why does the left associate themselves with the likes of Parenti?

[wyldwolf]

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.

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Parenti cites claims by US General Charles Boyd, British General Michael Rose, French General Philippe Morillon, EC peace mediator Lord David Owen, and other Western military and political leaders to prove that it was really the Muslims, not the Serbs, who were bombing and besieging Sarajevo for three and a half years; that the Muslims were pretending to be besieged; and that massacres of Muslim civilians in Sarajevo were carried out by the Muslims against themselves.

http://www.glypx.com/BalkanWitness/hoare.htm

[w4rma]

1. Who? (nt)

[wyldwolf]

2. Parenti is/was a big hero to many here

... especially during the primaries.

[gottaB]

3. Don't hold your breath

Even though the Bosnian Serb Republic has formally apologized for the Srebenica massacre, admissions of error from the likes of Parenti have not been forthcoming.

Speaking as one who in the past gave much credence to views from the radical left, and particularly revolutionary socialists and communists, perhaps I can share a perspective that will help you understand.

Basically the extremists are filling a vacuum which has political, intellectual and cultural aspects. Politically the left in the United States has had few legitimate political outlets in recent decades. The Democratic Party on a national level represents the left insofar as it opposes the Republican Party, but many leftists don't feel that their stakes in the Democratic Party are very high. They feel marginalized, and that feeling can quickly turn to feelings of alienation and disaffection which are exploited by extremists. Exploitation is of course a twoway street. Leftists can and do exploit the extremist position in order to express their dissatisfaction with Democratic leadership. This tension I think will be an element of US politics for quite some time. The best the Democrats can hope for to is to manage it, and the way to do that is by keeping in touch with people. It seems to me that in the last decade we heard a lot about the calculus of who the Democrats could afford to alienate, while the truth is that the Democrats cannot afford to alienate anybody, particularly given that the Republicans have been poised to ruthlessly exploit any weakness in the Democratic Party.

On the intellectual front, the free press is in shambles. We have to face the reality that the credibility of leading publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post has been damaged. The publication of lies and propaganda has turned away many readers on the left, and spawned a rash of conspiracy theories about psyop infiltration and the like which, to be honest, don't seem entirely unreasonable to me. Personally, I believe I'm capable of reading around the propoganda, discerning fact from fiction, and making proper allowances for bias. But I can see why others would lump it all together, or wouldn't want to bother to develop their own filters for such flawed sources.

One set of biases in the media can be defined as social, and that has a cultural aspect as well. I don't think it's unfair to say that the Times for instance is pro-establishment, or that it doesn't give much expression to the political interests of the bottom quintiles. It tends towards the UHB (urban haute bourgeoisie), as it was called in Stillman's film Metropolitan. This class bias leads them to be less critical of government than they should be, given the responsibilities of the free press in a democratic society. It also appears as a kind of cultural elitism, which is attacked from the left and the right, and that sense of class bias undercuts the journalistic claim to objectivity.

Looking at the media culture as a whole, including television news and the enterntainment industry, I don't see evidence of the left being well represented. Michael Moore has emerged as "the" celebrity icon of the populist left precisely because of the dearth of leftist expression. Given the hugeness of the US enternainment industry, why aren't there hundreds of celebrity leftists producing unapologetically leftist works that are widely distributed via mainstream networks, and critiqued and discussed as expressions of popular culture? Comparing the US film industry to recent trends in European film, and considering the politics of the neorealists, one could almost be forgiven for assuming that the US has no political left, because even the desperately poor can realize all their dreams in America and they know it. Absurdity or at best condescension are the hallmarks of Hollywood's treatment of the lower classes.

In brief. People turn to extremists like Pareti because they feel alienated. Their feelings of alienation are grounded in political and social realities. The drift towards extremism can be countered by correctively addressing the forces of alienation in society.