Fascism, the Enemy of Democracy and Body Guard of Capitalism

This week is going to be loaded with highly informative, eye-opening presentations on the mess of our economy and ways to fix it. Please share them far and wide. Today begins with a thorough 30 minute review of fascist history showing many, many worrisome parallels to today. This lecture is likely to open your eyes on many issues. (If you prefer to read the script over listening to the lecture, you can do that here)

(Note: if the video linked above gets deleted, you may search the Internet for the title: “Real History: Free Market Fascism”)

Terms like fascism, capitalism, and socialism – and their relations to democracy – have been so tremendously warped, overused, and intentionally turned upside down in demagogic efforts to confuse the public, that it has become dangerous to use them in conversation as they tend to make people misunderstand and demonize each other, killing all meaningful conversation before it has had a chance to touch upon anything of substance. 

In this talk, Michael Parenti gives a very thorough review of how that thing that became known as fascism came into existence, and the things it did, replacing short (and often wrong) definitions with a full picture of actual historic events, many of which have been forgotten by the public and are in somewhat modified form being repeated today. The terms socialism, “left,” and “right” are also being made clearer in the process. Aside from helping us with understanding these labels better, this presentation gives us a rich insight into how things came to be the way they are now and where they are headed if we don’t put a stop to the dark forces in power. Among other things, Parenti addresses who supported fascism and who fascism supported in return, important things usually left out in school teachings which present the infamous fascist regimes as criminal (mostly because of the many people killed) but carefully avoid to name the motives behind their crimes or the beneficiaries of these crimes — acting, in a sense, as if fascism had just dropped out of the blue sky without any profound socio-economic connection. What crime investigator would ever skip over motive and beneficiaries in a crime investigation unless he were trying to cover it up?

While this lecture was given during (or shortly after?) the Reagan era, the parallels drawn between the current machinations of back then and the rise and operations of Mussolini’s and Hitler’s fascism half a century earlier are as valid today as they were back then; and – at the same time – this talk fills in gaps in many of today’s people’s knowledge of the slide towards disaster that the Reagan era ushered in, replete with the state machinery’s role in opposing the political “left” (which is to say, the disowned working people’s interests) on one hand and helping along fascists (and their super-rich cronies’ interests) on the other.

We, today, see history repeating again, as Michael Parenti did back in the Reagan era. The exact means may change, but the dire motives, goals, and economic and political outcomes are the same, as is the unholy marriage between the robber billionaires and their cronies in politics. We are today getting screwed by an old practice. We only need to take a look back to clearly understand what is happening now.

 

Further Readings:

1. http://jfmxl.sdf.org/MichaelParenti/index.html (has this lecture’s script and three more)
2. http://michaelparenti.org/ (hub leading to Parenti’s books, CDs, and articles)

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