In Fact Volume 1-3 Available

I was able to upload the first, second,and third volumes of In Fact to the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, Issue 12 of Volume 2 was incomplete and I was unable to upload it. Other than that, the other two volumes are complete.

A select few of the In Fact issues have been transcribed into text (.TXT) format and is available for download. Some of these were transcribed manually while others were done through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) programs. These programs are not fool-proof, so I had to review each copy for misreads and typos.

I believe the first three issues of Volume 2 has been transcribed, and a couple from Volume 1.

The People Don't Know

I uploaded "The People Don't Know" to the Internet Archive. It was originally on the HathiTrust Digital Library but I was able to (painstakingly) download and transfer the page files to PDF format. After that, it was uploaded to the Internet Archive.

Several Seldes Books Online

I've spent the last several months searching through different archives and University databases for online copies of George Seldes' books. I was actually able to locate four books in either digitized or transcribed forms.

You Can't Print That
Witch Hunt
Facts and Fascism
The People Don't Know

I also went to Wikipedia and added these links and several other books from the Internet Archive to the George Seldes article.

I plan on uploading The People Don't Know to the Internet Archive where it is likely to garner much more readers and fans of Seldes' work.

Sawdust Caesar Published Online

I was finally able to convert my Sawdust Caesar book scans into an entire PDF book file. The entire book is now available at the Internet Archive.

You can download it or read it here:

http://www.archive.org/details/SawdustCaesarTheUntoldStoryOfMussoliniAndFascism

The PDF file is complete but the text files are incomplete.

Enjoy!

In Fact Archives

I found the complete collections of In Fact and am currently in the process of archiving them at Archive.org. So far the first eight issues are available.

George Seldes on Archive.org

Archive.org was a natural place to send these articles because I learned quite a bit about George from videos and books that were available at the archive.

In Fact was Seldes' independent newsletter which he edited. The paper ran from 1940 until 1950 when the Red Scare and McCarthyism swept the country and many of his subscribers were forced to drop. In Fact covered press censorship, corruption, Fascism and all the news that the rest of the press refused to cover. His newsletter became a popular outlet for other journalists who could not get articles published. He was one of the few people to report on the link between cancer and cigarettes, and also the fact that most newspapers refused to print such articles out of fear of offending tobacco advertisers. The paper also printed articles by George Polk, who was murdered by the Fascist regime in Greece. In Fact stated shortly after that Polk believed someone would be killed by the Fascists, but this would not be widely acknowledged until the 1970's.

"Liberal Fascism" and Fascist Financing

I was reading Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, from Mussolini to the Politics of Change. On page 44 (of the paperback 1st Edition) Jonah Goldberg states:

From the moment Mussolini declared himself in favor of the war (World War 1), Italian Socialists smeared him for his heresy. 'Chi paga?' became the central question of the anti-Mussolini whisper campaign. 'Who's paying him?' He was accused of taking money from arms makers, and it was hinted darkly that he was on France's payroll. There's no evidence for any of this. From the beginning, fascism was dubbed as right-wing not because it necessarily was right-wing but because the communist left thought this was the best way to punish apostasy (and, even if it was right-wing in some long forgotten doctrinal sense, fascism was still right-wing socialism).

Although Goldberg states that there is no evidence that Mussolini was paid to advocate interventionism on France's (and later America's) side, that is completely wrong. There is plenty of evidence, one of which is a direct statement by Mussolini where he describes his actions as his sins (which he proudly stated he would never beg for anyone's forgiveness to atone for those sins).

George Seldes documents several other instances where close advisors and even French propagandists (and several members of the French goverment) acknowledge they paid Mussolini at least 100,000 francs which would be used to start Mussolini's own newspaper (il Popolo d'Italia).

One of the problems I find with Liberal Fascism is that there is no clear context as to many of the events in Mussolini or even Italy's history. For example, after the general strike of 1919 and 1920 Mussolini was very disappointed in the Socialists inability to take action in a time when Italy was paralyzed by the stikers. During the same period, Mussolini was actively supporting the strikes and approved of many of the Socialist's actions. Years later, he would state:

...[the general strikes of 1919 and 1920] were the low acts of the Socialists, against which the Fascist patriots had to fight.

When it became clear to Mussolini that the Socialists (which Mussolini approved of and was a former member until he was kicked out) were not going to attempt to seize power in Italy, he abandoned all hope and declared Socialism a failure (the Socialists were largely being torn apart by internal dissent). Shortly afterwords, Mussolini sold the services of his Black Shirts to special interests who wanted to crush the striking workers. Mussolini was given financial support through the Confederazione Generale dell' Industria and others provided him with weapons. This is the moment Mussolini begins using his Fascisti to target strikers, Socialists, Communists and even carried through a vendetta against all of his enemies on the Left. None of this is mentioned in Liberal Fascism. Jonah Goldberg carefully tiptoes around these inconvenient facts and as a result, he can easily downplay the large role industrialists and corporations played in not only Mussolini's fascism but also in Hitler's fascism.

In 425 pages, Henry Ford is mentioned only 3 times and in only one of those instances is it mentioned that he was an anti-Semite whom Hitler strongly admired. Instead of mentioning that Ford was a significant financeer of Hitler up until Hitler was arrested for instigating the Beer Hall Putsch, Goldberg only mentions that Hitler admired Ford's ability to mass produce the automobile. The chemical industry in Germany known as I.G. Farben is never mentioned although they made billions by financing Hitler. Fritz Thyssen, Junkers, J.P. Morgan, Standard Oil, DuPont, and many other international cartels made millions to billions in profits by financing Hitler and yet none of this is mentioned in Liberal Fascism and Goldberg works to downplay these facts.

Twilight of Dictators

One by one they are passing away in the smaller countries; the stronger ones begin to tremble on their thrones. The hundredth anniversary of the beginnings of a libertarian movement which spread throughout the world, sees again the struggle for human rights progressing.

The world seems to be recovering its sanity.

George Seldes, 1931.
Can These Things Be?