“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 Times’ initial obituary.
3 replies on “The Times Must Change”
The NYT believes that if if does not mention the true history of the horrors of socialism and communism it will be forgotten. The same is true in the high schools, colleges and universities where it is taught Joseph Stalin was an ally and the brave Russians lost so much and needed to have radical economic control to recover.
However the pesky facts keep coming out, and the result repeated. Venezuela is a current reminder whose only worth remaining is a bad example of the disaster seeking to change natural human inter-reaction brings.
Well said, John. Those who claim man must be re-made have a very consistent pattern of killing their patients.
I’m no fan of the NYT, but even I’m surprised by their inability to come to grips with the reality of history.
Through all of my life, the center left has used a formula “We don’t want X, we only want Y.” X has been something such as socialism, and Y has been something such as a socialistic measure. The mainstream of America chose to believe them, even as the new Y kept getting closer to being clearly X. Finally, in the years 2006 to 2009, the credibility of the claims collapsed in the eyes of most Americas; they came to understand that there was no natural stopping point (largely because each old Y caused new problems and rarely if ever produced the promised benefits).
Well, one way of controlling people’s fears of the state taking comprehensive control of life is to keep those people ignorant of the nightmarish outcomes that have been observed. The Times knows what it’s doing.