A bold and entertaining exploration of the epic struggles of yesterday and today.Blackshirts ampamp Reds explores some of the big issues of our time fascism capitalism communism revolution democracy and ecology. These terms are often bandied about but seldom explored in the original and exciting way that has become Michael Parentis trademark.Parenti shows how rational fascism renders service to capitalism how corporate power undermines democracy and how revolutions are a mass empowerment against the forces of exploitative privilege. He also maps out the external and internal forces that destroyed communism and the disastrous impact of the freemarket victory on eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. He affirms the relevance of taboo ideologies like Marxism demonstrating the importance of class analysis in understanding political realities and dealing with the ongoing collision between ecology and global corporatism.Written with lucid and compelling style this book goes beyond truncated modes of thought inviting us to entertain iconoclastic views and to ask why things are as they are.A penetrating and persuasive writer with an astonishing array of documentation to implement his attacks. ampmdashThe Catholic JournalistBy portraying the struggle between fascism and Communism in this century as a single conflict and not a series of discrete encounters between the insatiable need for new capital on the one hand and the survival of a system under siege on the other Parenti defines fascism as the weapon of capitalism not simply an extreme form of it. Fascism is not an aberration he points out but a rational and integral component of the system.ampmdashStan Goff author of Full Spectrum Disorder The Military in the New American Century Michael Parenti PhD Yale is an internationally known author and lecturer. He is one of the nations leading progressive political analysts. Author of over 275 published articles and twenty books his writings are published in popular periodi