December 10, 2003
WILLING DUPES:
The People Who Gave the Soviet Union a Pass (Arnold Beichman , 12/08/03, History News Network)
In my opinion, the seventy-four years during which the Bolsheviks ruled were the dark ages of democratic journalism for which the world paid heavily. Had the truth been forthcoming in the daily press, the magazines, radio and latterly television, the Kremlin might never have conquered half of Europe and turned sectors of the Western half into silent or enthusiastic allies. As late as 1986, Stuart H. Loory, onetime Moscow CNN bureau chief, in a letter to the Wall Street Journal (February 3, 1986) wrote:I can say without reservation that if the Communist Party of the Soviet Union were to submit itself to the kind of free elections held in South Vietnam in the 1960s or El Salvador in the 1980s, it would win an overwhelming mandate. . . . Except for small pockets of resistance to the Communist regime, the people have been truly converted in the past 68 years.
In his book about the Cold War, Martin Walker, then Washington correspondent of the British daily the Guardian, and earlier its Moscow correspondent, wrote:
The similarities between Moscow in the early 1980s and Washington in the early 1990s became eerily acute to one who had lived through both. The contrast between the former Soviet Union’s release of its prisoners and the way that the USA had over one million of its citizens incarcerated, summoned the bizarre, dismaying thought of an American Gulag.
Reading this passage brought up this memory: In 1949, David Dallin and Boris Nicolaevsky, Russian émigré social democrats, began publishing articles and finally a book on forced labor in the Soviet Union. During a visit to the Long Island home of a New York Times correspondent covering the United Nations I met the then Times Moscow correspondent. I told them about the Dallin-Nicolaevsky revelations and the map the authors had prepared showing where the concentration camps were located.
Both correspondents waved me away with the smug assurance that you shouldn’t take emigre propaganda seriously.
If you're too young to remember when such attitudes were common on the Left and in the press, just consider the continuing willingness of folks to believe that Elian Gonzalez's father wanted him returned to Castro's Cuba. Posted by Orrin Judd at December 10, 2003 08:29 AM
And let's not forget the reaction of the public, one of relief that it was over, and hatred of the people trying to prevent the betrayal that finally happened-- the same public that can't get enough of Lacey Peterson, Michael Jackson, JohnBenet Ramsey or whatever freak of the week is dominating the cable news networks.
I always figured he wanted his son back, just not in Cuba.
Posted by: Chris at December 10, 2003 10:35 AMOJ
Still common on the far left today. Just not overt beyond their inner circles.
Posted by: Genecis at December 10, 2003 01:20 PMDo you know, or merely suspect, that?
And if you know, how do you know?
Posted by: Jeff Guinn at December 10, 2003 03:03 PMI don't know where Orrin grew up, where the TRUTH about Communism was suppressed and nobody knew the awful things that went on there.
Certainly my home was well supplied with anticommunist books by, eg, the Overstreets; we got another dose at school (where we learned that the average Chinese was a Catholic and that the typical lunch of a Polish miner was a slice of bread spread with lard); and another dose in the political discourse on the streets and in the public halls.
The selection of misinformation was broader, no doubt, in Manhattan, but the idea that anticommunism was suppressed is pretty funny.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at December 10, 2003 10:52 PMHarry:
Here's one we can agree on: Tony Kushner was on Fresh Air yesterday talking about how deeply closeted Roy Cohn was. It was hilarious.
Posted by: oj at December 10, 2003 11:01 PMI heard a few minutes of that, but not that part. I am now reading Anthony Haden-Guest's "The Last Party," which has pictures of Roy snuggling with Steve Rubell at Studio 54.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at December 10, 2003 11:12 PMWho said anything about suppressing the TRUTH about communism? On the upper west side of Manhattan and along the rivers in Greenwich Village much of the nonsense published by left wing journals, rationalizing and equivocating, was believed. Anti-communism generated nothing but snide comments and condescending looks from that crowd. It was a fun time, quite entertaining actually. The absurdity of the intelectual climate down there was extreme.
Posted by: Tom C., Stamford,Ct. at December 11, 2003 12:38 PMMy mom knew Roy Cohn in NYC in the 50s, and used to talk about his 'orientation' even when I was little. People knew - lots of people.
In flyover country, communism had a bad name from 1946 on, and was widely smeared (once it was seen as a threat). But in Manhattan and Washington and Boston, it was revered more than in Moscow, even into the early 1980s. And Harry, it wasn't that the truth was suppressed, rather that it was mocked and dismissed, by people who should have known better (and not just by Park Avenue and Harvard types - Henry Wallace worshiped at the altar of Stalin, too).
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 11, 2003 01:32 PMjim:
I was referring to the fact of his homosexuality and the manner of leisure pursued by him and David Schine being used to smear McCarthy in the early 50s. Everyone knew Cohn was gay for thirty years.
Posted by: oj at December 11, 2003 01:59 PM