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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!
