The overwhelming response from those who heard part ONE of this program was disbelief – how can an analysis made in 1995 be so relevant for 2017!
In this conclusion Parenti addresses: How western capitalist states have cooperated with Fascism as they saw Fascists as bulwark against communism. He reminds us that US corporations such as Dupont, Ford, GM, ITT, had factories in fascist Germany and after the war collected money from the US tax payers for damages incurred in Allied bombing raids.
Parenti says that we might do well to stop thinking of Fascism as either or condition. To insist that you don’t have Fascism until every vestige of constitutional government is destroyed and the jackboot is on our necks is to overlook the antidemocratic manifestations in many “democracies”. There is Fascism in the pin striped suit – he says.
When the power of capital is untrammeled, Parenti says, all of us are at risk. The environment, the sacred forests, the creatures of the sea. The real burden to society are not the poor but the corporate rich we can no longer afford them.
This talk was recorded before a standing room audience of 1,200 in Berkeley, CA, on September 23, 1995. Parenti grew up in a working class Italian part of New York City and earned a PhD in political science from Yale.
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