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this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2026
188 points (99.0% liked)
Slop.
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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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.
Imagine invalidating vibes based analysis in this day and age
Where specifically?
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.
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.
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
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!
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.
It's just that the main points of that book were never even about Caesar or Rome, those were just illustration to:
The latter, and thanks. I suppose I'm glad that it seems to be mainly the Caesar book and not his writings on more recent history.