Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

U.S. leaders have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.

History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious crisis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to continually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.

To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut—measures that might sound familiar to us today.

To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards.

Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with generous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces.

True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party’s proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism.

Whose interests did Mussolini and Hitler support?

Both Mussolini and Hitler showed their gratitude to their big business patrons by privatizing many perfectly solvent state-owned steel mills, power plants, banks, and steamship companies. Both regimes dipped heavily into the public treasury to refloat or subsidize heavy industry. Agribusiness farming was expanded and heavily subsidized. Both states guaranteed a return on the capital invested by giant corporations while assuming most of the risks and losses on investments. As is often the case with reactionary regimes, public capital was raided by private capital.

At the same time, taxes were increased for the general populace but lowered or eliminated for the rich and big business. Inheritance taxes on the wealthy were greatly reduced or abolished altogether.

In fact, if fascism means anything, it means all-out government support for business and severe repression of antibusiness, prolabor forces.6

Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism’s raison d’être, the function Hitler himself kept referring to when he talked about saving the industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism.

Hitler is usually portrayed as an ideological fanatic, uninterested in crass material things. In fact, he accumulated an immense fortune, much of it in questionable ways.

The greatest source of Hitler’s wealth was a secret slush fund to which leading German industrialists regularly donated.

Italian fascism and German Nazism had their admirers within the U.S. business community and the corporate-owned press.

Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. Certainly, this is true of fascist ideology, whose emotive appeals have served a class-control function.

Fascism preaches the authoritarian rule of an all-encompassing state and a supreme leader. It extols the harsher human impulses of conquest and domination, while rejecting egalitarianism, democracy, collectivism, and pacifism as doctrines of weakness and decadence.

Patriarchal ideology was linked to a conservative class ideology that saw all forms of social equality as a threat to hierarchal control and privilege.

Anti-Semitic propaganda was cleverly tailored to appeal to different audiences. Superpatriots were told that the Jew was an alien internationalist. Unemployed workers were told that their nemesis was the Jewish capitalist and Jewish banker. For debtor farmers, it was the Jewish usurer. For the middle class, it was the Jewish union leader and Jewish communist. Here again we have a consciously rational use of irrational images. The Nazis might have been crazy but they were not stupid.

Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics.

There was much talk about a “Nazi revolution” that would revitalize society, sweeping away the old order and building the new. For this reason, mainstream writers feel free to treat fascism and communism as totalitarian twins. It is a case of reducing essence to form.

Fascism never intended to offer a social solution that would serve the general populace, only a reactionary one, forcing all the burdens and losses onto the working public. Divested of its ideological and organizational paraphernalia, fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial circles.

That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.

After World War II, the Western capitalist allies did little to eradicate fascism from Italy or Germany, except for putting some of the top leaders on trial at Nuremberg.

Within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been fighting the Nazi occupation were jailed.

Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or actively employed by U.S. intelligence agencies during the cold war and otherwise enjoying the protection of high-placed individuals. Some of them found their way onto the Republican presidential campaign committees of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush.16

As subsequent judicial investigations concluded, the strategy of tension was not a simple product of neofascism but the consequence of a larger campaign conducted by state security forces against the growing popularity of the democratic parliamentary Left.

The real sin of revolutionaries, communist or not, was that they championed the laboring classes against the wealthy few. They advocated changes in the distribution of class power and the way wealth was produced and used. They wanted less individualistic advancement at the expense of the many and collective betterment for the entire working populace.

These countries do not threaten the national security of the United States or its people, but the overseas interests of global capitalism.

Generally, as Western investments have increased in the Third World, life conditions for the ordinary peasants and workers have grown steadily more desperate.

By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermination of whole villages, and the like.

For those local and international elites who maintain control over most of the world’s wealth, social revolution is an abomination.

What is needed for social betterment is not International Monetary Fund loans or corporate investments but political organization and democratic opportunity, and freedom from U.S.-sponsored state terrorism.

When popular forces mobilize against privilege and wealth, this causes “instability,” which is judged to be undesirable by U.S. policymakers and their faithful flacks in the U.S. corporate media.

The U.S. national security state uses coercion and violence not in support of social reform but against it, all in the name of “stability,” “counterterrorism,” “democracy,”—and of late and more honestly, “the free market.”

It is better to have a strong [i.e., repressive] regime in power than a liberal government if it is indulgent and relaxed and penetrated by Communists.”

that the government has direct responsibility for the welfare of the people.” So they had to be dealt with harshly without regard for such niceties as democratization and human rights.

This is because U.S. commitments are not to the ordinary people of other lands, but to the privileged reactionary factions that are most accomodating to Western investors.

Bush’s capacity for selective perception had all the unexamined audacity of a dominant ideology that condemns only those who act against an unjust status quo, not those who use violence to preserve it.

U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false.

Of course, revolutions do limit the freedoms of the corporate propertied class and other privileged interests: the freedom to invest privately without regard to human and environmental costs, the freedom to live in obscene opulence while paying workers starvation wages, the freedom to treat the state as a private agency in the service of a privileged coterie, the freedom to employ child labor and child prostitutes, the freedom to treat women as chattel, and so on.

Their professed desire to bring Western political democracy to nations that have had revolutions rarely extends to free-market autocracies.

How does that victimization in prerevolutionary Cuba measure against the much more widely publicized repression that came after the revolution, when Castro’s communists executed a few hundred of the previous regime’s police assassins and torturers, drove assorted upper-class moneybags into exile, and intimidated various other opponents of radical reforms into silence?

Countries with a high level of economic freedom were those that imposed little or no taxes or regulations on business, and did without wage protections, price controls, environmental safeguards, and benefits for the poor.

The next time someone preaches the free-market gospel of economic freedom and productivity, we need ask, for whose benefit and at whose cost?

During the cold war, the anticommunist ideological framework could transform any data about existing communist societies into hostile evidence.

How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained.

If true, one wonders why, in country after country, these Reds side with the poor and powerless often at great risk and sacrifice to themselves, rather than reaping the rewards that come with serving the well-placed.

In other words, to be credible opponents of the cold war, we first had to join in cold war condemnations of communist societies.

For instance, in 1949 some twelve unions were ousted from the CIO because they had Reds in their leadership. The purge reduced CIO membership by some 1.7 million and seriously weakened its recruitment drives and political clout.

For ruling interests, it makes little difference whether their wealth and power is challenged by “communist subversives” or “loyal American liberals.” All are lumped together as more or less equally abhorrent.