Michael Parenti, Vous Connaissez?

[Taranne]

… Je vous laisse le découvrir par vous-mêmes. Que du bonheur.

http://www.michaelparenti.org/

[melodius]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Parenti

Pourquoi tant d'intérêt pour ce bonhomme ?

[h16]

  melodius a dit :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Parenti

Pourquoi tant d'intérêt pour ce bonhomme ?

Parce qu'il a un nom rigolo qu'on peut détourner, comme par exemple Michael Parencouy.

[Taranne]

  melodius a dit :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Parenti

Pourquoi tant d'intérêt pour ce bonhomme ?

Parce qu'il le vaut bien:

  'Wikipedia a dit :

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. [1] 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 many claim 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. [2]

Another influential essay, particularly among Maoists and supporters of China's invasion of Tibet, is "Friendly Feudalism: The Tibet Myth" which casts Tibet as an extremely corrupt feudal system sustained by slavery which has seen drastic improvements because of the invasion and subsequent policies of the Chinese government. [3]

Bref, c'est le cousin américain d'Annie Lacroix-Riz et de Eric Hobsbawm.

Qu'il soit si peu connu chez nous est une injustice flagrante.

[melodius]

Si tu ouvres un fil pour mieux faire connaître chaque intellectuel marxiste américain tapi dans une quelconque université, il va falloir prévoir de meilleures solutions d'hébergement pour liberaux.org.

Je trouve par ailleurs rigolo qu'il ait écrit un bouquin à la gloire de César. Ca m'étonne qu'il n'ait pas encore viré néocon.

[Taranne]

Je l'ai découvert via son article sur le Dalaï-Lama. Au début, j'ai eu un peu peur, parce que je croyais qu'il s'agissait d'un véritable historien, et puis j'ai vu sa biographie et j'ai compris…

[Harald]

Je ne connaissais pas l'olibrius, mais force est d'admettre qu'il a une tête de vainqueur, ce qui n'est déjà pas si mal.