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.

Hitler “knew that as long as German industry was making money, his private money sources would be inexhaustible. Thus, he’d see to it that German industry was never better off than under his rule—by launching, for one thing, gigantic armament projects,”8 or what we today would call fat defense contracts.

Italian fascism and German Nazism had their admirers within the U.S. business community and the corporate-owned press. Bankers, publishers, and industrialists, including the likes of Henry Ford, traveled to Rome and Berlin to pay homage, receive medals, and strike profitable deals.

Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols.

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.

In societies throughout the ages, if able to find the opportunity, women have attempted to limit the number of children they bear. This poses a potential problem for a fascist patriarchy that needs vast numbers of soldiers and armaments workers. Women are less able to assert their procreative rights if kept subservient and dependent. So fascist ideology extolled patriarchal authority. Every man must be a husband, a father, and a soldier, il Duce said. Woman’s greatest calling was to cultivate her domestic virtues, devotedly tending to the needs of her family while bearing as many offspring for the state as she could.

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.

For this reason, mainstream writers feel free to treat fascism and communism as totalitarian twins. It is a case of reducing essence to form. The similarity in form is taken as reason enough to blur the vast difference in actual class content.

Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of popular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine revolutionary class content. It propagates a “New Order” while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confusion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.

in good part because the very people who were supposed to investigate these crimes were themselves complicit.

The Rockefeller family’s Chase National Bank used its Paris office in Vichy France to help launder German money to facilitate Nazi international trade during the war, and did so with complete impunity.

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. 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.

The very concept of “revolutionary violence” is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform.

What poses as a U.S. commitment to peaceful nonviolent change is really a commitment to the violent defense of an unjust, undemocratic, global capitalism. 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.”

But to applaud social revolutions is not to oppose political freedom. To the extent that revolutionary governments construct substantive alternatives for their people, they increase human options and freedom.

U.S. policymakers argue that social revolutionary victory anywhere represents a diminution of freedom in the world. The assertion is false. The Chinese Revolution did not crush democracy; there was none to crush in that oppressively feudal regime. The Cuban Revolution did not destroy freedom; it destroyed a hateful U.S.-sponsored police state. The Algerian Revolution did not abolish national liberties; precious few existed under French colonialism. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not abrogate individual rights; no such rights were available under the U.S.-supported puppet governments of Bao Dai, Diem, and Ky.

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.

And the grudging moves toward political democracy occasionally made in these autocracies come only through popular pressure and rebellion and only with the unspoken understanding that democratic governance will not infringe substantially upon the interests of the moneyed class.

As Fidel Castro tells it: The [Cuban] revolution has sent teachers, doctors, and workers to dozens of Third World countries without charging a penny. It shed its own blood fighting colonialism, fighting apartheid, and fascism. … At one point we had 25,000 Third World students studying on scholarships. We still have many scholarship students from Africa and other countries. In addition, our country has treated more children [13,000] who were victims of the Chernobyl tragedy than all other countries put together. They don’t talk about that, and that’s why they blockade us—the country with the most teachers per capita of all countries in the world, including developed countries. The country with the most doctors per capita of all countries [one for every 214 inhabitants]. The country with the most art instructors per capita of all countries in the world. The country with the most sports instructors in the world. That gives you an idea of the effort involved. A country where life expectancy is more than 75 years. Why are they blockading Cuba? Because no other country has done more for its people. It’s the hatred of the ideas that Cuba represents.

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

Redbaiting leftists contributed their share to the climate of hostility that has given U.S. leaders such a free hand in waging hot and cold wars against communist countries and which even today makes a progressive or even liberal agenda difficult to promote.

Left is any rational evaluation of the Soviet Union, a nation that endured a protracted civil war and a multinational foreign invasion in the very first years of its existence, and that two decades later threw back and destroyed the Nazi beast at enormous cost to itself. In the three decades after the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviets made industrial advances equal to what capitalism took a century to accomplish—while feeding and schooling their children rather than working them fourteen hours a day as capitalist industrialists did and still do in many parts of the world. And the Soviet Union, along with Bulgaria, the German Democratic Republic, and Cuba, provided vital assistance to national liberation movements in countries around the world, including Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress in South Africa.

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...

there was less economic inequality than under capitalism.

productive forces were not organized for capital gain and private enrichment; public ownership of the means of production supplanted private ownership.

priority was placed on human services.

communist countries did not pursue the capital penetration of other countries.

While undeniably appealing, this worker syndicalism denies the necessities of state power. Under such an arrangement, the Nicaraguan revolution would not have lasted two months against the U.S.-sponsored counterrevolution that savaged the country. It would have been unable to mobilize enough resources to field an army, take security measures, or build and coordinate economic programs and human services on a national scale.

For a people’s revolution to survive, it must seize state power and use it to (a) break the stranglehold exercised by the owning class over the society’s institutions and resources, and (b) withstand the reactionary counterattack that is sure to come.

People cannot live on the social wage alone. Once our needs are satisfied, then our wants tend to escalate, and our wants become our needs.

Even in the best of societies, much labor has an instrumental value but no inherent gratification.

The intent was to use a shot of capitalism to bolster socialism; the reality was that socialism was used to subsidize and build an unforgiving capitalism.

Unburdened by any documentation, these “estimates” invite us to conclude that the sum total of people incarcerated in the labor camps over a twenty-two year period (allowing for turnovers due to death and term expirations) would have constituted an astonishing portion of the Soviet population. The support and supervision of the gulag (all the labor camps, labor colonies, and prisons of the Soviet system) would have been the USSR’s single largest enterprise.

To be sure, crimes of state were committed in communist countries and many political prisoners were unjustly interned and even murdered. But the inflated numbers offered by cold-war scholars serve neither historical truth nor the cause of justice but merely help to reinforce a knee-jerk fear and loathing of those terrible Reds.

Many of the defendants were eventually acquitted but a number were sentenced to prison. What we witness here is the Nuremberg trials in reverse: Reds put on trial for their anti-fascist efforts by West German friendly-to-fascism prosecutors, using a retroactive application of FRG penal law for GDR citizens. As of the beginning of 1997, several thousand more trials were expected.

During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed.

In 1991, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev, prodded by Russian president Yeltsin, announced that the Communist party of the USSR no longer had legal status. The party’s membership funds and buildings were confiscated. Workers were prohibited from engaging in any kind of political activities in the workplace. Six leftist newspapers were suppressed, while all other publications, many of them openly reactionary, enjoyed uninterrupted distribution. The U.S. media, and even many on the U.S. Left, hailed these acts of suppression as “moving ahead with democratic reforms.”

Yeltsin banned labor unions from all political activities, suppressed dozens of publications, exercised monopoly control over all broadcast media, and permanently outlawed fifteen political parties.

More important than democratic rule was free-market “reform,” a code word for capitalist restoration. As long as democracy could be used to destabilize one-party communist rule, it was championed by the forces of reaction.

On June 11, 1995, Lech Walesa’s personal pastor, Father Henryk Jankowski, declared during a mass in Warsaw that the “Star of David is implicated in the swastika as well as in the hammer and sickle” and that the “diabolic aggressiveness of the Jews was responsible for the emergence of communism” and for World War II.

If West Germany had denazified anywhere near as thoroughly as it forced the East to desocialize, it would be a totally different country

In 1992, Russia’s birth rate fell below its death rate for the first time since World War II. In 1992 and 1993, East Germans buried two people for every baby born.

In 1992 alone, Russia saw its consumer spending drop by 38 percent. (By comparison, during the Great Depression, consumer spending in the United States fell 21 percent over four years.)

During the communist era, three of every five books in the world were produced in the Soviet Union. Today, as the cost of books, periodicals, and newspapers has skyrocketed and education has declined, readership has shrunk almost to Third World levels.

Books of a Marxist or otherwise critical left perspective have been removed from bookstores and libraries. In East Germany, the writers’ association reported one instance in which 50,000 tons of books, some brand new, were buried in a dump. The German authorities who disposed of the books apparently did not feel quite free enough to burn them.

Facing forced privatization, news and entertainment media have had to find rich owners, corporate advertisers, conservative foundations, or agencies within the newly installed capitalist governments to finance them. Television and radio programs that had a left perspective, including some popular youth shows, have been removed from the air. All media have been purged of leftists and restaffed by people with acceptable ideological orientations. This process of moving toward a procapitalist communication monopoly has been described in the Western media as “democratization.”