By Brian Carnell

Saturday, May 24, 2003

Project Censored recently moved to a new web site, but it was a brief blurb about its award ceremony that caught my eye,

We Celebrated Our Awards Ceremony!!!

Political analyst/author Michael Parenti and cartoonist Dan Perkins, aka Tom Tomorrow, creator of This Modern World, gave a keynote of Project Censored's annual release of top 25 news stories that were undercovered by mainstream media.

Could there be a better choice of keynote speakers than Michael Parenti for a group that Davids Walls notes has a highly tarnished reputation thanks to its "reliance on dubious sources and a lack of rigorous research and fact-checking" (Parenti is also apparently among the group that picks the stories that Project Censored will feature).

Parenti, of course, was (and is) probably the most prominent apologist for the Soviet Union of the last quarter century. In his 1993 book Blackshirts and Reds, Parenti complained that no one yet had conducted a "rational" assessment of the Soviet Union's accomplishments and argued that Lenin and Stalin had accomplished the sort of economic feats that capitalism could only dream of. Parenti went on to accuse no less than uber-leftist Noam Chomsky of red baiting and being compromised by corporate propaganda for Chomsky's anti-Soviet statements.

As Left wing sociologist Walls notes, Parenti was behind Project Censored's whitewashing of Bosnian genocide in the 2000 edition of Project Censored,

Second, NATO intervention in Kosovo followed a brutal war in Bosnia, which reached its nadir in Srebrenica, a UN-protected "safe area," in July 1995. Some 300 lightly armed Dutch troops in the UN force were pushed aside by heavily armed Bosnian Serb forces, and 7,000 unarmed Bosnian Muslim men and boys were marched off and killed. Some 4,500 bodies were recovered by mid- 2001.9 This event is widely acknowledged to be the largest atrocity to occur in Europe since the end of World War II. Bosnian Serb general Radislav Krstic was tried by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in the Hague, and was convicted of genocide in August 2001 for his responsibility for this slaughter.10

In light of the centrality of the Srebrenica atrocity, it shows breathtaking audacity for Michael Parenti in his Censored 2000 commentary to refer to Srebrenica only to mention killings by Bosnian Muslims in the area in 1992, three years before the infamous massacre. In his comments appearing as chapter 6, "The Media and their Atrocities," Parenti writes disparagingly about accounts of atrocities in Bosnia: "Hyperbolic labeling takes the place of evidence: 'genocide,' 'mass atrocities,' 'systematic rapes,' and even 'rape camps'--camps which no one has ever located." (p. 208) Parenti continues this denial in his recent book, To Kill a Nation.

To the contrary, solid evidence of systematic rape was presented in the recent trial of Serb army commander Dragoljub Kunarac and two paramilitary leaders who were charged with presiding over the rape, torture, and sexual enslavement of dozens of women during 1992 and 1993 in the southeastern Bosnian town of Foca. Sixteen brave Bosnian women had testified against Kunarac and his colleagues. Women's groups and human rights advocates around the world hailed the guilty verdict by the ICTY, delivered in the Hague on February 22, 2001. For the first time, an international court ruled that the systematic rape of women in wartime must be considered a war crime and a crime against humanity. People on the Left ought to be equally enthusiastic about this precedent.

Interestingly, for someone with such strong views about contemporary Yugoslavia, Parenti has almost nothing to say in his several related articles and books about its principal post-WWII leader, Marshall Tito (Josip Broz). Tito led the first Communist country to break with Stalin in 1948, was a leader of the non-aligned movement, and supported interesting experiments in worker self-management. Perhaps Parenti's silence on Tito is explained by his greater sympathy for the Soviet Union, as evidenced in the chapter "Stalin's Fingers" in his Blackshirts & Reds, which attempts to belittle the crimes of Stalin.

Hmmm . . . could the complete disappearance of the ozone layer be affecting the judgment of the folks putting out Project Censored? (And where's the Tom Tomorrow cartoon about activists who appear on the same stage with those who whitewash genocide?)

Sources:

Blackshirts and Reds: Rational Fascism and the Overthrow of Communism. Michael Parenti, San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1997.

Dubious Sources: How Project Censored Joined The Whitewash of Serb Atrocities. David Walls, New Politics, vol. 9, no. 1, Summer 2002.

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