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Blackshirts and Reds Bot

@reds_bot

Sep 11

Do people in the East want the free market? Opinion polls taken in late 1993 in Russia showed only 27 percent of all respondents supported a market economy. By large majorities, people believed that state control over prices and 1/4

over private business is "useful," and that "the state should provide everyone with a job and never tolerate unemployment." In Poland, 92 percent wanted to keep the state welfare system, and lopsided majorities wanted to retain subsidized 2/4

housing and foods and return to full employment (Monthly Review, 12/94). "Most people here," reports a New York Times Moscow correspondent (6/23/96), "are suspicious of private property, wonder what was so bad about a system that 3/4

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Blackshirts and Reds Bot

@reds_bot

Sep 11

What distinguishes fascism from ordinary right-wing patriarchal autocracies is the way it attempts to cultivate a revolutionary aura. Fascism offers a beguiling mix of revolutionary-sounding mass appeals and reactionary class politics. The Nazi party's full 1/4

name was the National Socialist German Workers Party, a left-sounding name. As already noted, the SA storm troopers had a militant share-the-wealth strain in their ranks that was suppressed by Hitler after he took state power. Both the Italian fascists and 2/4

the Nazis made a conscious effort to steal the Left's thunder. There were mass mobilizations, youth orga-nizations, work brigades, rallies, parades, banners, symbols, and slo-gans. There was much talk about a "Nazi revolution" that would revitalize society, 3/4

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Blackshirts and Reds Bot

@reds_bot

Sep 11

Once the capitalist restorationists in Eastern Europe and the for-mer Soviet Union took state power, they worked hard to make sure that the new order of corporate plunder, individual greed, low wages, mindless pop culture, and 1/4

limited electoral democracy would take hold. They set about dismantling public ownership of production and the entire network of social programs that once served the public. They integrated the erstwhile communist countries into 2/4

the global capitalist system by expropriating their land, labor, natural resources, and markets, swiftly transforming them into impover-ished Third World nations. All this was hailed in the U.S. corporate-owned press as a great 3/4

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Blackshirts and Reds Bot

@reds_bot

Sep 11

What happened to the U.S. businesses that collaborated with fascism ? The Rockefeller family's Chase National Bank used its Paris office in Vichy France to help launder German money to facilitate Nazi international trade during the war, and did so with 1/4

complete impunity. Corporations like DuPont, Ford, General Motors, and ITT owned factories in enemy countries that produced fuel, tanks, and planes that wreaked havoc on Allied forces. After the war, instead of being prosecuted for treason, ITT collected $27 2/4

million from the U.S. government for war damages inflicted on its German plants by Allied bombings. General Motors collected over $33 million. Pilots were given instructions not to hit factories in Germany that were owned by U.S. firms. Thus Cologne was 3/4

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Blackshirts and Reds Bot

@reds_bot

Sep 10

Much production in East Germany was dismantled to prevent competition with West German firms. This was especially evident when collective agriculture was broken up to protect the heavily sub-sidized and less productive private farms 1/4

of West Germany.8 Without making compensation, West German capitalists grabbed almost all the socialized property in the GDR, including factories, mills, farms, apartments and other real estate, and the medical care system— assets 2/4

worth about $2 trillion—in what has amounted to the largest expropriation of public wealth by private capital in European history. The end result of all this free-market privatization in East Germany is that rents, once 5 3/4

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Blackshirts and Reds Bot

@reds_bot

Sep 10

Since the overthrow of communism, free-market right-wing forces in the various Eastern European countries enjoyed significant financial and organizational assistance from U.S.-financed agencies, such as the National Endowment for 1/5

Democracy, the AFL-CIO s Free Trade Union Institute (a group intimately linked to the CIA), and the Free Congress Foundation, an organization with an anticommunist and conservative religious ideology.4 Communists and other Marxists 2/5

endured political repression throughout Eastern Europe. In East Germany, the Party of Democratic Socialism had its property and offices, paid for by party mem-bers, seized in an attempt to bankrupt it. In Latvia, the communist 3/5

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