Dear reader,
Michael Parenti died two days ago and I had not seen much Lemmy coverage of this loss. As a larger community, Lemmings tend to share a worldview that seeks awareness of less discussed ailments in history (at least those of us raised in cultures where the subjects are taboo and education precludes questioning). For some Lemmings, like myself, I lack the prior context for many of the more left leaning and anti-imperialist thinking - I found Parenti to have been my intro into this area. For folks inrerested in these, and many more topics, I would highly recommend folks unware of Michael Parenti to take a look into his enormous lifetime of work. His careful discussions on what has made the imperial order of the West so crushing to entire ideas, peoples, and countries was so helpful for me to understand some of what I was missing. For the unitiated I enjoyed starting with Blackshirts and Reds and the much beloved Yellow Parenti Lectures.
I just found a lofi bg version and now I must share it: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ng4BMf-_FSQ
The general Lemmy audience mostly hasn't read Parenti's work. Much more discussion of his death in Lemmy's commie communities. But everyone on this side of Lemmy thinks communism = dictatorship, so you're not going to see discussions of hyper-critical writers and activists over here.
That makes some sense. I think his body of work has plenty to offer people that may write off communism as just "communism when bad". I hope in the wake of his passing somebody out there might see this post and broaden their horizons, even if slightly. In the meantime, I will peer over the hedge into the commie communities.