The century on which we are entering can be and must be the century of the common man.
The symptoms of fascist thinking are colored by environment and adapted to immediate circumstances. But always and everywhere they can be identified by their appeal to prejudice and by the desire to play upon the fears and vanities of different groups in order to gain power.
Our chemical and other manufacturing concerns are all too often ready to let the Germans have Latin American markets, provided the American companies can work out an arrangement which will enable them to charge high prices to the consumer inside the United States.
The dangerous American fascist is the man who wants to do in the United States in an American way what Hitler did in Germany in a Prussian way.
The American fascist would prefer not to use violence. His method is to poison the channels of public information.
It has been claimed at times that our modern age of technology facilitates dictatorship.
It is no coincidence that the growth of modern tyrants has in every case been heralded by the growth of prejudice.
Their final objective toward which all their deceit is directed is to capture political power so that, using the power of the state and the power of the market simultaneously, they may keep the common man in eternal subjection.
A liberal knows that the only certainty in this life is change but believes that the change can be directed toward a constructive end.
The American fascists are most easily recognized by their deliberate perversion of truth and fact. Their newspapers and propaganda carefully cultivate every fissure of disunity, every crack in the common front against fascism.
A fascist is one whose lust for money or power is combined with such an intensity of intolerance toward those of other races, parties, classes, religions, cultures, regions or nations as to make him ruthless in his use of deceit or violence to attain his ends.
There are probably several hundred thousand if we narrow the definition to include only those who in their search for money and power are ruthless and deceitful.
The myth of fascist efficiency has deluded many people.
This dullness of vision regarding the importance of the general welfare to the individual is the measure of the failure of our schools and churches to teach the spiritual significance of genuine democracy.
Monopolists who fear competition and who distrust democracy because it stands for equal opportunity would like to secure their position against small and energetic enterprise.
Until democracy in effective enthusiastic action fills the vacuum created by the power of modern inventions, we may expect the fascists to increase in power after the war both in the United States and in the world.
Most American fascists are enthusiastically supporting the war effort. They are doing this even in those cases where they hope to have profitable connections with German chemical firms after the war ends.
Fascism is a worldwide disease. Its greatest threat to the United States will come after the war, either via Latin America or within the United States itself.
The European brand of fascism will probably present its most serious postwar threat to us via Latin America.
The worldwide, agelong struggle between fascism and democracy will not stop when the fighting ends in Germany and Japan.
