Josh

“How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“During the years of Stalin’s reign, the Soviet nation made dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women’s rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the Stalinist era is discussed. To say that “socialism doesn’t work” is to overlook the fact that it did. In Eastern Europe, Russia, China, Mongolia, North Korea, and Cuba, revolutionary communism created a life for the mass of people that was far better than the wretched existence they had endured under feudal lords, military bosses, foreign colonizers, and Western capitalists.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“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 capitalist and Jewish banker. For debtor farmers, it was the Jewish usurer. For the middle class, it was the Jewish union leader and Jewish communist. Here again we have a consciously rational use of irrational images. The Nazis might have been crazy but they were not stupid.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism

“Capitalism is not just an economic system but an entire social order. Once it takes hold, it is not voted out of existence by electing socialists or communists.”
― Michael Parenti, Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism