10 Books to understand the fascist conspiracy
The conspiracy is fascist, not communist. And the reason you might have learned otherwise is because the world of conspiracy research is dominated by fascists, the real conspirators, whose goal is to shape your understanding of the conspiracy to manufacture an opposition to serve their own ends.
1. The Russian Roots of Nazism: White Emigres and the Making of National Socialism, 1917-1945
By Michael Kellogg
This book examines the overlooked topic of the influence of anti-Bolshevik, anti-Semitic Russian exiles on Nazism. White émigrés contributed politically, financially, militarily, and ideologically to National Socialism. This work refutes the notion that Nazism developed as a peculiarly German phenomenon: it arose primarily from the cooperation between völkisch (nationalist/racist) Germans and vengeful White émigrés. From 1920-1923, Adolf Hitler collaborated with a conspiratorial far right German-White émigré organization, Aufbau (Reconstruction). Aufbau allied with Nazis to overthrow the German government and Bolshevik rule through terrorism and military-paramilitary schemes. This organization's warnings of the monstrous 'Jewish Bolshevik' peril helped to inspire Hitler to launch an invasion of the Soviet Union and to initiate the mass murder of European Jews. This book uses extensive archival materials from Germany and Russia, including recently declassified documents, and will prove invaluable reading for anyone interested in the international roots of National Socialism.
2. One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America
By Kevin M. Kruse
We're often told that the United States is, was, and always has been a Christian nation. But in One Nation Under God, historian Kevin M. Kruse reveals that the belief that America is fundamentally and formally Christian originated in the 1930s. To fight the "slavery" of FDR's New Deal, businessmen enlisted religious activists in a campaign for "freedom under God" that culminated in the election of their ally Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. The new president revolutionized the role of religion in American politics. He inaugurated new traditions like the National Prayer Breakfast, as Congress added the phrase "under God" to the Pledge of Allegiance and made "In God We Trust" the country's first official motto. Church membership soon soared to an all-time high of 69 percent. Americans across the religious and political spectrum agreed that their country was "one nation under God." Provocative and authoritative, One Nation Under God reveals how an unholy alliance of money, religion, and politics created a false origin story that continues to define and divide American politics to this day.
3. From the New Deal to the New Right: Race and the Southern Origins of Modern Conservatism
By Joseph E. Lowndes
The role the South has played in contemporary conservatism is perhaps the most consequential political phenomenon of the second half of the twentieth century. The region’s transition from Democratic stronghold to Republican base has frequently been viewed as a recent occurrence, one that largely stems from a 1960s-era backlash against left-leaning social movements. But as Joseph Lowndes argues in this book, this rightward shift was not necessarily a natural response by alienated whites, but rather the result of the long-term development of an alliance between Southern segregationists and Northern conservatives, two groups who initially shared little beyond opposition to specific New Deal imperatives.
Lowndes focuses his narrative on the formative period between the end of the Second World War and the Nixon years. By looking at the 1948 Dixiecrat Revolt, the presidential campaigns of George Wallace, and popular representations of the region, he shows the many ways in which the South changed during these decades. Lowndes traces how a new alliance began to emerge by further examining the pages of the National Review and Republican party-building efforts in the South during the campaigns of Eisenhower, Goldwater, and Nixon. The unique characteristics of American conservatism were forged in the crucible of race relations in the South, he argues, and his analysis of party-building efforts, national institutions, and the innovations of particular political actors provides a keen look into the ideology of modern conservatism and the Republican Party.
4. Old Nazis, the New Right, and the Republican Party: Domestic fascist networks and their effect on U.S. cold war politics
By Russ Bellant
Bellant convincingly documents three arguments in this short, journalistic book. First, many people who had been active in Nazi or pro-Nazi groups in Eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s subsequently came to this country, often under the auspices of the Displaced Persons Commission. Second, many of these emigres then became active in political and ethnic groups affiliated with the Republican Party, providing financial and electoral support and crusading relentlessly against Communism. Third, and most important, some of the most unsavory elements of the anti-Communist right gained a foothold in official foreign policy circles under Reagan. Bellant's case is strong and disturbing, but his book is terribly organized, and the meaningful arguments are mixed in with overstated claims (especially the suggestions of a fascist conspiracy) and charges based only on political disagreement, not malfeasance.
5. The Beast Reawakens: Fascism's Resurgence from Hitler's Spymasters to Today's Neo-Nazi Groups and Right-Wing Extremists
By Martin A. Lee
In The Beast Reawakens, journalist Martin A. Lee documents the revival of fascist ideals from the wake of the Second World War to recent violent incidents in Europe and America. Defeated in war, many Nazis built new and profitable lives for themselves, stirring political intrigue and serving as role models to a new generation of white supremacists like Americans Francis Parker Yockey, whose book Imperium became the bible of anti-Semitism, and Willis Carto, who continues to run several ostensibly mainstream policy groups that deny the Holocaust ever took place. Often forced underground yet certain of their cause, this second generation of extremists can be linked to such recent violence as the Oklahoma City bombings, the shocking lynching of James Byrd in Jasper, Texas, and the abortion clinic bombings by Eric Rudolf, who remains a fugitive. With extraordinary detail and insight, The Beast Reawakens examines the many strands of rightwing extremism worldwide to put the current fascist resurgence in contemporary perspective.
6. White Rage: The Extreme Right and American Politics
By Martin Durham
White Rage examines the development of the modern American extreme right and American politics from the 1950s to the present day. It explores the full panoply of extreme right groups, from the remnants of the Ku Klux Klan to skinhead groups and from the militia groups to neo-nazis. In developing its argument the book:
discusses the American extreme right in the context of the Oklahoma City bombing, 9/11 and the Bush administration;
explores the American extreme right’s divisions and its pursuit of alliances
analyses the movement’s hostilities to other racial groups.
Written in a moment of crisis for the leading extreme right groups, this original study challenges the frequent equation of the extreme right with other sections of the American right. It is a movement whose development and future will be of interest to anyone concerned with race relations and social conflict in modern Americ
7. Rogue Agents: The Cercle and the 6I in the Private Cold War 1951 - 1991
By David Teacher
David Teacher has been researching notorious disformationist Brian Crozier and his various allies since 1988, producing the book Rogue Agents in 2008. Since then, the book has been expanded twice: once in 2011 to include later research and scans of the numerous internal documents used in its preparation, and now in 2015 to integrate newly declassified sources (State Department cables, records of Kissinger's phone-calls, private papers of Cercle participants) and recent academic publications. This final edition of a now-classic work of investigation documents the role played by the Cercle Pinay and Crozier's private intelligence service, the 6I, in supporting Franco, White South Africa, Rhodesia, Thatcher, Reagan and Strauss, and denigrating progressive politicians and forces such as Wilson, Brandt, Carter, Mitterrand and the pro-disarmament movement of the 1980s.
8. The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power
By Jeff Sharlet
They insist they're just a group of friends, yet they funnel millions of dollars through tax-free corporations. They claim to disdain politics, but congressmen of both parties describe them as the most influential religious organization in Washington. They say they're not Christians, but simply believers.
Behind the scenes at every National Prayer Breakfast since 1953 has been the Family, an elite network dedicated to a religion of power for the powerful. Their goal is "Jesus plus nothing." Their method is backroom diplomacy. The Family is the startling story of how their faith—part free-market fundamentalism, part imperial ambition—has come to be interwoven with the affairs of nations around the world.
9. Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right
By Jane Mayer
In her new preface, Jane Mayer discusses the results of the most recent election and Donald Trump's victory, and how, despite much discussion to the contrary, this was a huge victory for the billionaires who have been pouring money in the American political system. Why is America living in an age of profound and widening economic inequality? Why have even modest attempts to address climate change been defeated again and again? Why do hedge-fund billionaires pay a far lower tax rate than middle-class workers? In a riveting and indelible feat of reporting, Jane Mayer illuminates the history of an elite cadre of plutocrats—headed by the Kochs, the Scaifes, the Olins, and the Bradleys—who have bankrolled a systematic plan to fundamentally alter the American political system. Mayer traces a byzantine trail of billions of dollars spent by the network, revealing a staggering conglomeration of think tanks, academic institutions, media groups, courthouses, and government allies that have fallen under their sphere of influence. Drawing from hundreds of exclusive interviews, as well as extensive scrutiny of public records, private papers, and court proceedings, Mayer provides vivid portraits of the secretive figures behind the new American oligarchy and a searing look at the carefully concealed agendas steering the nation. Dark Money is an essential book for anyone who cares about the future of American democracy.
10. Democracy in Chains: The Deep History of the Radical Right’s Stealth Plan for America
Nancy MacLean
Behind today’s headlines of billionaires taking over our government is a secretive political establishment with long, deep, and troubling roots. The capitalist radical right has been working not simply to change who rules, but to fundamentally alter the rules of democratic governance. But billionaires did not launch this movement; a white intellectual in the embattled Jim Crow South did. Democracy in Chains names its true architect—the Nobel Prize-winning political economist James McGill Buchanan—and dissects the operation he and his colleagues designed over six decades to alter every branch of government to disempower the majority.
In a brilliant and engrossing narrative, Nancy MacLean shows how Buchanan forged his ideas about government in a last gasp attempt to preserve the white elite’s power in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education. In response to the widening of American democracy, he developed a brilliant, if diabolical, plan to undermine the ability of the majority to use its numbers to level the playing field between the rich and powerful and the rest of us.
Corporate donors and their right-wing foundations were only too eager to support Buchanan’s work in teaching others how to divide America into “makers” and “takers.” And when a multibillionaire on a messianic mission to rewrite the social contract of the modern world, Charles Koch, discovered Buchanan, he created a vast, relentless, and multi-armed machine to carry out Buchanan’s strategy.
Without Buchanan's ideas and Koch's money, the libertarian right would not have succeeded in its stealth takeover of the Republican Party as a delivery mechanism. Now, with Mike Pence as Vice President, the cause has a longtime loyalist in the White House, not to mention a phalanx of Republicans in the House, the Senate, a majority of state governments, and the courts, all carrying out the plan. That plan includes harsher laws to undermine unions, privatizing everything from schools to health care and Social Security, and keeping as many of us as possible from voting. Based on ten years of unique research, Democracy in Chains tells a chilling story of right-wing academics and big money run amok. This revelatory work of scholarship is also a call to arms to protect the achievements of twentieth-century American self-government.