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Sunday, March 4, 2018

I would say I'm not sure what's wrong with the New York Times, but I am sure

Yet another post I've been sitting on for a while, mostly because I haven't been posting much, not because the post isn't worthwhile. But late last year, The New York Times launched a series of articles telling us how wonderful Soviet Communism was. They did so without a hint of irony, apparently:
The Trump administration marked this week’s 100th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution by declaring a National Day for the Victims of Communism. The New York Times marked the same anniversary in a different way: by running a series of articles extolling the virtues of communism.
The irony of the series’ title, “Red Century,” seems lost on the Times’s editors. The 20th century was “red” indeed — red with the blood of communism’s victims. The death toll of communism, cited in “The Black Book of Communism,” is simply staggering: In the USSR, nearly 20 million dead; China, 65 million; Vietnam, 1 million; Cambodia, 2 million; Eastern Europe, 1 million; Africa, 1.7 million; Afghanistan, 1.5 million; North Korea: 2 million (and counting). In all, Communist regimes killed some 100 million people — roughly four times the number killed by the Nazis — making communism the most murderous ideology in human history.
Never mind all that. University of Pennsylvania professor Kristen R. Ghodsee writes that Communists had better sex: “Eastern women had twice as many orgasms as Western women . . . [who] had less sex, and less satisfying sex, than women who had to line up for toilet paper.” She has tough words for Joseph Stalin because he “reversed much of the Soviet Union’s early progress in women’s rights — outlawing abortion and promoting the nuclear family.” Yes, that was Stalin’s crime. Not the purges, not the gulag, but promoting the nuclear family.
I guess the Times has a long history of loving them some communists. They didn't start with supporting North Vietnam in that conflict, after all:
The Times’s series is in the tradition set by former Times Moscow bureau chief Walter Duranty, who wrote glowing reports on Stalin’s rule that included repeated denials of the mass starvation from Stalin’s engineered famine in Ukraine. “Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda,” he wrote, while millions starved to death. And besides, “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
Now, after a century of slaughter, the Times is back at it, portraying communism as a noble cause, the murders carried out in its name simply aberrations. Never mind that there is not a single example of a country where communism was tried and it did not result in terror, purges, massacres, starvation and totalitarian misery. Yet take any of the opinion pieces above and replace the word “Communist” with “Nazi,” and then try to imagine that anyone would publish them, other than perhaps the Daily Stormer.
And, no, the Times never gave back the Pulitzer Prize that Duranty was awarded. The prize remains on display in the newpaper's building along with all of the paper's other Pulitzers. Duranty knew what was going on but declined to report on it. It is not clear whether he simply wanted to retain access to top Soviet officials or whether he agreed with them, but I know which choice I'm going with. And either way, Duranty was scum. So was -- and is -- his employer. It would be difficult to find a more biased "news" outlet.

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