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Saturday, July 27, 2013

FABIAN FREEWAY: The Who and How British Socialism Came to America

One of my favorite sources for those that would
destroy individual liberties in America. No self-
respecting, self-taught political 'scientist'
should be without.

High Road to Socialism in the USA 


Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) PDF File 42,030 KB 7/17/2009
Rose L. Martin Fabian Freeway - High Road to Socialism in the USA
Publication Information Western Islands, Boston, MA, 1966

[excerpt]

Over the years the Fabian turtle has won a series of gradual victories that could hardly been predicted in 1920 when the possibility of socialist control in England and the US seemed remote to its own leaders.

In England the Fabian Society has succeeded in penetrating and permeating organizations, social movements, political parties until today its influence pervades the whole fabric of daily life. After WWII, Fabians presided over the liquidation of nation’s colonial empire and today [1966] through their control of opinion-forming groups at the highest levels, they play a powerful role in formulating foreign policy on both sides of the Atlantic.

By 1961, at least 36 high officials of the New Frontier Admin were found to be past or present members of an Anglo-Fabian-inspired organization calling itself Americans for Democratic Action. 

In the past 30 years a whole series of loaded epithets has been invented for the purpose—beginning with “reactionary” in the early 1930s and proceeding through “fascist” and “McCarthyite” to “Birchite”. At the present “Right Wing extremist” is the automatic catchword applied to any person who seeks to expose or oppose the Socialist advance.

Arthur Schlesinger, jr. from Harvard wrote in the Parisian Review, “There seems to be no inherent obstacle to the gradual advance of Socialism in the US through a series of ‘New Deals’”. Elsewhere he describes the New Deal as “a process of backing into Socialism.”

In 1949 Schlesinger was advocating “liberal Socialism” and cling on power states to ‘expand its main strength in determining the broad levels and conditions of economic activity.” From 1961 to 1964, Schlesinger was Administrative Assistant to the President of the US.

In 1962, Gus Hall, General Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S. told students at the University of California in an off-campus address, that the U.S. is “towards Socialism, Not like in other countries but based on America’s background, and still Socialism.” He predicted that the “US will move gradually from Socialism to the higher state of Communism.”

Seen in the light, the value of the Socialist International to the communist International becomes plain. Popular confusion on the subject has given rise to a dangerous myth, namely, that a basic and irreconcilable enmity exists between Socialists and communists. This is by no means true.

On the same October evening in 1883 that Karl Marx died, 16 young Britishers met to hear Thomas Davidson, a Scottish-born American give a talk on “The New Life.” From that meeting, the Fabian Society of London was born. The nine who remained in the Fabian Society wanted to change the world through a species of propaganda termed “education,” which would lead to political action. This group is now the most prominent and important Socialist organization in England. Without advertising the fact, it has also assumed leadership of a world-wide Socialist movement and is the dominant influence in the Socialist International.

Its originality lies in the techniques it has developed for permeating established institutions and penetrating political parties in order to win command of the machinery of power.

The Fabian Society was named for Quintus Fabius Maximus, a Roman General and dictator who lived in the third century B.C. In his lifetime, Fabius was nicknamed “Cunctator” the Delayer—because of his delaying tactics against Hannibal in the second Punic War. The motto of the Fabian Society is “For the right moment you must wait, as Fabius did most patiently when warring against Hannibal, though many censured his delays; but when the time comes, you must strike hard, as Fabius did or your waiting will be in vain and fruitless.” This has been shortened to “I wait long, but when I strike, I strike hard.”

Early in its infancy, George Bernard Shaw joined and was elected into the Fabian Executive. Before joining the Fabians, Shaw had belonged to a Marxist reading circle. As a speaker, playwright and essayist, Shaw did more than any other human being to establish the fiction that the polite conspiracy called Fabian Socialism is a “peaceful constitutional, moral and economical movement,” needing nothing for its “bloodless and benevolent realization except that the English people should understand and approve of it. (17)

It was Shaw who introduced Sidney Webb into the Society. They became collaborators in producing pamphlets, essays, and reports, drafted plans for political activity and formulated internal and external policies of the Society in advance of executive meetings. Soon they were joined by Syndey Olivier (Lord Olivier) who became the Fabian-inspired Secretary of State for India. Then Graham Wallas – Fabian missionary to the U.S. joined them. In their creed, it announces that “the Fabian Society consists of Socialists” and “aims at the reorganization of society by the emancipation of land and Industrial Capital from individual and class ownership and vesting them in the community for the general benefit. (18-19).

It was the marriage of Beatrice Potter, daughter of a Canadian railway magnate who left her 1,000 pounds a year in life income, to Sidney Webb that began to pave the way for Fabian research. Fabian research was to buy an opponent under mountains of exhaustive detail.

Fabian research supplied the content for the “educational” material distributed by the Society, a good deal of it in the form of tracts and pamphlets presenting the Fabian stand on successive issues. They started to infiltrate town councils, school boards in order to steer the education into the Socialist channels. Ove time, the Fabian Society was to develop a Socialist elite—to discover and mold the leaders of an evolving Socialist world.

By 1900, Fabian Socialist groups started on university campuses. In 1912, university students accounted from more than 1/5 of the Society’s membership. Some of them went on to serve in government.

They then started the London School of Economics. Its benefactor was Henry Hutchison, MP who committed suicide in 1894 and who left a trust of 9000 pounds to further the “propaganda and other purposes of the Society.” The Webbs taught at the London School.

Joseph P. Kennedy Jr., Joseph P. Kennedy Sr.,
and John F. Kennedy arriving at Southampton,
England, July 2, 1938
Others who served on staff included Harold Laski. Among Professor Laski’s students were Jospeh P. Kennedy Jr. in 1933-34 and John F. Kennedy in 1935-36. Even today, the Fabian Society remains a dangerously subtl conspiracy beneath a cloak of social reform.

The Fabian Society of London was the mother society, source of programs, directive and propaganda which were handed down. At the heard of various concentric circles, ringed around and shielded from scrutiny, was the small, hard core of the Fabian leadership which acknowledged no responsibility for the sometimes contradictory acts of individual members—even after stimulating such action. For almost 50 years, Sidney Webb remained the guiding force of the Society—never letting the right hand know what the left was doing.

Unlike their European Socialist comrades, the Fabians established themselves as a private Society of limited membership rather than a political party. The Society was neither doctrinaire nor given to philosophical hairsplitting. All it exacted was a broad pledge of allegiance to Socialist goals. After 1919, Fabians transferred their allegiance en bloc to the British Labor Party, at whose foundation other Fabians had assisted.

What George Dangerfield called “the strange death of liberal England” was hastened by the fact that the Fabian Society was able to release a steady barrage of printed matter politically damaging to Liberalism and its leaders. Through “permeation” Fabians got the ear of important or key persons and inducing them to push through some action desired by them. By 1931-32, both Sidney Webb and George Bernard Shaw confessed their allegiance to Communism and the Party.

In a book which the Webb’s wrote about their visit to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics in 1932 called “Soviet Socialism—A new Civilization?” it never referred to the horrors and brutality with the hug man-made famines in the Ukraine and Crimea. In testimony before the International Security Subcommittee of the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary, in April 7, 1952, Colonel I. M. Bogolepov, a former Soviet Army officer testified bluntly that the entire text of the Webbs’ book had been prepared in the Soviet Foreign Office. Material for the chapter on Soviet prison camps, stressing the “humane” methods employed in those factories of death was complied by the Secret Police.

When the Webb’s died in 1947, a grateful Labor Government interred the ashes of both of them who were practicing atheists in Westminister Abby.

In the Beatrice Webb House in Surrey England, there is a stained glass window ordered by Shaw that depicts himself and Webb smashing the world with workingmen’s hammers. Among the Fabians kneeling down in mock adoration is HG Wells.

It was Arthur Henderson, a long member of the Fabian Executive, was the foreign minister who in 1929 engineered British diplomatic recognition of Bolshevik Russia and paved the way for similar recognition by the United States.

The destructive nature of the Fabian Socialist was never made sufficiently clear to the British public. The good manners tended to veil their revolutionary purpose and render it improbable to all but the initiate. To gain popular sympathy, the Society concealed its will to power behind a series of apparently benign social welfare programs and preached the brotherhood of man for the attainment of purely material ends.

Members included: Harold Wilson, Prime Minister Attlee

See p. 75 – Fabian Socialist government degreed a job freeze in 1946 and ordered working men and women to take and hold specific jobs at a fixed wage. Rules, permits and excessive paper work not only killed personal initiative but poisoned the daily life of the average citizen. In February 1947, PM Attlee admitted in the Commons, 17 Government Ministries were free to enter private homes without search warrants. Ten thousand officials had authority to invade homes for purposes of inspection. Due process was abandoned as farmers and workingmen became subject to arrest or eviction by official order. In a single year, over 30,000 prosecutions for violating routine regulations were recorded.

Although the widely touted Beveridge Plan was in effect, it has by no means succeeded in abolishing want. As one left wing American commentator noted, the plan merely furnished a thin cushion against total disaster for the most impoverished third of the population. True, every citizen was entitled to prenatal care, a birth subsidy, hospitalization and medical care of sorts, unemployment insuyrance, an old-age pension, funeral coosts and an allowance for his widow and dependent orphans. The subsidies and allowances were tiny and with mounting inflation, barely sufficed for the poorest--$16 at birth and $80 for a pauper burial.

So poverty was not eliminated but increased to plague proportions, and life was a nightmare for everyone but the most dedicated bureaucrats. A man might have “social security,” yet he could not go out and buy a dozen eggs. After 4 years of Socialist government he was only entitled to an egg and a half per week as decreed by Marxist No. 1, John Strachey, Fabian Minister of Food/Supply. (76)

Socialism in practice, unlike its glowing predictions, was turning out to be a dreary treadmill for the great majority of the British people. Confiscatory taxes on land, inheritance and income, coupled with the restrictions on productive investment had driven into flight whatever capital was left or forcd it to remain idle.

Though the best brains of the Fabian Society were engaged in the furtile effort to make socialism work, it was becoming obvious that the new system of improvisation and promises simply cound not deliver the goods. Socialist theory in action was wrecking the economy of Britain which for several centuries had prospered from the profitable sale and brokerage of goods and services around the world. 78

The Fabian Society’s handwriting was plain in the International’s 1951 Frankfurt manifesto which declared “democratic planning” to be the basic condition for achieving Socialism. Statism and the welfare state, as demonstrated by the British Socialists during their spell of majority Labor Party Government was being packaged deceptively for export around the world. 80

Coexistence with the Soviet Union and its satellites was defensible and remained a basic point of Fabian foreign policy. It was echoed by the Socialist International, it was echoed by a succession of Fabian Socialist Ministers in the Commonwealth countries, typified by PM Walter Nash of New Zealand. In August 1954, Morgan Phillips of the Fabian International Bureau led a British labor delegation which included Lord Attlee on a junket to Moscow and Red China. 81

Phillips “reflected that a great new age was now dawning for Asia, an age that the Labor Government in Britain had helped to usher in when it granted independence to India, Pakistan and Burma.” 82

Fabian lenience toward communist movements and leaders was held to be justified not only by their joint Socialist heritage, but by their common purpose of achieving Socialism throughout the world. In the lead essay of the New Fabian Essays, published in 1952, as a “restatement” in modern terms of unchanging Fabian objectives, then Fabian Executive R.H.S. Crossman noted that Communist movements are often the most effective way of introducing Socialism into backward countries which lack parliamentary experience.

By inference, Democratic Socialism as preached by Fabians is designed primarily to captivate advanced industrial nations where the more direct Communist methods of attack do not appeal and cannot so easily penetrate. Plainly the two movements supplement each other, even if their vocabulary is different and their tasks are divided.

Fabian Socialists still preferred to retain their separated identity and their right to criticize which is the Fabian definition of freedom. 92

At the outbreak of WWII by a key member o f the Fabian International Bureau, R.W.G. McKay, aided by Fabian-approved Rhodes Scholars Clarence K. Streit and Herbert Agar, promoted the cause of the Atlantic Union and continue to do so today. Federal Union calls among other thins for the Government of the U.S. to reunite with Britain, while Atlantic Union marshals European support for the same plan. Both in its original and expanded forms, Federal Union has appropriated the secret dream of 19thC Empire builder Cecil Rhodes and remolded it along line more adapted to the schemes of the Socialist International.

What it proposes is that the world’s most advanced Christian nations should revise their idea of national sovereignty and pool their economic as well as their military resources. Its Fabian framers attempt to justify the plan by quoting copiously from the writings of the early American Federalists, although the new type of union projected is very far from anything James Madison or Alexander Hamilton had in mind. Atlantic Union or Atlantica, would embrace a group of 15 highly industralized welfare states on both sides of the North Atlantic and culminate into one World Government. The Socialist character of that eventual World Sate is not emphasized in the smoothly written propaganda and even smoother social functions designed to attract industrialists, financiers, educators, statesmen and military figures of the several NATO nations. 83-84

While striving to render patriotism outmoded and to discredit the concept of national sovereignty in the more literate countries, British Fabians at the same time speeded up their efforts to promote nationalist movements in so-called backward areas of the globe. At first glance it might seem a contradiction but closer scrutiny reveals that Fabian aid to national independence movements in colonial and semi-colonial lands stems from the theories advanced in 1902 by John Atkinson Hobson in his book, Imperialism, which ante-dated and influenced Lenin’s writings on the subject. 84

In 1949 Sir Stafford Cripps, then a Minister of the Crown, made the remarkable announced that “The liquidation of the British Empire is essential to Socialism.” This statement appeared in the march 1949 issue of Venture, published by the Fabian Colonial Bureau, later renamed the Fabian Commonwealth Bureau. During the same year, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions was formed as an adjunct of the Fabian-led Socialist International to speed colonial liquidation not only in British Territories but in other regions as well. 85

Trade unions around the world were to be inoculated with Socialism and to press for the political independence of dismemberment of the British Empire. 87

Members of the Americans for Democratic Action from the United States were welcomed regularly at Fabian Summer Schools. 87

There is a firm nucleus of Fabian civil servants in every government department and Fabian Socialists have been regularly appointed as Opposition members on government Advisory Boards as well as key posts at the UN. A.D.K. Owen known as David Owen has been a fixture at the UN since its inception. As director of the Office of Technological Services, he has been in a position to dispense patronage to Fabian Socialists on a worldwide basis.

Thought the terminology has changed with the times, the Fabian society remains a secret society of Socialists, dedicated to transforming the existing world order by methods necessarily devious and not always short of sedition. 92

Wilson succeeded to the political leadership of Britain’s labour Party at a moment when International Socialism appeared more confident of being able to move into a position of world-wide control, than at any time since the Russian Revolution. With left wing Social Democratic administrations in office or on the verge of it in a majority of countries throughout the so-called Free world, few socialists doubt that they can readily establish a modus operendi with the economically embarrassed Socialist Fatherland and its satellites. 100

Said Harold Wilson on 2/11/63, “Now, we have an American government in active sympathy!” Wilson meant was that the United States now had a program of international commodity agreements. He went on to say,  “Commodity agreements for temperate foodstuffs must provide the machinery for channeling the overspill of our advanced countries into the hungry countries. Buy why food only? There is a surplus of steel in many advanced countries and in this country the steel mills are working at 60% capacity. We want to help India and a score of other developing countries.”

The world giveaway program projected by Wilson and his colleagues of the SI has endless possibilities, limited only by the resources of the donor countries. 100

As a student and teacher at Christ Church College, Oxford, Gordon Walker was a contemporary of Dean Rusk, Walt Whitman Rostow in Washington under the Kennedy-Johnson Administration. After WWII, he served as parliamentry private secretary for a year to Harold Laski’s great friend/ally, Herbert Morrison, Appoints as commonwealth Secretary in 1950-51, he speeded the dissolution of the British Empire: a process initiated by his former chief, Arthur Creech-Jones, an early chairman of the Fabian Colonial Bureau. 103

Like his colleagues of the SI at home/abroad, Denis Healey accepted at face value the Communist world’s amoeba-like application of the early adage, Divide and Conquer. 105

The Right Honorable Harold Wilson, MP, Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Vice Chairman of the Socialist International, announced he would proceed without delay to implant full-scale Socialism in Britain—and eventually in the world. Like his predecessors of the postwar era, Wilson’s initial move was to raise $4B abroad to strengthen the British pound to finance his government’s elusive schemes for what it termed the “social democratic revolution.” The first Billion came from the IMF, providentially set up 20 year earliers by Lord Keynes and described by a Socialist International spokesman as being “in essence a Socialist conception.” 109

Visiting Washington to confirm with newly elected Johnson, Wilson told the WH correspondents that the theme of these discussions was “interdependence.” What at first blush might have seemed no more than a classic bit of Fabian “imprudence” was spoke in deadly earnest. The route for “interdependence,” taken in the literal sense and pursued to its logical conclusion, leads in the end to World Government. 110

The Fabians seized control of the Mother of Parliaments and control of the Labor Party Platform which stated clearly: “For us World Government is the final objective…” It was no coincidence that the platform of the Socialist International approved 2 years before in Oslo, proclaimed the same objective and designated the United Nations as an interim medium for achieving it. Nor was it purely wishful rhetoric when Socialist International Information declared that the British labour Party’s victory marked “a renaissance of the power and influence of democratic Socialism throughout the world.” 110

There was another secret weapon valued more highly than the atom bomb by Anglo-American Fabians of the New Deal era. Namely, the university professor, who as the British Fabian Socialist philosopher, John Atkinson Hobson, had suggested was to be the future secret weapon of national strategy. A familiar of Justice Louis D. Brandeis and of the latter’s protege, Felix Frankfurther (founder and director of the ACLU), Hobson merely pointed up a trend that had been gaining momentum in America since the turn of the century. With the Roosevelt Admin, the liberal-to Left professor moved into his prescribed orbit s the planner and guide of national policies based on Fabian Research. A trio of university professors played a major part in shaping the social, fiscal, legal and diplomatic strategy of the Roosevelt Admin. Two were British Nationals, closely identified with the Fabian Society of London. The third was an American citizen who had helped to found organizations in this country known as affiliates of the (Fabian Socialist) League for Industrial Democracy, and who had been rebuked by Former President Theodore Roosevelt for his racial bias. Their names were Felix Frankfurther, Harold J. Laski and John Maynard Keynes. 297-98

Roosevelt had admitted more than a year before becoming President to sponsor the TVA, the Agricultural Adjustment, Public Works and Conservation programs; Securities Exchange and Holding Company control; and something resembling the Nations Recovery Act. He had also agreed to sponsor a system of social insurance leading to the welfare state. If no hint of those intentions appeared in the Democratic Party platform of 1932, only the public was surprised by the rapid-fire developments following Roosevelt’s accession to power (298).

 Frankfurter recommended prodigies to assist two liberal Supreme Court Justices, Louis D. Brandeis and Oliver Wendell Holmes. Among those recommended were Dean Acheson. With America’s first Socialist-inspired government program staffed and operating with key liberals recommended by Frankfurter, he spent a year at Oxford, near his Fabian admirers. 301

It was Congressman Louis T. McFadden of Pennsylvania who told the US House of Repr. On May 3, 1934 that a certain Israel Moses Seiff had recently declared in a public speech, “Let Us go slowly for a while, until we can see how our plan works out in America.” Seiff belonged to the British organization, Political and Economic Planning-PEP and the plan to which he referred was The New Deal. Why, wondered McFadden would Seiff call the New Deal “our plan?“ UNINTENTIONALLY SEIFF HAD REVEALED A REALTIONSHIP BETWEEN FABIAN SOCIALIST PLANNERS IN ENGLAND AND IN THE UNITED STATES. 302
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