Michael Parenti, a Marxist political theorist with uncompromising views who published more than 20 books and lectured widely, but who was accused of being an apologist for brutal regimes, including in the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, died on Jan. 24 in Amherst, Mass. He was 92.
His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his son, Christian Parenti.
Infuriated in the 1960s by American involvement in the Vietnam War, Dr. Parenti moved ever leftward.
He was convicted of striking a state trooper at an antiwar protest in 1970, and he ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Vermont in 1974 on the same third-party socialist ticket as Bernie Sanders (in Mr. Sanders’ first bid for the U.S. Senate, an unsuccessful one).
By the 1980s and ’90s, when Dr. Parenti’s influence arguably reached its apogee, his books were read alongside those of Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, two better known (and better selling) left-wing authors.
His 1974 textbook, “Democracy for the Few,” which went through nine editions, was, like Mr. Zinn’s “A People’s History of the United States,” a tour of American history and institutions through the lens of class struggle.
In his 1986 book on the news media, “Inventing Reality: The Politics of the Mass Media,” Dr. Parenti argued that leading newspapers and TV networks promoted the interests of their corporate owners and that most of their content was “ruling class propaganda.”
Assessing the book for The New York Times Book Review, Michael Pollan wrote that Dr. Parenti had painted the press in “broad Marxist strokes” that made even some of his forceful critiques “easy to dismiss.”
Dr. Parenti spoke on campuses in a feisty, animated oratorical style. America’s business owners, he once intoned, had at various times opposed the eight-hour workday, Social Security, environmental controls and other social advances, and it was naïve, he said, to believe that capitalists cared a whit about the working class.
“They fought tooth and nail with every bit of miserly, miserable greed,” he said of the business class, “unforgiving, unrelenting against every decent thing that we’ve had, and to credit capitalism for the things that they have opposed is to really get your head screwed on wrong.”
Dr. Parenti seemed to view every American domestic challenge as the fault of capitalism and every U.S. foreign venture as an act of militarized imperialism.
His support for nominally Marxist governments led him toward positions few others on the American left would take. In the 1980s, he defended the Soviet Union as it crumbled and its former satellites in Eastern Europe won independence. He took the side of Serbia and its murderous leader Slobodan Milosevic during the wars in Yugoslavia in the 1990s, as that country fractured into independent nations and NATO carried out a bombing campaign against Serbia.
“He was an apologist for the Soviet system,” said Stephen Zunes, a professor of politics at the University of San Francisco, who shared an office with Dr. Parenti in the 1980s, when both worked at the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-wing Washington think tank.
“I’d piss him off by wearing a Solidarity T-shirt,” Dr. Zunes added, referring to the Polish anti-Communist movement.
In “To Kill a Nation,” his 2000 book about Yugoslavia, Dr. Parenti scoffed at news reports that Bosnian Serbs had executed nearly 7,500 Bosnian Muslims in 1995 in Srebrenica, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. That number was dubious because few corpses had been exhumed, he said.
Dr. Parenti further claimed in the book that “most of the ethnic cleansing” that occurred as Yugoslavia broke apart “was perpetrated not by the Serbs but against them.”
He became a co-chair of an international committee to defend Mr. Milosevic, who died at 64 in 2006 while on trial for crimes against humanity, including genocide. In 2007, the International Court of Justice at The Hague found that Bosnian Serb troops had indeed massacred nearly 8,000 Muslims men and boys in Srebrenica.
A planned speech by Dr. Parenti to a peace group in San Jose, Calif., in 2012 attracted protests by human rights organizations, including the Congress of North American Bosniaks, which called him a genocide denier. Dr. Parenti withdrew from the event.
Michael John Parenti was born on Sept. 30, 1933, in Manhattan, the only child of Michael and Rena (Di Lorenzo) Parenti. He grew up in East Harlem. His father worked on a bread truck and later became a cabdriver, and his mother was a seamstress.
Dr. Parenti graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx and the City College of New York. He earned a master’s degree in political science from Brown University and a Ph.D. in political science from Yale in the early 1960s.
In May 1970, while he was a visiting associate professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Dr. Parenti attended an antiwar rally days after the Kent State shootings in Ohio. He tussled with a state trooper and was convicted of battery and resisting arrest, though he avoided jail time.
By the time he was convicted, he had moved on to teach at the University of Vermont, where he became a cause célèbre when the board of trustees sought to remove him because of his criminal record and because he had carried a Vietcong flag at a demonstration in Burlington. Students and faculty rallied behind him, but the trustees declined to renew his contract in 1971.
In 1974, Dr. Parenti ran for U.S. House of Representatives on the Liberty Union Party line. (It is now the Green Mountain Peace and Justice Party.) Calling for banks and big corporations to be taken over by the public, he received 7 percent of the vote in a three-way race.
Mr. Sanders also lost on the Liberty Union ticket that year but went on to be elected mayor of Burlington as an independent in 1981. Dr. Parenti later said that he “broke” with Mr. Sanders over Mr. Sanders’s support of NATO’s 1999 bombing of Yugoslavia, which forced Mr. Milosevic to withdraw his troops from the Kosovo region.
Dr. Parenti held teaching positions at Howard University, Brooklyn College and California State University, Long Beach, but was never offered tenure. He believed this was because of his far-left politics and his criminal conviction, his son said in an interview.
Dr. Parenti’s marriage to Susan Mahon ended in divorce. Besides his son, who is a professor of economics at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York, he is survived by a grandson.
Dr. Parenti’s other books include “Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism” (1997) and “The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome” (2003).
But he was almost never reviewed in the traditional press, a situation that frustrated him.
“He felt that was par for the course,” his son said. “If you stray too far to the left, you’re ignored by the mainstream.”
Trip Gabriel is a Times reporter on the Obituaries desk.
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