Michael Parenti
Författare till The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People's History of Ancient Rome
Om författaren
Michael Parenti (Ph.D., Yale University) is an internationally known, award-winning author, scholar, and lecturer who addresses a wide variety of political and cultural subjects. Among his recent books are God and His Demons (2010), Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader (2007), The Culture visa mer Struggle (2006), The Assassination of Julius Caesar (2003), and Democracy for the Few, 9th edition (2010). visa färre
Foto taget av: By Willa Madden - michaelparenti.org, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4276634
Verk av Michael Parenti
CovertAction Quarterly: Torture are U.S. 4 exemplar
Terrorismo La Gran Excusa: lo que los Estados Unidos no quieren saber de ellos mismos (2002) 2 exemplar
Le Mythe des jumeaux totalitaires. Fascisme méthodique et renversement du communisme (French Edition) (2013) 1 exemplar
Video. Liberty Bound: Is the United States Bound for Liberty, or Does it Just have Liberty Bound? 1 exemplar
Ruler of the Planet 1 exemplar
Conscientious Objections 1 exemplar
Associerade verk
You Are Being Lied To: The Disinformation Guide to Media Distortion, Historical Whitewashes, and Cultural Myths (2001) — Bidragsgivare, vissa utgåvor — 691 exemplar
Taggad
Allmänna fakta
- Vedertaget namn
- Parenti, Michael
- Födelsedag
- 1933-09-30
- Kön
- male
- Nationalitet
- USA
- Bostadsorter
- New York, New York, USA
New Haven, Connecticut, USA
Providence, Rhode Island, USA - Utbildning
- City College of New York (BA|Political Science)
Brown University (MA|Political Science)
Yale University (PhD|Political Science) - Yrken
- political scientist
public intellectual - Relationer
- Parenti, Christian (son)
Medlemmar
Recensioner
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Associerade författare
Statistik
- Verk
- 35
- Även av
- 5
- Medlemmar
- 2,246
- Popularitet
- #11,417
- Betyg
- 3.7
- Recensioner
- 22
- ISBN
- 94
- Språk
- 6
- Favoritmärkt
- 15
I’d have to guess that any modern reader would have their hackles raised by the Stalinist apologetics that take up the middle portion of the book. Parenti seems to feel a responsibility not only to shine a light on the commendable social programs of the USSR, but also whitewash human rights abuses by contrasting them with the millions of victims of worldwide capitalism. I can understand his motivation here. After all, if we stacked the sum total of Gulag victims versus the number of Americans that froze to death on the street or died in imperialist wars or because of addiction brought on by hopelessness, parity seems far from unimaginable. That being said, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth to read the lengths Parenti goes to to make his point, a point that he doesn’t even need to make in the first place; his other arguments are salient enough.
The truth is, throughout the book’s final section breaking down a Marxist interpretation of the modern world, it’s almost impossible to find fault with Parenti’s reasoning. Walking through my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, you can’t help but wonder how things got so fucked up in our country (as Bernie Sanders always says, the richest country in the history of the world), and once you start reading Marx, it all becomes so clear. The thrill of reading Das Kapital for me was how clear-eyed and steely it was - no emotional harangues, no guilt-tripping that I had come to associate with leftist politics. It’s just good analysis bound up with a profound respect for human dignity and potential. Now, as we close in on 4 decades of unchallenged global capitalist hegemony, Marx’s predictions and analytical framework seem to me essential for understanding how we’ve gotten into this morasse. Parenti is at his best when he adopts this tone, not feeling the need to resort to what-abouts or litigations of the past, merely observing, reporting, and putting forth an interpretation. One of the key problems of living in a capitalist society (as a American *the* capitalist society) is that you forget things can be any other way. Unlike communist repression, which for all its perniciousness was always out in the open, capitalist societies have learned how to hide the brainwashing in the sweetest, most palatable of packages. Our society is set up to cloak the detritus generated by the system, or worse, train people to ignore or dismiss it. Reading Marx and books like this help you learn to notice the profound immortality of the system that surrounds us and affect our every thought and decision.… (mer)