An Acorn Doesn’t Fall Far From the Oak Tree

I bring up this tired old cliché because of its applicability to the Parentis, father and son. The father, Michael Parenti, is a hardcore Communist activist who wrote for the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) theoretical journal Political Affairs among other CP publications. He is the author of 23 books (some used as college texts) and countless more articles. His specialized area of focus is on the structural class conflict of capitalist society and power. His communist affiliations were written up in the pioneering study book, Covert Cadre” Inside the Institute for Policy Studies by S. Steve Powel, Green Hill Publishers Inc. The son, Christian, is a correspondent for The Nation and is author of The Freedom: Shadows and Hallucinations in Occupied Iraq (2004), The Soft Cage: Surveillance in America from Slavery to the War on Terror (2003), Lockdown America: Police and Prisons in the Age of Crisis (2000) and Radical Hamilton: Economic Lessons from a Misunderstood Founder (2020). His principal area of focus is upon the structural class conflict of capitalist society and power. It is interesting that the son provides a major Marxist class conflict analysis of the capitalist history of the American Police State in the video above, while the father totally ignores discussion of the murderous regimes of the Communist totalitarian police states responsible for the deaths of over one hundred million persons in the 20th Century, and instead indulges in lyrical Aesopian language describing the supposedly munificent and benevolent aspects of Marxist-Leninist regimes such as in the Soviet Union, Cuba, the Peoples Republic of China, or Nicaragua.

I bring this up because Christian Parenti is one of the major contributing commentators in the ViceTV  progressive agitprop series, While The Rest of Us Die, helping to set the essential critical tone and ideological thrust of the six episodes.

In the final program of the series, Brace for Impact, the first fifteen minutes is probably the hardest hitting, most accurate and authoritative indictment of the American national security state ever broadcast. Then suddenly, after a casual drive-by dismissal to diminish or marginalize persons raising questions regarding the November 22, 1963 JFK assassination or the September 11, 2001 attacks, as “conspiracy theorists,” the true intent or purpose of the program becomes blatantly evident — it is the most savage demonization and malicious indictment of Donald Trump and his followers, as traitorous evil villains of the highest order. No scurrilous slur or calumny is withheld in this litany of lies and disinformation. This is the most disingenuous “conspiracy theory” of them all.

In the final segment Christian Parenti calls for the dismembering and defunding of the American military establishment and giving these tax monies to the social welfare sector of the state (something of the face of it is something libertarians could initially applaud). But I suspect something more sinister and duplicitous was actually going on in Parenti’s mind.

One of the most powerful and influential books I have ever read is Double Lives: Spies and Writers in the Secret Soviet War of Ideas Against the West, by Stephen Koch. It pointed out that it was one of the principal campaigns of Stalin and the Communist International in the interwar years (particularly in the early 1930s leading up to the Popular Front period) was to establish and foster extensive international peace movements, “peace congresses,” in western nations while at the same time covertly building up Soviet military strength for eminent war with “the reactionary counter-revolutionary” Western democracies who the paranoiac Stalin saw as his enemies. This “peace conspiracy” was directed by the Soviet’s master manipulator and propagandist Willi Münzenberg, who created an elaborate series of fronts and fellow-travelling networks for this purpose. Millions of willfully ignorant dupes, “useful idiots,” and naïve” pacifists” were enlisted in the ranks of “Peace.”

The totalitarian Soviet Union no longer exists. But overt Communists like the Parentis and their progressive pawns and “useful idiots” of today who fill the ranks of the Biden regime and the Democrats are instead being bamboozled concerning the specter of the Peoples Republic of China. Their result — America must overtly disarm while China covertly builds a major war machine as the emerging super power on the world stage.

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