Anti-communism is not an opinion but an environment. The communist is demonized so empire can call itself innocent. Liberal reason disciplines dissent more effectively than repression. Vietnam exposes anti-communism as an ideology that requires bodies.
By Prince Kapone | Weaponized Intellects Book Review | Weaponized Information | January 28, 2026
I. When Anti-Communism Becomes the Atmosphere
Michael Parenti’s The Anti-Communist Impulse, first published in 1970, is an early but fully formed intervention against the ideological backbone of U.S. imperial power. Written during the height of the Vietnam War and at a moment when Cold War dogma saturated American political life, the book does not treat anti-communism as a mistaken belief or an excess of paranoia. Parenti approaches it as a coherent and functional ideology—one that shapes perception, authorizes violence, disciplines dissent, and furnishes capitalism with its most reliable moral alibi. This is not a work of abstract theory or academic balance. It is a historical-materialist excavation of how an empire teaches itself to see domination as virtue and resistance as crime, long before bombs are dropped or governments are overthrown.
Parenti doesn’t begin this book by asking you what you think about communism. He begins by asking a harder question: what has anti-communism already done to your mind? Not your ballot. Not your party ID. Your mind—your reflexes, your moral vocabulary, the way you sort the world into “free” and “unfree” before you’ve even looked at the evidence. His opening move is simple and devastating: anti-communism isn’t just a position people hold. It is a whole climate—an ideological weather system—that drifts through schools, newspapers, churches, and dinner-table common sense until it starts to feel like “reality” itself. And once it feels like reality, it no longer has to argue. It only has to repeat.
What Parenti is naming, in plain language, is the way empire manufactures default settings. He describes how “images” get made—manageable simplifications that help people navigate a world too complex to grasp all at once—but he refuses the liberal excuse that distortion is just inevitable and therefore harmless. Yes, human beings reduce a flood of stimuli into images. But which images get promoted, circulated, rewarded, and sanctified? Which ones get punished, mocked, or disappeared? That’s not psychology in the abstract. That’s politics. That’s power. The ruling class does not need to control every thought in your head; it only needs to build the narrow hallway your thoughts must walk through to be considered “reasonable.”
Then he lands the line that should still embarrass every respectable columnist in the country: our fear that communism might someday take over most of the world blinds us to the fact that anti-communism already has. This is not a metaphor. He is talking about budgets, wars, alliances, and the moral exemptions handed out to U.S. violence like candy. Anti-communism becomes a kind of global permit—permission to spend, to invade, to sabotage, to starve, to bomb—while calling it “defense.” It becomes the national purpose that substitutes for democracy: not building a decent life for working people, but keeping the world safe for capital’s right to own everything.
Parenti’s method here is not the fog-machine method of Western Marxism—the seminar-room habit of floating above the battlefield describing the smoke. He’s doing something more dangerous and more useful: he insists on feedback. On evidence. On the elimination of error through confrontation with the record. If your picture of the world produces endless war, endless coups, endless “tragic necessities,” then the problem may not be a few bad leaders. The problem may be the picture. And if your politics is built out of prepackaged images—“communist aggression,” “American virtue,” “free world,” “totalitarian menace”—then you are not analyzing reality; you are consuming an ideological product.
And Parenti makes another move that matters because it blocks the cheap escape hatch. He does not romanticize communist states. He names repression where it exists—purges, censorship, oligarchic rule—and he refuses to excuse violations of human dignity. But he also refuses the anti-communist scam where socialism is treated like an eternal crime while capitalism’s crimes get rebranded as unfortunate imperfections. If we “despise and deplore” camps and censorship, he says, then let’s be serious: do we deplore them only when they wear a red flag, or also when they wear a crown, a cross, a corporate logo, or a U.S. aid package? He points directly to the U.S.-backed dictatorship belt—places whose torture chambers never disqualified them from being called “friends.” That’s the moral geometry of empire: the same act becomes either “tyranny” or “security” depending on who does it.
This introduction also tells you where the book comes from: Vietnam. Not as an academic curiosity, but as a rupture—an experience that forces a person to trace the chain of ideas that made the slaughter seem normal. Parenti describes how, the more he wrestled with that war, the more he began to question the entire train of attitudes that carried the United States into it. That’s the book’s origin point: anti-communism not as a topic, but as a mechanism that keeps delivering bodies—foreign bodies—into the gears of U.S. power.
So Part I does the necessary work before anything else can be understood. It clears the ideological fog. It tells the reader: if you want to talk about communism, you first have to talk about the anti-communist impulse—because that impulse doesn’t just criticize socialism. It manufactures the very reality in which socialism must appear as the permanent villain and capitalism can keep wearing the mask of innocence. And once you see that, the question stops being “Is communism good or bad?” and becomes what it always should have been: who benefits from the story we are being forced to live inside?
II. The Enemy Is Invented, the Empire Is Absolved
Once Parenti has cleared the ground—once anti-communism is revealed as atmosphere rather than argument—the next move follows with ruthless logic. If an ideology is going to organize an entire world, it needs more than abstractions. It needs a villain with a face. And so communism, already stripped of history and material conditions, is transformed into something darker: not a social system, not a political project, but a moral monstrosity. The “demon communist” is born not through evidence, but through repetition—through a steady drip of adjectives that do the work facts are no longer required to do. Irrational. Fanatical. Expansionist. Inhuman. Once these traits are assumed, everything else becomes unnecessary.
Parenti shows how this demonology functions as a shortcut around thought. If communists are inherently violent, then any violence directed at them is preemptive self-defense. If they are incapable of reason, then negotiation is naïveté. If they are immune to reform, then annihilation becomes the only rational option. This is not analysis—it is theological warfare. The communist is no longer a historical actor responding to exploitation, invasion, or underdevelopment. He becomes a metaphysical threat, a contagion. And like all good demons, he must be confronted everywhere, always, and without restraint.
But demons do not float in a vacuum. They require saints. And here Parenti turns the lens sharply toward the other half of the construction: “America the Virtuous.” The United States does not merely oppose communism; it does so reluctantly, tragically, with a heavy heart and clean hands. Its power is portrayed as reactive, never initiating conflict, always responding to provocation. Where communist violence is explained as essence, U.S. violence is explained as circumstance. Where socialist repression is treated as proof of moral rot, capitalist repression is reframed as an unfortunate deviation from noble ideals.
This is the structural inversion that keeps empire morally weightless. Parenti dissects how American actions are severed from American interests. Resources disappear. Markets vanish. Strategic positioning fades into the background. What remains is a story of burden and sacrifice: a nation dragged into conflicts it did not seek, forever cleaning up the messes of other people’s ideologies. The result is an imperial power that cannot recognize itself as imperial, because empire has been translated into virtue.
The brilliance of Parenti’s intervention here is that he refuses to treat this as hypocrisy alone. This is not simply about leaders lying to the public. It is about a moral framework so deeply internalized that it structures perception itself. When the United States topples governments, funds death squads, or levels villages, these acts are not processed as expressions of domination. They are processed as regrettable necessities, or worse, as invisible. Meanwhile, any act of resistance against U.S.-aligned power—no matter how defensive, no matter how rooted in survival—is instantly magnified into proof of communist aggression.
This pairing—the demon communist and the virtuous America—locks together like gears. Each justifies the other. The more monstrous the enemy appears, the more innocent the empire must be. And the more innocent the empire claims to be, the more monstrous any challenge to it must look. In this closed moral universe, evidence no longer tests the narrative; it is filtered through it. The question is never whether the United States is acting violently, but whether its violence is sufficiently justified. The answer, conveniently, is always yes.
What Parenti is doing in this section is deepening the argument from ideology as atmosphere to ideology as moral machinery. Anti-communism no longer just shapes what people think is real; it dictates what they think is permissible. It tells them whose lives are tragic when lost and whose lives are statistics. It tells them which prisons are gulags and which are “correctional systems.” And most importantly, it tells them that power exercised by the United States is not power at all, but responsibility.
By the end of this movement, the reader is left with an uncomfortable realization: anti-communism does not merely oppose a rival system. It functions as an absolution ritual for empire itself. And once that absolution is granted, the groundwork is laid for something far more durable than propaganda—an entire culture that will defend domination not because it is forced to, but because it believes it is doing good.
III. When Ideology Learns to Speak Softly
By the time Parenti arrives here, the enemy has been invented and the empire morally absolved. What remains is the most dangerous phase of all: normalization. Anti-communism no longer needs the volume of crusade or the theatrics of demon-hunting. It settles in. It becomes habitual. It learns how to speak softly, how to sound reasonable, how to pass itself off as moderation. This is where Parenti makes a move that still rattles the U.S. left: he shows that anti-communism survives not in spite of liberalism, but through it.
Anti-communism, Parenti explains, becomes an American way of life precisely when it stops announcing itself as repression. It migrates into schools as “objectivity,” into journalism as “balance,” into civic culture as “common sense.” Children learn early which histories are respectable and which are embarrassing. Students learn that capitalism has flaws, but socialism has sins. The lesson is subtle but relentless: criticism is allowed, even encouraged—so long as it never threatens ownership, empire, or class power. This is not censorship by force. It is censorship by framing.
Here Parenti dismantles the comforting myth that conservatives carry the burden of reaction while liberals guard the gates of reason. The liberal and conservative, he shows, are not opposites but partners in an ideological division of labor. Conservatives police the boundaries with blunt force; liberals police them with credentials. One shouts “treason,” the other whispers “unserious.” One waves the flag; the other waves peer review. The result is the same: socialism is kept permanently outside the realm of legitimate possibility.
This is why Parenti treats liberal anti-communism as the more sophisticated threat. It does not burn books; it footnotes them. It does not jail radicals en masse; it buries them under layers of professional disdain. Western Marxism, stripped of revolutionary purpose and repackaged for academic consumption, plays a key role here. Class struggle is discussed as discourse. Imperialism becomes a metaphor. Capitalism is critiqued endlessly—but never confronted as a system that must be dismantled. The revolution is postponed indefinitely, pending better language.
What Parenti exposes is how dissent itself gets disciplined. Acceptable critique becomes a performance of moral concern rather than a challenge to power. One may condemn “excesses,” “mistakes,” or “authoritarian tendencies,” but never the structural violence of capitalism or the legitimacy of empire. In this framework, the radical is not dangerous because he is wrong, but because he refuses to stay within the lines. And so he must be rendered unreasonable, dogmatic, or extreme—not through argument, but through tone-policing and professional exile.
This is the moment where anti-communism completes its transformation from ideology into culture. It no longer needs to be imposed from above because it is reproduced from within. People learn to censor themselves before anyone else has to. They learn which questions lead to grants, which lead to tenure, and which lead nowhere at all. Anti-communism becomes a kind of social intelligence test: the truly “serious” thinker knows which conclusions not to reach.
By building this section out of lived institutions rather than abstract claims, Parenti deepens the analysis again. The problem is no longer simply false ideas about socialism or exaggerated fears of communism. The problem is an entire intellectual ecosystem designed to make systemic alternatives appear childish, dangerous, or morally suspect. Anti-communism here does not scream. It smiles. It reassures. It invites discussion—on the condition that nothing fundamental ever change.
And this is where the ground is prepared for the next escalation. Once anti-communism has become culture—once it has trained a population to accept empire as normal and capitalism as inevitable—it is ready to travel. What begins as domestic common sense will soon present itself to the world as moral leadership. And virtue, as Parenti is about to show, becomes one of empire’s most efficient weapons.
IV. Virtue Goes Abroad Wearing a Uniform
Once anti-communism has been absorbed into everyday common sense—once it no longer needs to shout or threaten—its next mutation is expansion. What Parenti shows in this movement is how a domesticated ideology refashions itself as a global mission. The same assumptions that disciplined dissent at home now reorganize perception abroad. U.S. power does not travel as power. It travels as virtue. And virtue, when armed, becomes one of the most efficient technologies of domination ever invented.
Parenti traces how American foreign policy is narrated not in the language of interests, resources, or class power, but in the language of moral burden. The United States is never described as pursuing advantage; it is described as being “drawn in,” “forced to respond,” or “called upon” by history itself. Intervention becomes obligation. Aggression becomes responsibility. And anti-communism supplies the ethical solvent that dissolves every inconvenient motive—oil, markets, strategic corridors—into a single purified justification: stopping evil.
This is where Parenti’s argument takes on its full weight. Anti-communism is no longer just an ideology that distorts reality; it is a belief system that actively reorganizes it. Wars are not debated as political choices but framed as moral tests. To question them is not to disagree, but to fail. The critic is no longer wrong—he is suspect. He lacks resolve. He does not understand the stakes. In this way, anti-communism polices not only conclusions but character.
Parenti is careful to insist that this crusading posture is not merely cynical theater staged by elites for public consumption. It works precisely because it is internalized by those who wield power. Policymakers, journalists, and intellectuals alike come to experience U.S. actions as inherently defensive, even when they are globally disruptive. The ideology does not sit outside decision-making; it structures what decision-makers can even recognize as an option. Alternatives vanish before they are considered.
The metaphor of the “holy crusade” is not rhetorical excess. Like any crusade, anti-communism divides the world into sacred and profane zones. Violence committed within the sacred camp is regrettable but necessary. Violence committed outside it is proof of barbarism. Evidence that contradicts the doctrine does not refute it; it confirms the enemy’s depravity. The system becomes immune to falsification. Every outcome, including catastrophe, is reabsorbed as further justification.
What deepens the analysis here is Parenti’s refusal to isolate foreign policy from domestic ideology. The same moral grammar that excused repression at home now rationalizes devastation abroad. The same habits of thought that made socialism unspeakable domestically make sovereignty intolerable internationally. Anti-communism thus reveals itself not as a response to specific threats, but as a standing permission structure for empire—a license to act without ever naming oneself as an aggressor.
By the end of this section, anti-communism has completed another transformation. It has moved from atmosphere, to moral machinery, to cultural reflex—and now to global vocation. The United States does not merely oppose communism; it claims the right to reorder the world in its absence. And once virtue is given a passport and a gun, the question is no longer whether violence will follow, but how much of it can be made to look like salvation.
This prepares the ground for the next descent. Because when an ideology declares itself sacred, it also begins to predict its own enemies—and to punish them in advance. Anti-communism, Parenti is about to show, does not just respond to threats. It manufactures them, fulfills them, and then points to the wreckage as proof that it was right all along.
V. When Fear Writes the Future
At this stage of Parenti’s argument, anti-communism has fully armored itself with moral certainty. What follows is its most insidious trick: it begins to operate as prophecy. No longer content to interpret the world, anti-communist ideology starts to pre-write it. Threat is no longer something discovered through evidence; it is something anticipated, assumed, and then actively produced. The future is feared in advance—and that fear is used to justify violence in the present.
Parenti shows how anti-communism becomes a self-fulfilling doctrine. Socialist states are encircled, sanctioned, sabotaged, and militarized under the claim that they are inherently aggressive. When those states respond by fortifying their defenses, centralizing authority, or restricting internal dissent, these reactions are seized upon as confirmation of the original accusation. Cause disappears. Effect becomes essence. The ideology is never wrong because it ensures that reality will eventually conform to its expectations.
This predictive violence is not abstract. It takes concrete form in military bases, covert operations, economic strangulation, and the permanent assumption of hostility. Parenti is explicit: what is presented as “containment” is often provocation by another name. Anti-communism manufactures the very behavior it claims to fear, then points to that behavior as proof that preemption was necessary all along. The loop closes. Responsibility evaporates.
At this point, race enters the picture not as an accessory, but as a structural accelerant. In the construction of the “Yellow Demon,” Parenti exposes how Cold War fear draws from older reservoirs of white supremacist mythology. Asian communism is portrayed not merely as ideological deviation but as civilizational menace—collectivist, inscrutable, swarming, and expansionist by nature. The language shifts subtly but decisively: socialism becomes something that spreads like a disease, not something people choose in response to material conditions.
This racialization does essential ideological work. It supplies the emotional charge that abstraction alone cannot sustain. It transforms geopolitical conflict into cultural dread. The enemy is no longer simply wrong; it is alien. And once the enemy is alien, empathy becomes treason and restraint becomes weakness. Anti-communism thus fuses seamlessly with older colonial logics, reactivating them for a new era under the banner of ideological struggle.
What Parenti is doing here is tightening the vise. Anti-communism now appears not only as moral cover for empire, but as a machine that programs the future it claims to predict. It turns defense into destiny and fear into evidence. Every escalation becomes rational because it was always assumed. Every atrocity becomes unfortunate but unavoidable because the enemy was imagined as incapable of any other response.
By the end of this section, the reader is forced to confront a chilling conclusion: anti-communism does not misjudge the world accidentally. It reorganizes the world in advance so that its darkest expectations will be met. And when those expectations arrive—when resistance hardens, when states militarize, when conflict explodes—the ideology stands back, points, and says, “We warned you.” What it never admits is that it wrote the script.
The stage is now set for the proof. Ideology that predicts violence eventually demands demonstration. And in Vietnam, Parenti will show, anti-communism found the war it had been preparing to justify all along.
VI. The War That Proved the Lie
By the time Parenti turns to Vietnam, the reader should already understand that this war did not erupt from misunderstanding or tragic miscalculation. It arrived on schedule. Vietnam was not a deviation from anti-communist logic; it was its demonstration. This is where ideology, having predicted catastrophe long enough, demands material confirmation. The war becomes proof—not of communist aggression, but of the ideological system that required such proof to sustain itself.
Parenti is unsparing in how he dismantles the official story. Vietnam was never about defending freedom, protecting democracy, or stopping an expansionist threat. It was about denying a people the right to determine their own future outside the orbit of Western capital and colonial inheritance. Yet anti-communism made this denial invisible by reframing Vietnamese resistance as pathology. The Vietnamese were not fighting to expel foreign domination; they were “fanatics,” “insurgents,” “proxies.” Their history was erased so that their resistance could appear unprovoked.
What makes Vietnam decisive in Parenti’s analysis is not simply the scale of destruction, but the ease with which it was morally processed. Millions killed, entire landscapes poisoned, villages erased—yet the dominant narrative never arrived at the obvious conclusion that the ideology guiding the war might be criminal. Failure was absorbed as tragedy, not indictment. Defeat was blamed on tactical errors, media weakness, or insufficient resolve, never on the premises themselves. Anti-communism, once again, proved immune to falsification.
Parenti shows how even the language of dissent was disciplined. The war could be criticized for being “unwinnable” or “poorly managed,” but rarely for being imperialist in origin. Protest was tolerated only insofar as it did not name the system that produced the war. In this way, anti-communism structured not just the prosecution of violence, but the boundaries of opposition to it. The ideology did not collapse under the weight of its own brutality; it adapted.
This is the moment where Parenti’s method becomes unmistakably materialist. He insists that Vietnam was not the product of bad ideas floating freely, but of ideas embedded in institutions—think tanks, media, universities, military doctrine—working in concert with class interests. Anti-communism had already done its preparatory work long before the first troops were deployed. It trained the public to accept mass death as unfortunate necessity and trained policymakers to experience escalation as responsibility.
Vietnam, then, is not simply a case study. It is a verdict. It reveals what happens when an ideology that erases history, demonizes resistance, racializes threat, and sanctifies empire is allowed to govern reality unchecked. The war did not discredit anti-communism because the ideology was never about truth. It was about authorization. And in Vietnam, it authorized one of the greatest crimes of the twentieth century while insisting on its own innocence.
With this section, the analysis reaches a brutal clarity. Anti-communism is no longer a matter of distorted perception or moral inversion alone. It is a mechanism that converts fear into policy and policy into mass death. The question that now presses forward is unavoidable: if this is what anti-communism produces when tested at scale, what exactly is it defending? And whose interests does it ultimately serve?
The answer, Parenti will argue next, lies not in abstract ideals but in the cold continuity of class power—where revolution is treated as crime, and repression is renamed order.
VII. When Liberation Becomes a Crime
After Vietnam, Parenti refuses to let the reader retreat into the comforting fiction that the violence was exceptional. Instead, he tightens the argument by returning to first principles: what is a revolution, and why does anti-communism treat it as inherently illegitimate? Here the ideological trick becomes unmistakable. Revolution—when carried out by the oppressed against entrenched power—is framed not as a political response to exploitation, but as a moral violation. Meanwhile, counterrevolution, no matter how brutal, disappears into the neutral language of “stability,” “order,” and “security.”
Parenti exposes how this inversion protects the existing distribution of power. If revolution is always criminal, then the conditions that produce it never have to be examined. Land theft, labor super-exploitation, racial domination, foreign occupation—these become background noise, not causes. Anti-communism thus operates as a permanent injunction against historical explanation. It forbids asking why people rebel, permitting only condemnation of the rebellion itself.
This is where Parenti reconnects ideology directly to political economy. Revolutions are dangerous not because they are violent—states are violent by design—but because they threaten ownership. They challenge who controls land, factories, resources, and labor. Anti-communism supplies the moral vocabulary that allows these material threats to be reclassified as irrational outbursts or foreign subversion. Once relabeled, they can be crushed without remorse.
Counterrevolution, by contrast, is rendered invisible precisely because it aligns with profit and prestige. When socialist governments are overthrown, when unions are smashed, when peasant movements are drowned in blood, these acts are rarely described as revolutionary violence. They are described as restoration. Order returning. Markets reopening. Confidence restored. Parenti shows how this language performs ideological labor: it naturalizes domination and makes resistance appear as the original sin.
What deepens the analysis here is Parenti’s insistence that anti-communism does not merely justify repression after the fact; it anticipates it. By defining any radical redistribution of power as inherently illegitimate, the ideology grants advance approval to whatever measures are necessary to prevent it. Assassinations, coups, embargoes, terror—these become defensive responses to a crime that has not yet been committed but is assumed in advance.
This is the point where the reader can no longer mistake anti-communism for a difference of opinion. It is revealed as a standing doctrine of class war—one that criminalizes liberation while sanctifying the violence required to maintain existing hierarchies. The oppressed are denied not only power, but moral standing. Their struggle is not debated; it is disqualified.
By the end of this section, the logic of anti-communism stands exposed in its most naked form. It is not about preventing tyranny. It is about preventing transformation. It does not fear dictatorship in the abstract; it fears the loss of control over wealth, labor, and political destiny. And with that recognition, Parenti prepares the final movement of the book—where anti-communism’s victory is revealed not as triumph, but as tragedy.
VIII. The Victory That Hollowed Everything Out
By the time Parenti reaches the end of this excavation, anti-communism no longer needs to be exposed as deception. It stands revealed as something far more corrosive: a victory that devoured the very capacities a society needs to call itself free. Here Parenti names the final form of the ideology—moral imperialism—and shows how domination, once fully normalized, begins to experience itself as benevolence. Power no longer argues for itself. It congratulates itself.
Moral imperialism is not simply hypocrisy dressed in humanitarian language. It is a worldview in which violence sincerely believes it is virtuous. U.S. interventions are not justified as expedient or profitable, but as reluctant acts of conscience. The empire does not conquer; it “helps.” It does not dominate; it “stabilizes.” And because the language is moral rather than material, the consequences disappear behind intention. The dead become unfortunate. The destroyed societies become regrettable. The system itself remains untouchable.
Parenti insists that this is anti-communism’s greatest success. Not the defeat of any particular socialist project, but the reorganization of moral reasoning itself. A population trained to see domination as rescue loses the ability to recognize violence when it is committed in its name. Critical thought is replaced with ethical reflex. People no longer ask whether an action is just; they ask whether it aligns with the approved moral script. Empire becomes an attitude before it is a policy.
This is why Parenti calls the success tragic. Anti-communism wins by narrowing the moral imagination. It teaches people to fear alternatives more than injustice, to distrust movements more than institutions, to condemn resistance more harshly than repression. In doing so, it empties political language of substance. Words like “democracy,” “freedom,” and “human rights” remain in circulation, but they are severed from material reality. They float, untethered, above a world organized by force.
What has been lost is not simply sympathy for socialism. What has been lost is the capacity to think historically, to analyze power concretely, to connect suffering to its causes. A society saturated in anti-communism learns to see each catastrophe as isolated, each war as unique, each atrocity as an exception. Pattern recognition becomes dangerous. Structural explanation becomes suspect. Memory itself is disciplined.
In this sense, anti-communism does not merely defend empire abroad; it disfigures democracy at home. It produces citizens fluent in moral rhetoric but illiterate in political economy. It rewards outrage while punishing analysis. It tolerates dissent so long as it never coalesces into challenge. The ideology triumphs not by silencing everyone, but by teaching them how to speak without saying anything that matters.
Parenti leaves us here deliberately uneasy. There is no false resolution, no appeal to balance, no invitation to reconcile with the system that required such devastation to sustain itself. The book closes by making clear that anti-communism’s greatest achievement is also its indictment: it has succeeded so thoroughly that it now feels natural. And anything that feels natural is hardest to overthrow.
To read The Anti-Communist Impulse now—especially in the wake of Parenti’s death—is to recognize the scale of what he refused. He refused to sanitize power. He refused to trade clarity for acceptance. He refused the comforts of Western Marxism’s abstraction in favor of analysis sharpened for struggle. The tragedy he names is not inevitable. It is produced. And what is produced, he reminds us, can be dismantled—but only if we are willing to see it clearly, without the moral anesthesia empire depends on.
Conclusion. Michael Parenti and the Discipline of Refusal
What The Anti-Communist Impulse ultimately leaves us with is not a critique in the academic sense, but a line of demarcation. Parenti does not invite the reader into a seminar. He drags them into a confrontation—with evidence, with history, with the consequences of ideas that kill. The book closes where it began, but on a higher plane: anti-communism is not an error to be corrected through better discourse, but a governing ideology of empire that must be dismantled if any genuine emancipation is to be possible.
This is why Parenti mattered, and why his passing in January 2026 should not be marked with polite retrospectives or depoliticized praise. He was not a “public intellectual” in the liberal sense. He was a Marxist-Leninist who understood that ideas are instruments, not ornaments. Where Western Marxism retreated into critique without consequence, Parenti insisted on analysis that named names, traced interests, and followed power to its material endpoints. He refused the safety of abstraction. He refused the comfort of moral equivalence. And most importantly, he refused to treat empire as a misunderstanding rather than a system.
In this early work, we already see the full architecture of his method. History is not a backdrop; it is a weapon against mystification. Morality is not an attitude; it is a terrain of struggle. Violence is not an accident; it is organized, justified, and reproduced through ideology. Anti-communism, Parenti shows, is the hinge that allows capitalism to present itself as freedom while waging permanent war against alternatives. It criminalizes liberation, sanctifies repression, and trains entire populations to confuse domination with virtue.
What makes this book endure is that Parenti never allows the reader to hide behind innocence. If anti-communism functions as atmosphere, culture, morality, and policy, then opposing it requires more than disagreement. It requires discipline. It requires a willingness to break with “reasonable” limits imposed by institutions that profit from silence. It requires the courage to say plainly that socialism has been slandered not because it failed to improve lives, but because it threatened ownership, hierarchy, and imperial control.
Parenti’s legacy is not that he provided all the answers. It is that he modeled a way of thinking that refused capitulation. He showed that Marxism is not an identity or a rhetorical posture, but a method forged in struggle and accountable to reality. Against the corrosive currents of U.S. Western Marxism—its obsession with language over power, critique over confrontation, careers over consequences—Parenti stood firm. He wrote for workers, for organizers, for those whose lives were shaped by decisions made far from seminar rooms.
To read The Anti-Communist Impulse today is to recognize how much of the present was already diagnosed over half a century ago. The demonization of China, the sanctification of sanctions, the humanitarian packaging of siege and starvation, the liberal policing of acceptable dissent—all of it moves along the grooves Parenti mapped with unsparing clarity. His work reminds us that empire does not survive by force alone. It survives by training people to love the stories that justify their own domination.
Parenti is gone, but the discipline he practiced remains necessary. Anti-communism still functions as the moral glue of imperial order. Capital still demands innocence for its crimes. And the task he set before us—to strip ideology down to its material function and side openly with the oppressed—has not expired. This book was never meant to be admired. It was meant to be used. And in that sense, it remains what it always was: a weapon, sharpened by history, waiting to be picked up again.
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