I've learned long ago that AskHistorians is a good place to find facts, but a very bad place to find opinions and analyses.
The historian community is... very complex, to put it mildly. The AskHistorians community, even more so.
Having prefaced that, both comments are bullshit. Parenti never wrote Blackshirts and Reds as an academic historical study. He wrote it as a digestable, easily-read explanation of how fascism and communism actually work. Filling it with sources and footnotes would be pointless, as they would be useless to the average reader, and distracting to everyone else. However, most of his books do contain extensive bibliography, statistics, sources and further analysis at the end, which tells us how far these commenters got into reading one of Parenti's books.
Furthermore, the idea that Parenti is a nobody in the field of history is a ridiculous claim, and ironically, needs citation. Parenti has been published at least 25 times that I can count, and his papers have been cited by at least 1500 other academic works, which is a very respectable number for a "nobody". His books carry hundreds of citations each in other academic projects.
I've learned long ago that AskHistorians is a good place to find facts, but a very bad place to find opinions and analyses.
The historian community is... very complex, to put it mildly. The AskHistorians community, even more so.
Having prefaced that, both comments are bullshit. Parenti never wrote Blackshirts and Reds as an academic historical study. He wrote it as a digestable, easily-read explanation of how fascism and communism actually work. Filling it with sources and footnotes would be pointless, as they would be useless to the average reader, and distracting to everyone else. However, most of his books do contain extensive bibliography, statistics, sources and further analysis at the end, which tells us how far these commenters got into reading one of Parenti's books.
Furthermore, the idea that Parenti is a nobody in the field of history is a ridiculous claim, and ironically, needs citation. Parenti has been published at least 25 times that I can count, and his papers have been cited by at least 1500 other academic works, which is a very respectable number for a "nobody". His books carry hundreds of citations each in other academic projects.