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Parenti haters are coping hard after their pro US state Anarchist professor got caught in the didler's list. (thelemmy.club)
submitted 8 months ago by to c/slop@hexbear.net
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[–] 23 points 8 months ago (9 children)

I haven't seen much specifically left wing criticisms, but historians and history interested people have been on him for essentially citing vibes in some of his writing.

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  • [–] 15 points 8 months ago (7 children)

    Where specifically?

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  • [–] 20 points 8 months ago

    I'm too inept at parsing the ancient primary sources to really dig into his (non-)conspiracy theory that Cicero completely fabricated the Catiline conspiracy. The way he portrays it in the book makes it sound like it's crazy that historians took Cicero at his word, but his version is really quite fringe as far as I can tell. But again, I don't have the historian skills to figure out if Parenti was torturing the sources or not.

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago (5 children)

    Where I saw the criticism or where he cites vibes? The answer for the first one is basically every time he gets mentioned, including here. The answer for the second one is "The Assassination of Julius Caesar: A People’s History of Ancient Rome" That's the one I remember the most criticism for.

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  • [–] 16 points 8 months ago

    The premise of historians not liking assassination of Julius Caesar is that Parenti spends most of it debunking the traditional claims of Caesar being assassinated for being a tyrant and instead shows he was assassinated for doing populist reforms that pissed off the landlords and ruling class (I think mainly for societal stability not because he was pro worker or anything)

    The traditional historical view is almost entirely informed by the landlords and ruling class pov, and since the historians are drenched in liberalism they never really went out of their way to question the ruling class.

    It's been a while ( years) since I went over it though so this might be off a bit

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  • [–] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (2 children)

    Bourgeois historians criticize the book that proven them to be either at the level of 1st year student or actively engaging in obfuscating history for the benefit of ruling class? No wai!

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  • [–] 6 points 8 months ago (1 child)

    As I said ive seen the criticism levied here before too. I doubt most of the people criticising him for citing newspaper articles or his dreams or whatever the complaint is are doing so to undermine the left.

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  • [–] 11 points 8 months ago*

    It's just that the main points of that book were never even about Caesar or Rome, those were just illustration to:

    1. Historians are not using dialectical materialism enough.
    2. Academia is knowingly or not serving the ruling class, which is really cold take since even the "Father of History" Herodotus straight up took Athenian money to smear Persia but they still don't like to have it pointed out.
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