Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader

By Michael Parenti

City Lights 2007

Book Review

Contrary Notions is the first book I’ve read by Parenti (who turns 90 this year) addressing the new millennium. It contains chapters summarizing extensive documentary evidence that the 2000 and 2004 presidential elections were rigged, along with the 2002 and 2006 midterms. Parenti is particularly scathing about the role of touch screen computers that consistently altered votes to Republican in long time Democratic districts.

It also singles out the failure of the Department of Homeland Security (formed after 9-11) and the Red Cross to provide emergency relief after hurricane Katrina. I was particularly shocked to learn of all the private aid FEMA (the DHS branch responsible for emergency relief) turned away

• Three Walmart trailer trucks loaded with food and water
• A caravan of doctors and nurses from Ohio
• 1000 doctors along with medical supplies from Cuba
• One billion barrels of gasoline, water purification plants, 50 tons of food and water, plus $5 million from Venezuela*

Parenti’s section on Clinton’s war on Yugoslavia begins with the economic war against the country that started under Bush senior (1991-92) and continued under Clinton with the installation of the overt Nazi Frank Tudjman (whose overt Serbian ethnic cleansing was never reported in the Western media). Clinton simultaneously backed the heroin running Kosovo Liberation Army (previously on the US Terrorist Watchlist) in their efforts to cleanse the majority Albanian province of Kosova of all non-Albanian ethnicities.

The systematic bombing of 16 Yugoslavia radio and TV outlets was accompanied by systematic demonization (by the State Department and Western media) of the Yugoslavia’s largest ethnic group (the Serbs). The latter were repeatedly scapegoated for atrocities committed by the Croats, Bosnia’s fundamentalist Muslim government and the KLA, as well as for the refugee crisis triggered by the NATO bombing of Kosovo.

Slobodan Milosovic, Yugoslavia’s democratically elected president, was misportrayed as a bloodthirsty nationalist although he and his wife had long compaigned against ethnic nationalism and supremacy.** Charged with war crimes by the International Criminal Court, he died in custody of a heart attack. The ICC eventually exonerated him when the evidence justifying his arrest (mass graves, genocide, etc) never materialized.

The book also includes an excellent chapter on working class history, which highlights

• The fact that the US War Department kept records on Lincoln’s assassination for 60 years
• The omission of armed revolts by farmers, slaves and Native Americans from most history texts
• The suppressed history of the invasion of the Soviet Union by British, French and US (numbering 40,000) troops in 1918-20
• The role of Britain in aiding and abetting Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia, after which they immediately transferred all the Czech gold held by the Bank of England to the Third Reich.

There’s also a great on the hidden history of the US war on Iraq.

*They eventually agreed to accept aid from 50 other countries, including the Dominican Republic, Holland, India, Mexico, Pakistan, Russia, Thailand and Germany.

**Ironically (thanks to Milosevic), Serbia is the only multi-ethnic country left in the former Yugoslavia.