More on the Fascist Roots of Liberalism

(more thoughts inspired by Jonah Goldberg's book Liberal Fascism

Have you noticed how Obama is discouraging donations to charity? His idea seems to be that the government should be the entity that has a monopoly on charity. The Nazis coopted independent religions and other charities during their rise to power. When they took over, they replaced the churches with a Nazi monopoly on charity. However, in the Nazi formulation, anyone who wasn't a "national comrade" was excluded from government aid to the needy and unfortunate. "Everything for the race, and nothing outside of it" was the central ethos of Nazism's mission and appeal.

In America the medical profession "got drafted into the ranks of social planners, because of World War I and the great influenza epidemic." Public health, "for doctors promoted to the rank of physicians to the body politic," caused the Hippocratic oath to lose influence. The Germans called that sort of thinking, "the common good supercedes the private good."

American progressives celebrated the election of Hitler, a famous teetotaler. In Germany the concern was more that alcohol and the more despised cigarette would lead to the degeneration of Aryan purity. Tobacco was credited with every evil imaginable, including fostering homosexuality. "Prohibition was the premier illustration of how closely American progressives linked moral and physical health, and many Nazis looked favorably on the American effort"