Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

Seizing upon anything but class, U.S. leftists today have developed an array of identity groups centering around ethnic, gender, cultural, and life-style issues. These groups treat their respective grievances as something apart from class struggle, and have almost nothing to say about the increasingly harsh politico-economic class injustices perpetrated against us all. Identity groups tend to emphasize their distinctiveness and their separateness from each other, thus fractionalizing the protest movement.

Again and again we are asked to choose between freedom and security when in truth there is no security without freedom. In both dictatorships and democracies, the agencies of “national security,” acting secretively and unaccountably, have regularly violated both our freedom and our security, practicing every known form of repression, corruption, and deceit.