Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

by Michael Parenti

The turn of the twentieth century found the McKinley administration in a war of attrition against the people of the Philippines lasting from 1898 to 1902 (with pockets of resistance continuing for years afterward). In that conflict, U.S. forces slaughtered some 200,000 Filipino women, men, and children.1 At about that same time, in conjunction with various European colonial powers, the United States invaded China to help suppress the Boxer Rebellion at substantial loss of life to the Chinese rebels. U.S. forces took over Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam and in the following decades invaded Mexico, Soviet Russia, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and other countries, actions that usually inflicted serious losses upon the populations of these countries.

From grade school through grad school, few of us are taught anything about these events, except to be told that U.S. forces must intervene in this or that country in order to protect U.S. interests, thwart aggression, and defend our national security. U.S. leaders fashioned other convenient rationales for their interventions abroad. The public was told that the peoples of various countries were in need of our civilizing guidance and desired the blessings of democracy, peace, and prosperity. To accomplish this, of course, it might be necessary to kill off considerable numbers of the more recalcitrant among them. Such were the measures our policymakers were willing to pursue in order to “uplift lesser peoples.”

Testifying before a Congressional committee, former CIA director William Colby admitted that under his direction U.S. forces and their South Vietnam collaborators carried out the selective assassination of 24,000 Vietnamese dissidents, in what was known as the Phoenix Program.

U.S. policymakers and their media mouthpieces judged the war a “mistake” because the Vietnamese proved incapable of being properly instructed by B-52 bomber raids and death squads.

In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U.S. forces or U.S.-supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disappeared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the “dirty war” of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.

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.

“U.S. leaders have the right to define the limits of socioeconomic development within other nations.”

“The United States must play a counterrevolutionary containment role in order to protect our national interests.”

This is true only if we equate “our national interests” with the investment interests of high finance. U.S. interventionism has been very effective in building neo-imperialism, keeping the land, labor, natural resources, and markets of Third World countries available at bargain prices to multinational corporations. But these corporate interests do not represent the interests of the U.S. people. The public pays for the huge military budgets and endures the export of its jobs to foreign labor markets, the inflow of thousands of impoverished immigrants who compete for scarce employment and housing, and various other costs of empire.

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

“The United States has a moral obligation to guarantee the stability of nations that are undergoing democratic development but are threatened by revolutionaries and terrorists.”

In fact, most U.S. interventions are on behalf of corrupt and self-serving oligarchs and antidemocratic militarists (who take power with or without the benefit of U.S.-sponsored showcase elections). Third World oligarchs are frequently educated at elite U.S. universities or end up on the CIA payroll, as do their police chiefs and military officers, many of whom receive training in torture and assassination at U.S. counterinsurgency institutions.

“Fundamental social change should be peacefully pursued within the established order of nations rather than by revolutionary turmoil.”

People throughout the world do not need more corporate investments, rather they need the opportunity to wrest back their land, labor, natural resources, and markets in order to serve their own social needs. Such a revolutionary development invites fierce opposition from apostles of the free market, whose violent resistance to social change makes peaceful transformation impossible to contemplate.

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. Most social revolutions begin peaceably. Why would it be otherwise? Who would not prefer to assemble and demonstrate rather than engage in mortal combat against pitiless forces that enjoy every advantage in mobility and firepower?

For those local and international elites who maintain control over most of the world’s wealth, social revolution is an abomination. Whether it be peaceful or violent is a question of no great moment to them. Peaceful reforms that infringe upon their profitable accumulations and threaten their class privileges are as unacceptable to them as the social upheaval imposed by revolution.

U.S. foreign aid programs offer another example of how imperialist policy masquerades as social reform within Third World nations. Aid programs are not intended to effect serious social betterment. At best, they finance piecemeal projects of limited impact. More often, they are used to undermine local markets, drive small farmers off their land, build transportation and office facilities needed by outside investors, increase a country’s debt and economic dependency, and further open its economy to multinational corporate penetration.

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.

We might recall Jean Kirkpatrick’s distinction between “benign” authoritarian right-wing governments that supposedly are not all that brutal and allow gradual change, and horrid totalitarian left-wing ones that suppress everyone. The real distinction is that the right-wing government maintains the existing privileged order of the free market, keeping the world safe for the empowered hierarchies and wealthy classes of the world. In contrast, the left-wing “totalitarians” want to abolish exploitative property relations and create a more egalitarian economic system. Their favoring the have-nots over the haves is what makes them so despicable in the eyes of the latter.

We might recall that unforgettable moment when President George Bush—whose invasions of Panama and Iraq brought death and destruction to those nations and who presided over a U.S. military empire that is the single greatest purveyor of violence in the world—lectured revolutionary leader Nelson Mandela on the virtues of nonviolence, even going so far as to quote Martin Luther King, Jr., during Mandela’s visit to Washington, D.C. in June 1990. Mandela’s real sin in Bush’s eyes was that he was part of a revolutionary movement that engaged in armed struggle against a violently repressive apartheid regime in South Africa.

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.

During the Vietnam era, explanations as to why people sided with the communist revolutionaries came from some unexpected sources. U.S. ambassador Henry Cabot Lodge admitted, “The only people who have been doing anything for the little man—to lift him up—have been the communists” (New York Times, 2/27/66). In a similar vein, one faithful propagator of the official line, columnist James Reston, wrote with surprising candor, “Even Premier Ky [U.S.-sponsored dictator of South Vietnam] told this reporter today that the communists were closer to the people’s yearnings for social justice and an independent life than his own government” (New York Times, 9/1/65). What Lodge and Reston left unsaid was that the “little man” and the “people’s yearnings” for social justice were the very things that U.S. leaders were bent on suppressing.

There is no such thing as freedom in the abstract. There is freedom to speak openly and iconoclastically, freedom to organize a political opposition, freedom of opportunity to get an education and pursue a livelihood, freedom to worship as one chooses or not worship at all, freedom to live in healthful conditions, freedom to enjoy various social benefits, and so on. Most of what is called freedom gets its definition within a social context.

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.

The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), a sweeping multinational free-trade act that amounts to a carte blanche for global capitalism, offers no protection for children who are exploited, abused, overworked, and underpaid. During GATT negotiations, leaders of Third World countries successfully argued against placing any restrictions on child labor, arguing that children have always worked in their cultures and such traditional practices should be respected. To prohibit child labor would limit the free market and effect severe hardship on those poor families in which a child is often the only wage earner. Even if the longstanding practice of children helping out on farms is acceptable (assuming they are not overworked and are allowed to go to school), the practice of “locking them into a hotbox of a factory for 14 hours a day” is something else. Furthermore, they may be the only wage earner “because adult workers have been laid off in favor of children, who are infinitely more exploitable and provide bigger profits for prosperous factory owners” (Anna Quindlen, New York Times, 11/23/94).

So a conservative think tank like the Heritage Foundation rated Cuba along with Laos, Iraq, and North Korea as countries with the lowest level of “economic freedom.” 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. Economic freedom is the real concern of conservatives and plutocrats; the freedom to utilize vast sums of money to accumulate still vaster sums, regardless of the human and environmental costs. Mass productivity coupled with elitist distribution results in more wealth for the few and greater poverty for the many. So after two centuries of incredible technological development and unprecedented economic expansion, the number of people living in poverty in the capitalist world has grown more quickly than any other demographic cohort. The world’s slum population has increased at a far greater rate than the total global population. Amazing growth in industrial productivity has been accompanied by increasingly desperate want, misery, and repression. In short, there is a causal link between vast concentrations of wealth and widespread poverty. The next time someone preaches the free-market gospel of economic freedom and productivity, we need ask, for whose benefit and at whose cost? Those who show concern for the elites overthrown in the whirl of revolution should also keep in mind the hundreds of m...

For these reasons, those of us who are genuinely concerned about democracy, social justice, and the survival of our planet should support rather than oppose popular revolutions.

In the United States, for over a hundred years, the ruling interests tirelessly propagated anticommunism among the populace, until it became more like a religious orthodoxy than a political analysis.

If communists in the United States played an important role struggling for the rights of workers, the poor, African-Americans, women, and others, this was only their guileful way of gathering support among disfranchised groups and gaining power for themselves. How one gained power by fighting for the rights of powerless groups was never explained. What we are dealing with is a nonfalsifiable orthodoxy, so assiduously marketed by the ruling interests that it affected people across the entire political spectrum.

Then and now, many on the Left have failed to realize that those who fight for social change on behalf of the less-privileged elements of society will be Red-baited by conservative elites whether they are communists or not. 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.

Left anticommunists find any association with communist organizations morally unacceptable because of the “crimes of communism.” Yet many of them are themselves associated with the Democratic party in this country, either as voters or as members, apparently unconcerned about the morally unacceptable political crimes committed by leaders of that organization. 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 prot...

Though life under communism left a lot to be desired and the services themselves were rarely the best, communist countries did guarantee their citizens some minimal standard of economic survival and security, including guaranteed education, employment, housing, and medical assistance.

One might recall how, in 1918-20, fourteen capitalist nations, including the United States, invaded Soviet Russia in a bloody but unsuccessful attempt to overthrow the revolutionary Bolshevik government. The years of foreign invasion and civil war did much to intensify the Bolsheviks’ siege psychology with its commitment to lockstep party unity and a repressive security apparatus.

The exigencies of revolutionary survival did not “make inevitable” the heartless execution of hundreds of Old Bolshevik leaders, the personality cult of a supreme leader who claimed every revolutionary gain as his own achievement, the suppression of party political life through terror, the eventual silencing of debate regarding the pace of industrialization and collectivization, the ideological regulation of all intellectual and cultural life, and the mass deportations of “suspect” nationalities.

“Capitalism with a human face” is being replaced by “capitalism in your face.”

All communist nations were burdened by rigid economic command systems.

“We can no longer tolerate the managerial system that rejects scientific and technological progress and new technologies, that is committed to cost-ineffectiveness and generates squandering and waste.”

Improvements in production would lead only to an increase in one’s production quota. In effect, well-run factories were punished with greater work loads. Poor performing ones were rewarded with lower quotas and state subsidies.

Only a foolish or saintly farmer would work harder to produce better quality meat for the privilege of getting paid less.

Talking to the people themselves, one found that they complained less about overbearing control than about the absence of responsible control.

Corruption and favoritism were commonplace.

The system itself rewarded evasion and noncompliance.

Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs.

“We thought building a good society would make good people. That’s not always true.”

In a society of rapidly rising—and sometimes unrealistic—expectations, those who did not do well, who could not find employment commensurate with their training, or who were stuck with drudge work, were especially inclined to want a change. Even in the best of societies, much labor has an instrumental value but no inherent gratification. The sooner a tedious task is completed, the sooner there is another to be done, so why knock yourself out?

As a system of analysis mainly concerned with existing capitalism, Marxism has relatively little to say about the development of socialist societies.

With the decline of communist power in Eastern Europe, the worst political scum began to float to the surface, Nazi sympathizers and hate groups of all sorts, though they were not the only purveyors of bigotry.

Leaders who talk only to each other are soon out of touch with reality.

Not everyone romanticized capitalism. Many of the Soviet and Eastern European emigrés who had migrated to the United States during the 1970s and 1980s complained about this country’s poor social services, crime, harsh work conditions, lack of communitarian spirit, vulgar electoral campaigns, inferior educational standards, and the astonishing ignorance that Americans had about history.

What we do know of Stalin’s purges is that many victims were Communist party officials, managers, military officers, and other strategically situated individuals whom the dictator saw fit to incarcerate or liquidate. In addition, whole catagories of people whom Stalin considered of unreliable loyalty—Cossacks, Crimean Tarters, and ethnic Germans—were selected for internal deportation.