Michael Parenti

[ButterflyBlood]

I've seen posts while browsing the archives that claim Parenti has defended Pol Pot, Stalin and Mao in the past.

Can anyone give links to any such articles?

[Ellen Forradalom]

1. I heard him speak some years back

and yes, he's a Stalin apologist. I was totally unimpressed.

[nothingshocksmeanymore]

2. Parenti has written some good stuff but did equivocate a bit on

Pol Pot..only problem is I am not sure the articles will be online. If this is around tomorrow, I'll check my bookmarks, I am getting ready to leave.

I regard the writings of Jim Lobe to be a bit more evenly parsed on Foreign Policy.

[name not needed]

3. Who the hell is Michael Parenti?

[wyldwolf]

4. Some people are real sensitive here about Parenti...

..and any thread is an almost guarantee of a flame war, but what the hell! I think he is a loon.

In Parenti's most recent work, "To Kill a Nation", he praises Milosevic.

Parenti has a reputation for playing fast and loose with the facts. Here is one example:

David Walls, professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and author of The Activist's Almanac: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to the Leading Advocacy Organizations in America took exception with Parenti's views on Kosovo.

I was surprised by my reaction to its treatment of Kosovo. Project Censored had given this single topic an unprecedented five story awards plus a commentary by Michael Parenti... who has served on Project Censored's national panel of judges for several years. Even more troubling, for two years in a row Project Censored had whitewashed human rights atrocities committed by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia: Censored 1999 denies gruesome crimes at the Omarska camp in Bosnia in 1992 and Censored 2000 denies a massacre of civilians at Racak in Kosovo in 1999.

Speaking of Parenti and his participation in Project Censored, Walls also said, Reliance on dubious sources and a lack of rigorous research and fact-checking have tarnished the project's reputation as a media watchdog. On the subject of the former Yugoslavia, Project Censored, I sadly concluded, had departed the terrain of the democratic Left for a netherworld of conspiracy theorists, Marxist-Leninist sects, and apologists for authoritarian regimes.

The Marxist-Humanist News & Letters of June 2001 details how protesters showed up outside the office of San Francisco radio station KPFA to protest Parenti's appearance on that station's "Flashpoints" show. The protestors distributed a flyer which read, in part:

Divorcing Marxism from freedom all too easily leads to lending support to tyrants who claim the label "socialist." In a letter to the SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN (3/21/01), Michael Parenti claims a nostalgia for "the guaranteed income, free education, medical care and affordable housing" of the Milosevic era, and dismisses allegations of ethnic cleansing, rape camps and mass atrocities. He contends that only 70 bodies have been recovered from the supposed massacre of Srebrenica. This last contention openly conflicts with the report by the UN Commission on Human Rights on Srebrenica, issued 11/15/99, which provided pages and pages of evidence on the massacre, including an account by one Croat member of the Bosnian Serb Army, Drazen Erdemovic, whose unit by itself executed over 1,000 Muslim men and boys on the Pilica state farm.

Parenti consistently downplays the extent of Joseph Stalin's crimes. He recently claimed on KPFA that the number in the Gulags may have been as low as in the thousands. And he dismisses counts of victims in the millions, presented by the likes of Russian Marxist Roy Medvedev, as exaggerations and propaganda.

[RichM]

7. Let's examine the type of "evidence" in this laughable unethical smear,

written by someone who knows virtually nothing about Parenti's writing.

The post consists of 2 "pieces of evidence." There's a sharply critical remark from 1 (one) person, a professor named David Walls, at Sonoma State. And there's mention of some protestors on 1 (one) occasion outside KPFA.

Now, consider any public person that has ever expressed controversial views of any type. The person could be Eugene Debs, Margaret Sanger, Martin Luther King, Jane Fonda, Noam Chomsky, even Bill Clinton, etc -- do you suppose it would be hard to dig up a little dirt on ANY of these people? Michael Parenti is a Marxist writer. All Marxists are regarded basically as lunatics by "mainstream" US society. They are ALL controversial, and to dig up 2 little bits of negative commentary on one of them means exactly nothing.

As for KPFA and Project Censored in general - they LOVE Michael Parenti. He's invited to speak on KPFA all the time, and his lectures are shown on Free Speech TV in Berkeley several nights every week. Project Censored has annual awards, and Parenti has been the keynote speaker for the awards ceremony, for each of the last 2 years. (I was present at the one in Sept. '02.) I never even heard of Prof. Walls, but apparently, he doesn't like Parenti. So what? It's one person's opinion.

Parenti has also been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize this year for his latest book, and he is VOLUNTEERING to work for Dennis Kucinich. He appeared at several Dennis fundraisers in the last few weeks, including a panel discussion, where the 4 panelists were Parenti, Kucinich, Medea Benjamin, and Matt Gonzales. Parenti has even come into the Kucinich headquarters to volunteer to handwrite & address letters to Iowa, and do office work.

BTW, it should not be thought that Mr. wyldwolf just "wrote" the above post. No, he has a copy of it somewhere. I remember this, because several months ago, he was copy-and-pasting the EXACT SAME TEXT all over DU. There were days where he posted the same exact text half a dozen or more times, in different threads, on the same day. It was the same stupid thing, word for word - the bit about the KPFA protestors and David Wall. He has some kind of obsession about it. (And WHY is this, you might ask? It's because Parenti is a leftist, and leftists believe that the Kosovo War was based on lies, much like the Iraq War. However, this conclusion is very disagreeable to Mr. wyldwolf, because it means Gen. Clark, whom he supported quite volubly at the time, had participated in something filthy, rather than in something glorious. So, he went & dug up some dirt on Parenti - whom he's obviously never read.)

[wyldwolf]

8. You must mean in this thread where the Parenti/Milosevic/Stalin apologists

were shot down. Again.

No sense rehashing it here. We'll let everyone read the exchange:

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=104&topic_id=586040

Posts #49 and 50 were the best!

And I might add, there is nothing wrong with reposting info from a previous thread when someone asks for it.

As if the fact that it has been posted before somehow detracts from the overall truthfulness of it...

[RichM]

10. On an Internet chat board, what gets "shot down" depends merely on

who participates in the discussion. The exchange you cite reflects the views of several moderate Democrats, all friendly to Clark, & none of whom is even slightly familiar with Parenti's work. If I was outnumbered that day, it proves exactly nothing -- no more than it would prove if you went to Free Republic, and got "shot down" arguing "Dems vs Repubs" with a bunch of rightwing nutcases.

You don't really have the ethical right to smear an author that you know so little about. However, if you keep to the safe turf of a Democratic Party chatboard, you'll always be safely in the majority against a leftist viewpoint. If you were on a Marxist chatboard, we'd eat you for lunch.

[wyldwolf]

11. Parenti: a Milosevic/Stalin apologist- what does that make his defenders?

It seems Parenti has a reputation for playing fast and loose with the facts. Here is one example:

David Walls, professor of sociology at Sonoma State University and author of The Activist's Almanac: The Concerned Citizen's Guide to the Leading Advocacy Organizations in America took exception with Parenti's views on Kosovo.

I was surprised by my reaction to its treatment of Kosovo. Project Censored had given this single topic an unprecedented five story awards plus a commentary by Michael Parenti... who has served on Project Censored's national panel of judges for several years. Even more troubling, for two years in a row Project Censored had whitewashed human rights atrocities committed by Serbs in the former Yugoslavia: Censored 1999 denies gruesome crimes at the Omarska camp in Bosnia in 1992 and Censored 2000 denies a massacre of civilians at Racak in Kosovo in 1999.

Speaking of Parenti and his participation in Project Censored, Walls also said, Reliance on dubious sources and a lack of rigorous research and fact-checking have tarnished the project's reputation as a media watchdog. On the subject of the former Yugoslavia, Project Censored, I sadly concluded, had departed the terrain of the democratic Left for a netherworld of conspiracy theorists, Marxist-Leninist sects, and apologists for authoritarian regimes.

The Marxist-Humanist News & Letters of June 2001 details how protesters showed up outside the office of San Francisco radio station KPFA to protest Parenti's appearance on that station's "Flashpoints" show. The protestors distributed a flyer which read, in part:

Divorcing Marxism from freedom all too easily leads to lending support to tyrants who claim the label "socialist." In a letter to the SAN FRANCISCO BAY GUARDIAN (3/21/01), Michael Parenti claims a nostalgia for "the guaranteed income, free education, medical care and affordable housing" of the Milosevic era, and dismisses allegations of ethnic cleansing, rape camps and mass atrocities. He contends that only 70 bodies have been recovered from the supposed massacre of Srebrenica. This last contention openly conflicts with the report by the UN Commission on Human Rights on Srebrenica, issued 11/15/99, which provided pages and pages of evidence on the massacre, including an account by one Croat member of the Bosnian Serb Army, Drazen Erdemovic, whose unit by itself executed over 1,000 Muslim men and boys on the Pilica state farm.

Parenti consistently downplays the extent of Joseph Stalin's crimes. He recently claimed on KPFA that the number in the Gulags may have been as low as in the thousands. And he dismisses counts of victims in the millions, presented by the likes of Russian Marxist Roy Medvedev, as exaggerations and propaganda.

How conspiracy minded is Parenti? He once said, "The owners and managers of the press determine which person, which facts, which version of the facts, and which ideas shall reach the public.” quoted in Democracy for the Few, by Michael Parenti.

Parenti's most recent work, "To Kill a Nation", praises Milosevic!

[Terwilliger]

5. this is a link to Parenti's view on Milosevic

http://www.iacenter.org/milos_parenti1.htm

[Mike Niendorff]

6. From what I've seen, the far right *loves* this guy.

At least in the sense that "if you're not onboard with the Right Wing, we'd love to 'associate' you with this guy".

I can speak from experience on this.

Back when I worked with the Greens (2000-2001), we had at least two 'infiltrators' in our local (not counting the guy at the state convention who quietly snapped my picture, then bummed a ride home from me and tried to get me to 'privately' advocate violence during the trip ... :eyes:). Anyway, to get back to our 'local' infiltrators : they were very gung-ho about this Michael Parenti guy, and pushed very hard to get as many members of our local as possible to attend one of his lectures out at the UW. I'd never heard of him, but went along on their recommendation (I hadn't yet learned the real story on these guys' participation). When we got there, the room was about half full (figure about 150-200 people), with at least 50-60% of them being from local Green Party groups (complete with banner, in one case). Note that this was *not* a highly-advertised event, at least as far as I could tell. It was pretty clear by that time that our local wasn't the only one whose members were being solicited-from-within to attend this event. And I'd be *very* surprised if the people doing the event-recruitment within these other locals were any different from those doing it in ours (ie: infiltrators/disruptors from the Republican and Libertarian parties).

There's more to the story, but you get the gist. It turns out that Parenti is, by most standards, an apologist for Stalinism (specifically: he devotes *lots* of time and print to minimizing the deaths attributed to Stalin -- it's clearly much more than an historical question for him). As to why so many RWers want to 'associate' progressives with that guy, well, I think that pretty much speaks for itself : they would much rather attack us with carefully-engineered lies about being 'communist sympathizers', rather than deal with our *actual* positions on their own merits. That, and the fact that they've been smearing people this way for generations, meaning that they've gotten very, very efficient at it.


MDN

[RichM]

9. I know more about Parenti than most people here, so let me take a .

swing at your question. Suppose someone said to you, "You know, a careful review of the most objective evidence indicates that Stalin actually didn't kill as many people as generally claimed in the West." Would you automatically regard this as "defending" Stalin; as being a "Stalin apologist?"

If you answer "yes," then you would regard Parenti as a Stalin apologist. Otherwise, you should listen to his argument, because there is a great deal of substance to it. He basically reviews the work of 3 historians who were granted access to KGB archives in 1993, after the fall of the USSR. These authors generally concluded that the number of people who died in the gulags was a hell of lot less than had been previously thought, in the West. Making clear what his assumptions are, Parenti arrives at a figure of about 800,000 total executions in the gulags from 1921-1953. This INCLUDES those who committed nonpolitical crimes (murder, theft, etc).

He also reviews the other numbers that have been bandied about, which range from 5 million (Roy Medvedev) to as high as 100 million. He reviews the flimsy nature of the "evidence" on which these other numbers are based.

The tone of his conclusions is conveyed by this sentence: "In any case, the killings of political opponents were not in the millions of tens of millions -- which is not to say that the actual number was either inconsequential or justifiable." You should be able to hear that this is a fairly moderate statement. He is not trying to tell you that Stalin was a great guy. He is trying to say that our impression of Stalin has greatly exaggerated the numbers of dead, because it was always in the propaganda interest of the US, to make Stalin out to be the devil incarnate. This is very similar to the recent Saddam, or Noriega, or Sandinista, or Milosevic etc experience: all of these guys were plenty unsavory. But the US propaganda system has always encouraged a ridiculous level of demonization. What Parenti is saying, is that it worked the same way with Stalin, too.

[cryofan]

12. Yes, and what can we really believe from the USA govt when it comes to

....what was going on behind the Iron Curtain? That whole era was really a war of fear declared on the American public funded by the wealthy, meant to exterminate socialism in order to protect their fat wallets.

That said, it is apparent to me that authoritarian socialism may not be workable" power corrupts, etc. I would rather try a true democracy, where the govt is simplified and based on public referenda.

[Dirk39]

13. Hi,

Hello from Germany!
what's the title of the book, Parenti wrote about the Soviet-Union under Stalin? Couldn't find it on his webpage.
Thanx,
Dirk

[RichM]

14. Hi Dirk - it's actually just one chapter of the book"Blackshirts and Reds"

The chapter is called "Stalin's Fingers."

[bpilgrim]

15. Michael Parenti is one of the GIANTS on political history.

i am a admirer of his work and perspective on history which is usually that of the people rather than the rulers which tends to get him lumped in with the left but strikes me always as much closer to the truth and as history has repeatedly demonstrated the elite often exploit the masses and will do whatever it takes to smear or destroy the folks who point that out.

Mr. Paenti is one of those type of folk.

His latest...

The Assassination of Julius Caesar

A People's History of Ancient Rome

is an excellant and easy read with a new perspective on ancient romes end of the begining... with very interesting paralels to our own recent history.

nominated for a pulitzer as well.

anyways... you can certainly learn a LOT from him and i take as someone who should not be ignored.

:hi:

peace

[bpilgrim]

16. kick

hate to be a thread killer :evilgrin:

peace