News & Letters, June 2001

Michael Parenti, apologist for Stalinism

The following is excerpted from a flyer distributed to protest a recent appearance by writer Michael Parenti on San Francisco radio station KPFA's show Flashpoints. Parenti is author of TO KILL A NATION: THE ATTACK ON YUGOSLAVIA. The complete document is available from Wild in the Streets, 2140 Shattuck Ave. #2200, Berkeley, CA 94704.

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. It is available on the Internet from the Commission's website, www.unhchr.ch/ .

Milosevic started out as a major bank official. As Serbia's leader, he was the architect of savage austerity measures imposed upon working people, a policy which implemented the demands of the IMF and international capital. This led to violent protests by workers, including an attack on the Yugoslav parliament building in July 1988, and mass rioting in the streets of Belgrade in March 1991, as well as widespread strikes in which people from all ethnic backgrounds cooperated on the basis of class interests. The response of Milosevic, and other bureaucrats such as the leaders of Croatia and Bosnia, was to fan the flames of ethnic strife. The U.S. government initially supported Milosevic, on the basis of his willingness to enforce IMF policies, and only turned on him when his regime was deemed unstable.

Milosevic's rule led to mass protests within Yugoslavia in late '96-early '97, after he tried to overturn by force the results of opposition victories in local elections. He retreated, briefly, then resorted to escalating repression in Kosovo. In May 2000, his government suppressed what was left of independent media, including radio station B-92, the first station outside the U.S. to send a message of support to the KPFA staff during the July 1999 Pacifica occupation. Meanwhile, Parenti was on "Flashpoints," describing the Yugoslav opposition as a creature of the CIA. He likewise ignored the murder of several publishers of opposition newspapers.

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.

The politics and program of state capitalism and social democracy espoused by Parenti have already been tried, and proven disastrous, for both working people and the socialist movement. To succeed in getting rid of capitalism, a move necessary for both humanity and the planet, we must disavow this program and the wreckage left behind in its wake.