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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people national politics & policies responsibility too much government

The Times Must Change

“Political leaders prefer to project a noble history, sometimes by turning complicity in atrocities into claims of victimhood,” the New York Times informed us last Sunday. “In Russia, Mr. Putin and many of his lieutenants came from the K.G.B. and resisted fully confronting its repressive history. And they, like many of their countrymen, prefer to portray Stalin not only as the architect of the Gulag but also as the leader who built Russia’s industrial might and led it to victory in the Great Patriotic War.” 

The Gray Lady here marks the passing of Arseny Roginsky, an organizer and activist who kept alive the memory of state mass murder in his homeland. The Times quotes the late hero as insisting that common talk of “victims of repression” is nowhere near enough. The repression did not merely descend upon the people as “a plague.” 

The victims were targets of “state terror.”

But there was something missing in this too-​brief notice. Though the Nazis were mentioned, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics wasn’t.

Communism was not.*

State terror did not infect its perpetrators biologically, like the world’s worst case of x-oplasmosis. It neither descended from the heavens nor ascended from the swamps. The infection was ideological — the result of Marxian socialism, of unworkable communism. 

By not mentioning socialism or communism or even the USSR, the New York Times carries on its sad history of leftist apologetics. The case of the lying propagandist Walter Duranty — the Times’ award-​winning foreign correspondent and author of Mission to Moscow — should have been the last of that.

It isn’t, apparently. The Times still protects its safe-​space socialist readers.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

 

* The omissions were also present in the Timesinitial obituary.


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Accountability general freedom ideological culture media and media people moral hazard national politics & policies

Not So Bad, Communism?

First the good news. The New York Times has repudiated Walter Duranty’s 1930s-​era “journalism” for whitewashing — “underestimating” — the murderousness of Soviet Communism.

So that’s done, right? 

Whatever its failings today, the paper will certainly no longer allow writers to use its august pages to discount blatant systematic evil. 

Right?

But Helen Raleigh, a writer for The Federalist who is an immigrant from China, finds that the Times does indeed persist in glossing over the sins of Communism. In commemorating the centenary of the Bolshevik Revolution, the paper is “once again proving itself Communism’s greatest apologist” through articles variously arguing that “women had better sex under socialism to now claiming China’s Communist revolution taught Chinese women to ‘dream big’…”

As if, suggests Raleigh, Duranty’s ghost were still calling the shots.

In rebuttal, she recounts what so many people suffered under Communism, as exemplified by the fate of her Aunt San. 

At age 15, her aunt was forced by Mao’s government to leave the city and work in the countryside, separately from her siblings, who were forced to do the same but in different villages. Cutting family ties was important “so people could devote themselves 100 percent to the Communist Party’s causes.” 

Primitive farming, mandatory singing of gruesomely cheerful revolutionary songs, food rations, malnutrition, ritual humiliation, derailed education, derailed or extinguished lives. 

Just a few of the standard ingredients of the totalitarianism that, according to the Times of 2017, taught women to “dream big.”

Which should remind us: despite only a few countries’ close ties to the doctrine — Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — Communism’s threat to world peace, prosperity, and freedom remains big.

The Times must change.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.


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