I’ve learned long ago that AskHistorians is a good place to find facts, but a very bad place to find opinions and analyses.
The historian community is… very complex, to put it mildly. The AskHistorians community, even more so.
Having prefaced that, both comments are bullshit. Parenti never wrote Blackshirts and Reds as an academic historical study. He wrote it as a digestable, easily-read explanation of how fascism and communism actually work. Filling it with sources and footnotes would be pointless, as they would be useless to the average reader, and distracting to everyone else. However, most of his books do contain extensive bibliography, statistics, sources and further analysis at the end, which tells us how far these commenters got into reading one of Parenti’s books.
Furthermore, the idea that Parenti is a nobody in the field of history is a ridiculous claim, and ironically, needs citation. Parenti has been published at least 25 times that I can count, and his papers have been cited by at least 1500 other academic works, which is a very respectable number for a “nobody”. His books carry hundreds of citations each in other academic projects.
I looked at only one comment, the highest actual comment on the first link. The cited books don’t lead me to believe this guy’s well-read at all, not only because of the weird format, but also they’re not the useful kind of citation that backs up central claims.
Parenti’s work speaks vaguely about “less inequality”, “public ownership of the means of production”, and “priority placed on human services”, but these statements say nothing about the real, systemic experiences of Soviet citizens, particularly industrial workers who were explicitly supposed formed the basis of Soviet society. Saying that there was “public ownership” of industry is a truism. It tells us nothing about what state ownership and management meant for ordinary Soviet industrial laborers in terms of wages, working hours, factory management, social mobility, and more broadly their participation in Soviet society. It’s a “socialist” history of the USSR with the working class’ real, material experiences written out.
I know this feels right to people who haven’t got a grasp on the fact that they live in a capitalist society. All manner of improvements can be made to the superstructure of a capitalist society, it won’t become equal. How do I know the USSR was socialist? For most of its existence it didn’t have a class of people with an overrepresented influence over its administration or the functioning of its society. Specific statistics and policies that indicate prosperity or democracy aren’t immaterial, but they are only ancillary.
Parenti spends no time engaging with the vast academic literature on Russian and Soviet workers and labor history. Most of these works are written by socialist scholars interested in examining the role of class and labor in Soviet society.
The poster has to know this ain’t true. Western historiography on the subject of the USSR and other worker states is notoriously devoid of first-hand accounts and documents. Grover Furr calls attention to this in many of his speeches and writings: a medieval historian who doesn’t have a good grasp of multiple languages used in the region they’re studying is rightly a laughingstock, yet how many historians of the USSR speak (or just read) russian? How many historians of seeseepee know mandarin?
… In none of these works is the Soviet state itself a producer or unfiltered transmitter of worker’s “class interests”, inasmuch as scholarship nowadays accepts the idea that such a diverse group - in terms of gender, background, geography, and profession - could have a coherent set of interests.
I’m not sure I’m reading this right, but I think the dimwit is proposing the proletariat doesn’t exist because intersectionality makes class interests too complicated, which would be as correct as the dodo population is numerous. We’re who we are here, we’ve at least skimmed Capital, we’re better than to believe added factors change the core of a system.
Parenti largely avoids engaging with the question of how “socialist” the USSR was in a substantive way. He skips description of what the USSR “was” for excuses about “why”. Certainly its leaders were convinced Marxists, and this set of beliefs pervaded every aspect of the USSR’s existence. …
And so on and so on. How someone could read Blackshirts and Reds and come away with the singular question “Why didn’t the author prove to my satisfaction that the USSR was communist?” is beyond me. I might be convinced they never read a word Parenti wrote considering their entire comment, it’s filled with stuff they may have gotten from reviews.
I would just like to point out that citing sources means little on its own if the sources cited are other academics who are circling jerking about a topic they were raised to only ever analyze through an incredibly biased lens.
Similar to how, just because wikipedia has sources, doesn’t mean it’s inherently a reliable place to get information, much less an unbiased one (really, there’s no such thing as an unbiased place to get information). Academics sometimes like to act as if there is such a thing, that they can extricate themselves from bias, but they can’t. That doesn’t mean there isn’t true and untrue, but it does mean that how you array the facts into narrative, which facts you choose to include and not include, can drastically change how it comes across. A source that was attempting to be fully unbiased would have to include as many different takes as possible from different angles, different cultures, different languages, including materials destroyed by invaders (making it impossible to start with), and do no editing or editorializing on the presentation of those angles. Which is an unrealistic ask and one that nobody but the most centrist fool would attempt because it’s not going to accomplish anything meaningful in the first place, since at that point, you’re basically teaching people the biases they already came with in lieu of giving them new ones to consider.
Bias, to be clear, is not a dirty word; it is an inevitability we deal with constantly. But trying to be actively dishonest, to promote views that harm the masses, the colonized, that is dirty. Between the colonizer and the colonized, between the capitalist and the proletariat, I will be biased and side with the colonized and the proletariat, whether they show up as separate or as the same. And I will be biased and side with the colonized over the colonizer who is part of the proletariat because the liberation of the colonized is more important.
If an “academic” approaches with opposite biases, or if they approach with biases sympathetic to communism but of the view that it has “never been tried”, if they work within liberal institutions that elevate those who justify imperialism and speak poorly of communism, they are going to create elaborate works of colonizer design that get cited in other elaborate works of colonizer design. Their bibliography cannot protect them from such things. I say this not to dismiss any and all academic works coming out of western imperialist academia, but to make the point that if you don’t take biases into account, if you start with the belief that some of it is free of bias, you have already let them have unfair footing in which they can claim their systems of evidence and approval as intrinsic proof of some kind of superior ability of perspective they don’t have.
Hope this makes sense to people. If you’ve been raised in the idea of being above it all with impartiality, you might find some of this sounds odd; even to me, there is a part that goes “but, but, I can extricate myself somehow and be above it, right?” But none of us are a god who exists outside, are we?
Edit: for typo
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You have definitely fallen into a radicalization pipeline, my dude. But you’re in good company.
There were two “Reigns of Terror,” if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the “horrors” of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror —that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.
-Mark Twain, “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, chapter 13”
“He that is angry without cause, shall be in danger; but he that is angry with cause, shall not be in danger: for without anger, teaching will be useless, judgments unstable, crimes unchecked.” Therefore to be angry is not always an evil.
-Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologae, misattributing a quote from Opus Imperfectum to St. John Chrysotom
I happen to be a pacifist, but if I had had to make a decision about fighting a war against Hitler, I may have temporarily given up my pacifism and taken up arms.
-MLK, The Other America
There are reasons we celebrate righteous violence. To suggest that all violence is the same is pure liberalism. Literally. The worst type, the zeroeth:
We stand for active ideological struggle because it is the weapon for ensuring unity within the Party and the revolutionary organizations in the interest of our fight. Every Communist and revolutionary should take up this weapon.
But liberalism rejects ideological struggle and stands for unprincipled peace, thus giving rise to a decadent, Philistine attitude and bringing about political degeneration in certain units and individuals in the Party and the revolutionary organizations.
-Mao, Combat Liberalism
…[I] must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen’s Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to “order” than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice…
-MLK, Letter from a Birmingham Jail
Horseshoe theory is a centrist trap. Don’t fall into it.
the wise man bowed his head solemnly and spoke: “theres actually zero difference between good & bad things. you imbecile. you fucking moron”
-dril, Tweet
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As far as I remember the term “alt right” was coined by literal nazis in an attempt to hide the fact that they were nazis. The dogshit liberal media picked it up and ran with it for a little while, but it’s not really being used anymore for good reason. They’re all just “right”, there’s nothing “alt” about it. “Alt left” was never a thing.
And anyone who can look at the state of the world today and not get radicalized are not to be taken seriously. The only “extremists” are the people who think everything is just a-ok and that radical change is not needed.
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