No More Learning

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. " And on another occasion he wrote: "War alone . . . puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have the courage to meet it. " Ironically, most Italian army conscripts had no stomach for Mussolini s wars, tending to remove themselves from battle once they discovered that the other side was using live ammunition.
Fascist doctrine stresses monistic values: Ein Volk, ein Reich, ein Fuehrer (one people, one rule, one leader). The people are no longer to be concerned with class divisions but must see themselves as part of a harmonious whole, rich and poor as one, a view that supports the economic status quo by cloaking the ongoing system of class exploitation. This is in contrast to a left agenda that advocates the articulation of popular demands and a sharpened awareness of social injustice and class struggle.
This monism is buttressed by atavistic appeals to the mythical roots of the people. For Mussolini, it was the grandeur that was Rome; for Hitler, the ancient Volk. A play written by a pro-Nazi, Hans Jorst, entitled Schlageter and performed widely throughout Germany soon after the Nazis seized power (Hitler attended the opening night in Berlin) pits Volk mysticism against class politics. The enthusiastic August is talking to his father, Schneider:
? RATIONAL FASCISM 13
August: You won't believe it, Papa b u t . . . the young people dont pay much attention to these old slogans anymore . . . the class struggle is dying out.
Schneider: So, and what do you have then?
August: The Volk community. Schneider: And thats a slogan? August: No, it's an experience!
Schneider: My God, our class struggle, our strikes, they weren't an experience, eh? Socialism, the International, were they fantasies maybe?
August: They were necessary, b u t . . . they are historical experiences. Schneider: So, and the future therefore will have your Volk commu-
nity. Tell me how do you actually envision it? Poor, rich,
healthy, upper, lower, all this ceases with you, eh? . . .
August: Look, Papa, upper, lower, poor, rich, that always exists. It is only the importance one places on that question that's decisive. To us life is not chopped up into working hours and furnished with price charts. Rather, we believe in human existence as a whole. None of us regards making money as the most impor- tant thing; we want to serve. The individual is a corpuscle in the
bloodstream of his people. 10
The son's comments are revealing: "the class struggle is dying out. " Papa's concern about the abuses of class power and class injus- tice is facilely dismissed as just a frame of mind with no objective reality. It is even falsely equated with a crass concern for money. ("None of us regard making money as important") Presumably matters of wealth are to be left to those who have it. We have some- thing better, August is saying: a totalistic, monistic experience as a people, all of us, rich and poor, working together for some greater glory. Conveniently overlooked is how the "glorious sacrifices" are borne by the poor for the benefit of the rich.
The position enunciated in that play and in other Nazi propa- ganda does not reveal an indifference to class; quite the contrary, it represents a keen awareness of class interests, a well-engineered
10 George Mosse (ed. ), Nazi Culture (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1966), 116-118.
? 14 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
effort to mask and mute the strong class consciousness that existed among workers in Germany. In the crafty denial, we often find the hidden admission.
Patriarchy and Pseudo-Revolution
Fascism's national chauvinism, racism, sexism, and patriarchal values also served a conservative class interest. Fascist doctrine, espe- cially the Nazi variety, makes an explicit commitment to racial supremacy Human attributes, including class status, are said to be inherited through blood; one's position in the social structure is taken as a measure of one's innate nature. Genetics and biology are marshalled to justify the existing class structure, not unlike what aca- demic racists today are doing with their "bell curve" theories and warmed-over eugenics claptrap.
Along with race and class inequality, fascism supports homopho- bia and sexual inequality. Among Nazism's earliest victims were a group of Nazi homosexuals, leaders of the SA storm troopers. When complaints about the openly homosexual behavior of SA leader Ernst Roehm and some of his brown-shirted storm troopers continued to reach Hitler after he seized power, he issued an official statement con- tending that the issue belonged "purely to the private domain" and that an SA officer's "private life cannot be an object of scrutiny unless it conflicts with basic principles of National Socialist ideology. "
The paramilitary SA had been used to win the battle of the streets against trade unionists and Reds. The storm troopers acted as a pseudo-revolutionary force that appealed to mass grievances with a rhetorical condemnation of finance capital. When SA membership skyrocketed to three million in 1933, this was too discomforting to the industrial barons and military patricians. SA street brawlers who denounced bourgeois decadence and called for sharing the wealth and completing the "Nazi revolution" would have to be dealt with.
Having used the SA to take state power, Hitler then used the state
? RATIONAL FASCISM 15
to neutralize the SA. Now suddenly Roehm s homosexuality did con- flict with National Socialist ideology. In truth, the SA had to be decapitated not because its leaders were homosexual--though that was the reason given--but because it threatened to turn into a seri- ous problem. Roehm and about 300 other SA members were exe- cuted, not all of whom were gay. Among the victims was veteran Nazi propagandist Gregor Strasser, who was suspected of leftist leanings.
Of course, many Nazis were virulently homophobic. One of the most powerful of all, SS leader Heinrich Himmler, saw homosexuals as a threat to German manhood and the moral fiber of Teutonic peo- ples, for a "homosexual sissy" would not procreate or make a good soldier. Himmler s homophobia and sexism came together when he announced: "If a man just looks at a girl in America, he can be forced to marry her or pay damages. . . therefore men protect themselves in the USA by turning to homosexuals. Women in the USA are like bat- tie-axes--they hack away at males. "11 Thus spoke one of the great minds of Nazism. In time, Himmler succeeded in extending the oppression of gays beyond the SA leadership. Thousands of gay civil- ians perished in SS concentration camps.
In societies throughout the ages, if able to find the opportunity, women have attempted to limit the number of children they bear. This poses a potential problem for a fascist patriarchy that needs vast numbers of soldiers and armaments workers. Women are less able to assert their procreative rights if kept subservient and dependent. So fascist ideology extolled patriarchal authority. Every man must be a husband, a father, and a soldier, il Duce said. Woman's greatest call- ing was to cultivate her domestic virtues, devotedly tending to the needs of her family while bearing as many offspring for the state as she could.
Patriarchal ideology was linked to a conservative class ideology that saw all forms of social equality as a threat to hierarchal control
11 Richard Plant, The Pink Triangle, 91.
? 16 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
and privilege. The patriarchy buttressed the plutocracy: If women get out of line, what will happen to the family? And if the family goes, the entire social structure is threatened. What then will happen to the state and to the dominant class's authority, privileges, and wealth? The fascists were big on what today is called "family val- ues"--though most of the top Nazi leaders could hardly be described as devoted family men.
In Nazi Germany, racism and anti-Semitism served to misdirect legitimate grievances toward convenient scapegoats. Anti-Semitic propaganda was cleverly tailored to appeal to different audiences. Superpatriots were told that the Jew was an alien internationalist. Unemployed workers were told that their nemesis was the Jewish cap- italist and Jewish banker. For debtor farmers, it was the Jewish usurer. For the middle class, it was the Jewish union leader and Jewish com- munist. Here again we have a consciously rational use of irrational images. The Nazis might have been crazy but they were not stupid.
What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura. Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics. The Nazi party's full name was the National Socialist German Workers Party, a left-sounding name. As already noted, the SA storm troopers had a militant share-the- wealth strain in their ranks that was suppressed by Hitler after he took state power.
Both the Italian fascists and the Nazis made a conscious effort to steal the Left's thunder. There were mass mobilizations, youth orga- nizations, work brigades, rallies, parades, banners, symbols, and slo- gans. There was much talk about a "Nazi revolution" that would revitalize society, sweeping away the old order and building the new.
For this reason, mainstream writers feel free to treat fascism and communism as totalitarian twins. It is a case of reducing essence to form. The similarity in form is taken as reason enough to blur the vast difference in actual class content. Writers like A. James Gregor
? RATIONAL FASCISM 17
and William Ebenstein, countless Western political leaders, and oth- ers who supposedly are on the democratic Left, regularly lump fas- cism with communism. Thus, Noam Chomsky claims, "The rise of corporations was in fact a manifestation of the same phenomena that led to fascism and Bolshevism, which sprang out of the same totali- tarian soil. "12 But in the Italy and Germany of that day, most workers and peasants made a firm distinction between fascism and commu- nism, as did industrialists and bankers who supported fascism out of fear and hatred of communism, a judgment based largely on class realities.
Years ago, I used to say that fascism never succeeded in solving the irrational contradictions of capitalism. Today I am of the opinion that it did accomplish that goal--but only for the capitalists, not for the populace. Fascism never intended to offer a social solution that would serve the general populace, only a reactionary one, forcing all the burdens and losses onto the working public. Divested of its ide- ological and organizational paraphernalia, fascism is nothing more than a final solution to the class struggle, the totalistic submergence and exploitation of democratic forces for the benefit and profit of higher financial circles.
Fascism is a false revolution. It cultivates the appearance of pop- ular politics and a revolutionary aura without offering a genuine rev- olutionary class content. It propagates a "New Order" while serving the same old moneyed interests. Its leaders are not guilty of confu- sion but of deception. That they work hard to mislead the public does not mean they themselves are misled.
Friendly to Fascism
One of the things conveniently overlooked by mainstream writers is the way Western capitalist states have cooperated with fascism. In his collaborationist efforts, British Prime Minister Neville
12 Chomsky interviewed by Husayn Al-Kurdi, Perception, March/April 1996.
? 18 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
Chamberlain was positively cozy with the Nazis. He and many of his class saw Hitler as a bulwark against communism in Germany, and Nazi Germany as a bulwark against communism in Europe.
After World War II, the Western capitalist allies did little to eradi- cate fascism from Italy or Germany, except for putting some of the top leaders on trial at Nuremberg. By 1947, German conservatives began to depict the Nuremberg prosecutors as dupes of the Jews and com- munists. In Italy, the strong partisan movement that had waged armed struggle against fascism was soon treated as suspect and unpatriotic. Within a year after the war, almost all Italian fascists were released from prison while hundreds of communists and other leftist partisans who had been fighting the Nazi occupation were jailed. History was turned on its head, transforming the Blackshirts into victims and the Reds into criminals. Allied authorities assisted in these measures. 13
Under the protection of U. S. occupation authorities, the police, courts, military, security agencies, and bureaucracy remained largely staffed by those who had served the former fascist regimes or by their ideological recruits--as is true to this day. The perpetrators of the Holocaust murdered six million Jews, half a million Gypsies, thou- sands of homosexuals, several million Ukranians, Russians, Poles, and others, and got away with it--in good part because the very people who were supposed to investigate these crimes were them- selves complicit.
13 Roy Palmer Domenico, Italian Fascists on Trial, 1943-1948 (Chapel Hill: Univer- sity of North Carolina Press, 1991), passim. So in France, very few of the Vichy collaborators were purged. "No one of any rank was seriously punished for his
or her role in the roundup and deportation of Jews to Nazi camps": Herbert Lottman, The Purge (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 290. Much the same
can be said about Germany; see Ingo Muller, Hitlers Justice (Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard University Press, 1991), part 3, "The Aftermath" U. S. military author- ities restored fascist collaborators to power in various Far East nations<< In South Korea, for instance, Koreans collaborators and the Japanese-trained police were used to suppress left democratic forces. The South Korean Army was commanded by officers who had served in the Imperial Japanese Army "and were proud of it. " Numbers of them had been guilty of war crimes in the Philippines and China: Hugh Deane, "Korea, China and the United States: A Look Back," Monthly Review, Feb. 1995, 20 and 23.
? RATIONAL FASCISM 19
In comparison, when the Communists took over in East Germany, they removed some 80 percent of the judges, teachers, and officials for their Nazi collaboration; they imprisoned thousands, and they executed six hundred Nazi party leaders for war crimes. They would have shot more of the war criminals had not so many fled to the protective embrace of the West.
What happened to the U. S. businesses that collaborated with fas- cism?
The Rockefeller family's Chase National Bank used its Paris office in Vichy France to help launder German money to facilitate Nazi international trade during the war, and did so with complete impunity. 14 Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 million from the U. S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings. General Motors collected over $33 million. Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U. S. firms. Thus Cologne was almost leveled by Allied bombing but its Ford plant, providing military equipment for the Nazi army, was untouched; indeed, German civilians began using the plant as an air raid shelter. 15
For decades, U. S. leaders have done their part in keeping Italian fascism alive. From 1945 to 1975, U. S. government agencies gave an estimated $75 million to right-wing organizations in Italy, including some with close ties to the neofascist Movimento Sociale Italiano (MSI). In 1975, then Secretary of State Henry Kissinger met with
14 After the war, Hermann Abs, head of the Deutsche Bank and in effect "Hitler's paymaster," was hailed by David Rockefeller as "the most important banker of our time. " According to his New York Times obituary, Abs "played a dominant role in West Germany's reconstruction after World War II. " Neither the Times
nor Rockefeller said a word about Abs' Nazi connections, his banks predatory incursions across Nazi occupied Europe, and his participation, as a board member of I. G. Farben, in the use of slave labor at Auschwitz: Robert Carl Miller, Portland Free Press, Sept/Oct 1994.
15 Charles Higham, Trading with the Enemy.
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MSI leader Giorgio Almirante in Washington to discuss what "alter- natives" might be considered should the Italian Communists win the elections and take control of the government.
Hundreds of Nazi war criminals found a haven in the United States, either living in comfortable anonymity or actively employed by U. S. intelligence agencies during the cold war and otherwise enjoying the protection of high-placed individuals. Some of them found their way onto the Republican presidential campaign com- mittees of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George Bush. 16
In Italy, from 1969 to 1974, high-ranking elements in Italian military intelligence and civilian intelligence agencies; members of P2, a secret lodge of upper-class reactionaries, pro-fascist Vatican officials, and top military brass; and GLADIO, a NATO-inspired anticommunist mercenary force, embarked upon a concerted cam- paign of terror and sabotage known as the "strategy of tension Other participants included a secret neofascist group called the Ordine Nuovo, NATO officials, members of the carabinieri, mafia bosses, thirty generals, eight admirals, and influential Freemasons like Licio Gelli (a fascist war criminal recruited by U. S. intelligence in 1944). The terrorism was aided and abetted by the "international security apparatus" including the CIA. In 1995, the CIA refused to cooperate with an Italian parliamentary commission investigating the strategy of tension ( Corriere della Sera, 4/12/95, 5/29/95).
The terrorist conspirators carried out a series of kidnappings,
16 One of them, Boleslavs Maikovskis, a Latvian police chief who fled to West Germany to escape Soviet war crimes investigations and then to the United States, was heavily implicated in the Nazi slaughter of over two hundred Latvian villagers. He served for a time on a Republican party subcommittee to re-elect President Nixon, then fled back to Germany to avoid a belated U. S. war crimes investigation, dying at the ripe old age of 92 (New York Times, 5/8/96). Nazi war criminals have been aided by Western intelligence agencies, business interests, the military, and even the Vatican. In October 1944, German paratroop commander Major Walter Reder slaughtered 1,836 defenseless civilians in a village near Bologna, Italy as a reprisal against Partisan activities. He was released from
prison in 1985, after Pope John Paul II, among others, made an appeal on his behalf--over the strenuous protests of relatives of the victims.
? RATIONAL FASCISM 21
assassinations, and bombing massacres (i stragi), including the explosion that killed eighty-five people and injured some two hun- dred, many seriously, in the Bologna train station in August 1980. As subsequent judicial investigations concluded, the strategy of tension was not a simple product of neofascism but the consequence of a larger campaign conducted by state security forces against the grow- ing popularity of the democratic parliamentary Left. The objective was to "combat by any means necessary the electoral gains of the Italian Communist party" and create enough fear and terror in the population so as to undermine the multiparty social democracy and replace it with an authoritarian "presidential republic," or in any case "a stronger and more stable executive. " {La Repubblica, 4/9/95; Corriere della Sera, 3/27/95, 3/28/95, 5/29/95).
In the 1980s, scores of people were murdered in Germany, Belgium and elsewhere in Western Europe by extreme rightists in the service of state security agencies (Z Magazine, March 1990). These acts of terrorism went mostly unreported in the U. S. corporate- owned media. As with the earlier strategy of tension in Italy, the attacks were designed to create enough popular fear and uncertainty so as to undermine the existing social democracies.
Authorities in these Western European countries and the United States have done little to expose neo-Nazi networks. As the whiffs of fascism develop into an undeniable stench, we are reminded that Hitler s progeny are still with us and that they have dangerous links with each other and within the security agencies of various Western capitalist nations.
In Italy, in 1994, the national elections were won by the National Alliance, a broadened version of the neofascist MSI, in coalition with a league of Northern separatists, and Forza Italia, a quasi-fascist movement headed by industrialist and media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. The National Alliance played on resentments regarding unemployment, taxes, and immigration. It called for a single tax rate for rich and poor alike, school vouchers, a stripping away of the
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social benefits, and the privatization of most services.
The Italian neofascists were learning from the U. S. reactionaries how to achieve fascism's class goals within the confines of quasi- democratic forms: use an upbeat, Reaganesque optimism; replace the jackbooted militarists with media-hyped crowd pleasers; con- vince people that government is the enemy--especially its social service sector--while strengthening the repressive capacities of the state; instigate racist hostility and antagonisms between the resident population and immigrants; preach the mythical virtues of the free market; and pursue tax and spending measures that redistribute
income upward.
Conservatives in the Western nations utilize diluted forms of the
fascist mass appeal. In the USA, they propagate populist-sounding appeals to the "ordinary Middle American" while quietly pressing for measures that serve the interests of the wealthiest individuals and corporations. In 1996, right-wing Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich, while proffering a new rollback agenda that supposedly would revitalize all of society, announced "I am a genuine revolutionary. " Whether in Italy, Germany, the United States, or any other country, when the Right offers a "new revolu- tion" or a "new order," it is in the service of the same old moneyed interests, leading down that well-trodden road of reaction and repression that so many Third World countries have been forced to take, the road those at the top want us all to travel.
? CHAPTER 2
LET US NOW PRAISE REVOLUTION
For most of this century U. S. foreign policy has been devoted to the suppression of revolutionary governments and radical move- ments around the world. The turn of the twentieth century found the McKinley administration in a war of attrition against the people of the Philippines lasting from 1898 to 1902 (with pockets of resis- tance continuing for years afterward). In that conflict, U. S. forces slaughtered some 200,000 Filipino women, men, and children. 1 At about that same time, in conjunction with various European colo- nial powers, the United States invaded China to help suppress the Boxer Rebellion at substantial loss of life to the Chinese rebels. U. S. forces took over Hawaii, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Guam and in the following decades invaded Mexico, Soviet Russia, Nicaragua, Honduras, the Dominican Republic, and other countries, actions that usually inflicted serious losses upon the populations of these countries.
1 Leon Wolf, Little Brown Brother (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960). 23
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The Costs of Counterrevolution
From grade school through grad school, few of us are taught any- thing about these events, except to be told that U. S. forces must intervene in this or that country in order to protect U. S. interests, thwart aggression, and defend our national security. U. S. leaders fashioned other convenient rationales for their interventions abroad. The public was told that the peoples of various countries were in need of our civilizing guidance and desired the blessings of democ- racy, peace, and prosperity. To accomplish this, of course, it might be necessary to kill off considerable numbers of the more recalcitrant among them. Such were the measures our policymakers were willing to pursue in order to "uplift lesser peoples "
The emergence of major communist powers like the Soviet Union and the Peoples Republic of China lent another dimension to U. S. global counterrevolutionary policy. The communists were depicted as evil incarnate, demonized conspirators who sought power for power's sake. The United States had to be everywhere to counteract this spreading "cancer," we were told.
In the name of democracy, U. S. leaders waged a merciless war against revolutionaries in Indochina for the better part of twenty years. They dropped many times more tons of explosives on Vietnam than were used throughout World War II by all combatants com- bined. Testifying before a Congressional committee, former CIA director William Colby admitted that under his direction U. S. forces and their South Vietnam collaborators carried out the selective assassination of 24,000 Vietnamese dissidents, in what was known as the Phoenix Program. His associate, the South Vietnamese minister of information, maintained that 40,000 was a more accurate esti- mate. 2 U. S. policymakers and their media mouthpieces judged the war a "mistake" because the Vietnamese proved incapable of being properly instructed by B-52 bomber raids and death squads. By
2Mark Lane, Plausible Denial (New York: Thunders Mouth Press, 1991), 79.
? LET US NOW PRAISE REVOLUTION 25
prevailing against this onslaught, the Vietnamese supposedly demon- strated that they were "unprepared for our democratic institutions
In pursuit of counterrevolution and in the name of freedom, U. S. forces or U. S. -supported surrogate forces slaughtered 2,000,000 North Koreans in a three-year war; 3,000,000 Vietnamese; over 500,000 in aerial wars over Laos and Cambodia; over 1,500,000 mil- lion in Angola; over 1,000,000 in Mozambique; over 500,000 in Afghanistan; 500,000 to 1,000,000 in Indonesia; 200,000 in East Timor; 100,000 in Nicaragua (combining the Somoza and Reagan eras); over 100,000 in Guatemala (plus an additional 40,000 disap- peared); over 700,000 in Iraq;3 over 60,000 in El Salvador; 30,000 in the "dirty war" of Argentina (though the government admits to only 9,000); 35,000 in Taiwan, when the Kuomintang military arrived from China; 20,000 in Chile; and many thousands in Haiti, Panama, Grenada, Brazil, South Africa, Western Sahara, Zaire, Turkey, and dozens of other countries, in what amounts to a free-market world holocaust.
Official sources either deny these U. S. -sponsored mass murders or justify them as necessary measures that had to be taken against an implacable communist foe. Anticommunist propaganda saturated our airwaves, schools, and political discourse. Despite repeated and often factitious references to the tyranny of the Red Menace, the anticommunist opinion makers never spelled out what communists actually did in the way of socio-economic policy. This might explain why, despite decades of Red-bashing propaganda, most Americans, including many who number themselves among the political cognoscenti, still cannot offer an informed statement about the social policies of communist societies.
3 The 1991 war waged by the Bush administration against Iraq, which claimed an estimated 200,000 victims, was followed by U. S. -led United Nations economic sanctions. A study by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, The Children Are Dying (1996), reports that since the end of the war 576,000 Iraqi children have died of starvation and disease and tens of thousands more suffer defects and illnesses due to the five years of sanctions.
? 26 BLACKSHIRTS AND REDS
The anti-Red propagandists uttered nary a word about how revo- lutionaries in Russia, China, Cuba, Vietnam, Nicaragua, and other countries nationalized the lands held by rich exploitative landlords and initiated mass programs for education, health, housing, and jobs. Not a word about how their efforts advanced the living stan- dards and life chances of hundreds of millions in countries that had long suffered under the yoke of feudal oppression and Western colo- nial pillage, an improvement in mass well-being never before wit- nessed in history.
No matter that the revolutionaries in various Asian, African, and Latin American countries enjoyed popular support and were willing to pursue a neutralist course in East-West relations rather than place themselves under the hegemony of either Moscow or Peking. They still were targeted for a counterrevolutionary battering. From oppos- ing communists because they might be revolutionaries, it was a short step to opposing revolutionaries because they might be communists.
The real sin of revolutionaries, communist or not, was that they championed the laboring classes against the wealthy few. They advo- cated changes in the distribution of class power and the way wealth was produced and used. They wanted less individualistic advance- ment at the expense of the many and collective betterment for the entire working populace.
Presumptions of Power
Ruling classes throughout the world hate and fear communism not for its lack of political democracy, but because it attempts to establish economic democracy by building an egalitarian, collectivist social system--though they rarely come right out and say as much. This counterrevolutionary interventionist policy rests on several dubious assumptions that might be stated and rebutted as follows:
1. "U. S. leaders have the right to define the limits of socio- economic development within other nations. " Not true. Under no
? LET US NOW PRAISE REVOLUTION 27
canon of international law or any other legal stricture do the leaders of this country have the right to ordain what kind of economic sys- tem or mode of social development another country may adopt, no more right than do the leaders of other countries have to dictate such things to the United States. In practice, the option to dictate is exer- cised by the strong over the weak, a policy of might, not right.
2. "The United States must play a counterrevolutionary contain- ment role in order to protect our national interests. " This is true only if we equate "our national interests" with the investment interests of high finance. U. S. interventionism has been very effective in building neo-imperialism, keeping the land, labor, natural resources, and markets of Third World countries available at bargain prices to multinational corporations. But these corporate interests do not rep- resent the interests of the U. S. people. The public pays for the huge military budgets and endures the export of its jobs to foreign labor markets, the inflow of thousands of impoverished immigrants who compete for scarce employment and housing, and various other costs of empire. 4
Furthermore, revolutionary governments like Cuba, Libya, Vietnam, and North Korea were--and still are--eager to trade and maintain peaceful relations with this country. These countries do not threaten the national security of the United States or its people, but the overseas interests of global capitalism. If allowed to multiply in numbers, countries with an alternative socialist system, one that uses the land, labor, capital, and natural resources in collectivist ways, placing people before profits, would eventually undermine global capitalism.
3. "The United States has a moral obligation to guarantee the sta- bility of nations that are undergoing democratic development but are threatened by revolutionaries and terrorists. " In fact, most U. S. interventions are on behalf of corrupt and self-serving oligarchs and
4 For a further discussion of this and related points, see my book Against Empire (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1995), chapter 4.
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antidemocratic militarists (who take power with or without the ben- efit of U. S. -sponsored showcase elections). Third World oligarchs are frequently educated at elite U. S. universities or end up on the CIA payroll, as do their police chiefs and military officers, many of whom receive training in torture and assassination at U. S. counterinsur- gency institutions. 5
4. "Fundamental social change should be peacefully pursued within the established order of nations rather than by revolutionary turmoil" U. S. policymakers maintain that they favor eliminating mass poverty in poorer countries and that they are not opposed to the laudatory objectives of social revolution but to its violent meth- ods. They say that transformations must be effected gradually and peacefully, preferably through private investment and the benign workings of the free market. In fact, corporate investment is more likely to deter rather than encourage reform by preempting markets and restructuring the local economy to fit foreign capital extraction needs. International finance capital has no interest in bettering the life chances of Third World peoples. Generally, as Western invest- ments have increased in the Third World, life conditions for the ordi- nary peasants and workers have grown steadily more desperate.
Whose Violence?
People throughout the world do not need more corporate investments, rather they need the opportunity to wrest back their land, labor, natural resources, and markets in order to serve their own social needs. Such a revolutionary development invites fierce opposition from apostles of the free market, whose violent resis- tance to social change makes peaceful transformation impossible to contemplate.
Even in countries like the United States, where reforms of limited scope have been achieved without revolution, the "peaceful" means
5 On the U. S. training of torturers and assassins, see Washington Posty 9/21/96.
? LET US NOW PRAISE REVOLUTION 29
employed have entailed popular struggle and turmoil--and a con- siderable amount of violence and bloodshed, almost all of it inflicted by police and security forces.
That last point frequently goes unmentioned in discussions about the ethics of revolutionary violence. The very concept of "revolu- tionary violence" is somewhat falsely cast, since most of the violence comes from those who attempt to prevent reform, not from those struggling for reform. By focusing on the violent rebellions of the downtrodden, we overlook the much greater repressive force and violence utilized by the ruling oligarchs to maintain the status quo, including armed attacks against peaceful demonstrations, mass arrests, torture, destruction of opposition organizations, suppression of dissident publications, death squad assassinations, the extermina- tion of whole villages, and the like.
Most social revolutions begin peaceably. Why would it be other- wise? Who would not prefer to assemble and demonstrate rather than engage in mortal combat against pitiless forces that enjoy every advantage in mobility and firepower? Revolutions in Russia, China, Vietnam, and El Salvador all began peacefully, with crowds of peas- ants and workers launching nonviolent protests only to be met with violent oppression from the authorities. Peaceful protest and reform are exactly what the people are denied by the ruling oligarchs. The dissidents who continue to fight back, who try to defend themselves from the oligarchs' repressive fury, are then called "violent revolu- tionaries" and "terrorists. "
For those local and international elites who maintain control over most of the world's wealth, social revolution is an abomination. Whether it be peaceful or violent is a question of no great moment to them. Peaceful reforms that infringe upon their profitable accu- mulations and threaten their class privileges are as unacceptable to them as the social upheaval imposed by revolution.
Reforms that advance the conditions of life for the general public are not as materially intractable or as dependent on capital resources
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as we have been led to believe. There is no great mystery to building a health clinic, or carrying out programs for food rationing, land redistribution, literacy, jobs, and housing. Such tasks are well within the capacity of any state--if there is the political will and a mobi- lization of popular class power.
Consider Kerala, a state in India where the actions of popular organizations and mass movements have won important victories over the last forty years against politico-economic oppression, gen- erating a level of social development considerably better than that found in most of the Third World, and accomplished without out- side investment. Kerala has mass literacy, a lower birth rate and lower death rate than the rest of India, better public health services, fewer child workers, higher nutritional levels (thanks to a publicly subsi- dized food rationing system), more enlightened legal support and educational programs for women, and some social security protec- tions for working people and for the destitute and physically handi- capped. In addition, the people of Kerala radically altered a complex and exploitative system of agrarian relations and won important vic- tories against the more horrid forms of caste oppression.
Though Kerala has no special sources of wealth, it has had decades of communist organizing and political struggle that reached and moved large numbers of people and breathed life into the states democracy.