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The Democratic Party is discredited and in disarray, Trump is about to take power, capitalism is eating the planet, and a lot of people are as angry as they are disorientated. Liberal complaint is omnipresent and bullshit is rampant. Is the solution to the Trumpocalypse a kinder, gentler plutocrat with a better haircut? Has it ever been more necessary to insist on some clarity? Will the remains of what is called "the left" in the US ever have a better opportunity to distinguish Liberal complaint from radical analysis?
Questions, questions...
Michael Parenti's words are more timely and urgent than ever.
Videos by Michael Parenti.
From an interview with Parenti in June 2012:
MP: Most U.S. leftists want to open toward those to the right of them and eschew those to their left. Their prime passion seems to be making war against communism or what they call "Stalinism," a largely undefined and rather dated demon. I'm talking about people on the intellectual and sectarian left, not the Tea Party reactionaries. Many of the liberal-left saw Milosevic as the last Stalinist in Europe who had to be done in. So they readily swallowed the mass media's fabricated stories about genocidal atrocities allegedly committed by the Serbs. They stood shoulder to shoulder with NATO, the CIA, the Pentagon, the White House and mainstream media, the same usual suspects whom they say we should never trust. They believed every demonizing story fed to them about the Serbs. To give just one example: they believed that 100,000 people in Kosovo were slaughtered by the Serbs and that the Trepca mines were filled with corpses. No such mass graves were found and in the Trepca shafts not even a shoe or belt buckle was found. Actually the Serbs were the ones who had the largest multi-ethnic populations in their republic, including Croats, Albanians, and Slovenians; the Serbs were not indulging in ethnic cleansing and certainly not genocide. The Kosovars fleeing south during the war openly exclaimed that they were running from the NATO bombings not from a Serbian Juggernaut. I have all the sources and citations in To Kill a Nation, almost all of them western sources including ones from the United Nations and even NATO.
But it is a familiar scenario: U.S. leaders demonize the targeted leader, in this case the democratically elected Milosevic, and this gives them license to bomb his people---with depleted uranium no less. In my book The Face of Imperialism I call it "Privatization by Bombing." I was in Serbia a few weeks after the 78 days of bombing and noted that only government-owned and worker-owned factories, utilities, hotels and the like were bombed. The privately owned Hilton Hotel and other private companies had not a scratch.
What is unusual is that so many lefties got suckered into this "humanitarian war" scenario. As I say, I think some of them are fighting the ghost of Stalin, possessed as they are by their knee-jerk anti-communism. The Serbs were targeted by the U.S. imperialists because they were the biggest ethnic group, the one most against secession, and with a working class that was more socialist than in any other of the Yugoslav republics.
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http://www.michaelparenti.org/reflectio ... demia.html
