Blackshirts & Reds by Michael Parenti

Author:Michael Parenti
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: City Lights Books

One-Way Democracy

More important than democratic rule was free-market “reform ,” a code word for capitalist restoration. As long as democracy could be used to destabilize one-party communist rule, it was championed by the forces of reaction. But when democracy worked against free-market restoration, the outcome was less tolerated.

In 1990, in Bulgaria, capitalist restoration did not go according to plan. Despite generous financial and organizational assistance from U.S. sources, including the Free Congress Foundation, the Bulgarian conservatives ended up a poor second to the communists, in what Western European observers judged to be a fair and open election. What followed was a coordinated series of strikes, demonstrations, economic pressure, acts of sabotage, and other disruptions reminiscent of CIA-orchestrated campaigns against left governments in Chile, Jamaica, Nicaragua, and British Guyana. Within five months, the free-market oppositionists forced the democratically elected communist government to resign. Bulgarian communists “complained that the U.S. had violated democratic principles in working against freely elected officials.”52

The same pattern emerged in Albania where the democratically elected communist government won an overwhelming victory at the polls, only to face demonstrations, a general strike, economic pressure from abroad, and campaigns of disruption financed by the National Endowment for Democracy and other U.S. sources. After two months the communist government collapsed. Once the Right took power, a new law was passed denying Albanian communists and other opponents of capitalist restoration the right to vote or otherwise participate in political activities. As a reward for having extended democratic rights to all citizens, the Albanian communists and all former state employees and judges were stripped of their civil rights.

In the 1996 Albanian elections, the Socialists and other opposition parties—who had been predicted to do well—withdrew from the election hours before the polls closed in protest of the “blatantly rigged” vote. Election monitors from the European Union and the United States said they witnessed numerous instances of police intimidation and the stuffing of ballot boxes. The Socialist party had its final campaign rally banned and a number of prominent leaders barred from running for office because of their past communist affiliations (New York Times, 5/28/96). When the Socialists and their allies tried to hold protest rallies, they were attacked by Albanian security forces who beat and severely injured dozens of demonstrators (People’s Weekly World, 5/11/96 and 6/1/96).

Openly anti-Semitic groups, cryptofascist parties, and hate campaigns surfaced in Russia, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Belarus, Czechoslovakia, and Rumania. Museums that commemorated the heroic antifascist resistance were closed down and monuments to the struggle against Nazism were dismantled. In countries like Lithuania, former Nazi war criminals were exonerated, some even compensated for the years they had spent in jail. Jewish cemeteries were desecrated and xenophobic attacks against foreigners of darker hue increased. With the communists no longer around, Jews and foreigners were blamed for low crop prices, inflation, crime, and other social ills.

On June 11, 1995, Lech Walesa’s personal pastor, Father Henryk Jankowski, declared during a mass in Warsaw that the “Star of David is implicated in the swastika as

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