A bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today. Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about, but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of ...
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A bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today. Blackshirts & Reds explores some of the big issues of our time: fascism, capitalism, communism, revolution, democracy, and ecology. These terms are often bandied about, but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parenti's trademark. Parenti shows how "rational fascism" renders service to capitalism, how corporate power undermines democracy, and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism, and the disastrous impact of the "free-market" victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism, demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism. Written with lucid and compelling style, this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought, inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views, and to ask why things are as they are. "A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks." -- The Catholic Journalist "By portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict, and not a series of discrete encounters, between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other, Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism, not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration, he points out, but a 'rational' and integral component of the system." --Stan Goff, author of Full Spectrum Disorder: The Military in the New American Century Michael Parenti , PhD Yale, is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nation's leading progressive political analysts. Author of over 275 published articles and twenty books, 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 . His informative and entertaining books and talks have reached a wide range of audiences in North America and abroad.
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Complacency is the greatest enemy of freedom and democracy, and reading this sobering examination of the role class plays in our lives is like setting a bomb off under the feet of the complacent. Parenti shows how polemicists on both the right AND left dis Marxism either without fully studying it in depth or because popular sentiment holds that the philosophy has been disproved by 20th century events, such, with great truth, one might substitute the word, "Marxism" for "Christianity" in Chesterton's famous quote, "There's nothing wrong with [it], it's just never been tried." True, Parenti goes out on a limb at times, but his erudition and clarity of style should turn some doubters into true believers. Especially effective is his explication of how the ever-increasing divide between the super-rich and the rest of us is diminishing not only the size of our bank accounts and our disposable income but the very quality of our lives. I read these sections with a mind to G. W. Bush's tax giveaways to the wealthy, who don't need them, basing such practices on the outworn (and completely fallacious) policy known as "supply side economics," which Reagan tried when he was in the White House and which his own economist, David Stockman, suggested was a "joke," saying he didn't think the president would take him seriously. Now, John McBush wants to make these tax cuts permanent. If you think economic times are bad now, just wait! But the great thing about Parenti is, he doesn't spare anyone, left or right. This is a must read for those convinced the rich and powerful care nothing about their fellow man, a dispensable commodity just like the products he produces so that profits go to the top 1% and no one else. A good, quick read, and a sobering one at that!
