical use of even that misbegotten term, without regard for any reasonable definition.

Inquiry about Fascism

Maurice Bardèche
From Qu’est-ce que le FASCISME? (1961)

I am a fascist writer. One ought to thank me for my acquaintance: for it is, at least, one established fact in a debate where the elements are obfuscated.

Nobody, in fact, admits to being fascist. Soviet Russia, which lives under single-party rule and a police-dictatorship, is not a fascist country; it is even, so it seems, the complete opposite. The Hungarian government that has tanks fire upon workers and tries strikers before a military tribunal is not a fascist government either. It merely defends the power of the people. A provisional government that employs terrorism to impose the will of a revolutionary faction on an entire country is not a fascist organization either; it is a movement of national liberation.^[1] Thus it is not the form of the institutions that characterizes fascism, but something else.

There is no more unanimity about the ends than about the means. If you defend capitalism, you are necessarily fascist, according to the Communists. But the common opinion does not agree with them. The United States, England, Adenauer’s Germany, are fascist only for representatives of the Soviet Union and their lackeys. Even in France where political crises have brought to power a kind of presidential rule (régime présidentiel)^[2], the man in the street shakes his head with disbelief when one explains to him that he lives in a fascist dictatorship. Thus, to heed respectfully the CEOs of the banks and major trusts is not enough to be convicted of fascism without further discussion.

This criterion that escapes us, however, one feels can be found eventually through some examples, if we have a resolute conscience. “There are some fascist countries,” exclaims the resolute conscience, “and you very well know which ones. The military dictatorships of Latin America, the countries where the politicians are only managers for fruit-juice vendors, Franco’s government in Spain, these are what we call fascism. The definition that you seek, derive it from your own analysis: a fascist regime is that which denies liberty to the people in order to maintain the privileges of a wealthy minority. Do not play games with words. Fascism is the combination of a method and a goal: it suppresses liberty, which is not blameworthy in itself, but it suppresses it in order to assure social inequality and poverty, and that is how we recognize it.”

There is only one objection to this definition, but it is embarrassing. It is that there is no fascist who is willing to recognize fascism in the military dictatorships of Latin America, in the fiefs of fruit-juice vendors, or even in Franco’s Spain, which, moreover, cannot honestly be equated with the preceding examples. Fascists refuse to recognize themselves in what the intellectuals, the newspapers, and the political parties call fascism. They go farther: they condemn, as their adversaries, these examples that are placed before them. What then is this fascism in which we see everything other than the press, the radio, and the learned men of our time?

If I were one of a kind, this clarification would not be worth the effort. But a strange prodigy occurs: the fascist writer, the fascist intellectual, is nowhere to be found; the government that is willing to be charged with fascism exists only at the antipodes, and it is as archaic as a Negro king^[3]. But on the other hand there are fascist groups and they do not hide it; there are young fascists and they proclaim it; there are fascist officers and one trembles at this discovery^[4]; finally there is a fascist spirit and above all there are thousands of persons who are fascist without knowing it, under another hat that they wear and that they regard with suspicion, of which fascism, as we conceive it and not as one describes it, would be their entire hope if one explained to them what it is. Behold the mirror that reflects our hearts: I want them to recognize themselves. Or that they know, at least, in what cause they are not our brothers. Even our enemies ought to know what they are fighting. The weather (le temps) that filled our sails has made us sail past the Cape of Lies. The Land of Lies recedes into the mist; twenty-year-old eyes no longer see it. And now, in the wind that is rising, it is no longer necessary to be afraid of words.
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[1] Most likely referring to Fidel Castro. One of Bardèche’s chapters asks if Castro is a fascist.
[2] Charles de Gaulle, of course.

[3] In 1958 (three years before this publication) the Premier of Québec, Maurice Duplessis, was compared to a “Negro king” by André Laurendeau, meaning that Duplessis could maintain in Québec the 19th-century combination of extreme cultural conservatism (granting enormous influence to the Catholic Church) and laisser-faire economic policy, because forces outside of Québec kept Duplessis in power, much as a Negro king in Africa might be kept in power by the British and could do as he liked so long as he cooperated with the British on matters of importance to them. The period of Duplessis’s policies (1936-1959) is called la Grande Noirceur (the Great Darkness). When Bardèche refers to an archaic “Negro king,” it seems that he has in mind the backward rule of Maurice Duplessis, which was sometimes wrongly called fascist. Bardèche seems to say that Duplessis did not object to the label, even though it was inaccurate.
[4] In May 1958 a group of generals, supported by “committees of public safety,” seized control in some of the French colonies and in Corsica, and demanded that Charles de Gaulle take over the French government and stop the dissolution of the French Empire. De Gaulle had given them reason to believe that he supported their cause, but once in power, he did the opposite of what they wanted. These generals were called “fascist” by the Communists in France. There seems to be some ironic humor in Bardèche’s reference to the “discovery” of the “fascist officers,” since as Gaullistes they surely did not consider themselves fascist, any more than De Gaulle himself.

Maurice Bardèche on Mussolini

Steve Bannon and Nationalism

Hadding — Mon, 16 Oct 2017 16:17:00 +0000

I read some reactions to a recent speech by Steven K. Bannon from people identifying as Alt Right. One response, I thought, was overly laudatory, the other overly dismissive. Here I give very briefly my view of Bannon’s relationship to nationalism and to the race.

On the whole, Steve Bannon is a conservative Catholic — conservative in the old sense of preserving traditions. His public statements generally reflect that. He has in the past stated his rejection of racism, but also his opposition to economic globalism and support for a nationalism based not on race but on social ties and culture. This seems to be in accord with the Catholic worldview. Based on this understanding of Bannon, I would not expect him to advocate anything more radical than civic nationalism.

Civic nationalism is not really enough to prevent racial decline, but it is a good start. I might point out that Mussolini’s Italy was a civic nationalist state. Once the principle is established, that the state exists to preserve the people in it and to guard their interests against predatory minorities and against predatory foreigners, further refinements can be made later.

What I find especially important is Bannon’s stated view that the economy exists to serve the nation. This is a direct repudiation of what passes for conservatism today. That “conservatism,” which would not have been regarded as conservative a century ago, subordinates all other considerations to profit. Under that ideology, race is one of many values sacrificed on the altar of Mammon. The rejection of that ideology is a prerequisite for our race’s survival. In that regard, Bannon is in practice, regardless of his declared disregard for race as a value, a more radical advocate for our race than some who carried torches in Charlottesville, who still espouse that destructive ideology of profit.

What I find curious is Bannon’s repeated misuse of the word corporatist. He uses the word corporatist as a smear-word, the way Marxists use it, apparently as a synonym for plutocrat, and of course as a way to avoid saying Jew.

As a conservative Catholic, Bannon ought to know the proper meaning of corporatism, because it was advocated by Pope Leo XIII. Corporatism is a system that is supposed to prevent any particular set of interests from dominating a national economy and serving themselves to the detriment of the nation as a whole. This is the corporatism that was later adopted by Mussolini’s Italy, and would eventually have been implemented in National-Socialist Germany. It is an expression of economic populism. There is even a fine article on Wikipedia that explains this, if it hasn’t yet been vandalized by editors.

Marxists have inverted the meanings of words like corporatism that represent alternatives to Leninism in order, I believe, to remove those concepts from public discourse. As a conservative Catholic, Bannon should know better.

During the election last year I supported Trump. To those who pointed out Trump’s shortcomings, especially his Jewish connections, my response was that unfortunately Hitler was not on the ballot. Nor is it reasonable to expect somebody like Hitler to be on the ballot in a country as badly entrenched in delusion as the United States. The USA needs radical change, and this does not happen overnight. There are bound to be intermediate stages. Before the National-Socialists became dominant in the German Reichstag and Hitler was appointed chancellor, Europe was shocked by the election in 1925 of the conservative president Paul von Hindenburg. Hindenburg was not Hitler, but he made Hitler possible. Without losing sight of our ideal, this is how we have to view political change, as an incremental process.

Steve Bannon seems to be less educated in nationalism than he should be; he doesn’t even know as much as a conservative Catholic should know. It appears that his outlook is not altogether free of the prevalent “conservative” attitudes and other propaganda of the past few decades — but he does nonetheless represent a move in the right direction.

Don’t Celebrate Too Much Yet

Hadding — Thu, 10 Nov 2016 17:52:00 +0000

The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States represents a temporary reprieve for the United States of America as a majority-White country. It could become much more than that, but it is not yet evident that it will.

While Trump represents a move in the right direction, he has given no indication that he will take adequate measures to deal with the biggest fundamental problems in the United States:

demographic shift;
the embedded anti-White elite.

Trump talks about keeping illegal aliens out entirely, and has mentioned deportation, with priority given to those who commit crimes beyond simply being here illegally.

Of course the government should be doing this! How did this ever become controversial?

However, if President Trump deports every illegal alien and prevents all further illegal immigration, that will not be enough to preserve the White majority in the United States for very long.

In the first place, as Ann Coulter has been saying, legal immigration is an even bigger problem than illegal immigration, but Trump has not proposed to curb that.

Apart from any question of immigration, there is the differential birthrate between the non-White and White populations. There is no way for the government to address this problem without taking actions that would presently be considered unconstitutional.

The hour is very late, in regard to this demographic problem in the United States. The direness of the situation is reflected in the fact that Trump (according to current widely acknowledged figures) lost the popular vote and won only through the quirks of the Electoral College, due to the fact that Hispanic populations are concentrated in a few states and not evenly distributed like the White majority.

Of course it will be a disaster even for many non-Whites in the United States if Whites cease to be the majority. Rush Limbaugh refers to the White population as “the people who make the country work.” We can only hope that Trump, or somebody, will recognize the compelling need to preserve a White majority, and find a way, despite restrictions of the Constitution as currently interpreted, to preserve the country’s future.

The fact that there are already anti-White tantrums against Trump’s election is a hopeful sign. It was similar leftist tantrums in Germany (the Reichstag Fire being one manifestation) that facilitated Hitler’s assumption of emergency powers so that he could do what needed to be done. Let that anti-White rabble keep up its disturbances. Let them become more and more outrageous. There is hope for us in their irrational behavior.

Meanwhile you will see the anti-White elite and their lackeys like George Will scream bloody murder if Trump even presses the limits of executive power as much as Obama has done already. George Will explicitly stated this position immediately after the election, in anticipation of Trump’s not behaving like a typical Republican.

On the bright side, even before he won the election, Trump’s candidacy was very educational for the American public, in terms of shifting the range of acceptable public discourse, and bringing hidden problems to the surface.

Most notably there is the conflict between the interests of the White majority and the “Neoconservative” Jews like Krauthammer and Kristol, and crypto-leftists like George Will and the Bush family, who had embedded themselves in the Republican Party and hobbled its potential for representing White interests. Such infiltrators are now widely recognized as enemies of the White majority because of their reaction to Trump.

This lesson needs to be kept in mind, because just as they tried to prevent Trump’s election, they will now try to prevent Trump from making any significant permanent changes to stop the country’s decline. Their attempts to make nice and to pretend once again that they are really on our side of course should be rejected.

For the country’s survival, these people really should be removed from the body politic, “as a physician would purge a bacillus,” in the words of Mussolini. But it seems highly unlikely that Trump will do any such thing, as long as these subversives cannot be shown to have committed any statutory crime.

Trump’s enemies have called him a “racist autocrat” but that seems to represent what those anti-White subversives fear and expect, rather than Trump’s actual positions. We can hope that he will grow in that regard.

Meanwhile, the greatest good accomplished by the election of Donald Trump may be outside the United States. Of course it will be good for Russia and Syria if the USA ceases its saber-rattling and covert support for religious lunatics, but it also happens to be the case that US influence operates behind the scenes in the politics of Western Europe, especially Germany. It was US pressure that induced Germany to begin reparations payments to the State of Israel, and later to import unnecessary Turkish guestworkers. It is a good bet that behind-the-scenes manipulation has something to do with the current flood of non-White immigrants in Germany, and especially the inviting hospitality of “Mama Merkel.” Trump’s election will give Europe the possibility of taking necessary actions to recover from this.

In regard to the United States however, if Trump does not greatly alter the country’s demographic decline, it seems practically inevitable that he will be succeeded, before long, one way or another, by a real autocrat.

Wooden Soldiers and Bogeymen as Racial Allegory

Hadding — Fri, 25 Dec 2015 19:18:00 +0000

I first made the point that the character of Silas Barnaby in Hal Roach’s Babes in Toyland represented a synthesis of Jewish stereotypes with a post dated 24 December 2012. (That first stab at the topic has some flaws, mainly because I had not read the libretto for the original stage-production.) Thereafter other bloggers wrote on the same thesis. One year after, the quasi-outraged Rainer Chlodwig von Kook wrote “March of the Wooden National-Socialists” then there was an article by Tomato Bubble‘s Mike King, who even used images from my original post.

The article below was submitted to The Occidental Observer in time for Christmas 2015, but was rejected for publication.

An Interpretation of Hal Roach’s Babes in Toyland

by Hadding Scott

Hal Roach’s 1934 film Babes in Toyland was later given the alternate title March of the Wooden Soldiers. Here, to avoid confusion with the 1903 operetta and 1904 children’s book of the same name (or the 1961 Disney film, which is slightly closer to the operetta), I will consistently use the alternate title to refer to Hal Roach’s film. There is, after all, good reason for not referring to these very different works by the same title.

March of the Wooden Soldiers is a 1934 film from Hal Roach’s production company, starring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. It pretends to be based on the 1903 operetta Babes in Toyland by librettist Glen MacDonough and composer Victor Herbert. While Roach’s film includes some elements of the famous operetta, however, including some of the great music, it is a very different work, with different characters and a different story. I argue that what Hal Roach and his writers created is a racial allegory.

First, it is necessary to know what happens in the film.

Plot-Summary

After a fairly lengthy familiarization with what kinds of pleasant and innocent people inhabit Toyland, mostly characters from nursery-rhymes, the story begins with sinister old Silas Barnaby visiting the Old Woman in the Shoe to ask about the Old Woman’s nubile daughter, Little Bo-Peep, who has just gone out. Bushy-browed Barnaby locates Bo-Peep, a slender blonde beauty, and proposes marriage.

When Bo-Peep refuses, Barnaby becomes threatening and returns to Mother Peep demanding a mortgage-payment on the Shoe, which she is unable to make.

Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee live in an upstairs room of the Shoe. Ollie Dee has saved up some money that he will give to Mother Peep to keep up with the mortgage, but Stannie Dum has borrowed it to buy “peewees,” leaving an “IOU.”

Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee are workers in the Toy Factory. Ollie hopes to get the money for Mother Peep from the Master Toymaker, with whom he claims to be on good terms, but Stannie made a blunder that ruined any possibility of that. Santa Claus has ordered 600 toy soldiers 1 foot high, but Stannie garbled the order so that 100 soldiers 6 feet high were made. Santa Claus says, “I couldn’t give those things to my children to play with!” and the one toy-soldier that Stannie and Ollie have brought out for demonstration proceeds to make a wreck of the Toy Factory, making it impossible to ask the Master Toymaker for any favors.

Tom-Tom the Piper’s Son has proposed marriage to Little Bo-Peep and she has accepted, but Silas Barnaby will not be deterred. He returns to issue an ultimatum to Mother Peep: either Little Bo-Peep will marry him or Mother Peep and the other residents of the Shoe will be cast out onto the street.

After an attempt to solve Mother Peep’s problems by sneaking into Barnaby’s house, Stannie Dum and Ollie Dee are convicted of burglary and sentenced by Old King Cole to dunking, to be followed by banishment to Bogeyland. At this point Little Bo-Peep agrees to marry Silas Barnaby, with the result that he drops the charges against Stannie and Ollie.

Bo-Peep is given a way out of the marriage when Stannie, covered in a bridal veil, takes her place at the wedding, to be unveiled only after Barnaby hands over the mortgage on the Shoe. Ollie gets the mortgage in his hands and tears it up before Silas Barnaby detects the trick.

After this fortunate turn, Tom-Tom tells Bo-Peep that he will take her away, and sings “Castle in Spain.” But this is not the end of the film: there is nearly half an hour to go, enough time for Barnaby to attempt revenge. Like the Big Bad Wolf, Barnaby blows over Elmer the Pig’s house of straw and abducts him. Barnaby then has the pig’s hat and fiddle and some sausages planted in Tom-Tom’s house to frame him for “pignapping.” Old King Cole banishes Tom-Tom to Bogeyland.

Stannie and Ollie accidentally discover that the sausage used to frame Tom-Tom was beef, not pork, then find Elmer the Pig bound and gagged in Barnaby’s cellar, but Tom-Tom has already been carried away to Bogeyland. Barnaby flees as Old King Cole offers 50 thousand guineas for the scoundrel’s capture “dead or alive.”

Bo-Peep goes looking for Tom-Tom in Bogeyland and finds him. Then Barnaby finds the two of them sleeping in a cave and a struggle ensues. Barnaby summons his minions, the apelike Bogeymen, to help him capture Tom-Tom and Bo-Peep.

Stannie and Ollie, pursuing Barnaby, happen upon Tom-Tom and Bo-Peep, and, panicking at the site of the onrushing Bogeymen, flee with them back to Toyland, where, recounting their experience, they play the role of heroes.

Meanwhile Barnaby vows “to destroy the whole of Toyland” by leading the onslaught of the Bogeymen. The gates of Toyland are thrown open with Silas Barnaby at the head of a mob of furry brown men, who seem primarily occupied with getting into the dwellings where people are hiding and then carrying them away.

Stannie and Ollie fight the Bogeymen with darts, until Stannie gets the idea of activating the 100 six-foot-tall toy soldiers. The march of the soldiers out of the toy warehouse to the scene of battle is an awesome sight. The Bogeymen are no match for the Wooden Soldiers and are quickly defeated.

The Bogeymen at the end are pushed out the gate and into the moat, where they are eaten by crocodiles and the townspeople have a great laugh. Ollie then accidentally gets shot in the buttocks with a cannonload of darts.

Babes in Toyland vs. Oliver and Hardy in Toyland

Hal Roach’s 1934 film, although it begins with Mother Goose singing “Toyland” as she introduces characters from a book titled Babes in Toyland, tells an entirely different story from the one in the book, and really none of the characters are the same. Only certain elements from MacDonough’s Babes in Toyland are retained, and some of those retained elements are given a very different meaning.

Whereas MacDonough’s story wanders through several towns and other locales, the 1934 screenplay has only two locales: the charming walled city called Toyland where all the harmless nursery-rhyme characters live (with a villain among them), and on the other hand Bogeyland, a wilderness inhabited by Bogeymen. The Bogeymen play a key part in the 1934 production, insofar as the villain mobilizes them in an attack on Toyland (the main event in what I see as a racial allegory), whereas in the book neither Bogeyland nor Bogeymen exist, and no such attack occurs.

The differences between the villain of the 1934 production and the villain of the book are most important. For one thing, they have different names. The original villain was Uncle Barnaby, whereas the 1934 villain is Silas Barnaby. That is an important difference that relates to the different crimes of the two villains.

Uncle Barnaby’s intended victims were his nephew and niece, whom he wanted to kill so that he could steal their inheritance; MacDonough’s story revolves entirely around this intention of murder and larceny, and the children’s escape. Although the Uncle Barnaby of the book is a greedy usurer, and although he is said to wear a skullcap – considerations that might lead one to ask about his ethnicity – there is a barrier to interpreting Uncle Barnaby as Jewish, insofar as he is a blood-relative of the main characters, his intended victims, about whom there is nothing remotely Jewish. (The innocent niece and nephew, the main characters of the book, do not appear at all in Hal Roach’s film.)

By contrast, the Silas Barnaby of the 1934 production is nobody’s uncle, which leaves open the possibility of seeing him as a Jew. Indeed he seems to be a composite of negative Jewish stereotypes: he is the usurer, the shyster, the agitator. He has power and influence because of his money, but the central motive for Silas Barnaby has nothing to do with money: rather, he is trying to force the young, pure, idealistic blonde, Little Bo-Peep, to marry him. (That may not seem an especially Jewish motive but it can be taken as a metaphor for the Jewish demand of not being excluded from anything in Gentile society.) The way that Silas Barnaby attempts to force Little Bo-Peep to marry him also happens to anticipate in several respects (or perhaps inspired, given that the later film is not a strictly accurate history) the cinematic representation of Joseph Suess Oppenheimer in Veit Harlan’s Jud Süß(1940), where Little Bo- Peep is replaced by Dorothea Sturm.

A blogger named Mike King, who has clearly taken his cue from my original post on this topic from 24 December 2012, makes much of the fact that Barnaby’s assistant wears what looks like a yarmulke. By itself, it is hard to know how much to make of that, since the Master Toymaker also wears a skullcap (although different). The headwear of Barnaby’s assistant, however, gains significance from the fact that the wearer is also the only swarthy person and the only character with a foreign accent in the film. (“Foreign-born” used to be practically a euphemism for Jewish.) Although inconclusive in itself, all of this together can be taken as corroborative of the other evidence of Barnaby’s Jewishness.

Of course, unless it is recorded

somewhere that one of them actually said so, it is impossible to prove absolutely that Hal Roach and his screenwriters, Frank Butler and Nick Grindé – or Stan Laurel, if his influence went that far – intended Silas Barnaby as a Jew. It is certain, however, that Silas Barnaby can be seen as a Jew. The gestaltimplying the Jewishness of Silas Barnaby – at least three Jewish stereotypes in one character – is (for me at least) quite compelling.

Bogeymen of the Early 20^th Century

Barring inspiration from some non-material realm, creatures of fantasy such as the Bogeymen must be derived from things that actually exist. It is not hard to think of a foundation in reality for the idea of Bogeymen. Ollie Dee tells Old King Cole that the Bogeymen are “half-man and half-animal”; the word Bogeymen already says that they are simultaneously men and not quite men, or a lower type of man.

When the torch-bearing throng of Bogeymen enters Toyland with Silas Barnaby at their head, the residents of Toyland flee into their houses. The Bogeymen rush through the streets and begin climbing on the houses, looking for ways to break in. Torches in the Bogeymen’s hands imply arson, but that possibility is never actualized because it would put a blemish on the eventual happy ending. Arson is not the only likely outcome that is omitted. We see a Bogeyman seizing a screaming young woman, and several Bogeyman carrying off children, but of course no one’s clothes are torn or removed. Silas Barnaby himself is in the act of abducting his own unwilling bride when the Wooden Soldiers arrive to reestablish order and civilization. In this film for general audiences, of course the real horror of what Silas Barnaby and the Bogeymen represent is only implied. What is implied matches what we know happens when Blacks become lawless.

The White world had experienced numerous bloody Negro insurrections in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries.

Outbursts of Black mass-violence against Whites continued long after slavery was abolished. In the early 20^th century there was a Negro uprising in Cuba staged by the Partido Independiente de Color that developed into the Cuban Race War of 1912, which was accompanied by rape, murder, and “unspeakable outrages” against White women (Crawfordsville Review, 6 June 1912). Order was reestablished only after the United States sent in marines and bluejackets.

In 1915 D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, one of the most influential films of all time, represented the Negro takeover and accompanying abuses after the War of Southern Independence. These troubles, as represented in the film, were caused fundamentally by a White congressman of perverse will named Stoneman, and his mulatto protégé Silas Lynch. In the finale, the Negroes’ rampage is suppressed by the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan on horseback.

In 1917, the bloody Bolshevik takeover in Russia cast a long shadow over the first half of the 20th century. Lothrop Stoddard’s 1922 book, The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace of the Underman, explained this event as the result of a proliferation of congenital misfits and throwbacks, which he called “the underman.”

In the 1920s Lothrop Stoddard added scholarly respectability to the proposition that the White race must act to preserve itself against the encroachment and aggression of non-White races. Stoddard’s influence was such that his book The Rising Tide of Color against White World Supremacy (1920) was even mentioned in a 1921 speech given by President Warren G. Harding in Birmingham, Alabama. That book attracted attention again in 1933 because of concerns about the expansion of Imperial Japan, about which Stoddard had been prescient.

Stoddard’s warnings focused mainly on the human material for revolution, not so much on the instigators. Not infrequently, behind the Negro insurrections of the 19th century there stood an instigator or inspirator who was himself not a Negro but a White man obsessed with Biblical morality, John Brown being the most famous example. In the 20th century, however, agitation of the Negro and of the “underman” against the majority was largely taken over by Jews pursuing power for their ethnic group.

The Great Depression, which had begun in 1929, created favorable conditions for a revolutionary movement – notoriously led by Jews (e.g., at that time Herbert Benjamin, Israel Amter, Mike Gold) in the USA as it had been in Russia – to recruit new members with the intention of eventually bringing Bolshevism to the United States. They were especially successful in recruiting Negroes.

Thus, when March of the Wooden Soldiers appeared in 1934, bloody insurrections by Negroes and other lower humanity were a matter of living memory and of present concern, and there was widespread awareness of the role of Jews as instigators. Meanwhile, the vision of a violent Negro rampage suppressed by an armed force of White men constituted the finale of the greatest motion picture yet created.

In fact, Babes in Toyland can be seen as in some ways the same story as Birth of a Nation, with Bogeymen in the place of Blacks and wooden soldiers in the place of Klansmen, and Silas Barnaby playing a role somewhat analogous to that of Congressman Stoneman and Silas Lynch. In that light, the copying of the name Silas from Birth of a Nation, where Silas was the mulatto who transgressed with his intention to marry a White woman, seems to be a hint about how the villain of Babes in Toylandis to be understood. In other words, Silas Barnaby is transgressing against a racial barrier when he seeks to marry Bo-Peep – because he is a Jew.

Hal Roach’s Differences with Jews

The producer is the idea-man behind the movie. Hollywood producer Hal Roach was an Irish American who, after starting as an actor in Hollywood, was able to start his own production-company because of an inheritance. His best-known productions are the Our Gang shorts, and films featuring Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

One of Hal Roach’s silent productions in 1927 was a short called Jewish Prudence, written by Stan Laurel and starring Jewish character-actor Max Davidson. It portrays Jews in a thoroughly stereotypical manner that must

Stan Laurel was no dummy.

inevitably have a cautionary effect. It shows Jews for example as swindlers. Of course this does not mean that Hal Roach categorically disliked all Jews, but it suggests that for him Jews as a group were no object of reverence.

It may also be significant that Stan Laurel, the writer of Jewish Prudence, is said by various sources to have exerted considerable influence over how March of the Wooden Soldiers turned out (e.g., Danny Lawrence, The Making of Stan Laurel, 2011, p. 82, writes that Roach “yielded to Stan on the creative side of the production”).

In 1937, three years after March of the Wooden Soldiers, Hal Roach formed the RAM (Roach And Mussolini) production company, with Vittorio Mussolini, the 20-year-old son of the Italian Duce. The company started with capital from the Banca Nazionale del Lavoro (a subsidiary of the Italian government at that time) and from Roach himself. Once the deal was sealed, Roach met the Duce, a great fan of motion-pictures who hoped that Hal Roach would bring Italian productions up to the Hollywood standard. Perhaps it was March of the Wooden Soldiersthat had particularly impressed the Italian leader!

When Roach came under attack for this deal, he made no bones about the fact that the trouble was coming from Jews. To the Jews, Roach gave a half-pleading, half-scolding response, recorded in Sheilah Graham’s “Hollywood Today” column:

“Mussolini has never expressed himself against the Jews,” said Roach. “As a matter of fact, Italy is full of non-Aryans driven out of Germany by Hitler. But if one day Mussolini adopted Hitler’s racial policy, a man close to him could be of great use. I’m convinced that my association with Mussolini is the finest thing that could have happened for the Jews. If they’re smart, they’ll stop antagonizing Mussolini by showing bad feeling toward his son.” [Sheilah Graham, 5 October 1937]

When Vittorio Mussolini visited the United States in 1937, he first had to avoid Communist protestors in New York City (AP, 24 September 1937), then was under heavy police protection during his 20 minute layover in Kansas City (AP, 25 September 1937), then had his presence “deplored” in paid advertisements by Hollywood’s “Anti-Nazi League for the Defense of American Democracy” (AP, 25 September 1937). With a candor that would later become quite rare, The Day, a newspaper in New London, Connecticut, stated unequivocally that the troubles befalling Roach And Mussolini were due to the prevalence of Jews in Hollywood:

Moreover, considering the large number of Jews in executive, directorial and screen acting parts, in Hollywood, it was not surprising to find a fairly well established antagonism toward Mussolini’s son in the colony. Il Duce is the father of Fascism; in many matters he is supposed to be working hand and glove with Hitler. Hitler has persecuted the Jews, and the members of this race in Hollywood think it not unreasonable to hold that Mussolini is at least indirectly connected with the troubles that have beset their people.

When the Hal Roach studios arranged a testimonial dinner for young Mussolini, before he hurriedly left the movie center, more than half of the 300 invited guests failed to appear…. [“Snub to Young Mussolini”,The Day, New London, Conn., 2 November 1937]

One author describes the demise of Roach And Mussolini as having been forced on Roach by the company that distributed his films:

“The industry as a whole let Roach know, but fast, that they weren’t happy,” said Roach special effects man Roy Seawright. “But Roach could be stubborn; he used to be a truck driver and he ran his business the way he did a truck He saw a road to take, and he was going to go down that road come hell or high water.”

The upshot of all this was that an appalled Nick Schenck pulled Loew’s distribution out from under Roach. His last MGM release was the Laurel and Hardy feature Blockheads, after which, in May of 1938, he began releasing through United Artists….

Roach had no apparent regrets; as an old man living in Beverly Hills, one of the prominent features of his house was a warmly autographed portrait of Benito Mussolini. [Scott Eyman, Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer, 2008]

Incidentally, the highly conditional nature of the Hollywood Jews’ opposition to Fascism is evident in the fact that four years prior to the short life of Roach And Mussolini, Jack Cohn, a vice-president of Columbia Pictures, had made the encomiastic documentary Mussolini Speaks, and was thereafter invited to visit the flattered Duce (“From the Studios”, Lewiston Daily Sun,6 February 1933). The difference is that in the years between Jack Cohn’s Mussolini Speaks and Hal Roach’s deal with Vittorio Mussolini, a positive relationship developed between Italy and National-Socialist Germany, which was seen as contrary to Jewish interests. This consideration of Jewish interests made all the difference in whether it was acceptable for anyone in Hollywood to do business with Fascist Italy, and whether Fascist Italy must be portrayed positively or negatively.

Thus, Hal Roach backed out of the deal with Mussolini because Jews forced him and he could not do otherwise.

It is apparent that Hal Roach’s political and social outlook was different from and somewhat opposed to that of Jewish Hollywood. It does not seem unlikely that Hal Roach would have made a film with implied negative messages about Jews such as I believe March of the Wooden Soldiers to be, especially since his studio had already made at least one short film with overt negative messages about Jews in 1927.

Alfred Rosenberg on the relationship of National-Socialism to Totalitarianism

Hadding — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 02:53:00 +0000

One emphasized the state; one emphasized race.

By 1934 the supporters of the NSDAP included many recent converts from other ideologies, some of whom had supported the old order of the Prussian Monarchy, others (like Goebbels) who had been Marxists. The Italian Fascist state had already appeared for twelve years as a great success, supported by neohegelianism, a modification of the hegelian thought-system which had supported the Prussian State until its demise in 1918 (when it was succeeded by the Weimar Republic). Hegelianism and neohegelianism justified the state as an end in itself. National-Socialism did not regard the state as an end in itself, but because the examples of Prussia and Fascist Italy loomed large at the time, it was tempting for people not thoroughly familiar with national-socialism to see it in this light (and even today it is not unusual for careless sources to mislabel national-socialism as “fascism”). The liberal age which Rosenberg mentions began with the Enlightenment of the 18th century, and found expression in ideologies ranging from democratic-republicanism to hegelianism to marxism. In this piece published in the Völkischer Beobachter of January 9, 1934, Alfred Rosenberg shows that he is not against the use of a powerful state as a tool, but explains that it is important to distinguish the essential ideas of national-socialism from ideas rooted in the liberal age, so as to avoid a recurrence of the idolatry of the state that liberal ideas engender. (Translation and introduction by Hadding Scott.)

“The State is only a means to an end. Its end and its purpose is to preserve and promote a community of human beings who are physically as well as spiritually kindred.” — Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

Total State?
Alfred Rosenberg

Völkischer Beobachter, 9 January 1934

In recent months, in many speeches and essays, the view has been expressed that from now on instead of the multi-party state, instead of the liberally splintered form of government, there is the “total state.” It is said that this state seizes at once the whole political, economic, and cultural life of the nation, that it is the guardian, leader, and commander of all expressions of life, so as to secure thereby the necessary unity of Germany in all fields. In all these utterances it has been overlooked that the abstract state has been thoroughly an idea of the liberal age, which was set up as a technical instrument of power apart from economy and culture as a thing existing for itself, and was accordingly worshiped or, by other tendencies, passionately combatted. In reality it was such that the representatives of the state, before the war, often no longer had any sense of being a servant of the people, but instead regarded the state as a thing for itself, which hovered over the nation and whose representatives possessed the claim of exaltation over all other citizens.This abstract concept of the state had still not changed after 1918, but had merely acquired another attribute.

The revolution of January 30, 1933 is not by any means the continuation of the absolutist state with yet another attribute; rather the state is now cast into a completely different relationship to our people and national character. What has been accomplished in the past year and yet will be accomplished to a greater extent, is not the so-called totality of the state but the totality of the National-Socialist movement. The state is no longer something which should exist apart from the people and apart from the movement, be it as a mechanistic apparatus, be it as a ruling instrument; rather it is a tool of the National-Socialist worldview.

This appears to be only a small distinction between the emphases in the main thrust of a political or epistemological conception. And yet the clarification of ideological assumptions is of enormous importance, because on the basis of a false development of concepts — perhaps not at first, but surely in the course of time — a practical consequence for the conduct of policy will occur. If we spoke continuously of the total state, in this way the concept of the state in itself would gradually move back to the center among younger National-Socialists and coming generations, and the affairs of the state would be perceived as the primary thing. But if we emphasize already today with utmost clarity that it is a specific political worldview and movement which claims the right of totality, so will the gazes of generations focus precisely on this movement and regard the relationship between the state and the NSDAP in a completely different light, than if one designated the state in itself as the highest thing.

The National-Socialist movement is the formed power of the thought of the 20th century, formed for the preservation of the whole German people, its blood and its character. At the disposal of this movement the state stands as its most powerful and manly tool, and must always receive anew its vital powers and impulses from the movement, whereby it remains flexible and enduring, and escapes the danger of bureaucratization, ossification, and alienation from the people. Once it is seen in this relationship, the national-socialist concept of the state becomes properly infused with blood, and we believe that the state thus receives for the first time its consecration, its inner strength, and its authority in a higher degree than if, led perhaps by energetic individuals*, it could become a goal in itself, and consequently ossified.

On all these grounds it is recommended for all National-Socialists to speak no longer of the total state, rather of the completeness (totality) of the National-Socialist worldview, of the NSDAP as the body of this worldview, and of the National-Socialist state as the tool for the preservation of the soul, spirit, and blood of National-Socialism as the powerful phenomenon which made its beginning in the 20th century.
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* Mussolini of course would have been the most obvious example.