History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious cri- sis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to con- tinually recreate their hierarchal
structure
of power and privilege.
Blackshirts-and-Reds-by-Michael-Parenti
?
BLACKSHIRTS & RED
Parenti, Michael, 1933- Blackshirts & reds
? By Michael Parenti
Dirty Truths (1996)
Against Empire (1995)
Democracy for the Few (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1995) Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America (1994) Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (1986,
2nd edition, 1993)
Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (1992)
The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race (1989)
Power and the Powerless (1978)
Ethnic and Political Attitudes (1975)
Trends and Tragedies in American Foreign Policy ( 1971) The Anti-Communist Impulse (1969)
? MICHAEL PARENTI
BLACKSHIRTS &
Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS San Francisco
?
? (C) 1997 by Michael Parenti All Rights Reserved
10 987654321
Cover design: Nigel French Book design: Nancy J. Peters Typography: Harvest Graphics
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Parenti, Michael, 1933--
Blackshirts and reds : rational fascism and the overthrow of
communism / Michael Parenti, p. cm.
ISBN 0-87288-330-1 (he). --ISBN 0-87286-329-8 (pbk. ) 1. Communism. 2. Post-communism. 3. Fascism.
4. Capitalism.
7. Revolutions.
I. Title.
HX44. 5. P35 1997 335. 43--dc21
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97-119 CIP
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? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Sally Soriano, Peggy Noton, Jane Scantlebury, and Richard Plevin for their valuable support and helpful criticisms of the manuscript. On numerous occasions, Jane also utilized her professional librarian skills to track down much needed information at my request. My thanks also to Stephanie Welch, Neala Haze? , and Kathryn Cahill for valuable assistance rendered.
Again, I wish to express my gratitude to Nancy J. Peters, my editor at City Lights Books, for her encouragement and her critical reading of the final text. And belated thanks are owed my publisher, the poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for inviting me to become a City Lights author some years ago. Finally, a word of appreciation to Stacey Lewis and others too numerous to mention who partook in the production and distribution of this book: they who do the work.
? To the Reds and others, nameless heroes many, who resisted yesterdays Blackshirts and who continue to fight today s ruthless corporate stuffed shirts.
And to the memory of Sean Gervasi and Max Gundy, valued friends and warriors for social justice.
Per chi conosce solo il tuo colore, bandiera rossa, tu devi realmente esistere, perche` lui esista . . . tu che gia` vanti tante glorie borghesi e operaie, ridiventa straccio, e il piu` povero ti sventoli.
For him who knows only your color, red flag, you must really exist, so he may exist. . .
you who already have achieved many bourgeois
and working-class glories,
you become a rag again and the poorest wave you.
-- Pier Paolo Pasolini
? CONTENTS
Preface xiu 1 RATIONAL FASCISM 1
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.
Plutocrats Choose Autocrats 2 Whom Did the Fascists Support? 6 Kudos for Adolph and Benito 10 The Rational Use of Irrational Ideology 11 Patriarchy and Pseudo-Revolution 14 Friendly to Fascism 17
2 LET US NOW PRAISE REVOLUTION 23
Revolutions are democratic developments that expand the freedoms of people who enjoyed no freedom under oppressive prerevolu- tionary regimes. Revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. They bring a dramatic reduction in political and economic oppression.
The Costs of Counterrevolution 24 Presumptions of Power 26 Whose Violence? 28 Free Market for the Few 31 The Freedom of Revolution 34 What Measure of Pain? 36
? 3 LEFT ANTICOMMUNISTE 41
Like conservatives and reactionaries, most of the U. S. Left greeted communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with fear and loathing, and with idealized expectations that took no account of Western encirclement and the survival necessities of socialism under siege.
Genuflection to Orthodoxy 42 Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism 49 Decentralization vs. Survival 53
4 COMMUNISM IN WONDERLAND 59
The internal irrationalities and weaknesses of past communist economies and the systemic reasons why productivity stagnated and reforms were so difficult to effect.
Rewarding Inefficiency 59 Nobody Minding the Store 62 Wanting It All 65 Reactionism to the Surface 68 Romanticizing Capitalism 72
5 STALING FINGERS 76
Newly published documentation on the gulag reveals a somewhat different picture of the repressive nature of communist systems, both in the past and in recent times. The historic accomplishments in economic development within communist countries repre- sented a positive gain in the lives of hundreds of millions.
How Many Victims? 77 Where Did the Gulag Go? 81 Memories of Maldevelopment 84
? 6 THE FREE-MARKET PARADISE GOES EAST(I) 87
Repression by conservative forces in the former communist states in the name of "democratic reform. " Privileges from pre-communist days restored to the old owning classes. Western investors plunder the public sector at great profit to themselves, reducing the former communist countries to Third World levels.
Suppression of the Left 87 One-Way Democracy 94 Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? 97 Colonizing the East 100
7 THE FREE-MARKET PARADISE GOES EAST(II) 105
The emergence of free-market rapacity and growing inequality, widespread crime, social maladies, and victimization, especially of women, children, the elderly, and the poor. The Third Worldization and cultural decay of formerly collectivist societies.
For Vipers and Bloodsuckers 105 Shock Therapy for the Many 108 Crime and Corruption 111 Cultural Decay 112 Women and Children Last 114 "We Didn't Realize What We Had" 116
? 8 THE END OF MARXISM? 121
Understanding the fundamental concepts and discoveries of a view of society and politics that today is more relevant than ever, helping us to overcome truncated modes of thought, teaching us to ask why things are as they are.
Some Durable Basics 122 More Right than Wrong 125 More Wealth, More Poverty 129 A Holistic Science 132 Learning to Ask Why 136
9 ANYTHING BUT CLASS: AVOIDING
THE C-WORD 141
Class is more than a demographic category. Anything-but-class explanations of social realities invite us to deny the obvious links between wealth and power and the collision of ecology with capitalism.
The Class Denial of Class 141 The ABC Theorists 144 Everyday Class Struggle 149 Wealth and Power 152 Eco-Apocalypse, a Class Act 154
Index
161
? PREFACE
This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of "democratic capitalism" to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anticommunism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic efforts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries.
The political orthodoxy that demonizes communism permeates the entire political perspective. Even people on the Left have internalized the liberal/conservative ideology that equates fascism and communism as equally evil totalitaran twins, two major mass movements of the twentieth century. This book attempts to show the enormous differ- ences between fascism and communism both past and present, both in theory and practice, especially in regard to questions of social equality, private capital accumulation, and class interest.
The orthodox mythology also would have us believe that the Western democracies (with the United States leading the way) have opposed both totalitarian systems with equal vigor. In fact, U. S. lead- ers have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.
In the pages ahead I discuss how capitalism propagates and prof- its from fascism, the value of revolution in the advancement of the human condition, the causes and effects of the destruction of com- munism, the continuing relevance of Marxism and class analysis, and the heartless nature of corporate-class power.
Over a century ago, in his great work Les Mise? rables Victor Hugo asked, "Will the future arrive? " He was thinking of a future of social justice, free from the "terrible shadows" of oppression imposed by the few upon the great mass of humankind. Of late, some scribes
XIII
? XIV BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
have announced "the end of history" With the overthrow of com- munism, the monumental struggle between alternative systems has ended, they say. Capitalism's victory is total. No great transforma- tions are in the offing. The global free market is here to stay. What you see is what you are going to get, now and always. This time the class struggle is definitely over. So Hugo s question is answered: the future has indeed arrived, though not the one he had hoped for.
This intellectually anemic end-of-history theory was hailed as a brilliant exegesis and accorded a generous reception by commenta- tors and reviewers of the corporate-controlled media. 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.
But the question we really should be asking is, do we have a future at all? More than ever, with the planet itself at stake, it becomes nec- essary to impose a reality check on those who would plunder our limited ecological resources in the pursuit of limitless profits, those who would squander away our birthright and extinguish our liber- ties in their uncompromising pursuit of self-gain.
History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious cri- sis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to con- tinually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.
Truth is an uncomfortable venue for those who pretend to serve our society while in fact serving only themselves--at our expense. I hope this effort will chip away at the Big Lie. The truth may not set us free, as the Bible claims, but it is an important first step in that direction.
--Michael Parenti
? CHAPTER ONE
RATIONAL FASCISM
While walking through New Yorks Little Italy, I passed a novelty shop that displayed posters and T-shirts of Benito Mussolini giving the fascist salute. When I entered the shop and asked the clerk why such items were being offered, he replied, "Well, some people like them. And, you know, maybe we need someone like Mussolini in this country. " His comment was a reminder that fascism survives as something more than a historical curiosity.
Worse than posters or T-shirts are the works by various writers bent on "explaining" Hitler, or "reevaluating" Franco, or in other ways sanitizing fascist history. 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. All these publications, along with many conven- tional academic studies, have one thing in common: They say little if anything about the class policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. How did these regimes deal with social services, taxes, business, and the conditions of labor? For whose benefit and at
?
? 2 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
whose expense? Most of the literature on fascism and Nazism does not tell us. 1
Plutocrats Choose Autocrats
Let us begin with a look at fascisms founder. Born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith, Benito Mussolini's early manhood was marked by street brawls, arrests, jailings, and violent radical political activi- ties. Before World War I Mussolini was a socialist. A brilliant orga- nizer, agitator, and gifted journalist, he became editor of the Socialist party's official newspaper. Yet many of his comrades suspected him of being less interested in advancing socialism than in advancing himself. Indeed, when the Italian upper class tempted him with recognition, financial support, and the promise of power, he did not hesitate to switch sides.
By the end of World War I, Mussolini, the socialist, who had orga- nized strikes for workers and peasants had become Mussolini, the fascist, who broke strikes on behalf of financiers and landowners. Using the huge sums he received from wealthy interests, he projected himself onto the national scene as the acknowledged leader of i fasci di combattimento, a movement composed of black-shirted ex-army officers and sundry toughs who were guided by no clear political doctrine other than a militaristic patriotism and conservative dislike for anything associated with socialism and organized labor. The fas- cist Blackshirts spent their time attacking trade unionists, socialists, communists, and farm cooperatives.
1 Among the thousands of titles that deal with fascism, there are a few worthwhile exceptions that do not evade questions of political economy and class power, for instance: Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Ax of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig,
1969); Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Monad Press/ Pathfinder Press, 1973); James Pool and Suzanne Pool, Who Financed Hitler (New York: Dial Press, 1978); Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1976); Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publisher, 1935).
? RATIONAL FASCISM 3
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen- tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut--measures that might sound familiar to us today
But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy- cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate. 2
2 Between January and May 1921, "the fascists destroyed 120 labor headquarters, attacked 243 socialist centers and other buildings, killed 202 workers (in addition to 44 killed by the police and gendarmerie), and wounded 1,144. " During this time 2,240 workers were arrested and only 162 fascists. In the 1921-22 period up to Mussolini's seizure of state power, "500 labor halls and cooperative stores were burned, and 900 socialist municipalities were dissolved": Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 124.
? 4 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi- ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"--really a coup d'e? tat--took place.
Within two years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the Socialist, Liberal, Catholic, Democratic, and Republican parties, which together had commanded some 80 percent of the vote. Labor leaders, peasant leaders, parliamentary delegates, and others critical of the new regime were beaten, exiled, or murdered by fascist terror squadristi The Italian Communist party endured the severest repression of all, yet managed to maintain a courageous underground resistance that eventually evolved into armed struggle against the Blackshirts and the German occupation force.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown- shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con- cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener- ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July
? RATIONAL FASCISM 5
1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37. 3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour- geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as "Moscow inspired. " Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13. 7 million.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. 3 Meanwhile a num- ber of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January
1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
3 Earlier in 1924, Social Democratic officials in the Ministry of Interior used Reichswehr and Free Corps fascist paramilitary troops to attack left-wing demonstrators. They imprisoned seven thousand workers and suppressed Communist party newspapers: Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 47.
? 6 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued a politico-economic agenda not unlike Mussolini's. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.
History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious cri- sis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to con- tinually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.
Truth is an uncomfortable venue for those who pretend to serve our society while in fact serving only themselves--at our expense. I hope this effort will chip away at the Big Lie. The truth may not set us free, as the Bible claims, but it is an important first step in that direction.
--Michael Parenti
? CHAPTER ONE
RATIONAL FASCISM
While walking through New Yorks Little Italy, I passed a novelty shop that displayed posters and T-shirts of Benito Mussolini giving the fascist salute. When I entered the shop and asked the clerk why such items were being offered, he replied, "Well, some people like them. And, you know, maybe we need someone like Mussolini in this country. " His comment was a reminder that fascism survives as something more than a historical curiosity.
Worse than posters or T-shirts are the works by various writers bent on "explaining" Hitler, or "reevaluating" Franco, or in other ways sanitizing fascist history. 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. All these publications, along with many conven- tional academic studies, have one thing in common: They say little if anything about the class policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. How did these regimes deal with social services, taxes, business, and the conditions of labor? For whose benefit and at
?
? 2 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
whose expense? Most of the literature on fascism and Nazism does not tell us. 1
Plutocrats Choose Autocrats
Let us begin with a look at fascisms founder. Born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith, Benito Mussolini's early manhood was marked by street brawls, arrests, jailings, and violent radical political activi- ties. Before World War I Mussolini was a socialist. A brilliant orga- nizer, agitator, and gifted journalist, he became editor of the Socialist party's official newspaper. Yet many of his comrades suspected him of being less interested in advancing socialism than in advancing himself. Indeed, when the Italian upper class tempted him with recognition, financial support, and the promise of power, he did not hesitate to switch sides.
By the end of World War I, Mussolini, the socialist, who had orga- nized strikes for workers and peasants had become Mussolini, the fascist, who broke strikes on behalf of financiers and landowners. Using the huge sums he received from wealthy interests, he projected himself onto the national scene as the acknowledged leader of i fasci di combattimento, a movement composed of black-shirted ex-army officers and sundry toughs who were guided by no clear political doctrine other than a militaristic patriotism and conservative dislike for anything associated with socialism and organized labor. The fas- cist Blackshirts spent their time attacking trade unionists, socialists, communists, and farm cooperatives.
1 Among the thousands of titles that deal with fascism, there are a few worthwhile exceptions that do not evade questions of political economy and class power, for instance: Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Ax of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig,
1969); Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Monad Press/ Pathfinder Press, 1973); James Pool and Suzanne Pool, Who Financed Hitler (New York: Dial Press, 1978); Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1976); Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publisher, 1935).
? RATIONAL FASCISM 3
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen- tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut--measures that might sound familiar to us today
But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy- cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate. 2
2 Between January and May 1921, "the fascists destroyed 120 labor headquarters, attacked 243 socialist centers and other buildings, killed 202 workers (in addition to 44 killed by the police and gendarmerie), and wounded 1,144. " During this time 2,240 workers were arrested and only 162 fascists. In the 1921-22 period up to Mussolini's seizure of state power, "500 labor halls and cooperative stores were burned, and 900 socialist municipalities were dissolved": Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 124.
? 4 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi- ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"--really a coup d'e? tat--took place.
Within two years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the Socialist, Liberal, Catholic, Democratic, and Republican parties, which together had commanded some 80 percent of the vote. Labor leaders, peasant leaders, parliamentary delegates, and others critical of the new regime were beaten, exiled, or murdered by fascist terror squadristi The Italian Communist party endured the severest repression of all, yet managed to maintain a courageous underground resistance that eventually evolved into armed struggle against the Blackshirts and the German occupation force.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown- shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con- cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener- ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July
? RATIONAL FASCISM 5
1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37. 3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour- geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as "Moscow inspired. " Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13. 7 million.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. 3 Meanwhile a num- ber of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January
1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
3 Earlier in 1924, Social Democratic officials in the Ministry of Interior used Reichswehr and Free Corps fascist paramilitary troops to attack left-wing demonstrators. They imprisoned seven thousand workers and suppressed Communist party newspapers: Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 47.
? 6 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued a politico-economic agenda not unlike Mussolini's. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. In Germany as in Italy, the communists endured the severest political repression of all groups.
Here were two peoples, the Italians and Germans, with different histories, cultures, and languages, and supposedly different tempera- ments, who ended up with the same repressive solutions because of the compelling similarities of economic power and class conflict that prevailed in their respective countries. In such diverse countries as Lithuania, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, and Spain, a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save big capital from the impo- sitions of democracy. 4
Whom Did the Fascists Support?
There is a vast literature on who supported the Nazis, but rela- tively 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 unfavor- able might be said about it. Whose interests did Mussolini and Hitler support?
In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s, old indus- trial 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 confis- cated and handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished.
4 This is not to gainsay that cultural differences can lead to important variations. Consider, for instance, the horrific role played by anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany as compared to fascist Italy.
? RATIONAL FASCISM 7
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 per- cent, 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 subsi- dize 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 cor- ruption. 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. During the radical 1930s, in the United States, Great Britain, and Scandanavia, upper-income groups experienced a
? 8 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
modest decline in their share of the national income; but in Germany the top 5 percent enjoyed a 15 percent gain. 5
Despite this record, most writers have ignored fascism's close col- laboration with big business. Some even argue that business was not a beneficiary but a victim of fascism. Angelo Codevilla, a Hoover Institute conservative scribe, blithely announced: "If fascism means anything, it means government ownership and control of business" (Commentary, 8/94). Thus fascism is misrepresented as a mutant form of socialism. In fact, if fascism means anything, it means all-out government support for business and severe repression of antibusi- ness, prolabor forces. 6
Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism's raison d'e^tre, the function Hitler himself kept referring to when he talked about saving the industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism. It is a subject that deserves far more attention than it has received.
While the fascists might have believed they were saving the pluto- crats from the Reds, in fact the revolutionary Left was never strong enough to take state power in either Italy or Germany. Popular forces, however, were strong enough to cut into profit rates and
5 Simon Kuznets, "Qualitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations" Economic Development and Cultural Change, 5, no. 1, 1956, 5-94.
6 Ex-leftist and reborn conservative Eugene Genovese (New Republic, 4/1/95) eagerly leaped to the conclusion that it is a "nonsensical interpretation" to see "fascism as a creature of big capital. " Genovese was applauding Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that the capitalist class was not the primary force behind fascism
in Spain. In response>> Vicente Navarro (Monthly Review 1/96 and 4/96) noted
that the "major economic interests of Spain," assisted by at least one Texas oil millionaire and other elements of international capital, did indeed finance Franco's fascist invasion and coup against the Spanish Republic. A crucial source, Navarro writes, was the financial empire of Joan March, founder of the Liberal Party and owner of a liberal newspaper. Considered a modernizer and an alternative to the oligarchic, land-based, reactionary sector of capital, March made common cause with these same oligarchs once he saw that working-class parties were gaining strength and his own economic interests were being affected by the reformist Republic.
? RATIONAL FASCISM 9
interfere with the capital accumulation process. This frustrated capitalism s attempts to resolve its internal contradictions by shifting more and more of its costs onto the backs of the working populace. Revolution or no revolution, this democratic working-class resis- tance was troublesome to the moneyed interests.
Along with serving the capitalists, fascist leaders served them- selves, getting in on the money at every opportunity. Their personal greed and their class loyalties were two sides of the same coin. Mussolini and his cohorts lived lavishly, cavorting within the higher circles of wealth and aristocracy. Nazi officials and SS commanders amassed personal fortunes by plundering conquered territories and stealing from concentration camp inmates and other political vic- tims. Huge amounts were made from secretly owned, well-con- nected businesses, and from contracting out camp slave labor to industrial firms like I. G. Farben and Krupp.
Hitler is usually portrayed as an ideological fanatic, uninterested in crass material things. In fact, he accumulated an immense fortune, much of it in questionable ways. He expropriated art works from the public domain. He stole enormous sums from Nazi party coffers. He invented a new concept, the "personality right," that enabled him to charge a small fee for every postage stamp with his picture on it, a venture that made him hundreds of millions of marks. 7
The greatest source of Hitler s wealth was a secret slush fund to which leading German industrialists regularly donated. Hitler "knew that as long as German industry was making money, his private money sources would be inexhaustible. Thus, he'd see to it that German industry was never better off than under his rule--by launching, for one thing, gigantic armament projects,"8 or what we today would call fat defense contracts.
7 There already was a stamp of von Hindenburg to honor his presidency. Old Hindenburg, who had no love for Hitler, sarcastically said he would make Hitler his postal minister, because "then he can lick my backside"
8 Wulf Schwarzwaeller, The Unknown Hitler, 197.
? 10 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
Far from being the ascetic, Hitler lived self-indulgently. During his entire tenure in office he got special rulings from the German tax officethat allowed him to avoid paying income or property taxes. He had a motor pool of limousines, private apartments, country homes, a vast staff of servants, and a majestic estate in the Alps. His happiest times were spent entertaining European royalty, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who numbered among his enthusiastic admirers.
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. 9 During the 1920s and early 1930s, major publica- tions like Fortune, the Wallstreet Journal Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as the man who rescued Italy from anarchy and radical- ism. 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, Vltalia of San Francisco, financed largely by A. R Giannini s Bank of America, and Il 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.
9 Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (New York: Dell, 1983).
? RATIONAL FASCISM 26
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 Fuehrers 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 news- papers, for instance, the Nazis paid almost ten times the standard subscription rate for Hearsts INS wire service. In return, William Randolph Hearst instructed his correspondents in Germany to file friendly reports about Hitlers 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.
By the mid to late 1930s, Italy and Germany, allied with Japan, another industrial latecomer, were aggressively seeking a share of the world s markets and colonial booty, an expansionism that brought them increasingly into conflict with more established Western capi- talist nations like Great Britain, France, and the United States. As the clouds of war gathered, U. S. press opinion about the Axis powers took on a decisively critical tone.
The Rational Use of Irrational Ideology
Some writers stress the "irrational" features of fascism. By doing so, they overlook the rational politico-economic functions that fas- cism performed. Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. Certainly, this is true of fascist ideology, whose emotive appeals have served a class-control function.
First there was the cult of the leader, in Italy: il Duce, in Germany: der Feuhrerprinzip. With leader-worship there came the idolatry of
? 12 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
the state. As Mussolini wrote, "The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State. " Fascism preaches the authoritarian rule of an all-encompassing state and a supreme leader. It extols the harsher human impulses of conquest and domination, while rejecting egalitarianism, democracy, collectivism, and pacifism as doctrines of weakness and decadence.
A dedication to peace, Mussolini wrote, "is hostile to fascism. " Perpetual peace, he claimed in 1934, is a "depressing" doctrine. Only in "cruel struggle" and "conquest" do men or nations achieve their highest realization. "Though words are beautiful things," he asserted, "rifles, machine guns, planes, and cannons are still more beautiful.
Parenti, Michael, 1933- Blackshirts & reds
? By Michael Parenti
Dirty Truths (1996)
Against Empire (1995)
Democracy for the Few (1974, 1977, 1980, 1983, 1995) Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America (1994) Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media (1986,
2nd edition, 1993)
Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment (1992)
The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race (1989)
Power and the Powerless (1978)
Ethnic and Political Attitudes (1975)
Trends and Tragedies in American Foreign Policy ( 1971) The Anti-Communist Impulse (1969)
? MICHAEL PARENTI
BLACKSHIRTS &
Rational Fascism & the Overthrow of Communism
CITY LIGHTS BOOKS San Francisco
?
? (C) 1997 by Michael Parenti All Rights Reserved
10 987654321
Cover design: Nigel French Book design: Nancy J. Peters Typography: Harvest Graphics
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Parenti, Michael, 1933--
Blackshirts and reds : rational fascism and the overthrow of
communism / Michael Parenti, p. cm.
ISBN 0-87288-330-1 (he). --ISBN 0-87286-329-8 (pbk. ) 1. Communism. 2. Post-communism. 3. Fascism.
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? ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am indebted to Sally Soriano, Peggy Noton, Jane Scantlebury, and Richard Plevin for their valuable support and helpful criticisms of the manuscript. On numerous occasions, Jane also utilized her professional librarian skills to track down much needed information at my request. My thanks also to Stephanie Welch, Neala Haze? , and Kathryn Cahill for valuable assistance rendered.
Again, I wish to express my gratitude to Nancy J. Peters, my editor at City Lights Books, for her encouragement and her critical reading of the final text. And belated thanks are owed my publisher, the poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for inviting me to become a City Lights author some years ago. Finally, a word of appreciation to Stacey Lewis and others too numerous to mention who partook in the production and distribution of this book: they who do the work.
? To the Reds and others, nameless heroes many, who resisted yesterdays Blackshirts and who continue to fight today s ruthless corporate stuffed shirts.
And to the memory of Sean Gervasi and Max Gundy, valued friends and warriors for social justice.
Per chi conosce solo il tuo colore, bandiera rossa, tu devi realmente esistere, perche` lui esista . . . tu che gia` vanti tante glorie borghesi e operaie, ridiventa straccio, e il piu` povero ti sventoli.
For him who knows only your color, red flag, you must really exist, so he may exist. . .
you who already have achieved many bourgeois
and working-class glories,
you become a rag again and the poorest wave you.
-- Pier Paolo Pasolini
? CONTENTS
Preface xiu 1 RATIONAL FASCISM 1
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.
Plutocrats Choose Autocrats 2 Whom Did the Fascists Support? 6 Kudos for Adolph and Benito 10 The Rational Use of Irrational Ideology 11 Patriarchy and Pseudo-Revolution 14 Friendly to Fascism 17
2 LET US NOW PRAISE REVOLUTION 23
Revolutions are democratic developments that expand the freedoms of people who enjoyed no freedom under oppressive prerevolu- tionary regimes. Revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. They bring a dramatic reduction in political and economic oppression.
The Costs of Counterrevolution 24 Presumptions of Power 26 Whose Violence? 28 Free Market for the Few 31 The Freedom of Revolution 34 What Measure of Pain? 36
? 3 LEFT ANTICOMMUNISTE 41
Like conservatives and reactionaries, most of the U. S. Left greeted communism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with fear and loathing, and with idealized expectations that took no account of Western encirclement and the survival necessities of socialism under siege.
Genuflection to Orthodoxy 42 Pure Socialism vs. Siege Socialism 49 Decentralization vs. Survival 53
4 COMMUNISM IN WONDERLAND 59
The internal irrationalities and weaknesses of past communist economies and the systemic reasons why productivity stagnated and reforms were so difficult to effect.
Rewarding Inefficiency 59 Nobody Minding the Store 62 Wanting It All 65 Reactionism to the Surface 68 Romanticizing Capitalism 72
5 STALING FINGERS 76
Newly published documentation on the gulag reveals a somewhat different picture of the repressive nature of communist systems, both in the past and in recent times. The historic accomplishments in economic development within communist countries repre- sented a positive gain in the lives of hundreds of millions.
How Many Victims? 77 Where Did the Gulag Go? 81 Memories of Maldevelopment 84
? 6 THE FREE-MARKET PARADISE GOES EAST(I) 87
Repression by conservative forces in the former communist states in the name of "democratic reform. " Privileges from pre-communist days restored to the old owning classes. Western investors plunder the public sector at great profit to themselves, reducing the former communist countries to Third World levels.
Suppression of the Left 87 One-Way Democracy 94 Must We Adore Vaclav Havel? 97 Colonizing the East 100
7 THE FREE-MARKET PARADISE GOES EAST(II) 105
The emergence of free-market rapacity and growing inequality, widespread crime, social maladies, and victimization, especially of women, children, the elderly, and the poor. The Third Worldization and cultural decay of formerly collectivist societies.
For Vipers and Bloodsuckers 105 Shock Therapy for the Many 108 Crime and Corruption 111 Cultural Decay 112 Women and Children Last 114 "We Didn't Realize What We Had" 116
? 8 THE END OF MARXISM? 121
Understanding the fundamental concepts and discoveries of a view of society and politics that today is more relevant than ever, helping us to overcome truncated modes of thought, teaching us to ask why things are as they are.
Some Durable Basics 122 More Right than Wrong 125 More Wealth, More Poverty 129 A Holistic Science 132 Learning to Ask Why 136
9 ANYTHING BUT CLASS: AVOIDING
THE C-WORD 141
Class is more than a demographic category. Anything-but-class explanations of social realities invite us to deny the obvious links between wealth and power and the collision of ecology with capitalism.
The Class Denial of Class 141 The ABC Theorists 144 Everyday Class Struggle 149 Wealth and Power 152 Eco-Apocalypse, a Class Act 154
Index
161
? PREFACE
This book invites those immersed in the prevailing orthodoxy of "democratic capitalism" to entertain iconoclastic views, to question the shibboleths of free-market mythology and the persistence of both right and left anticommunism, and to consider anew, with a receptive but not uncritical mind, the historic efforts of the much maligned Reds and other revolutionaries.
The political orthodoxy that demonizes communism permeates the entire political perspective. Even people on the Left have internalized the liberal/conservative ideology that equates fascism and communism as equally evil totalitaran twins, two major mass movements of the twentieth century. This book attempts to show the enormous differ- ences between fascism and communism both past and present, both in theory and practice, especially in regard to questions of social equality, private capital accumulation, and class interest.
The orthodox mythology also would have us believe that the Western democracies (with the United States leading the way) have opposed both totalitarian systems with equal vigor. In fact, U. S. lead- ers have been dedicated above all to making the world safe for global corporate investment and the private profit system. Pursuant of this goal, they have used fascism to protect capitalism, while claiming to be saving democracy from communism.
In the pages ahead I discuss how capitalism propagates and prof- its from fascism, the value of revolution in the advancement of the human condition, the causes and effects of the destruction of com- munism, the continuing relevance of Marxism and class analysis, and the heartless nature of corporate-class power.
Over a century ago, in his great work Les Mise? rables Victor Hugo asked, "Will the future arrive? " He was thinking of a future of social justice, free from the "terrible shadows" of oppression imposed by the few upon the great mass of humankind. Of late, some scribes
XIII
? XIV BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
have announced "the end of history" With the overthrow of com- munism, the monumental struggle between alternative systems has ended, they say. Capitalism's victory is total. No great transforma- tions are in the offing. The global free market is here to stay. What you see is what you are going to get, now and always. This time the class struggle is definitely over. So Hugo s question is answered: the future has indeed arrived, though not the one he had hoped for.
This intellectually anemic end-of-history theory was hailed as a brilliant exegesis and accorded a generous reception by commenta- tors and reviewers of the corporate-controlled media. 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.
But the question we really should be asking is, do we have a future at all? More than ever, with the planet itself at stake, it becomes nec- essary to impose a reality check on those who would plunder our limited ecological resources in the pursuit of limitless profits, those who would squander away our birthright and extinguish our liber- ties in their uncompromising pursuit of self-gain.
History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious cri- sis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to con- tinually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.
Truth is an uncomfortable venue for those who pretend to serve our society while in fact serving only themselves--at our expense. I hope this effort will chip away at the Big Lie. The truth may not set us free, as the Bible claims, but it is an important first step in that direction.
--Michael Parenti
? CHAPTER ONE
RATIONAL FASCISM
While walking through New Yorks Little Italy, I passed a novelty shop that displayed posters and T-shirts of Benito Mussolini giving the fascist salute. When I entered the shop and asked the clerk why such items were being offered, he replied, "Well, some people like them. And, you know, maybe we need someone like Mussolini in this country. " His comment was a reminder that fascism survives as something more than a historical curiosity.
Worse than posters or T-shirts are the works by various writers bent on "explaining" Hitler, or "reevaluating" Franco, or in other ways sanitizing fascist history. 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. All these publications, along with many conven- tional academic studies, have one thing in common: They say little if anything about the class policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. How did these regimes deal with social services, taxes, business, and the conditions of labor? For whose benefit and at
?
? 2 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
whose expense? Most of the literature on fascism and Nazism does not tell us. 1
Plutocrats Choose Autocrats
Let us begin with a look at fascisms founder. Born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith, Benito Mussolini's early manhood was marked by street brawls, arrests, jailings, and violent radical political activi- ties. Before World War I Mussolini was a socialist. A brilliant orga- nizer, agitator, and gifted journalist, he became editor of the Socialist party's official newspaper. Yet many of his comrades suspected him of being less interested in advancing socialism than in advancing himself. Indeed, when the Italian upper class tempted him with recognition, financial support, and the promise of power, he did not hesitate to switch sides.
By the end of World War I, Mussolini, the socialist, who had orga- nized strikes for workers and peasants had become Mussolini, the fascist, who broke strikes on behalf of financiers and landowners. Using the huge sums he received from wealthy interests, he projected himself onto the national scene as the acknowledged leader of i fasci di combattimento, a movement composed of black-shirted ex-army officers and sundry toughs who were guided by no clear political doctrine other than a militaristic patriotism and conservative dislike for anything associated with socialism and organized labor. The fas- cist Blackshirts spent their time attacking trade unionists, socialists, communists, and farm cooperatives.
1 Among the thousands of titles that deal with fascism, there are a few worthwhile exceptions that do not evade questions of political economy and class power, for instance: Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Ax of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig,
1969); Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Monad Press/ Pathfinder Press, 1973); James Pool and Suzanne Pool, Who Financed Hitler (New York: Dial Press, 1978); Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1976); Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publisher, 1935).
? RATIONAL FASCISM 3
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen- tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut--measures that might sound familiar to us today
But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy- cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate. 2
2 Between January and May 1921, "the fascists destroyed 120 labor headquarters, attacked 243 socialist centers and other buildings, killed 202 workers (in addition to 44 killed by the police and gendarmerie), and wounded 1,144. " During this time 2,240 workers were arrested and only 162 fascists. In the 1921-22 period up to Mussolini's seizure of state power, "500 labor halls and cooperative stores were burned, and 900 socialist municipalities were dissolved": Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 124.
? 4 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi- ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"--really a coup d'e? tat--took place.
Within two years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the Socialist, Liberal, Catholic, Democratic, and Republican parties, which together had commanded some 80 percent of the vote. Labor leaders, peasant leaders, parliamentary delegates, and others critical of the new regime were beaten, exiled, or murdered by fascist terror squadristi The Italian Communist party endured the severest repression of all, yet managed to maintain a courageous underground resistance that eventually evolved into armed struggle against the Blackshirts and the German occupation force.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown- shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con- cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener- ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July
? RATIONAL FASCISM 5
1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37. 3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour- geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as "Moscow inspired. " Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13. 7 million.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. 3 Meanwhile a num- ber of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January
1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
3 Earlier in 1924, Social Democratic officials in the Ministry of Interior used Reichswehr and Free Corps fascist paramilitary troops to attack left-wing demonstrators. They imprisoned seven thousand workers and suppressed Communist party newspapers: Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 47.
? 6 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued a politico-economic agenda not unlike Mussolini's. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered.
History teaches us that all ruling elites try to portray themselves as the natural and durable social order, even ones that are in serious cri- sis, that threaten to devour their environmental base in order to con- tinually recreate their hierarchal structure of power and privilege. And all ruling elites are scornful and intolerant of alternative viewpoints.
Truth is an uncomfortable venue for those who pretend to serve our society while in fact serving only themselves--at our expense. I hope this effort will chip away at the Big Lie. The truth may not set us free, as the Bible claims, but it is an important first step in that direction.
--Michael Parenti
? CHAPTER ONE
RATIONAL FASCISM
While walking through New Yorks Little Italy, I passed a novelty shop that displayed posters and T-shirts of Benito Mussolini giving the fascist salute. When I entered the shop and asked the clerk why such items were being offered, he replied, "Well, some people like them. And, you know, maybe we need someone like Mussolini in this country. " His comment was a reminder that fascism survives as something more than a historical curiosity.
Worse than posters or T-shirts are the works by various writers bent on "explaining" Hitler, or "reevaluating" Franco, or in other ways sanitizing fascist history. 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. All these publications, along with many conven- tional academic studies, have one thing in common: They say little if anything about the class policies of fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. How did these regimes deal with social services, taxes, business, and the conditions of labor? For whose benefit and at
?
? 2 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
whose expense? Most of the literature on fascism and Nazism does not tell us. 1
Plutocrats Choose Autocrats
Let us begin with a look at fascisms founder. Born in 1883, the son of a blacksmith, Benito Mussolini's early manhood was marked by street brawls, arrests, jailings, and violent radical political activi- ties. Before World War I Mussolini was a socialist. A brilliant orga- nizer, agitator, and gifted journalist, he became editor of the Socialist party's official newspaper. Yet many of his comrades suspected him of being less interested in advancing socialism than in advancing himself. Indeed, when the Italian upper class tempted him with recognition, financial support, and the promise of power, he did not hesitate to switch sides.
By the end of World War I, Mussolini, the socialist, who had orga- nized strikes for workers and peasants had become Mussolini, the fascist, who broke strikes on behalf of financiers and landowners. Using the huge sums he received from wealthy interests, he projected himself onto the national scene as the acknowledged leader of i fasci di combattimento, a movement composed of black-shirted ex-army officers and sundry toughs who were guided by no clear political doctrine other than a militaristic patriotism and conservative dislike for anything associated with socialism and organized labor. The fas- cist Blackshirts spent their time attacking trade unionists, socialists, communists, and farm cooperatives.
1 Among the thousands of titles that deal with fascism, there are a few worthwhile exceptions that do not evade questions of political economy and class power, for instance: Gaetano Salvemini, Under the Ax of Fascism (New York: Howard Fertig,
1969); Daniel Guerin, Fascism and Big Business (New York: Monad Press/ Pathfinder Press, 1973); James Pool and Suzanne Pool, Who Financed Hitler (New York: Dial Press, 1978); Palmiro Togliatti, Lectures on Fascism (New York: International Publishers, 1976); Franz Neumann, Behemoth (New York: Oxford University Press, 1944); R. Palme Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution (New York: International Publisher, 1935).
? RATIONAL FASCISM 3
After World War I, Italy had settled into a pattern of parliamen- tary democracy. The low pay scales were improving, and the trains were already running on time. But the capitalist economy was in a postwar recession. Investments stagnated, heavy industry operated far below capacity, and corporate profits and agribusiness exports were declining.
To maintain profit levels, the large landowners and industrialists would have to slash wages and raise prices. The state in turn would have to provide them with massive subsidies and tax exemptions. To finance this corporate welfarism, the populace would have to be taxed more heavily, and social services and welfare expenditures would have to be drastically cut--measures that might sound familiar to us today
But the government was not completely free to pursue this course. By 1921, many Italian workers and peasants were unionized and had their own political organizations. With demonstrations, strikes, boy- cotts, factory takeovers, and the forceable occupation of farmlands, they had won the right to organize, along with concessions in wages and work conditions.
To impose a full measure of austerity upon workers and peasants, the ruling economic interests would have to abolish the democratic rights that helped the masses defend their modest living standards. The solution was to smash their unions, political organizations, and civil liberties. Industrialists and big landowners wanted someone at the helm who could break the power of organized workers and farm laborers and impose a stern order on the masses. For this task Benito Mussolini, armed with his gangs of Blackshirts, seemed the likely candidate. 2
2 Between January and May 1921, "the fascists destroyed 120 labor headquarters, attacked 243 socialist centers and other buildings, killed 202 workers (in addition to 44 killed by the police and gendarmerie), and wounded 1,144. " During this time 2,240 workers were arrested and only 162 fascists. In the 1921-22 period up to Mussolini's seizure of state power, "500 labor halls and cooperative stores were burned, and 900 socialist municipalities were dissolved": Dutt, Fascism and Social Revolution, 124.
? 4 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
In 1922, the Federazione Industriale, composed of the leaders of industry, along with representatives from the banking and agribusi- ness associations, met with Mussolini to plan the "March on Rome," contributing 20 million lire to the undertaking. With the additional backing of Italy's top military officers and police chiefs, the fascist "revolution"--really a coup d'e? tat--took place.
Within two years after seizing state power, Mussolini had shut down all opposition newspapers and crushed the Socialist, Liberal, Catholic, Democratic, and Republican parties, which together had commanded some 80 percent of the vote. Labor leaders, peasant leaders, parliamentary delegates, and others critical of the new regime were beaten, exiled, or murdered by fascist terror squadristi The Italian Communist party endured the severest repression of all, yet managed to maintain a courageous underground resistance that eventually evolved into armed struggle against the Blackshirts and the German occupation force.
In Germany, a similar pattern of complicity between fascists and capitalists emerged. German workers and farm laborers had won the right to unionize, the eight-hour day, and unemployment insurance. But to revive profit levels, heavy industry and big finance wanted wage cuts for their workers and massive state subsidies and tax cuts for themselves.
During the 1920s, the Nazi Sturmabteilung or SA, the brown- shirted storm troopers, subsidized by business, were used mostly as an antilabor paramilitary force whose function was to terrorize workers and farm laborers. By 1930, most of the tycoons had con- cluded that the Weimar Republic no longer served their needs and was too accommodating to the working class. They greatly increased their subsidies to Hitler, propelling the Nazi party onto the national stage. Business tycoons supplied the Nazis with gener- ous funds for fleets of motor cars and loudspeakers to saturate the cities and villages of Germany, along with funds for Nazi party organizations, youth groups, and paramilitary forces. In the July
? RATIONAL FASCISM 5
1932 campaign, Hitler had sufficient funds to fly to fifty cities in the last two weeks alone.
In that same campaign the Nazis received 37. 3 percent of the vote, the highest they ever won in a democratic national election. They never had a majority of the people on their side. To the extent that they had any kind of reliable base, it generally was among the more affluent members of society. In addition, elements of the petty bour- geoisie and many lumpenproletariats served as strong-arm party thugs, organized into the SA storm troopers. But the great majority of the organized working class supported the Communists or Social Democrats to the very end.
In the December 1932 election, three candidates ran for president: the conservative incumbent Field Marshal von Hindenburg, the Nazi candidate Adolph Hitler, and the Communist party candidate Ernst Thaelmann. In his campaign, Thaelmann argued that a vote for Hindenburg amounted to a vote for Hitler and that Hitler would lead Germany into war. The bourgeois press, including the Social Democrats, denounced this view as "Moscow inspired. " Hindenburg was re-elected while the Nazis dropped approximately two million votes in the Reichstag election as compared to their peak of over 13. 7 million.
True to form, the Social Democrat leaders refused the Communist party's proposal to form an eleventh-hour coalition against Nazism. As in many other countries past and present, so in Germany, the Social Democrats would sooner ally themselves with the reactionary Right than make common cause with the Reds. 3 Meanwhile a num- ber of right-wing parties coalesced behind the Nazis and in January
1933, just weeks after the election, Hindenburg invited Hitler to become chancellor.
3 Earlier in 1924, Social Democratic officials in the Ministry of Interior used Reichswehr and Free Corps fascist paramilitary troops to attack left-wing demonstrators. They imprisoned seven thousand workers and suppressed Communist party newspapers: Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle (New York: Henry Holt, 1986), 47.
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Upon assuming state power, Hitler and his Nazis pursued a politico-economic agenda not unlike Mussolini's. They crushed organized labor and eradicated all elections, opposition parties, and independent publications. Hundreds of thousands of opponents were imprisoned, tortured, or murdered. In Germany as in Italy, the communists endured the severest political repression of all groups.
Here were two peoples, the Italians and Germans, with different histories, cultures, and languages, and supposedly different tempera- ments, who ended up with the same repressive solutions because of the compelling similarities of economic power and class conflict that prevailed in their respective countries. In such diverse countries as Lithuania, Croatia, Rumania, Hungary, and Spain, a similar fascist pattern emerged to do its utmost to save big capital from the impo- sitions of democracy. 4
Whom Did the Fascists Support?
There is a vast literature on who supported the Nazis, but rela- tively 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 unfavor- able might be said about it. Whose interests did Mussolini and Hitler support?
In both Italy in the 1920s and Germany in the 1930s, old indus- trial 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 confis- cated and handed over to rich private owners. Minimum-wage laws, overtime pay, and factory safety regulations were abolished.
4 This is not to gainsay that cultural differences can lead to important variations. Consider, for instance, the horrific role played by anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany as compared to fascist Italy.
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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 per- cent, 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 subsi- dize 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 cor- ruption. 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. During the radical 1930s, in the United States, Great Britain, and Scandanavia, upper-income groups experienced a
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modest decline in their share of the national income; but in Germany the top 5 percent enjoyed a 15 percent gain. 5
Despite this record, most writers have ignored fascism's close col- laboration with big business. Some even argue that business was not a beneficiary but a victim of fascism. Angelo Codevilla, a Hoover Institute conservative scribe, blithely announced: "If fascism means anything, it means government ownership and control of business" (Commentary, 8/94). Thus fascism is misrepresented as a mutant form of socialism. In fact, if fascism means anything, it means all-out government support for business and severe repression of antibusi- ness, prolabor forces. 6
Is fascism merely a dictatorial force in the service of capitalism? That may not be all it is, but that certainly is an important part of fascism's raison d'e^tre, the function Hitler himself kept referring to when he talked about saving the industrialists and bankers from Bolshevism. It is a subject that deserves far more attention than it has received.
While the fascists might have believed they were saving the pluto- crats from the Reds, in fact the revolutionary Left was never strong enough to take state power in either Italy or Germany. Popular forces, however, were strong enough to cut into profit rates and
5 Simon Kuznets, "Qualitative Aspects of the Economic Growth of Nations" Economic Development and Cultural Change, 5, no. 1, 1956, 5-94.
6 Ex-leftist and reborn conservative Eugene Genovese (New Republic, 4/1/95) eagerly leaped to the conclusion that it is a "nonsensical interpretation" to see "fascism as a creature of big capital. " Genovese was applauding Eric Hobsbawm, who argued that the capitalist class was not the primary force behind fascism
in Spain. In response>> Vicente Navarro (Monthly Review 1/96 and 4/96) noted
that the "major economic interests of Spain," assisted by at least one Texas oil millionaire and other elements of international capital, did indeed finance Franco's fascist invasion and coup against the Spanish Republic. A crucial source, Navarro writes, was the financial empire of Joan March, founder of the Liberal Party and owner of a liberal newspaper. Considered a modernizer and an alternative to the oligarchic, land-based, reactionary sector of capital, March made common cause with these same oligarchs once he saw that working-class parties were gaining strength and his own economic interests were being affected by the reformist Republic.
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interfere with the capital accumulation process. This frustrated capitalism s attempts to resolve its internal contradictions by shifting more and more of its costs onto the backs of the working populace. Revolution or no revolution, this democratic working-class resis- tance was troublesome to the moneyed interests.
Along with serving the capitalists, fascist leaders served them- selves, getting in on the money at every opportunity. Their personal greed and their class loyalties were two sides of the same coin. Mussolini and his cohorts lived lavishly, cavorting within the higher circles of wealth and aristocracy. Nazi officials and SS commanders amassed personal fortunes by plundering conquered territories and stealing from concentration camp inmates and other political vic- tims. Huge amounts were made from secretly owned, well-con- nected businesses, and from contracting out camp slave labor to industrial firms like I. G. Farben and Krupp.
Hitler is usually portrayed as an ideological fanatic, uninterested in crass material things. In fact, he accumulated an immense fortune, much of it in questionable ways. He expropriated art works from the public domain. He stole enormous sums from Nazi party coffers. He invented a new concept, the "personality right," that enabled him to charge a small fee for every postage stamp with his picture on it, a venture that made him hundreds of millions of marks. 7
The greatest source of Hitler s wealth was a secret slush fund to which leading German industrialists regularly donated. Hitler "knew that as long as German industry was making money, his private money sources would be inexhaustible. Thus, he'd see to it that German industry was never better off than under his rule--by launching, for one thing, gigantic armament projects,"8 or what we today would call fat defense contracts.
7 There already was a stamp of von Hindenburg to honor his presidency. Old Hindenburg, who had no love for Hitler, sarcastically said he would make Hitler his postal minister, because "then he can lick my backside"
8 Wulf Schwarzwaeller, The Unknown Hitler, 197.
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Far from being the ascetic, Hitler lived self-indulgently. During his entire tenure in office he got special rulings from the German tax officethat allowed him to avoid paying income or property taxes. He had a motor pool of limousines, private apartments, country homes, a vast staff of servants, and a majestic estate in the Alps. His happiest times were spent entertaining European royalty, including the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, who numbered among his enthusiastic admirers.
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. 9 During the 1920s and early 1930s, major publica- tions like Fortune, the Wallstreet Journal Saturday Evening Post, New York Times, Chicago Tribune, and Christian Science Monitor hailed Mussolini as the man who rescued Italy from anarchy and radical- ism. 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, Vltalia of San Francisco, financed largely by A. R Giannini s Bank of America, and Il 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.
9 Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy (New York: Dell, 1983).
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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 Fuehrers 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 news- papers, for instance, the Nazis paid almost ten times the standard subscription rate for Hearsts INS wire service. In return, William Randolph Hearst instructed his correspondents in Germany to file friendly reports about Hitlers 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.
By the mid to late 1930s, Italy and Germany, allied with Japan, another industrial latecomer, were aggressively seeking a share of the world s markets and colonial booty, an expansionism that brought them increasingly into conflict with more established Western capi- talist nations like Great Britain, France, and the United States. As the clouds of war gathered, U. S. press opinion about the Axis powers took on a decisively critical tone.
The Rational Use of Irrational Ideology
Some writers stress the "irrational" features of fascism. By doing so, they overlook the rational politico-economic functions that fas- cism performed. Much of politics is the rational manipulation of irrational symbols. Certainly, this is true of fascist ideology, whose emotive appeals have served a class-control function.
First there was the cult of the leader, in Italy: il Duce, in Germany: der Feuhrerprinzip. With leader-worship there came the idolatry of
? 12 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
the state. As Mussolini wrote, "The Fascist conception of life stresses the importance of the State and accepts the individual only insofar as his interests coincide with those of the State. " Fascism preaches the authoritarian rule of an all-encompassing state and a supreme leader. It extols the harsher human impulses of conquest and domination, while rejecting egalitarianism, democracy, collectivism, and pacifism as doctrines of weakness and decadence.
A dedication to peace, Mussolini wrote, "is hostile to fascism. " Perpetual peace, he claimed in 1934, is a "depressing" doctrine. Only in "cruel struggle" and "conquest" do men or nations achieve their highest realization. "Though words are beautiful things," he asserted, "rifles, machine guns, planes, and cannons are still more beautiful.
