Michael Parenti
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Michael Parenti (born 1933) is an American Marxist political scientist, historian, and media critic. Parenti received his Ph.D. in political science from Yale University and has taught at several universities, colleges, and other institutions. He is the author of nineteen books and many more articles. His works have been translated into at least seventeen languages. Parenti lectures frequently throughout the nation and abroad. His book, The Assassination of Julius Caesar, was selected as Book of the Year (2004) by Online Review of Books.
Political views
Parenti is known for his steadfast leftist and radical political convictions, which have seen him maintain a sympathetic view of the orthodox communist movement even after the fall of the Soviet Union saw the disintegration of much of it.In the era of Mikhail Gorbachev, Parenti was highly critical of the USSR's reformist moves of "perestroika" and "glasnost", arguing that these had the effect of introducing capitalism into the country. He was critical of critical revisionist histories of Joseph Stalin and has maintained that accounts of his repression are regularly exaggerrated both in Russia and in the West. Parenti argued this most explicitly in Blackshirts and Reds, where he cites J. Arch Getty to put the number of executions in the Great Terror at 799,455. [#endnote_citation] Getty's numbers concern recorded executions during the period of 1921 and 1953 and are generally considered to be among the lower estimates of Stalinist terror. He does not offer his own estimates for deaths under Stalin, though he is quick to emphasize the importance of those charged with non-political crimes in the gulags. For Parenti, repression is compensated by what he claims were the country's "dramatic gains in literacy, industrial wages, health care, and women's rights" under Stalin's leadership. He characterizes Leon Trotsky, Stalin's primary Bolshevik opponent, as being "among the more authoritarian Bolshevik leaders".
Parenti has also defended Serbia and in particular its former president Slobodan Milošević against accusations of intolerance, aggression, and war crimes during the Yugoslav wars, as he views these as exaggerations and propaganda on the part of Western media. According to Parenti, these wars were instead caused by a deliberate US and Western policy aiming at dismembering Yugoslavia in order to impose liberal capitalism there. He is a prominent member of the International Committee to Defend Slobodon Milosevic and heads its US chapter. In this capacity he has called for Slobodan's release and defended both Milosevic and Serbs against allegations of atrocities:
- The media-hyped story of how the Serbs allegedly killed 7,000 Muslims in Srebrenica is uncritically accepted by Sell, even though the most thorough investigations have uncovered not more than 2,000 bodies of undetermined nationality. The earlier massacres carried out by Muslims, their razing of some fifty Serbian villages around Srebrenica, as reported by two British correspondents and others, are ignored. The complete failure of Western forensic teams to locate the 250,000 or 100,000 or 50,000 or 10,000 bodies (the numbers kept changing) of Albanians supposedly murdered by the Serbs in Kosovo also goes unnoticed. [link]
Notes
#↑ Specifically, Parenti cites "Victims of the Soviet Penal System in the Pre-War Years: A First Approach on the Basis of Archival Evidence" by J. Arch Getty, Gabor Rittersporn and Victor Zemskov, American Historical Review, 98 (October 1993), pp. 1017-1049Books by Michael Parenti
- The Anti-Communist Impulse, Random House, 1970.
- Trends and Tragedies in American Foreign Policy, Little, Brown,1971.
- Ethnic and Political Attitudes, Arno, 1975.
- Democracy for the Few, First Edition circa 1976, Seventh Edition 2001.
- Power and the Powerless, St. Martin's Press, 1978.
- Inventing Reality: the Politics of News Media. First edition 1986, Second Edition 1993.
- The Sword and the Dollar: Imperialism, Revolution and the Arms Race, St. Martin's, 1989.
- Make-Believe Media: the Politics of Entertainment, St. Martin's Press, 1992.
- Land of Idols: Political Mythology in America, St. Martin's, 1993.
- Against Empire, City Lights, 1995.
- Dirty Truths, City Lights Books, 1996. Includes some autobiographical essays.
- Blackshirts & Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism, City Lights Books, San Francisco, 1997.
- America Besieged, City Lights, 1998.
- History as Mystery, City Lights, 1999.
- The Terrorism Trap: September 11 and Beyond, City Lights, 2002.
- , The New Press, 2003.
- To Kill a Nation: The Attack on Yugoslavia, Verso, 2000.
- Superpatriotism, City Lights, 2004.
- The Culture Struggle, Seven Stories Press, 2006.
Selected quotes
- "The enormous gap between what US leaders do in the world and what Americans think their leaders are doing is one of the great propaganda accomplishments of the dominant political mythology."
- "A nation as such does not give aid to another nation. More precisely, the common citizens of our country, through their taxes, give to the privileged elites of another country. As someone once said: foreign aid is when the poor people of a rich country give money to the rich people of a poor country."
- "The US government has given over $200 billion dollars in military aid to some eighty nations since World War II. US weapons sales abroad have grown to about $10 billion a year and compose about 70 percent of all arms sold on the international marketplace. Two million foreign troops and hundreds of thousands of foreign police and paramilitary have been trained, equipped, and financed by the United States. Their purpose has not been to defend their countries from outside invasion but to protect foreign investors and the ruling elites of the recipient nations from their own potentially rebellious populations."
- "A liberal is never happier than when he can think that the person screwing him over politically is stupid."
- "Many Americans recognize that politicians lie, that they are capable of saying one thing then doing another, that they loudly proclaim a dedication to the people while quietly serving powerful interests. But when it comes to U.S. foreign policy, many of us retreat from that judgment. Suddenly we find it hard to believe that U.S. leaders would lie to us about their intentions in the world, and that they pursue neoimperialist policies having little to do with democracy."
- "Democracy is a wonderful invention by the people of history to defend themselves from the abuses of wealth. That's how it started out in ancient Greece and Rome and that's what it still is today."
External links
- [Michael Parenti Political Archive]
- [Talks by Michael Parenti] - MP3 format.
- ["Whittling Away at the Beast"] by Gilbert Wesley Purdy. A review of Superpatriotism by Michael Parenti.
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