Exposing Blatant Lies
I am consistently rewarded by attending campus programs imported by the Cultural Forum. I looked forward to last week’s talk in the EMU Ballroom by Michael Parenti. But I sensed something wrong when it was announced that Parenti was brought to campus by a local middle-school teacher who is Oregon’s leading apologist for the Serbian butchering of Bosnian and Kosovo Muslims.
Sure enough, Parenti set up his audience to accept blatant lies after he established some credibility by describing a reality: how U.S. imperialism discourages Third World democracies while widening the gulf between rich and poor at home. All of a sudden, he shifted into a tirade about how we are misled by the mass media parroting government misinformation about Serbian genocide “that did not exist.”
The linkage between government lies and lazy media is an unfortunate truth. But there are exceptions, such as in Serbia, where the controversial NATO bombing finally ended the slaughter of Kosovars for humanitarian, not imperialistic reasons. Propagandists like Parenti fool some people by stating the obvious and then deviously linking it to a lie.
What he and his chortling host deserve is a chance to be rebutted by the truth about Serbia as expressed by a campus authority who knows it firsthand — professor Ronald Wixman.

George Beres

retired

former University sports information director