I must disclose that this is not a common opinion. If I had a nickel for every time someone called Parenti a genocide denier I’d have two nickels, once on twitter and once on tumblr, which isn’t a lot but it’s weird that it’s happened twice.
I have a feeling this has something to do with his book To Kill a Nation but I have yet to read it so I have no idea.
To Kill a Nation (which I highly recommend reading, by the way) does seem to be the culprit here. Michael Parenti questioned the circumstantial evidence that the capitalist media put forth for its conspiracy theory that the Federal Rep. of Yugoslavia sought to create an ethnostate, notably the infamous Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Although it was criminal, I doubt that it was genocidal, which seems like a petty distinction until you remember that ‘genocide prevention’ was a necessary criterion for NATO intervention.
Sanders (a one-time friend of Parenti) voted, post facto, for the bombing by NATO, siting “genocide” as the chief concern at the time. However, one of the major critiques of NATOs actions is that it accelerated ethnic cleansing in the region. An article in The Guardian from 2009 had this to say:
Though justified by apparently humanitarian considerations, Nato’s bombing of Serbia succeeded only in escalating the Kosovo crisis into a full-scale humanitarian catastrophe. It is now widely acknowledged that the bulk of the ethnic cleansing and war crimes occurred after the start of Nato’s campaign, with an OSCE inquiry highlighting “the patterns of the expulsions and the vast increase in lootings, killings,removed, kidnappings and pillage once the Nato air war began on March 24”. Despite regular proclamations about Kosovo’s supposed multi-ethnic character and minority rights provisions, the failure to first prevent, and then to facilitate the safe and sustainable return of, over 200,000 internally-displaced persons (IDPs) is testimony both to the shortcomings of the initial justifications for intervention and the international community’s now almost decade-long mission to reconstruct Kosovo.
It’s also true that some of the targets hit by the NATO bombings were things like, schools and hospitals, and neighborhoods.
Parenti stated at a talk once that Sanders’ vote for the bombings is what terminated their friendship.
The write-up you posted looks very detailed, I’ll have to give it a read soon. There has been a long history of challenging the “genocide” narrative surrounding NATO’s involvement. The claim NATO made at the time just doesn’t seem to stand up to scrutiny.
Honestly when I read the book I was like “yeah this is just sitting hairs” then at the end I made the revelation that said hair splitting was necessary to combat NATOs reasoning for the bonbings
Because he debunked their propaganda narratives around Yugoslavia and exposed how and why it was deliberately torn apart by the West.
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It is correct to say that his portrayal of Yugoslavia in To Kill a Nation was very one-sided towards the Serb side. He is also a Statesian nationalist, as seen in his book Superpatriotism, where he tries to explain that there is “real patriotism” in the US versus the bourgeoisie’s “superpatriotism” and how the two are actually very very different for idealist reasons.
Despite this, take the good and leave out the bad. He is a very engaging and engaged writer and has a long bibliography, for one thing.
