Michael Parenti, born on this day in 1933, is a Marxist American political scientist and cultural critic. He has taught at American and international universities and has been a guest lecturer before campus and community audiences.
Michael Parenti was raised by an Italian-American working-class family in the East Harlem neighborhood of New York City. After graduating from high school, Parenti worked for several years. Upon returning to school, he received a BA from the City College of New York, an MA from Brown University and a PhD in political science from Yale University.
For many years Parenti taught political and social science at various institutions of higher learning. Eventually he devoted himself full-time to writing, public speaking, and political activism. He is the author of 20 books and over 300 articles.
Parenti's writings cover a wide range of subjects: U.S. politics, culture, ideology, political economy, imperialism, fascism, communism, democratic socialism, free-market orthodoxies, conservative judicial activism, religion, ancient history, modern history, historiography, repression in academia, news and entertainment media, technology, environmentalism, sexism, racism, Venezuela, the wars in Iraq and Yugoslavia, ethnicity, and his own early life.
His book Democracy for the Few, now in its ninth edition, is a critical analysis of U.S. society, economy, and political institutions and a college-level political science textbook published by Wadsworth Publishing. His book Blackshirts and Reds defended the Soviet Union and socialist states of the 20th century from criticism, arguing that they were morally superior compared to capitalist states, that the problems of the Soviet Union were caused by the Russian Civil War and capitalist interference, and that "Left anti-Communist" and "pure socialist" critics have failed to offer any alternatives to the Soviet Union's "siege socialism"
In 1974, Parenti ran for the U.S. House of Representatives in Vermont as the candidate of the democratic socialist Liberty Union Party; he came in third place, with 7.1% of the vote. Parenti was once a friend of Bernie Sanders, but he later split with Sanders over Sanders's support for the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia.
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Me explaining to my dad that Anne Applebaum is a NED hack and that double genocide theory is a ultranationalist myth pushed by the USA and the EU to rewrite history to paint the nazis in a good light to "own le putler" and that Dovid Katz got kicked out of the university of Vilnius for critizising Lithuanian prosecutors trying to sue holocaust victims who joined communist partisan brigades for terrorism and-
levels in my blood to raise several times over instantly
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I want someone to be cuddling me and feeding me bubble water. I regress the most when I'm sick wah