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Southern mill-owners and landlords, and the fascist-minded men of Wall Street, who are, after all, the real owners of the South, of its natural resources, of its plantations and industries. The lion's share of the profits accruing from the super-exploitation of the Negro and the pauperized poor whites of the South flows into the coffers of the financial overlords of Wall Street. The policies toward Negroes being enforced in the South are the policies of finance capital--of "America's Sixty families."

Is it not obvious that the Ku Klux Klan, the Black Legion, and other extra-legal bodies are the shock troops of budding American fascism; that their rampages against labor, the foreign-born, and Negroes are but dress rehearsals for a future violent onslaught on American democracy and the whole American people, now being planned by the economic royalists of Wall Street?

The fate of the Negro people, of oppressed and subject peoples everywhere, is inextricably bound up with the world struggle against fascism.

Fascism develops out of imperialism. It is the open terrorist rule of the big moneyed interests, the unbridled dictatorship of the forces of entrenched greed. In America the victory of fascism would mean the unrestrained rule of those interests aptly described by Secretary of the Interior Ickes as those "who, possessing wealth and economic power and social prestige, were willing to sacrifice the liberties of America in order that they might cling a little longer to their power."

FASCISM BEATS THE DRUM OF WAR

Fascist tendencies appear when the bankruptcy of capitalism becomes evident, when the policies of imperialist circles placing unbearable burdens on the shoulders of the toilers are met with definite and organized mass resistance; when this resistance of an awakened population, disillusioned and unwilling

to suffer in the midst of plenty, has developed to the point where profits are menaced and the whole profit system endangered. At this point, the ruling cliques seek to discard whatever elements of democracy there may exist and substitute their open dictatorship of terror over the masses--fascism. Such are the irrefutable lessons of Germany, Italy, and Japan.

But fascism, unable to solve the difficulties of capitalism at home, turns to military adventure and war abroad.

The horrors of Ethiopia, Spain, China--totalitarian wars against civilian populations, the indiscriminate bombing of non-combatants--these are but a foretaste of what fascism plans to unleash upon the world. These are but outpost skirmishes for the bloody shambles into which the international bandits of Berlin, Rome and Tokyo would plunge humanity.

Fascism means war. This is no idle supposition, but a positive reality. Listen to the statements of its leading representatives:

Hitler: "Pacifism is the deadly sin, for it means the surrender of the race. Had the German race been united in time, it would have been master of the globe.... The healthiest organisms have grown out of the bloodiest wars.... Eternal peace will lead humanity to the tomb.... The ultimate decision belongs to naked force, and the best defensive weapon is to attack." (Mein Kampf.)

Mussolini: "Fascism believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace.... War alone brings up to the highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have courage to make it." (The Political and Social Doctrines of Fascism.)

General Araki: "Our imperial spirit (kodo), which is the embodiment of the union between the true soul of the Japanese state and great ideal of the Japanese people, is by its nature a thing which must be propagated over the sevens seas and extended over the five continents. All obstacles interfering with this must be destroyed with strong determination, not stopping at the application of real force." ("Problems Facing Japan," in Kaikosha, July, 1932, quoted in the New York Japan Chronicle, March 22, 1933.)