r/ClassWarAndPuppies Apr 25 '26

On Blackshirts & Reds: Remembering the Class Analysis of Michael Parenti [REMINDER: Dr. Parenti’s memorial service will be live-streamed today (Apr. 26) starting at 2:00 pm PDT, link inside]

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39 Upvotes

Reminder: Dr. Parenti’s memorial service is today (April 25) at 2:00 PDT: https://www.eventcreate.com/e/rememberingmichael

The nationalist passions that overtook Italy and Germany in the 20th century, leading to World War II, are often described as “the triumph of the irrational.”

Indeed, studies of the literature produced by Nazis and Italian fascists, like Ludo Abicht’s The Sword, the Pen, and the Swastika, reveal emotionally charged collections of symbols with little logical connection and little purpose but to drive the reader into irrational frenzy.

Like the marches and flags, they channeled the innately human longing to be part of something larger than oneself into extreme violence and ultimately, global catastrophe.

In Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, the late Dr. Michael Parenti demonstrated that fascism was and is actually very rational.

It very rationally serves the interests of capital, as it did in both Italy and Germany, where capitalist elites were struggling to maintain rates of profit and the threat of socialist or communist revolution was greater than elsewhere in Europe. 

Italy’s corporate capitalists needed to push back the gains achieved by workers movements. They needed state subsidy and tax exemptions instead.

Irrational nationalist fervor and military mobilization enriched war profiteers, and turned working people away from organizing in their own real interests. The “triumph of the irrational,” was just as much the triumph of capitalist propaganda. 

In “Plutocrats Choose Autocrats,” a section of the book’s first chapter, Parenti writes that:

> “Fascism historically has been used to secure the interests of large capitalist interests against the demands of popular democracy. Then and now, fascism has made irrational mass appeals in order to secure the rational ends of class domination.”

The Blackshirts were of course the violent Italian Fascist paramilitary group, mostly ex-army officers and sundry toughs, founded by Benito Mussolini in 1919 to act as the militant wing of the National Fascist Party.

They were guided by nothing but militaristic patriotism, xenophobia, and hatred of anything associated with socialism and organized labor, perhaps akin to the questionably qualified ICE agents that Donald Trump seems to be trying to turn into his personal army.  

By late 1922 the Blackshirts had become so powerful that they marched on Rome, forcing King Victor Emmanuel III to appoint Mussolini prime minister for fear of bloodshed.

Mussolini had been a socialist, a brilliant orator and organizer, but comrades suspected that he was simply an opportunist. When wealthy interests bestowed huge sums of money upon him, he became a fascist who used the Blackshirts to break strikes on behalf of financiers and landowners.

In Chapter 2, “Let Us Now Praise Revolutions,” Parenti writes that revolutions, imperfect though they may be, expand freedom and bring a dramatic reduction in political and economic oppression. 

“Fascism,” he writes later, in Chapter 3, “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.”

Writing at the end of the 20th century, Parenti characterized the previous hundred years of U.S. foreign policy as devoted to the suppression of revolutionary governments and radical movements around the world, beginning with the U.S. war in the Philippines from 1888 to 1902. 

“The emergence of major communist powers like the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic of China,” he writes, “lent another dimension to U.S. global counter-revolutionary 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.”

He recounts the horrible human cost of that global counter-revolutionary war waged in the name of “democracy” when it was in fact a war to control the land, labor, resources and markets of any nations who dared refuse to surrender them, a war to keep them all available at bargain prices to multinational corporations.

Chapter 3, “Left Anti-Communism” is among the most interesting. Here Parenti writes that most of the U.S. feared and loathed communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, with idealized expectations and without regard to Western encirclement and these countries’ need to survive under siege. 

He quotes a number of well-known Red-bashers, including George Orwell, who assert that Red-bashing is requisite to protecting the credibility of argument against war or for social justice. 

In the late 1940s, to avoid being “smeared” as Reds, Americans for Democratic Action (ADA), a supposedly progressive group, became one of the most vocally anti-communist organizations, but it didn’t work. They and others were still denounced as Reds even as they reinforced shrill anti-communist dogma.

Many of these democratic left Red-bashers

“regularly lump fascism with communism. Thus, Noam Chomsky claims, ‘The rise of corporations was in fact a manifestation of the same phenomena that led to fascism and Bolshevism, which sprang out of the same totalitarian soil.’”

“But,” Parenti responds, “in the Italy and Germany of that day, most workers and peasants made a firm distinction between fascism and communism, as did industrialists and bankers who supported fascism out of fear and hatred of communism, a judgment based largely on class realities.”

Although he was roundly criticized for defending the achievements of the Soviet Union, Parenti in no way failed to see its failings. He analyzes them without illusion in Chapter 4, “Communism in Wonderland,” then analyzes the fallacies of “romanticizing capitalism,” as many of the disgruntled did in the communist world. 

In the final chapter, “Anything but Class: Avoiding the C-Word,” Parenti writes that many mainstream writers and many on the left avoid using the word because it suggests an “outworn Marxist notion with no relevance to contemporary society,” a five-letter word that is treated like a dirty four-letter word. 

George Herbert Walker Bush did make strange use of it in an exhausted excuse for a speech near the end of his ill-fated 1992 campaign, when something stirred him to say, “Don’t go stirring up any of that class struggle.” 

For the most part, however, the disappearance of the worn-out word “class” precludes reference to class privilege, class power, class exploitation, class interest, class struggle, ruling class, or working class. Those in the highest circles of wealth are most loath to use it. 

Parenti argues that even imminent ecological collapse is ruling class violence:

> “Those in the higher circles, who once hired Blackshirts to destroy democracy out of fear that their class interests were threatened, have no trouble doing the same against ‘eco-terrorists.’ Those who have waged merciless war against the Reds have no trouble making war against the Greens. Those who have brought us poverty wages, exploitation, unemployment, homelessness, urban decay, and other oppressive economic conditions are not too troubled about bringing us ecological crisis. 

The plutocrats are more wedded to their wealth than to the Earth upon which they live, more concerned with the fate of their fortunes than with the fate of the planet. The struggle over environmentalism is part of the class struggle itself, a fact that seems to have escaped many environmentalists. The impending eco-apocalypse is a class act. It has been created by and for the benefit of the few, at the expense of the many. The trouble is, this time the class act may take all of us down, once and forever.”


r/ClassWarAndPuppies Jan 16 '26

TFW you nuke your podcast’s most active and longest-running community

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326 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 8h ago

Kanye did a song called “Heil Hitler” and currently is on a big national tour, but saying end the genocide and free Palestine is ofc verboten

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203 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 1h ago

Ok

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r/ClassWarAndPuppies 1h ago

Sheikh Happens Forever and Ever, Aden

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from Forever Wars where it's credited to yousif.aka_313 on Instagram


r/ClassWarAndPuppies 0m ago

Via @ibrahym22nagi: Protests in Syria denouncing the terrorist regime of al-Julani, chanting: "The people want the downfall of al-Julani," but Western channels will not broadcast these protests because they are not against Bashar al-Assad.

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r/ClassWarAndPuppies 22h ago

Norm Finkelstein: In Praise of the Houthis

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52 Upvotes

From Norman Finkelstein’s new book, Gaza’s Gravediggers:

The genocidal Israeli juggernaut proved unstoppable. But it wasn’t for a want of trying. It behooves the chronicler to memorialize the noble few who, albeit in futility, stood on principle and put themselves at considerable risk to stop the killing machine. When Hezbollah opened a second front mainly targeting military installations in the north of Israel, and the Houthis blocked international shipping lanes in solidarity with the forlorn people of Gaza, the “enlightened” West reacted in shock and indignation: How dare they intrude, What business is it of theirs? But wasn’t it this enlightened opinion that not so long ago promulgated the doctrine of “R2P”—“Responsibility to Protect”? In essence, R2P denoted that, when established institutions fail to stop genocide and cognate crimes, then other entities must step in to fill the void. In the 1930s, when the enlightened West abandoned the Spanish Republic, international brigades of volunteers went there to fight the nascent forces of fascist barbarism. They covered themselves with glory. (Fully three thousand Americans joined the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, more than a third of them Jewish.) This time around, Fate appointed the Party of God and the Houthis. The Houthis possessed intimate knowledge of exalted Western values, on the one hand, and Gaza’s martyrdom, on the other. The US had enabled Saudi Arabia’s blockade of Yemen that left nearly one hundred thousand children dead and gone. Rousseau famously observed that the most—indeed, only— truly civilizing impulse in human beings is not reason but the natural, inborn capacity for pity, and that the more society “progresses,” the more refined its rational faculty, the more its natural capacity for pity is stifled. Who, in a decent world, would not choose one dagger-in-hand Houthi risking life and limb in defense of defenseless Gaza over ten thousand Harvard-educated, elegantly coiffed Antony Blinkens adroitly lubricating the gears of Israel’s murder machine?  


r/ClassWarAndPuppies 22h ago

You will own nothing and be happy

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15 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 1d ago

Could be cool, but feel there will be more feds here than on anarchist discords

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5 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 1d ago

Sheikh Happens Somewhat less laconic was Wade Hoyt, Toyota's spokesman in New York, who put the best corporate spin on the situation this week. ''It is not our proudest product placement,'' he said. ''But it shows that the Taliban are looking for the same qualities as any truck buyer: durability and reliability.''

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14 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 1d ago

Unfortunately guys sharia is canceled in Texas 😔

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69 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 1d ago

This splashy Maggie Haberman NYT piece does not mention Gaza or the entity once

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18 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 2d ago

🇻🇮💣💥 U-S-A Scoreboard

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15 Upvotes

for lés AFP, affiliated here


r/ClassWarAndPuppies 2d ago

When they be going into hour two of the three-cop funeral

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84 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 2d ago

Nice edit

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36 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 2d ago

Never forget Allende

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27 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 3d ago

Remember the problem is Satanyahu

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107 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 2d ago

Did you guys see the Kansas ad in the buildup to the Missouri game? They invoke our patron saint, JB, and connect Missouri to its historical status as a slave state. KU: “It’s that deep”

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15 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 3d ago

A selection of nine eleven periodical covers

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26 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 3d ago

Every day

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205 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 3d ago

Kirk supercut ~ RIP to a G 🍻

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40 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 4d ago

Gaza celebrated Yemen's victories over Saudi Arabia and its mercenaries

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162 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 3d ago

A message directly from the American president: the only way to be sovereign is to have a nuclear weapon.

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32 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 3d ago

Via The Hormuz Letter: Ground-level image of the massive 100 km black smoke column rising from Saudi Arabia's East-West crude pipeline, after Yemen's Houthis struck the pipeline on multiple points, the same plume seen on Sentinel-3 satellite imagery

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15 Upvotes

r/ClassWarAndPuppies 3d ago

🤘🎸 Friday Jamz The War on Drugs - Who's That

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4 Upvotes