One of my heroes has sadly passed away as of Saturday January 24 2026. A progressive historian, author and scholar with uncompromising principles. You heard him there at the beginning of the program, speaking in Boulder Colorado on April 15 1986 in a talk entitled “US Intervention, the 3rd World and the USSR.” You heard the passion, the clarity, the power of his voice – a voice that, over many decades, inspired many of us to fight for a better world for the people. And I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Parenti personally when I invited him to speak at the University of Guelph back in November 2011 which I followed up with a series of radio interviews over several years. But first I want to read Vijay Prashad’s moving tribute to Michael.
"Michael Parenti (1933-2026) died today. He has, as his son Christian said, 'gone to the Great Lecture Hall in the Sky'. A socialist from early into his life till the very end, Michael Parenti wrote in a feisty way and spoke bluntly the truths that were not always easy to digest in a wretched capitalist system. He was a fierce critic of imperialist wars and suffered the consequences of this because he could not keep and then hold academic jobs even in liberal states such as Vermont.
The toughest test for all of us came when the USSR collapsed, and it was in this period that Michael Parenti played an important role in the Battle of Ideas, fighting the reactionary Western media and the intellectual cowardice of his peers. His books on Yugoslavia's destruction earned him terrible attacks, which he brushed off as the necessary price you pay in this struggle. In the midst of it all, Michael wrote 'Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism' (1997), a rebuttal to the anti-Marxist and anti-Communist blather that had begun to infect the world. The book remains an essential tool to fight against the ridiculous anti-communist historiography that demeans the great achievements of the workers' movements.
He spent the last period of his life within himself, which was a loss to the rest of us, and now his departure leaves us without that anchor which he provided.
Michael Parenti. Comrade. Our Red Flag dips in your honour (Vijay Prashad, Saturday Jan 24 2026)."
I invited Michael Parenti to speak here in November 2011 when I was still in the Communist Party of Canada. I got in touch with him on Facebook believe it or not and he agreed to come. He spoke at the University of Guelph on November 2 in a talk entitled “The Face of Imperialism and the 99% Solution” a call-back to one of his last books (The Face of Imperialism) and the Occupy Movement which had not yet fully died out. He also spoke in Toronto and Hamilton on the same speaking tour, which was one of the last tours he did in his life. When I tried to invite him again in 2013, he told me that he wasn’t touring anymore. By the time Michael came to Guelph, I’d read a lot of his books – Democracy for the Few, Blackshirts and Reds, History as Mystery, The Assassination of Julius Caesar – and I remember being really nervous when we finally met face-to-face. I’d never really been in a situation like that before, meeting a favourite author and all. But it was great, I took him to CFRU, recorded an interview with him, treated him to dinner at the Grad Lounge and then he spoke that evening to about 200 people in a packed lecture hall in the basement of the Mackinnon Building. I still remember the fist pump he gave me when he was about to leave and go back to his hotel (which he said was so much better than the one he’d stayed at in Toronto, less traffic noise) – stuff like that sticks with you.
That day was the only time I talked with him in person, though I conducted several telephone interviews with him on various subjects. I’m going to play some excerpts from those interviews and from the talk he gave in Guelph in November 2011. But first I want to stress that Michael Parenti was not the only one to die on January 24. Alex Pretti an ICU nurse was shot dead on a Minneapolis Street by ICE Agents (aka Gestapo troops) when he was trying to protect a woman they were beating up on.
It reminded me of when Michael Parenti was beaten bloody by the police at University of Illinois Champagne-Urbana Campus in 1970 when he tried to stop a garbage truck that was being backed into a group of student protesters engaged in a sit-in.
Minneapolis is on fire now. The people have come out in their hundreds of thousands to oppose this brutal and violent occupation of their city. Plunging temperatures haven’t stopped them. And Michael would have supported and marched with these brave people 100%. Indeed, he dedicated his life to them and their ongoing struggle for dignity and justice which cuts across decades and centuries.
The struggle for peace, democracy and socialism is hard and long. But victories are won every day and the people are feeling their power and taking history in their hands all over the world.
Before I play the clip of his talk in Guelph, I want to leave you with a quote from the conclusion of his book The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome, the book that really introduced me to Michael’s work:
“And the people of Rome themselves...They who struggled against all odds with all the fear and courage of ordinary humans, whose names we shall never know, whose blood and tears we shall never see, whose cries of pain and hope we shall never hear, to them we are linked by a past that is never dead nor never really past. And so, when the best pages of history are finally written, it will not be by princes, presidents, prime ministers, or pundits, nor even by professors, but by the people themselves. For all their faults and shortcomings, the people are all we have. Indeed, we are they (The New Press, 2003).”
Rest in power Michael Parenti!
No comments:
Post a Comment