excerpts from the book
Blackshirts and Reds
by Michael Parenti
publisher - City Lights Books,
1997
261 Columbus Avenue
Sand Francisco, CA 94133
RATIONAL FASCISM
*****
Whom Did the Fascists Support?
There is a vast literature on who supported
the Nazis, but relatively little on whom the Nazis supported after
they came to power. This is in keeping with the tendency of conventional
scholarship to avoid the entire subject of capitalism whenever
something unfavorable might be said about it. Whose interests
did Mussolini and Hitler support?
In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany
in the 1930s, old industrial evils, thought to have passed permanently
into history, re-emerged as the conditions of labor deteriorated
precipitously. In the name of saving society from the Red Menace,
unions and strikes were outlawed. Union property and farm cooperatives
were confiscated and handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage
laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished.
Speedups became commonplace. Dismissals
or imprisonment awaited those workers who complained about unsafe
or inhumane work conditions. Workers toiled longer hours for less
pay. The already modest wages were severely cut, in Germany by
25 to 40 percent, in Italy by 50 percent. In Italy, child labor
was reintroduced.
To be sure, a few crumbs were thrown to
the populace. There were free concerts and sporting events, some
meager social programs, a dole for the unemployed financed mostly
by contributions from working people, and showy public works projects
designed to evoke civic pride.
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.
The result of all this? In Italy during
the 1930s the economy was gripped by recession, a staggering public
debt, and widespread corruption. But industrial profits rose and
the armaments factories busily rolled out weapons in preparation
for the war to come. In Germany, unemployment was cut in half
with the considerable expansion in armaments jobs, but overall
poverty increased because of the drastic wage cuts. And from 1935
to 1943 industrial profits increased substantially while the net
income of corporate leaders climbed 46 percent.
*****
Kudos for Adolph and Benito
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. Many did their utmost
to advance the Nazi war effort, sharing military-industrial secrets
and engaging in secret transactions with the Nazi government,
even after the United States entered the war. During the 1920s
and early 1930s, major publications like Fortune, the Wall Street
Journal, Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune,
and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as the man who
rescued Italy from anarchy and radicalism. They spun rhapsodic
fantasies of a resurrected Italy where poverty and exploitation
had suddenly disappeared, where Reds had been vanquished, harmony
reigned, and Blackshirts protected a "new democracy."
The Italian-language press in the United
States eagerly joined the chorus. The two most influential newspapers,
L'Italia of San Francisco, financed largely by A.P. Giannini's
Bank of America, and n Progresso of New York, owned by multimillionaire
Generoso Pope, looked favorably on the fascist regime and suggested
that the United States could benefit from a similar social order.
Some dissenters refused to join the "We
Adore Benito" chorus. The Nation reminded its readers that
Mussolini was not saving democracy but destroying it. Progressives
of all stripes and various labor leaders denounced fascism. But
their critical sentiments received little exposure in the U.S.
corporate media.
As with Mussolini, so with Hitler. The
press did not look too unkindly upon der Fuehrer's Nazi dictatorship.
There was a strong "Give Adolph A Chance" contingent,
some of it greased by Nazi money. In exchange for more positive
coverage in the Hearst newspapers, for instance, the Nazis paid
almost ten times the standard subscription rate for Hearst's INS
wire service. In return, William Randolph Hearst instructed his
correspondents in Germany to file friendly reports about Hitler's
regime. Those who refused were transferred or fired. Hearst newspapers
even opened their pages to occasional guest columns by prominent
Nazi leaders like Alfred Rosenberg and Hermann Goring.
*****
Friendly Fascism
One of the things conveniently overlooked
by mainstream writers is the way Western capitalist states have
cooperated with fascism. In his collaborationist efforts, British
Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was positively cozy with the
Nazis. He and many of his class saw Hitler as a bulwark against
communism in Germany, and Nazi Germany as a bulwark against communism
in Europe.
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.
By 1947, German conservatives began to depict the Nuremberg prosecutors
as dupes of the Jews and communists. In Italy, the strong partisan
movement that had waged armed struggle against fascism was soon
treated as suspect and unpatriotic. 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. History was turned on its head,
transforming the Blackshirts into victims and the Reds into criminals.
Allied authorities assisted in these measures.
Under the protection of U.S. occupation
authorities, the police, courts, military, security agencies,
and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served
the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits-as
is true to this day. The perpetrators of the Holocaust murdered
six million Jews, half a million Gypsies, thousands of homosexuals,
several million Ukranians, Russians, Poles, and others, and got
away with it-in good part because the very people who were supposed
to investigate these crimes were themselves complicit.
In comparison, when the Communists took
over in East Germany, they removed some 80 percent of the judges,
teachers, and officials for their Nazi collaboration; they imprisoned
thousands, and they executed six hundred Nazi party leaders for
war crimes. They would have shot more of the war criminals had
not so many fled to the protective embrace of the West.
What happened to the U.S. businesses that
collaborated with fascism? 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. Corporations like DuPont, Ford,
General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that
produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied
forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason,
ITT collected $27 million from the U.S. government for war damages
inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings. General Motors
collected over $33 million. Pilots were given instructions not
to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms. Thus
Cologne was almost leveled by Allied bombing but its Ford plant,
providing military equipment for the Nazi army, was untouched;
indeed, German civilians began using the plant as an air raid
shelter.
*****
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.
*****
LET US NOW PRAISE REVOLUTION
For most of this century U.S. foreign
policy has been devoted to: the suppression of revolutionary governments
and radical movements around the world. 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. 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.
The Costs of Counterrevolution
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."
The emergence of major communist powers
like the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China lent another
dimension to U.S. global counterrevolutionary policy. The communists
were depicted as evil incarnate, demonized conspirators who sought
power for power's sake. The United States had to be everywhere
to counteract this spreading "cancer," we were told.
In the name of democracy, U.S. leaders
waged a merciless war against revolutionaries in Indochina for
the better part of twenty years. They dropped many times more
tons of explosives on Vietnam than were used throughout World
War II by all combatants combined. 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. His associate, the South
Vietnamese minister of information, maintained that 40,000 was
a more accurate estimate. 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. By prevailing against this onslaught, the Vietnamese
supposedly demonstrated that they were "unprepared for our
democratic institutions."
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 million 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.
Official sources either deny these U.S.-sponsored
mass murders or justify them as necessary measures that had to
be taken against an implacable communist foe. Anticommunist propaganda
saturated our airwaves, schools, and political discourse. Despite
repeated and often factitious references to the tyranny of the
Red Menace, the anticommunist opinion makers never spelled out
what communists actually did in the way of socio-economic policy.
This might explain why, despite decades of Red-bashing propaganda,
most Americans, including many who number themselves among the
political cognoscenti, still cannot offer an informed statement
about the social policies of communist societies.
The anti-Red propagandists uttered nary
a word about how revolutionaries in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam,
Nicaragua, and other countries nationalized the lands held by
rich exploitative landlords and initiated mass programs for education,
health, housing, and jobs. Not a word about how their efforts
advanced the living standards and life chances of hundreds of
millions in countries that had long suffered under the yoke of
feudal oppression and Western colonial pillage, an improvement
in mass well-being never before witnessed in history.
No matter that the revolutionaries in
various Asian, African, and Latin American countries enjoyed popular
support and were willing to pursue a neutralist course in East-West
relations rather than place themselves under the hegemony of either
Moscow or Peking. They still were targeted for a counterrevolutionary
battering. From opposing communists because they might be revolutionaries,
it was a short step to opposing revolutionaries because they might
be communists.
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.
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