THE WORLD IS BEING MISLED TODAY. Which is entirely appropriate. Michael Parenti, who died yesterday at the age of 92, is this morning being described to millions of readers of the mainstream press today as a “Marxist academic”. But that’s not who he was. That’s a reductionist distraction—and one, aptly, coming from the reductionist press he spent his life fighting against. His real place in history is that he was one of the first people to fight against the fake labelling that the mainstream media uses to put people into dismissible boxes. When the mainstream media wants to point people away from inconvenient truthtellers, they simply stick a label on them – he’s a Marxist academic, he’s pro-China, he’s a repeater of “Kremlin talk points”, he’s a communist, he's a leftie. . GENOCIDE DENIER Perhaps the most powerful of those labels was “genocide denier” – applied liberally to Michael Parenti in the 1990s. Parenti was given that label after he wrote that 200,000 Muslims lived in Serbia, making it the most ethnically diverse region in Yugoslavia. This fact clashed dramatically with western media portrayals of its socialist government as “ethnic cleansers” who had to be “liberated” by “humanitarian action” taken by noble, goodhearted, angelic NATO warlords with their blessed missiles and troops. Since then, the western blob has thrown the label “genocide denier” against thousands of truthtellers—most egregiously by anyone who shares the truth about the Chinese Uyghurs, a group that has grown dramatically larger in literal terms and in relative terms than the Chinese Han—thus inconveniently contradicting a patently false genocide narrative championed for years by the BBC and other western media. . PAINFUL AWAKENING In 1970, Michael Parenti, a New Yorker of Italian-American parentage, was a run-of-the-mill lecturer at a university in Illinois. One day he decided to join a protest against the shootings of unarmed students at Kent State—the shocking killing of innocent young people who were correctly pointing out the very serious issues with US military intervention in Vietnam. Parenti was mercilessly clubbed by State Troopers and thrown in a cell for two days. This turned him into an active voice for truth against state power—and made him unemployable as a college teacher. . TOOLS FOR THE WESTERN ELITE Yet it wasn’t his protesting, but his books and speeches that gradually made him famous among the politically aware. He wrote that the journalists of the mainstream media were letting themselves be used as tools for the western elite’s military occupation of the western mindset—and the larger world. The mainstream media, of course, ignored his books or gave them negative reviews: “What do you expect from a guy like this? He’s a Marxist academic who repeats socialist talking points,” they pointed out. Label, label, label. The way his books and talks were framed made him sound like a far-left conspiracy theorist to anyone who showed the slightest interest in him, ensuring that they were largely ignored. But he continued to annoy them. “How odd that fewer police were needed in the communist police state than in the free-market paradise,” he asked. “You will have no sensation of a leash around your neck if you sit by the peg," he warned the public in the west. "It is only when you stray that you feel the restraining tug.” . MANUFACTURING CONSENT But then came Noam Chomsky, who powerfully echoed Parenti’s message: the media’s job, he wrote, was to manufacture consent for the US (and its little brothers the UK and EU) to use western public money to shape the world in a way that makes the rich western elite even richer. As Chomsky and others pointed out, US foreign policy said in writing that the west had an unfair amount of the world’s wealth, and the aim was to “maintain the disparity”. China, India and Africa must be kept poorer than the west. Despite the blatant unfairness of this, positive labels, including the Big Three (freedom, democracy and human rights) were given to all groups worldwide who promoted US State Department policy, and negative ones (authoritarian, communist, pro-China, pro-Putin, genocide denier) to everyone who stood up for their own communities. . RECOGNIZED AT LAST Although his last book came out 11 years ago, he has since become famous through social media – because finally, finally, many people today are realizing that Parenti was the forerunner of modern day heroes like Julian Assange, who said that the public didn’t like wars, and “had to be lied into them” by the mainstream media. In recent years, many of us have shared clips of his speeches, and passages from his writings. Michael Parenti may have passed away—but today, there are millions of truthtellers around the world spreading his message. We know what to do: ignore the labels, refuse to be taken in by the reductiveness of western mainstream media, read widely and make up our own minds about what is happening in the world. If the spirit of real journalism had a voice, it would say goodbye with a famous farewell: “Well done, thou good and faithful servant.”