Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism by Michael Parenti

Author:Michael Parenti
Language: eng
Format: mobi, pdf
Tags: History
Published: 2019-02-08T00:00:00+00:00

nals who lost no time in resuming their unsavory pursuits (New York

Times, 12/18/91).

Memories of Maldevelopment

In chapter two I discussed the role of popular revolution in advancing the condition of humankind. That analysis would apply as well to communist revolutions and is worth reiterating in the present context. We hear a great deal about the crimes of communism but almost nothing about its achievements. The communist govern ments inherited societies burdened with an age-old legacy of eco nomic exploitation and maldevelopment. Much of precommunist Eastern Europe, as with prerevolutionary Russia and China, was in effect a Third World region with widespread poverty and almost nonexistent capital formation. Most rural transportation was still by horse and wagon.

The devastation of World War II added another heavy layer of misery upon the region, reducing hundreds of villages and many cities to rubble. It was the communists and their allies who rebuilt these societies. v\Thile denounced in the U.S. press for leaving their economies in bad shape, in fact, the Reds left the economy of Eastern Europe in far better condition than they found it.

The same was true of China. Henry Rosemont, Jr. notes that when the communists liberated Shanghai from the U.S.-supported reac tionary Kuomintang regime in 1949, about 20 percent of that city's population, an estimated 1.2 million, were drug addicts. Every morning there were special street crews "whose sole task was to gather up the corpses of the children, adults, and the elderly who had been murdered during the night, or had been abandoned, and died of disease, cold, and/or starvation" (Z Magazine, October 1995).

During the years of Stalin's reign, the Soviet nation made dra

matic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights. These accomplishments usually go unmentioned when the

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