Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

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The first law of the market is to make the largest possible profit from other people’s labor. Private profitability rather than human need is the determining condition of private investment. There prevails a rational systematization of human endeavor in pursuit of a socially irrational end: “accumulate, accumulate, accumulate.” When I was half way through this book I was a bit disgruntled and thought it was just a communist apologetic piece. After finishing it, I realize that this is not what this book is. I find Parenti to be honest of his critiques of both capitalism and communism and providing a thought provoking and clarifying lens about our current global system of power and how western societies have been indoctrinated into excusing the failures of capitalism while condemning those of communism without understanding the important interplay between the two. This book was written in 1997 but it is likely even more pertinent to today, 2022.

Basically I want to know if anything in the book is true. I guess I am a product of the capitalist, anti-communist brainwashing the author talks about, because there are a LOT of things where I just go "that doesn't seem right..." Despite this record, most writers have ignored fascism’s close collaboration with big business. Some even argue that business was not a beneficiary but a victim of fascism. Angelo Codevilla, a Hoover Institute conservative scribe, blithely announced: If fascism means anything, it means government ownership and control of business ( Commentary, 8/94). Thus fascism is misrepresented as a mutant form of socialism. In fact, if fascism means anything, it means all-out government support for business and severe repression of antibusiness, prolabor forces. ⁶ There is a vast literature on who supported the Nazis, but relatively little on whom the Nazis supported after they came to power. This is in keeping with the tendency of conventional scholarship to avoid the entire subject of capitalism whenever something unfavorable might be said about it. Whose interests did Mussolini and Hitler support? Official Washington cannot tell the American people that the real purpose of its gargantuan military expenditures and belligerent interventions is to make the world safe for General Motors, General Electric, General Dynamics, and all the other generals.” While walking through New York’s Little Italy, I passed a novelty shop that displayed posters and T-shirts of Benito Mussolini giving the fascist salute. When I entered the shop and asked the clerk why such items were being offered, he replied, Well, some people like them. And, you know, maybe we need someone like Mussolini in this country. His comment was a reminder that fascism survives as something more than a historical curiosity.Absolutely ome of the greatest books written on the disastrous consequences of the resurgence of monopoly capitalism in the post-fall of the USSR. Michael Parenti once again [it seems effortless though we know it isn't] lays out a vast, meticulous history of market reforms that dragged eastern Europe down following 1991, all the way up to 1997, and connects this with the rise of fascism in the early to mid 20th century. This is like diet-lite-marxism-for-beginners from ~24 years ago, so not only am I not the right audience, but this also feels dated as hell.

This seems like Russian propaganda. He seems to be talking about the ideal of communism and not what it is in real life. (not that I am an expert)While I agree capitalism has some major issues which he points out, he seems to minimize communism's shortfalls.He made an interesting point that Capitalist and Fascists play footsie.After the war communists prosecuted many more Nazis than West Germany. Not sure how true that was, however if true I commend them for that.Although, hard decisions had to be made after WW2 to keep the countries working.Overall, worth reading to hear different viewpoints but beware of his agenda. Read more

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Under one or another Democratic administration, 120,000 Japanese Americans were torn from their homes and livelihoods and thrown into detention camps; atomic bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki with an enormous loss of innocent life; the FBI was given authority to infiltrate political groups; the Smith Act was used to imprison leaders of the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party and later on leaders of the Communist party for their political beliefs; detention camps were established to round up political dissidents in the event of a “national emergency”; during the late 1940s and 1950s, eight thousand federal workers were purged from government because of their political associations and views, with thousands more in all walks of life witchhunted out of their careers; the Neutrality Act was used to impose an embargo on the Spanish Republic that worked in favor of Franco’s fascist legions; homicidal counterinsurgency programs were initiated in various Third World countries; and the Vietnam War was pursued and escalated. And for the better part of a century, the Congressional leadership of the Democratic party protected racial segregation and stymied all antilynching and fair employment bills. Yet all these crimes, bringing ruination and death to many, have not moved the liberals, the social democrats, and the “democratic socialist” anticommunists to insist repeatedly that we issue blanket condemnations of either the Democratic party or the political system that produced it, certainly not with the intolerant fervor that has been directed against existing communism.”