8 thoughts on “All You Fascists Bound to Lose – a song by Woody Guthrie”

  2. I’m afraid to be the bearer of yet more bad news, but you have confused this title with another.
    This particular song has nothing to do with Hitler and the Nazis – who weren’t Fascists – or Mussolini or Franco or anything to do with Europe.

    It was actually about Fred Trump, who was Woody’s landlord.

    1. Thank you for that Ian. I was aware that he had a battle with Trump over his racist policies. He wrote a song about it. I wasn’t aware this one was in the same vein.
      I’m not sure you can claim Hitler wasn’t a fascist though.

      1. Always glad to be of service. I’ve a million more if needed.

        I always have a struggle with that Fascist claim and I see it everywhere, even Wikipedia, but that shouldn’t be regarded with being any ultimate authority.
        Considering we know the party origins and the intentional drawing of support from Social Democrats and Communists, we shouldn’t be blinded by falsities. It’s also false to claim Hitler had any responsibility towards the initial development of the Nazi party as it was fully fledged by the time of his taking control.
        Getting to the point! – the difference was at the heart of Hitler’s Nazi political philosophy was that he regarded Nazism as a syncretic movement.
        They also did seek official reconciliation with the Catholic Church, which also perhaps wasn’t the utmost of Fascist outlooks.

      2. So you don’t think they were just ploys to gather support from the working class without any real social leaning. I still maintain Hitler was a right-wing fascist who was populist, nationalist and used military expansionist tactics and scapegoating of Jews.

      3. Opher, well the party was formed on the basis of support of the working class, so come Hitler’s arrival some years later it was well and truly up and running and membership almost entirely being working class. I think their social leaning was clear cut. Hitler must have secured some more working class members, but in the main further support was garnered by threat, force and a change of law, however, that’s not strictly Fascist behaviour.
        Attributes such as nationalism and military expansion are not the sole domain of Fascism either.
        I’d very much think the scapegoating of Jews was in fact abject hatred. I’d also say that to express hatred of another race of people is not an act of Fascism, even as unsavory as it may seem.

        Of course, such an action is often described as “Fascist” today, but we should know better than to be using such a term. We really do have a terrible problem with a lack of deeper understanding on this issue and perhaps you will agree that we have too many people looking for the instant term, the instant phrase that’s all encompassing that saves them the trouble of deeper analysis and thorough learning. People label almost everything that is unsavory as “Fascist”, to the extent that the definition of intrinsic meaning is being lost.

        What is interesting is that after the defeat of Hitler in 1945, the British government sent the noted historian Hugh Trevor-Roper to Germany to investigate whether the claims of the Nazis were true. He quickly found that Fascism did not at all work the way it claimed to. Hitler, it turned out, was rather lazy as well as ill-informed about the complexities of such things as economics. What happened instead is that the people immediately below Hitler started building little empires for themselves, wasting resources, while corruption caused even more inefficiency than competition did in England. Therefore, the Fascist concept of one all encompassing ruler with overall control was an utter fantasy, hence, why Nazi Germany under Hitler’s control was never truly Fascist. Quasi-Fascist it maybe, but quasi is a fancy word for pretend.
        In short on paper Nazi Germany was given a Fascist status, but in reality was not and actually closer to what Hitler himself stated as being syncretic, ie., somewhere in the middle of left-right.

        If that makes any sense? Sorry, but I couldn’t get any of that in a short one-line sentence!

      4. Thanks for that Ian. That is very thorough. I can see what you are on about. But Hitler certainly based a lot of his ideology on the fascism of Mussolini and if we look at the definition: Fascism is characterized by strong nationalism, an extreme level of authoritarianism, corporatism, militarization and hostility towards both liberalism and Marxism.
        I’d add in racism and scapegoating into that definition.
        I can’t really see what Hitler was doing that wasn’t out and out right-wing fascism. Can you?
        It is interesting to hear that he was lazy and inefficient though. I’ve never heard that.

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