Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

Along with race and class inequality, fascism supports homophobia and sexual inequality. Among Nazism’s earliest victims were a group of Nazi homosexuals, leaders of the SA storm troopers. When complaints about the openly homosexual behavior of SA leader Ernst Roehm and some of his brown-shirted storm troopers continued to reach Hitler after he seized power, he issued an official statement contending that the issue belonged “purely to the private domain” and that an SA officer’s “private life cannot be an object of scrutiny unless it conflicts with basic principles of National Socialist ideology.” The paramilitary SA had been used to win the battle of the streets against trade unionists and Reds. The storm troopers acted as a pseudo-revolutionary force that appealed to mass grievances with a rhetorical condemnation of finance capital. When SA membership skyrocketed to three million in 1933, this was too discomforting to the industrial barons and military patricians. SA street brawlers who denounced bourgeois decadence and called for sharing the wealth and completing the “Nazi revolution” would have to be dealt with. Having used the SA to take state power, Hitler then used the state to neutralize the SA.