(I posted this on lemmygrad but I want to get some discussion from here too.)
I’ve been meaning to ask about some stuff regarding parenti that I see come up on different places.
One of them being about parenti’s book blackshirts and reds. So I’ve run into specific people who have claimed and bought up that parenti is lying about : how social democrats in germany gave fascists a path and its actually fault of soviets.
To paraphrase them
Soviets gave kpd direction to be hostile and also it wasn’t just “socdems will ally with nazis”. It was cause soviets gave advice to be hostile to the spd.
To boil it down, they say that parenti is wrong about rise of fascism and he whitewashed soviet mistakes.
The other thing that’s bought up is the bombing of germany and american industrial ties. I see it brought up that parenti is just lying about bombing in cologne of ford factory. And its actually all lies and say the charlie higham “trading with the enemy” reference is bullshit. They go on to say that american industrialist involvement with german industry is not that deep. And that parenti (and other communists) lie about this to make a grand narrative of american involvement. They bring up nazi economy book by tooze and this site as a debunking lies material.
Now my post isn’t so much about parenti, I wanna broadly discuss about the whole notion that soviets or german communists were the reason nazis came to power and that socdems were really not at fault.
And also to discuss that american industrialists involved with germany is some bullshit conspiracy. Which it isn’t, given the lengths across the board they spread collaborating after and before the war. I’ve been reading a lot of stuff on dulles, hw, and nazis spread across into different places for american interests. So I don’t think american involvement is some fake conspiracy.
What are your thoughts? (Sorry if this post is too long)
The leader of the socdems, Friedrich Ebert, often used the right-wing military called the Freikorps to attack leftists, and the Freikorps latter became a starter for the Nazis. That’s pretty uncontested knowledge. All this was happening when right-wing groups were assassinating people everywhere and mostly avoiding prosecution. Industrialists funding Nazis and right-wing groups is well founded.
Certainly communists made mistakes, but to blame the enemies of Nazism for Nazism without a charge is not great.
It’s a Wordpress blog.
Somewhere in this thread I mentioned samuel hoare. Yeah I know about freikorps but I guess the person I was talking about in the post only wants to shit on parenti. They only care about saying how whatever reference parenti put was bad about spd. Albeit plenty of history suggests otherwise. Which makes it weird to glom onto that stuff parenti said, as if saying socdems sided with fascists is not self evident.
Well yeah its a wordpress blog which apparently is staunchly debunking american ties to industries in germany. I don’t know some people just make bold claims and say they have great citations.