Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

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In Italy, during the 1970s, there emerged a veritable cottage industry of books and articles claiming that Mussolini not only made the trains run on time but also made Italy work well. Blackshirts and Reds goes out to answer some of the most important questions that plague leftist and western political discourse. It served the official worldview perfectly well, saying what the higher circles had been telling us for generations: that the struggle between classes is not an everyday reality but an outdated notion, that an untrammeled capitalism is here to stay now and forever, that the future belongs to those who control the present. Addeddate 2020-07-12 20:32:11 Identifier michael-parenti-blackshirts-and-reds Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t7zm49217 Ocr ABBYY FineReader 11. You can read this before Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom.

This book is essential and since its warnings and prescriptions have gone unheeded for 20 years, it is even more urgently essential today than it was when published. The end result was a dramatic improvement in living conditions for hundreds of millions of people on a scale never before or since witnessed in history. This is like diet-lite-marxism-for-beginners from ~24 years ago, so not only am I not the right audience, but this also feels dated as hell. The point Parenti makes is that modern Western culture embraces what can accurately be described as neo-fascist politics while condemning similar regimes of the past.All these publications, along with many conventional academic studies, have one thing in common: They say little if anything about the class policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. Maybe though my critique has to do with the fact that much of what he states is obvious to me, so maybe that's my problem, but his writing definitely suffers from a number of oversimplifications which would make it easy for any Liberal to dismiss his arguments in a second. I feel like Parenti never dips more than a toe into any sort of discourse on Stalin, but here he surprisingly dedicates an entire section to Stalin and the myths of the USSR under Stalin. Nevertheless, Blackshirts and Reds is an excellent overall criticism of fascism because it serves at least as importantly as a principled and unapologetic primer on the continuing practical relevance of Marxism to social change, the author making concisely clear why the honest study of Communist theory and practice -- undistorted by its dedicated enemies -- is no idle exercise in nostalgia, but a necessary prerequisite to really understand and transform present-day society.

Anarchists, democratic socialists [an oxymoron], dismissing these nations based on their stubborn refusal to detach from western propaganda, ultimately perpetuates the continued attacks and plundering of these nations. The latter course, I believe, would have produced a more com­fortable, more humane and serviceable society.In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists. His writings are published in popular periodicals, scholarly journals, and his op-ed pieces have been in leading newspapers such as The New York Times and The Los Angeles Times.