Fascism vs Communism

Do you understand how the Italian Fascists took power roughly 100 years ago?

Have you read letters or articles from black Southerners who were essentially re-enslaved when the Ku Klux Klan and their allies violently suppressed Reconstruction?

Have you heard the voices of those suppressed during the racist coup d’etat of 1890 in Wilmington, NC?

Have you seen eyewitness accounts of the the mass murders and lynchings of black sharecroppers in Arkansas, Oklahoma and elsewhere who dared to organize for a fair deal for the sharecroppers, or to run their own businesses?

Have you read the letters or diaries of relatives who were blacklisted or red-baited out of jobs after losing strikes in the coal fields and factories or campuses?

Unfortunately, it is the winners – who are generally the rich, the racists, and the rapacious scoundrels of this world with good PR machines – who generally get to dictate what gets written about history (and that includes the lying tyrants like Stalin or Mao who usurped the mantle of communism for their own benefit!). It is to the credit of Howard Zinn and other left-wingers that they began the process of correcting and revising the standard histories of the United States and other countries.

I was wondering how it was that in Italy, which had a very strong tradition of working-class or peasant socialist or anarchist thought and action, the Fascists were able to take over. This article in Slate, I think, explains it.

“The rise of fascism in the provinces of the Po Valley, in northern Italy, occurred in reaction to the remarkable postwar growth of Socialist power. During the biennio rosso (red two years), between 1918 and 1920, Socialists made huge electoral gains nationally and locally, while labor unions unleashed a wave of strikes unprecedented in Italian history. In the Po Valley, the Socialists established a virtual “state within a state,” winning control of municipal government, labor exchanges, and peasant leagues (unions). Socialists also founded cooperatives, cultural circles, taverns, and sporting clubs.³ Such working-class organizations exercised their power largely through legal means—elections, boycotts, strikes, and demonstrations—which nonetheless often led to clashes with police, with injuries and deaths on both sides.

“Political culture and the social order had been radically altered, with rough peasants and workers occupying the halls of power and red flags hanging from town halls. For landowners, life in this new “red” state meant higher wages, higher taxes, reduced profits, lost managerial authority, deteriorating private property rights, and the threat of social revolution. Moreover, displays of red flags, busts of Marx, and internationalist slogans offended nationalist and patriotic middle-class sentiments.⁴ Conservatives denounced the “red terror” and “atrocities” of this period, though the landowners and middle classes were in little real physical danger.⁵They were not physically assaulted, nor were their homes, offices, or private property damaged or destroyed. Yet, from their perspective, they lived in a world turned upside down. The Socialists had virtually “taken over,” and the liberal state appeared to have lost control of law and order.

Fascist squads of armed men personally beat up and humiliated all of the left-wing labor or peasant leaders, threatening their families as well, in town after town. They destroyed left-wing offices, printing presses, meeting halls, and forced elected officials to quit or be killed. All the while, the local police or military did absolutely nothing to stop them, and the left was much too divided to fight back militantly. Eventually, the Italian king invited the fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, to become the official leader of the country. He, in turn, then made all other parties illegal and launched various imperialist wars in Africa and the Balkans, helping set the stage for World War 2 – helping the Fascists come to power in Spain as well.

“…the most immediate and powerfully symbolic form of squadrist violence was the annihilation of the institutions of the Socialist Party, “but the ‘conquest’ of Socialist organizations and municipalities was reinforced and made possible by terror exercised against individuals.”⁷ The peasant leagues, cooperatives, labor halls, and social clubs—the entire infrastructure of the Socialist “state”—were intensely parochial institutions, organized around popular, charismatic political and labor leaders.⁸

Fascist squads thus practiced highly personal, localized strategies of violence and intimidation, attacking the most prominent and influential “subversives” within a given province, town, or comune. Fascists sometimes beat these men, occasionally with homicidal intent, but perhaps more commonly intimidated them until they were forced to leave town, thereby decapitating their organizations. The Fascists spent their weekends chasing prominent peasant leaders across the countryside.

Thus, life for labor leaders became terror-filled, especially because Fascists did not limit their attacks to the public sphere. Nowhere was safe. Late at night, 10, 30, or even 100 Blackshirts, as these squad members became known, sometimes traveling from neighboring towns, might surround a home, inviting a Socialist, anarchist, or Communist outside to talk. If they refused, the Fascists would enter forcibly or threaten to harm the entire family by lighting the house on fire.⁹

…

In small towns, where everyone knew everyone, Fascists inflicted ritual humiliation on their enemies, a powerful strategy of terror understood by all. Blackshirts forced their opponents to drink castor oil and other purgatives, and then sent them home, wrenching with pain and covered in their own feces. In some cases, squads forced their enemies to defecate on politically symbolic objects: pages of a speech, a manifesto, a red flag, and so on. After administering a castor oil treatment, Fascists sometimes drove prominent anti-Fascist leaders around in lorries in order to reduce them in the eyes of their own supporters.¹⁰ They also accosted their opponents in public, stripped them naked, beat them, and handcuffed them to posts in piazzas and along major roadways.¹¹

Although individual working-class leaders might have been willing to live under the constant threat of physical attacks, most were unwilling to subject their families to such danger. Deprived of leadership, meeting places, offices, records, and sympathetic Socialist town councils, the landless peasantry became subject to the landowners’ conventional tactics of strike breaking and intimidation. Having broken the leagues, the Fascists then forced the laborers into “politically neutral” (Fascist) syndicates. Vulnerable peasants had little choice but to join. Landowners used their newfound position of power to restore labor relations to the 19^thcentury status quo.

In this country, hundreds of thousands of people joined either a Socialist or Communist party at one point or another during the 20th century. In some cases, those organizations were divided by national origin (Swedes vs Russians vs Jews vs Finns vs Italians vs Blacks, etc) Many of those leftists only remained in those parties for a few months or years. But they helped re-build the American labor movement with their active, leading roles in the great industrial sit-down strikes of the late 1930s; they played important roles in the Civil Rights movement and in the New Deal. And we all know that the Soviet Red Army played the key role in bleeding the Third Reich of most of its military might and in defeating the Nazis. (Which is not to excuse any of the atrocities that the Soviet government visited upon its own people, including active communists who ended up in the gulags along with ordinary criminals or religious dissidents.)

In the late 1940s, the American government decided that all those former New Dealers or premature anti-fascists could no longer be tolerated, and the new Red Scare began. According to a recent book called “A Good American Family”, reviewed in the Washington Post,

“once the Red Scare began to gain steam, many former communists denied their pasts, refashioning themselves as ordinary liberals or refusing to talk about politics altogether. This required not only erasing the trauma of McCarthyism but also playing down the pain of breaking with a cause that had once lent so much meaning to their lives. Like many ex-communists, when Elliott did discuss his communist past, he referred to it as a mistake, a relic from a time when he was “stubborn in my ignorance and aggressive in my prejudices.”

“A Good American Family” shows us something more complex: that at one time, he thought it was possible to be a good communist, a good father and a good American all at once.”

(emphasis mine)

A radical look at the Vietnam War

I am of the generation that resisted the unjust American war in Vietnam, and am quite proud of the little that we did. I agree with the author quoted below that the Vietnam War, which killed two or three MILLION Asians in  order to prop up the Western world-wide colonial empire, was a crime, rather than a mistake. The heroism of the Vietnamese (and others) in fighting imperialism for over 30 years should never be forgotten.

I felt sorry for my friends, classmates and neighbors who got drafted to fight over there against their wishes – some of those who finished their two-year stint in Vietnam or elsewhere during that era were eager to join and help lead our anti-war chapter of Students for a Democratic Society at my college (Dartmouth).

If the military had in fact been able to draft me, I am not sure whether I would have fled to Canada, or else gone in and simply have been a most unwilling, uncooperative soldier (like so many others), or else been involved in a big protest of some sort, or else have either ended up in the stockade for my pains (along with many others). Maybe all of the above?

Here is part of an essay by Bruce Dixon in today’s ‘Black Agenda Report‘:

Convinced that Uncle Ho — as the Vietnamese called him — and his party would win the 1956 elections, the US created a brutal puppet government in the southern half of Vietnam to cancel the election and “request” US military aid against so-called invaders from so-called North Vietnam. In the final decade of the long Vietnamese war more than half a million US troops were deployed, more bombs were dropped than in all of World War 2, and millions of civilians mostly Vietnamese perished. It’s the final decade of the 30 year bloodbath that most now think of as the American war in Vietnam, Vietnam the mistake, Vietnam the tragic misunderstanding.

Only it wasn’t a mistake, and certainly not a misunderstanding. The Vietnamese and other colonial subjects had been insisting on their independence for decades. Ho Chi Minh showed up at Versailles back in 1919 when the terms of the treaty ending World War 1 were being drafted. Ho demanded independence for the African and Asian colonies of France, Britain and other European powers. The Vietnamese knew from the very beginning what they wanted to do with their lives and resources in their country. The so-called misunderstanding was that the US political and military establishment, and 5 US presidents over 30 years imagined they could torture, bomb, invade and slaughter their way to some other outcome.

Ultimately they could not. 58 thousand Americans and 3 million Asians perished. 3 million dead is not a mere mistake. It’s a gigantic crime, after the world wars, one of the 20th century’s greatest. Crimes ought at least to be acknowledged and owned up to, if not punished. Pretty sure Ken Burns is not at all about that. At best Burns seems to be about a species of healing and reconciliation that limits itself to Americans agreeing with and forgiving their trespasses against each other, and dutiful acknowledgements of the valor of fighters on both sides.

The series has not yet concluded, so we’ll have to wait and see whether Ken Burns ignores or buys into the discredited lie propagated by our country’s war propaganda industry that unaccounted for Americans prisoners were somehow left behind and missing at the end of the Vietnam war. They were not. But the little black flag and ceremonies for the imagined “missing” in Vietnam are standard now four decades after the war’s end.

I didn’t go to Vietnam. Vietnam came to me, or tried to. I was lucky enough to live in a big city, Chicago, and to connect with the antiwar movement, which included black soldiers and marines returning from Vietnam. Some of them frankly confessed to taking part in all sorts of atrocities and war crimes and we took them from high school to high school in the fall and early winter of 1967 to repeat those confessions, and to tell other young black people like us it was an unjust war we had a duty to resist.

I thought I was risking prison when I sold Black Panther newspapers at the armed forces induction center on Van Buren Street and refusing to be drafted like Muhammad Ali. But by then so many young people were resisting the war that Uncle Sam’s draftee army became useless. In that era there were not enough cells to lock us all up, and many white Americans were declaring themselves ready for revolution, or something like it. US policymakers learned that part of their lesson well. They ended the draft and most white antiwar protesters went home.

Noam Chomsky has it exactly right when he declares that Vietnam was not a mistake or tragic error. It was an example that said to the world – THIS is what you get when you defy the wishes of the US ruling elite. You get bombs, you get rivers of blood and you get your country’s economic potential set back half a century. Seen that way, Vietnam wasn’t some tragedy the US blundered into by mistake. It was an example. And a crime.

A rant concerning education

There is fraud in many, many realms of work and human enterprise. Including lawyers, doctors, businessmen, accountants, engineers, policemen, nurses, painters, taxi drivers, politicians, ‘reformers’, housewives, babies, children, students, the retired, stockholders, hunter-gatherers, soldiers, officers, spies, writers like me… (Sorry if I left out your favorite group; I got tired of typing this list) We are all sometimes crooked, no? Including some teachers.

But I think the problem is deeper. Yes, there is an awful lot of corruption and outright graft in education (as it is in many other areas). But I think that education and upbringing of the next generation is one of the most important things we can do. The last thing we really want is to have gangs of unemployed, disengaged kids hanging on street-corners, engaging in thuggish and criminal behavior, getting locked up for various offenses, engaging in violence and so on … regardless of whether their freaking math and reading test scores were ‘proficient’, ‘advanced’, ‘basic’, or ‘below basic’ – that’s not really important. What’s important is, are they becoming good human beings, or otherwise? And is it the sole job of the classroom teacher to fix all that? I don’t think he or she could if they tried. And, lord knows, they have been trying. And in the past 10 years they have been forced to work harder and harder, to no real human avail nor real improvement.

One could easily make the argument that we don’t spend nearly enough money on education. Heck, every single student should begin learning a foreign language soon after they learn to write their own. Plus, they should get really good coaching in some sort of physical endeavor (not necessarily a sport). Plus, they should all learn to play a musical instrument and to cook good food. And to appreciate good literature, music, and other cultures. And learn how to use various tools (metal, wood, software, and much, much more).

And to learn how society actually does function, and how it SHOULD work, why it works the way it does instead of the way it should, and to try to figure out ways from get from the actual present situation to an improved situation.

We are doing very little of any of this with our most underprivileged young society members. The kids who are raised in our ghettoes very seldom get to learn any of that stuff. Instead, society waits until they do something really, really wrong, and then locks them up. But it’s really, really expensive to keep someone locked up for 30 or 40 years – at about $20,000 per prisoner per year, that’s six hundred thousand to eight hundred thousand dollars ($600,000 to $800,000) per prisoner. It would have been a lot cheaper in the long run to invest in after-school programs to seriously engage students in sports, music, and much, much more, including lots of field trips to museums, zoos, mountains, beaches, factories, farms, and much, much more.

Instead, we are narrowing our educational goals more and more onto things that really don’t matter very much at all. (Have you actually LOOKED at the inane questions they ask on these dinky standardized NCLB tests? They were written by people who have absolutely no experience in the real world, or chose to ignore everything they ever learned about it.)