The most cogent arguments I have seen is that he supported Milosovic and the Serbs, it’s not a great look but as more level headed people have pointed out it’s not like Parenti was in Yugoslavia helping materially or whatever, his bad take doesn’t make him literally responsible for genocide or whatever they insist. Edit: especially when they say things like “Serb Imperialism” is a thing
I’ve seen him get called a genocide denier over this a couple of times but like… you’re allowed to be wrong in an actively unfolding academic debate about historical events in recent memory, especially when the evidence was still being uncovered. Was every single person in the 90s and early 2000s supposed to be on the same page so suddenly after the civil war and intervention, as if the academic consensus came from Heaven and all the Good People agreed with it instantly, and anyone who disagreed is a Bad Person?
And to kill a nation wasn’t explicitly genocide denial, it was mostly explaining how the ethnic warfare was a result of Western meddling and bombing, for the express purpose of breaking up and controlling Yugoslavia.
Poeple calling him like this didn’t even read that book, he never denied the genocide, he pointed out it’s not just all Serbs like western propaganda claimed and that the west and their darling paragons of democracy like Izetbegović or Tudman have been responsible for war in the first place.
I haven’t seen much specifically left wing criticisms, but historians and history interested people have been on him for essentially citing vibes in some of his writing.
I’m too inept at parsing the ancient primary sources to really dig into his (non-)conspiracy theory that Cicero completely fabricated the Catiline conspiracy. The way he portrays it in the book makes it sound like it’s crazy that historians took Cicero at his word, but his version is really quite fringe as far as I can tell. But again, I don’t have the historian skills to figure out if Parenti was torturing the sources or not.
Where I saw the criticism or where he cites vibes?
The answer for the first one is basically every time he gets mentioned, including here.
The answer for the second one is “The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome” That’s the one I remember the most criticism for.
The premise of historians not liking assassination of Julius Caesar is that Parenti spends most of it debunking the traditional claims of Caesar being assassinated for being a tyrant and instead shows he was assassinated for doing populist reforms that pissed off the landlords and ruling class (I think mainly for societal stability not because he was pro worker or anything)
The traditional historical view is almost entirely informed by the landlords and ruling class pov, and since the historians are drenched in liberalism they never really went out of their way to question the ruling class.
It’s been a while ( years) since I went over it though so this might be off a bit
Bourgeois historians criticize the book that proven them to be either at the level of 1st year student or actively engaging in obfuscating history for the benefit of ruling class? No wai!
As I said ive seen the criticism levied here before too. I doubt most of the people criticising him for citing newspaper articles or his dreams or whatever the complaint is are doing so to undermine the left.
It’s just that the main points of that book were never even about Caesar or Rome, those were just illustration to:
Historians are not using dialectical materialism enough.
Academia is knowingly or not serving the ruling class, which is really cold take since even the “Father of History” Herodotus straight up took Athenian money to smear Persia but they still don’t like to have it pointed out.
Well and the reforms did in fact lead to a lot of corruption and liberals entering the halls of power. Xi really did a good job keeping the parts that worked, and reversing the parts that didn’t. He’s still struggling with cleaning up liberal corruption to this day. The good thing was maintaining the dominance of the party through the reforms, so that once an ideologically minded administration got in, they could use that dominance to ensure adherence to the principles of the nation.
Can someone explain the Parenti haters? I would love to read criticisms of him from the left, even if it’s bad.
The most cogent arguments I have seen is that he supported Milosovic and the Serbs, it’s not a great look but as more level headed people have pointed out it’s not like Parenti was in Yugoslavia helping materially or whatever, his bad take doesn’t make him literally responsible for genocide or whatever they insist. Edit: especially when they say things like “Serb Imperialism” is a thing
I’ve seen him get called a genocide denier over this a couple of times but like… you’re allowed to be wrong in an actively unfolding academic debate about historical events in recent memory, especially when the evidence was still being uncovered. Was every single person in the 90s and early 2000s supposed to be on the same page so suddenly after the civil war and intervention, as if the academic consensus came from Heaven and all the Good People agreed with it instantly, and anyone who disagreed is a Bad Person?
And to kill a nation wasn’t explicitly genocide denial, it was mostly explaining how the ethnic warfare was a result of Western meddling and bombing, for the express purpose of breaking up and controlling Yugoslavia.
Given that most westerners take the word of the us media orgs as if the were their churches, “consensus came from heaven” isn’t too far off.
Poeple calling him like this didn’t even read that book, he never denied the genocide, he pointed out it’s not just all Serbs like western propaganda claimed and that the west and their darling paragons of democracy like Izetbegović or Tudman have been responsible for war in the first place.
He was comically optimistic about Gorby, I’m pretty sure
I haven’t seen much specifically left wing criticisms, but historians and history interested people have been on him for essentially citing vibes in some of his writing.
Imagine invalidating vibes based analysis in this day and age
Where specifically?
I’m too inept at parsing the ancient primary sources to really dig into his (non-)conspiracy theory that Cicero completely fabricated the Catiline conspiracy. The way he portrays it in the book makes it sound like it’s crazy that historians took Cicero at his word, but his version is really quite fringe as far as I can tell. But again, I don’t have the historian skills to figure out if Parenti was torturing the sources or not.
Where I saw the criticism or where he cites vibes? The answer for the first one is basically every time he gets mentioned, including here. The answer for the second one is “The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome” That’s the one I remember the most criticism for.
The premise of historians not liking assassination of Julius Caesar is that Parenti spends most of it debunking the traditional claims of Caesar being assassinated for being a tyrant and instead shows he was assassinated for doing populist reforms that pissed off the landlords and ruling class (I think mainly for societal stability not because he was pro worker or anything)
The traditional historical view is almost entirely informed by the landlords and ruling class pov, and since the historians are drenched in liberalism they never really went out of their way to question the ruling class.
It’s been a while ( years) since I went over it though so this might be off a bit
Bourgeois historians criticize the book that proven them to be either at the level of 1st year student or actively engaging in obfuscating history for the benefit of ruling class? No wai!
As I said ive seen the criticism levied here before too. I doubt most of the people criticising him for citing newspaper articles or his dreams or whatever the complaint is are doing so to undermine the left.
It’s just that the main points of that book were never even about Caesar or Rome, those were just illustration to:
The latter, and thanks. I suppose I’m glad that it seems to be mainly the Caesar book and not his writings on more recent history.
He was wrong about China being capitalist, but i’m not even really surprised he did since it was 1998 and he used almost exclusively western sources.
Well and the reforms did in fact lead to a lot of corruption and liberals entering the halls of power. Xi really did a good job keeping the parts that worked, and reversing the parts that didn’t. He’s still struggling with cleaning up liberal corruption to this day. The good thing was maintaining the dominance of the party through the reforms, so that once an ideologically minded administration got in, they could use that dominance to ensure adherence to the principles of the nation.
Can’t blame Parenti for that since the CPC was under the leadership of the Shanghai clique.
Well yea, re-istening to Black Shirts and Reds he made some comment about China, but I did remind myself it was 1998 when he wrote that.
1998 was Jiang Zemin’s rule, yeah Parenti had plenty of reasons for seeing China as capitalist during that time period.