From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

Antifascist poster, Spanish Civil War, c. 1938. "The foreign fascist hordes are trying to invade our territory. Antifascists! Block their road, bar them forever from our soil!"

There are so many parallels and similarities between the situation we face now and the situation faced by Americans during the 1930's and the rise of fascism at home and abroad, but there are also many profound differences. Perhaps the most troubling is the absence of any political ideology to counter a revived fascism that has been taking over the world.

One can say what one will about the merits of Communism, or the lack of them, but it was a coherent ideology opposed to fascism, and at the time the example of the Soviet Union could be and was held up as a model antifascist society. It was deeply -- and ultimately fatally -- flawed, of course, but it was something.

 Now? What is there?

Occupy is self-consciously non-ideological and apolitical. It operates in a space outside the framework of routine civil society -- which is one reason why it has been significantly successful, despite repression by authorities and more than a little internal dissension.

But unless something can stand as a counter to the modern neo-fascists, the fascists win. And hands down, they are winning, spectacularly and consistently. They have been doing so for decades, to the point where their victories are taken pretty much for granted as the way things are, the baseline from which any opposition is expected to arise. In other words, the neo-fascist reality is the one we all live in now.

In 1938, fascism was the political reality through much of Europe -- we forget that most of Europe was, by 1938 or 1939, ruled by fascists and what Magil and Stevens call "semi-fascists." Fascism was the reality in much of Asia and Latin America as well. Colonial Africa could not escape the fascist march.

The United States, as Magil and Stevens amply document, was riddled with overt and covert fascist elements and organizations, found in every aspect of government and throughout what passed for civil society, especially but not exclusively in the South.

I would argue that part of the reason for the pervasiveness of fascism at the time was "fashion." Fascism was new and energized, revolutionary in much the same way that Soviet Communism was, but with the key difference that fascism was the modern mass movement, the modern revolution if you will, that provided crucial support for the very sort of hypercapitalism that had so recently been responsible for crashing economies all over the world.

Fascism is the response of late-stage capitalism to existential crisis. The World War, the Russian Revolution(s), the financial collapse of 1929, and the mortal blow to the peoples of the capitalist democracies delivered by the Great (and at the time seemingly Endless) Depression, was perceived by many, inside and outside the system, as the quintessential Crisis of Capitalism that would quite likely lead to its ultimate demise.

Fascism was demonstrated as a functional alternative to both Communism and Capitalism in Extremis. There are many reasons why it was so successful at the time, chief among them that fascists gave people a common national purpose and it put people back to work. Global Capitalism on its own, as we've seen since the Crash of 2008, cannot do that. "Nations" are simply in the way, and keeping substantial numbers of people unemployed indefinitely is a necessity to ensure profits continue to rise (unemployment works by driving down wages and benefit costs).

Fascism was highly regimented and militarized in the 1930's, aspects which we note are largely absent from the neo-fascism of today.

Imperialism is still very much apparent, but no longer are vast armies assembled to undertake the conquest of foreign lands. According to modern military doctrine, mass armies are no longer necessary for conquest of desirable foreign territory or control of resources. Bribery works very well, and what can't be bought can be rather easily seized and held by a small, mobile, technologically advanced army together with a sufficient number of mercenaries to handle extraneous matters and occasional wet work. And of course remote controlled Death From Above machines take the place of thousands of military personnel.

As targets soon discover, there is no adequate defense against modern warfare.

Civil society and civilian life are largely neglected by the neo-fascist cabal of global rulers we see today. Apart from constant surveillance and sporadic repression of nascent uprisings, the ruling class essentially ignores most of what's going on in "The Street." There is an incessant barrage of propaganda from every corporate outlet.

 Everything the common people are allowed to  have is due to the "gifts" of the elites, and everyone is supposed to be grateful for what little -- or much -- they are given. But nothing comes without a cost.

Because taxes are seen as punishment for failure, only the "lesser people," who by definition are failures, are forced to pay taxes.

 Rent seeking, extraction, gambling, plunder and pillage now constitute the elite "economy" -- if you want to call it that. For man of the rest of us, subsistence has become the New Normal.

This is about where global fascists would have been by now if the unpleasantness of World War II hadn't intervened.


And so we continue with excerpts from "The Peril of Fascism" by A.B. Magil and Henry Stevens, published in 1938 by International Publishers, the American publisher for the Communist Party of the United States.

The Bonus March of 1932 was undoubtedly one of the epoch-making mass struggles in American history. It was initiated in a very modest form by a small, militant veterans' organization, the Workers' Ex-Servicemen's League (later renamed the League of American Ex-Servicemen [Note: the League disbanded in 1935, its members joining the American Legion and other veterans' organizations.] but it grew far beyond the plans of its original sponsors. Members of the American Legion, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the Disabled American Veterans disregarded the instructions of their national officialdom and joined with the members of the Workers' Ex-Servicemen's League and with unaffiliated veterans in the great trek to the nation's capitol. All told, about 20,000 of them gathered in Washington and camped for nearly two months in Anacostia Flats.

Hoover blasted the ex-soldiers out of Anacostia with the gun-fire, tear gas and bayonets of the United States Army. But he also helped blast himself out of the Presidency. Bloody Thursday, July 28 [1932], aroused the entire country. The great veterans' struggle broke through the anti-bonus policy of the Legion chiefs and won from the Portland, Oregon, convention in October, 1932, the first endorsement of immediate payment. [Note: the "bonus" was legislation passed in 1924 providing per-capita payment of $1 a day for those engaged in domestic military service during WWI and $1.25 per day for service overseas, payable in 1945. The Bonus March was organized in 1932 to demand immediate payment so as to alleviate some of the suffering caused by the Depression.]

The army of bonus marchers that staggered out of Washington in rout and apparent defeat became the nucleus of a movement which, gathering ever wider popular support, marched forward irresistibly until it culminated in 1936 in the passage by the 74th Congress of the bonus bill over President Roosevelt's veto.

The Bonus March revealed not only the strength of the veterans' movement, but also its weakness. It was only natural that among men who had little experience with rank and file organization and who only yesterday have been ardent patrioteers there should exist considerable political confusion. And there were not lacking at Anacostia Flats buzzard of reaction on the hunt for prey. We have already mentioned the Key Men of America. It was the Key Men, with the collaboration of General Pelham D. Glassford, at the time Washington police chief, that foisted on the marchers the Oregon adventurer, W. W. Waters, as commander-in-chief of the Bonus Expeditionary Forces. Waters surrounded himself with a host of shady characters, among them Harold B. Foulkrod, former manager of the Philadelphia branch of the Burns Detective Agency, who was named "legislative representative." These individuals sedulously used the  Red scare to divide the veterans. They were helped along by Father Coughlin who sent a $5,000 check to the B.E.F. "with absolute instructions that they who benefit by this donation be clear of all Communist leaders and Communist suggestions."

Out of the Bonus March emerged what was one of the country's first openly fascist terrorist organizations, the Khaki Shirts, also known later as the U. S. Fascists. It was launched by Waters, with himself as leader. The shirt idea spread rapidly, and Father J. R. Cox of Pittsburgh attempted to entice veterans into the Blue Shirts.

The passage of the Bonus resolution by the 1932 Legion convention marked the first step toward directing the organization away from the reactionary policies which it had hitherto pursued. But economic issues are inseparably bound up with questions of civil liberties, with the preservation of democracy itself. The leaders of the American Legion had early shown a decidedly pro-fascis bent and a special affection for Mussolini. In January, 1923, only two months after Il Duce has established the world's first fascist dictatorship, National Commander Alvin Owlsley, in an interview with the Newspaper Enterprise Association, expounded on the philosophy of the Legion's royal family in the following candid words:

If ever needed, the American Legion stands ready to protect our country's institutions and ideals as the Fascisti dealt with the destructionists who menaced Italy... Do not forget that the Fascisti are to Italy what the American Legion is to the United States.

The history of the Legion during most of the years since its inception certainly indicates that its leaders have attempted to live up to these "ideals." They have sought to suppress meetings of labor and liberal groups through the Legion's well-financed National Americanism Commission, directed by Homer Chaillaux, have incited red-hunts in the colleges and distributed large quantities of red-baiting literature, including that richly imaginative work, Mrs. Elizabeth Dilling's The Red Network, which lists among the country's dangerous Reds Mrs. Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Mayor La Guardia of New York City. In 1934-35 the Legion chiefs actively cooperated in the Chamber of Commerce-Hearst crusade against democracy. At the same time these super-nationalists have not neglected their international contacts. A Paris dispatch of Hearst's Universal Service published in the New York American as of June 25, 1935, stated:

Reports that the Prince of Wales, Colonel de la Rocque, head of French war veterans, and American Legion chiefs are cooperating to unite veterans to force their respective government to present a united front against Communism impressed delegates to the International Chamber of Commerce meeting. [The Prince of Wales, (later King Edward VIII and now the Duke of Winsor) at the time was making overtures to the German fascist war veterans' organization in line with the British Tory government's policy of rapprochement with the Nazi regime.]

But the membership of the Legion were beginning to move in a different direction. Many posts were adopting resolutions condemning strike-breaking and attacks on democratic rights. In San Francisco and Uniontown, Pennsylvania, Legion posts officially participated in parades for slain strikers.The Blissville Post of Queens, Long Island, after placing Paul Crosbie, an avowed Communist, on trial, ruled that "Communist membership is not sufficient reason for expulsion." In New Jersey the state organization of the Legion in 1936 opposed compulsory saluting of the flag for school children. In the same year, the Americanism Committee of the New York County Posts of the Legion adopted and circulated a pamphlet called: "Americanism, What Is It?" which advocated an Americanism that was a far cry from the Hearstized brand that the Legion chiefs had been propounding. In June, 1936, the convention of the New York County Legion voted opposition to teachers' loyalty oaths and urged higher relief allowances.

...

Let it be remembered that ex-servicemen have played an all-important role in the development of fascism in other countries. In Germany, the National Socialist Party was organized in 1919 by army officers who won their first successes among returned soldiers. In Italy, Mussolini formed his first terrorist bands from among former soldiers. In France, the core of the fascist forces has been the veterans' organization, Croix de Feu (now the Social Party) led by Colonel de la Rocque. In the United States, as we have seen, the Legion was groomed by its founders and early leaders to play a similar role. That their dreams are farther from realization today than at any time in the Legion's history is a tribute to the strength of the democratic sentiment among the World War veterans and the American people as a whole and their growing awareness of the social and political forces that are shaping the world today. The fight against professional patriotism and fascism in the American Legion has not yet been won, but recent developments offer hope that the men who went through the blood and muck of the war may yet avoid the tragic mistakes of their comrades in Germany, Italy, and France.

 

From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

Anti-Fascist Spanish Civil War Poster, c. 1938

What really strikes me about this book ("The Peril of Fascism -- The Crisis of American Democracy" by A. B. Magil and Henry Stevens, International Publishers, 1938) is how contemporary it seems. What was going on when this book was written closely resembles what's going on now, particularly the overbearing of the state and the violent suppression of dissent. Magil and Stevens see this as the hallmark of fascism, just as many observers do today, but in 1938, fascism was still something relatively new and revolutionary. Now it's something old and reactionary.

Liberals and progressives today may be primarily concerned with preserving what they can of the status quo against the tide of cruelty and barbarism being led by the modern day neo-fascist vanguard. It's a losing strategy, as it was in 1938. But in 1938, there was an ideological answer, and the world would soon enough be engulfed in flames to test it. Now, there seems to be an absence of ideology to counter the march of neo-fascism. The rebellions and revolutions around the world are for the most part not ideologically based, and so they seem to have little real substance (and as we have been seeing in North Africa, they don't produce the intended results.)

Some additional excerpts from "The Peril of Fascism" to help set the scene of what was going on in the 1930's. The parallels to today are obvious, and yet the differences are, too:

It was during this period that the Supreme Court emerged as perhaps the principal institutional bulwark of reaction. In previous periods, when the Presidency had been under the firm control of big business, the court played a role secondary to the executive branch of the government as an impediment to progress. Now, however, with the Presidency in the hands of Roosevelt, the conservative corporation lawyers who dominated the Supreme Court came to the rescue of the economic royalists. When the reactionary drive against Roosevelt was at its height in the spring of 1935, the Supreme Court went into action and nullified one New Deal law after another. Among the first to go was the N. R. A., which from the viewpoint of big business had outlived its usefulness. After that came the A.A.A. decision which attacked the principle of government taxation for farm relief. Other decisions nullified the railroad retirement act, which made railroad pensions compulsory; voided the Fraizer-Lemke act, providing partial relief to mortgage-ridden farmers; and set aside other progressive legislation, all in defense of the privileges and prerogatives of big business.

Never before had the Supreme Court attempted to exercise on such a vast scale its usurped powers to nullify Congressional legislation. From 1803, when the court first claimed its powers to void the law of the country, until the Civil War, the court wielded this power only once -- in the notorious Dred Scott case, which played an important part in precipitating the war between the states. It was not until after the Civil War, when monopoly capitalism developed the power of the judiciary as a means of strengthening its own rule, that the courts began to exercise their usurped powers on a considerable scale. From 1860 to 1932, the court refused to recognize the right of Congress to enact laws in 60 cases. At no stage, however, did it wield its autocratic powers with the vigor it did in 1935-36 when it rendered 12 decisions against Congress.

This development was of the most far-reaching importance for the future of American democracy. It meant that five reactionary lawyers, constituting themselves as a majority of the Supreme Court, arrogated the right to pass on all reform laws and to nullify the will of the people. At the present stage of American political development this autocratic exercise of power can be correctly described as fascist in tendency. By means of its usurped power, a majority of the court can, by judicial fiat, frustrate the proceses of even capitalist democracy. Here is one of the specifically indigenous forms in which the growing fascist tendencies of American big business was manifested.

But an even more obvious expression of the increasingly fascist temper of American reaction was the wholesale use of violence against workers and farmers. In the three years from 1933 to 1935 inclusive, state troops were sent against strikers and demonstrating workers and farmers at least 60 times. In 1934, 49 workers and farmers were killed by soldiers, police or armed mobs of vigilantes. In 1935, 39 were killed. Countless thousands were wounded with bullets, clubbed, beaten, tear-gassed, maimed. Thousands of others were arrested and jailed on trumped up charges for exercising their elementary democratic rights to free speech and assembly. In 1935 alone, the International Labor Defense estimates, there were nearly 18,000 recorded cases of arrests of workers and farmers who participated in strikes and unemployment and other demonstrations.

A crop of criminal syndicalism and sedition cases, unparalleled in recent years -- wrote the American Civil Liberties Union -- marked the drive of the reactionaries against demonstrations of the unemployed and organization of the workers in the left wing unions. Criminal anarchy, criminal syndicalism and sedition laws were invoked in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Iowa, Oregon, and in Georgia an insurrection statute was used in the same way.

Besides this "legal" use of violence was the extra-legal terror exercised by vigilantes and other gangs of fascist terrorists. In 1934, 1935, and 1936, armed terrorist groups cropped up in various parts of the country, organized and financed by employers and operating with the tacit, and in some cases, with the open consent of the police and other officials. These gangs -- composed, on the one hand, of underworld criminals, and on the other, of the "best people" in their communities -- were the shock troops of American fascism. They constitute the counterpart, even if in embryonic form, of Hitler's stormtroopers in Germany. They raided workers headquarters, kidnapped and beat labor organizers, intimidated recalcitrant officials -- all for the greater profit and glory of big capital.

Anti-working-class violence reached its highest pitch during and immediately after the San Francisco general strike in the summer of 1934. The strike, which was the most effective action of its kind in American history, struck fear among the capitalist bourbons throughout the country. The more panicky "princes of privilege" had visions of immanent revolution. The more realistic saw that the victory of the San Francisco marine workers would lead to a resurgence of the labor movement and encourage trade union organization in every industry. Both were determined to crush labor by every possible means.

The reign of terror inaugurated in California after the San Francisco strike approximated fascist rule. "Law and order," civil liberties and democratic rights were violently brushed aside by the police and fascist mobsters -- all in the name of law and order.

Literally thousands -- said one writer in the Nation, describing the situation in California in the summer of 1934 -- including many noncombatants have been gassed, had their skulls cracked, been trampled upon and shot. Countless homes have been entered. Private property has been ruthlessly destroyed.

The class-conscious workers of California are living in terror today. Except in Los Angeles their movement has been driven underground. They are listed, photographed, studied, harassed, and constantly attacked by their enemies. They have no protectors, no newspapers in which to appeal to public opinion. When they attempt to win better working conditions, they are met with special clubs four feet long, gas bombs, iron pipes, billies and bullets.

In Imperial Valley during the strikes this year, police, private armies and vigilantes committed every crime in the calendar upon their victims, who comprised the migratory workers and their allies, labor organizers, lawyers of the Civil Liberties Union, and the International Labor Defense. Hundreds were arrested; gas, water, and fire were used to terrorize the unfortunates, some of whom were working for 35 cents a day... Stockades held prisoners of war; chain gangs were improvised to punish them; all roads were blockaded against either food or moral aid for the victims...

In Northern California the red hunt was hardly a hunt. It was a war... Encouraged by statements of Governor Merriam, Mayor Rossi and Police Chief Quinn, the minor mayors of the Bay cities, vigilantes under many names -- "safety committees," Minute Men, White Guards, Silver Shirts, Ku Klux Klanners -- roamed the highways at will, acting in much the same manner as their German prototypes, the Brown Shirts.

The fascist reign of terror in California had its counterpart in many other communities throughout the country where workers and farmers struck or demonstrated for better conditions and for their democratic rights.

Sixteen workers were shot to death in the national textile strike in September, 1934. Seven were massacred by deputies at Honea Path, South Carolina; three in Trion, Georgia; others were killed in Greenville, South Carolina, Saylesville and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. Six were bayoneted by state troops in High Point, North Carolina. In Georgia, Governor Talmadge, an outspoken admirer of Hitler and a supporter of the American Liberty League, established concentration camps modeled after those of Nazi Germany.

In scattered areas throughout the country -- particularly in the South, in California, in coal and iron towns -- local regimes which were fascist in character, if not in name, were set up to prevent trade union organization. In these regions, the right of free speech, press and assemblage, the right to organize, strike and picket were completely abolished. Citizens enjoyed only such right as the employers and their private armies and mobsters were willing to permit -- and these were few indeed.

Such fascist fever spots had long existed in many company towns and sections of the South, but now the disease spread to many additional communities and assumed more virulent forms.

This was especially true in the southern plantation areas, where the vestiges of chattel slavery and the tradition of the violent suppression the Negroes created favorable conditions for the growth of the fascist germ.

Describing the suppression of the sharecroppers' strike in Arkansas in the autumn of 1935, an organizer for the Southern Tenant Farmers Union wrote in the New York Post:

At night deputy sheriffs and masked men ride the roads, on the lookout for secret meetings of the union... Beatings are frequent and killings are not uncommon. Planters even organized a fascist band, wearing green shirts and carrying the swastika as its symbol. .. Hundreds of our members have been beaten and scores of families have been driven from their homes by terror... At least ten of our members have been killed.

And so it went, on and on throughout the country, and this was during the heady day of the New Deal presided over by the saintly "leftist" FDR. Most people today are completely unaware of these aspects of the New Deal, and many people believe that things were somehow better then than they are now. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

While there are many parallels between then and now, for those who refused to stay in their "place," things were not only worse then, they could be and often were deadly.

The peril of fascism was all too real.

From the AntiFa Trenches, c. 1938 (contd)

The last installment of excerpts from Magil and Stevens' 1938 antifascist polemic, "The Peril of Fascism," focused on some of the fascistic characteristics of the early New Deal, particularly the National Recovery Administration ("We do our part"). This was a particularly interesting observation to me because the hagiography of FDR and the New Deal doesn't allow for these sorts criticisms of the Roosevelt efforts to tame if not end the Great Depression.

It was interesting to me partly because from the time I first learned about the New Deal, I was aware that it was at least partially based on fascist models, and the N. R. A. was among its most fascistic elements. It might be hard to imagine now, but at the time, there were only two activist models for dealing with the recurring Crisis of Capitalism: Communism and Fascism. The Standard Model for dealing with economic downturn and the suffering it caused was for government to do nothing, the theory being that the downturn would be rectified shortly by usual economic means and forces, bugger the sufferers (the herd could always benefit from a good cull, after all. Haw. Haw.)

But the Standard Model was tried during Hoover's Administration -- he was much more of an economic activist than he is usually given credit for, but he (like Obama)  delivered almost all of his activism at the top of the economic pyramid and left those in the middle and those on the bottom to fend for themselves -- and get severely punished if they got out of line.

This installment of Magil and Stevens looks into some of the characteristics of the pre-Depression "boom" and the Hooverite acts against the People:

Revealing the whole character of the "prosperity" era are the estimates of the distribution of income in 1929 published by the Brookings Institution, in a study, America's Capacity to Consume. According to these figures, 36,000 of the wealthiest families -- or one-tenth of one percent of all the families in the United States -- received an aggregate income of 9.8 billion dollars. At the other end of the social scale were 11,653,000 families, 42 per cent of the total receiving an aggregation of about 10 billion dollars -- or approximately the same as that of the 36,000 families at the top of the heap.

...

In the period of apparent prosperity, the weaknesses and contradictions of capitalism, not only in the United States but throughout the world, were combining to make inevitable the crash of 1929. These weaknesses in the New Era were discernable to all who cred to see, but there were not many who were willing to look. Marxists who attempted to call them to the attention of the country were denounced as crackpots too demented to glance at the soaring lines on the stock market charts for confirmation of the New Era of permanent prosperity. The loudest denunciation of these sour prophets of collapse came from the gentry in high offices of the American Federation of Labor, who assured the workers that those who doubted the New Capitalism and the benefits of collaboration with employers were troublemakers in the pay of Moscow.

In November of 1928, workers, farmers, and lower middle class people went to the polls and in overwhelming numbers cast their votes for Herbert Hoover or Alfred Smith -- the tweedledum and tweedledee of capitalism, both closely connected with the most powerful groups on Wall Street. The combined vote of the Socialist and Communist parties was less than half a million.

...

The 1929 crash came as a profound and bewildering shock to a country which had been fed the New Era buncombe. All classes shared in the bewilderment and incredulity, unable to believe that the rosy promise of the New Capitalism could end in the wreckage which they saw accumulating around them.
...

The great majority of workers were desperate and confused; they had been forced by the crisis to abandon the New Era philosophy and they had not yet acquired a clear conception of the source of their difficulties or of the method of solving them. But life, rather than formulated doctrine, dictated militant struggle. Gigantic unemployment demonstrations and hunger marches swept the country, striking panic in the "well-stocked clubs" where bankers and businessmen fearfully discussed the possibility of imminent revolution. The more clear-sighted and progressive sections of the labor movement demanded that the capitalist class shoulder the burden of the crisis, for which it was responsible, and they succeeded in mobilizing large mass movements behind demands such as adequate unemployment relief, social insurance, and a shorter working week without a reduction in pay. In these movements, the Communist Party played a leading and the most dynamic role.

Gradually, under the pressure of its membership, even the top leadership of the A. F. of L. was compelled to revise its position. During three years of acute crisis, Green, Woll, and other chieftains of the A. F. of L. stubbornly opposed unemployment insurance, echoing Hoover's pronouncement that the "dole" was un-American and more degrading than picking scraps of refuse from garbage pails.

...

Hunger and destitution were rampant among those who grew the nation's foodstuffs.

Stubbornly, the farmers resisted foreclosures and fought for farm relief. Farm strikes broke out throughout the rural middle west. Farmers, who had been bullwarks of "law and order," picketed highways with clubs and pitchforks and dragged foreclosing judges from the bench. Throughout the great  corn and hog belt, where private property rights had been regarded as sacred , there arose a cry: "Human rights above property rights" -- a slogan which revealed the profound changes among the farmers of the middle west.

...

The profound unrest of these vast masses of people expressed itself in growing demonstrations for unemployment relief and unemployment insurance, in the farm strikes, in resistance to foreclosures of small homes, in student strikes and demonstrations, in war veterans bonus marches, in the leftward movement of intellectuals. Everywhere there was ferment. Millions began to question the fundamentals of the existing order, vaguely realizing there was something basically wrong with a system which condemned men and women to die of hunger next to warehouses bulging with food and to gather decaying food from garbage heaps while wheat was burned in the fields and vegetables and milk were dumped into rivers.

...

As growing numbers of workers and farmers demonstrated their refusal to starve quietly and loudly voiced their demand for relief, the capitalist class, and the government authorities representing it, increasingly resorted to force. In scores of cities, unemployment demonstrations were broken up with police bullets and tear gas; troops were sent out against strikers; Negro sharecroppers attempting to organize unions were hunted down and lynched; a wave of deportations swept the country; states revived old criminal syndicalism and sedition statutes and professional patriots clamored for new repressive laws.

As the lines on business charts dropped, the number of violations of civil liberties rose. By 1930 the wave of suppression had reached the highest crest since the post-war hysteria of 1921. One survey of civil liberties in 1930 says:

There was a marked increase in 1930 in official and mob violence, a continued and a greater violation of the rights of labor, a larger number of deportations, and increased official interference with the expression of civil liberties... The year brought 25 lynchings, compared with 12 in 1929; 27 cases of mob violence, compared with 5 in 1929; 121 meetings and demonstrations forbidden, contrasted with 52 in 1929; a nation-wide drive against Communists; denial in 6 cases of citizenship to aliens for pacifist or radical views; a large number of deportations, mainly of Communists...

Not since 1921 has official interference with freedom of speech reached such proportions as in 1930... The 1930 cases are exclusive of the police attacks on the Communist-led demonstrations of February, March, May Day, August and Labor Day. Hundreds of arrests took place at these demonstrations all over the country, accompanied by brutal police tactics, resulting in the injury of scores of persons.

An incomplete compilation by the International Labor Defense listed the arrest of 5,851 persons in civil liberties cases -- including 1,137 in strikes, 860 for distributing leaflets and other literature, and 1,703 in unemployment and other demonstrations.

Police raided headquarters of workers' organizations in Detroit, Los Angeles, Chicago, Buffalo, Portland, and other cities, destroying property, seizing private correspondence, and arresting hundreds... in California, where the criminal syndicalism law was invoked for the first time since 1924, eleven organizers of an agricultural workers strike were railroaded to long jail sentences...

Official and mob violence further increased in 1931. The most acute terror prevailed in the Harlan, Kentucky, coal fields where a local regime of fascist terror was established by coal operators in an effort to suppress a walkout by 18,000 mountaineer miners. Twelve miners were killed in the Harlan fields by deputy sheriffs and gunmen imported from the slums of Chicago; scores were wounded; several kidnapped and beaten; workers' headquarters [were] destroyed. In Texas, Iowa and South Carolina, labor organizers were seized in the dead of night by armed mobs (some of them acting with police connivance) and brutally beaten. At Pontiac, Michigan, a "vigilante" mob seized and flogged fiver men who had participated in an unemployment demonstration, and (parroting the methods of the Italian fascists) compelled one of the victims to drink castor oil. The year 1931 also witnessed an intensification of the terror against Negroes in the South, exemplified by the arrest and frame-up of the nine Scottsboro Boys in the spring.

In 1932, suppression and murder of demonstrations and demonstrators intensified, culminating with the violent eviction of the Bonus Army from Washington, DC. 

That's just a taste of how the official and its allied suppression worked in those days. Surely we can see stark echoes of those tactics in the suppression of the Occupy Movement nowadays. And of course the reasons why are very similar. Those who sponsor and own the government were the same forces then as they are now, and they demand the silencing of all but "approved" dissent, and the crushing of any movement which might threaten their hegemony.

We are right back where we were -- except for the fact that there is no Communist vanguard any more -- despite the chattering of some "progressives" who are so fearful one will re-emerge from somewhere in the shadows and take over the pleasant and secure movements for (eventual) change that have long been underway, though more as academic exercises than as real movements for fundamental changes to a failed economic and political system.

"The Peril of Fascism" is written from a CPUSA point of view. It is strikingly familiar, but at the same time we don't see the kind of ferment today as was so paramount then, and one of the reasons is that there is no ideological counter to the rising tide of fascism today as there was then. Fascists will win under the circumstances...