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