December 9, 2003
COMPASS?:
Liberalism's obituary (Dennis Prager, December 9, 2003, Townhall)
On Dec. 1, 2003, this obituary headline appeared in the New York Times: "Sylvia Bernstein, 88, Civil Rights Activist, Dies."Though the passing of Mrs. Bernstein was reported in almost every major newspaper in the country, there is a good chance you missed it.
Too bad. Because the headline and the obituary tell you a great deal about the moral compass of mainstream American (and world) journalism.
For, if you read through the entire piece (almost always either a verbatim or edited Associated Press report), you will come across this one line: "Members of the Communist Party in the 1940s, the Bernsteins were targets of government scrutiny." [...]
According to every one of the seven major newspapers I checked, Mrs. Bernstein was described as essentially a wonderful, idealistic lady. So what if she was a member of the Communist Party at a time when Joseph Stalin was murdering and enslaving more human beings than anyone else had in history? So what if she was a member of the party that supported those who wished to destroy America, the land that her parents had fled to in order to be free people? So what if she remained in the Communist Party even after it supported the Soviet peace pact with Hitler's Nazi Germany?
None of this matters to mainstream journalists. For these people, the fact that a person was a member of the American Communist Party when it obeyed Joseph Stalin and the Soviet Communist Party is as irrelevant to a moral assessment of that person as if she had been a member of a stamp club. In fact, the only time her membership was even mentioned in the AP obituary printed in the New York Times, the Washington Post and elsewhere, was to invoke Mrs. Bernstein's victimhood.
As Mark Steyn recently asked [in the context of Dalton Trumbo]: "How do you feel about getting one of the great moral questions of the century wrong?" Posted by Orrin Judd at December 9, 2003 12:15 PM
So true. Not a lot of people came out of that period with clean hands or clean minds, did they?
But you pick on only one group. Why is that?
Posted by: Harry Eagar at December 9, 2003 2:41 PMBecause never did so many boast and fawn so much about something that was patently a lie.
The Nazis and their ilk sneered.
The Communists and their ilk suckled at the belly of the beast, and told the world they were drinking mother's milk.
Posted by: jim hamlen at December 9, 2003 2:48 PMand no one tries to claim that
Nazis/sympathizers were noble
idealists...
If you could really get down to their true feelings, the answer would be they still don't think they got it wrong. They would just say they had inept and/or corrupt people who screwed things up for them, the same way the far left in the Democratic Party today are blaming the party's congressional leadership for screwing things up and allowing Bush his victories on Iraq, education, Medicare and other issues.
Posted by: John at December 9, 2003 3:30 PMThose who thought Nazism a solution to capitalism changed their minds--those who thought communism never did.
Posted by: oj at December 9, 2003 4:30 PMbrian:
Sure they were. Folks like Churchill and Linbergh thought Nazism offered a way out of the crisis of capitalism. They were wrong, but good intentioned.
Posted by: oj at December 9, 2003 5:09 PMIt's my understanding that for Churchill,
Lindbergh, et al, the main attraction of Nazism
was that it wasn't Communism.
Wasn't Lindbergh's primary reason for opposing
war with Germany that it would weaken European
civilization and allow the Soviets to sweep in
afterwards and take over?
It is certainly true that no one considered
respectable in polite society allows ex-Nazi
sympathizers to defend themselves that way (good
intentions!), while I have seen Ted Hall's widow
disgustingly do so in interviews designed to make
us feel sorry for the poor young idealists...
Paul:
Not at all. Most folks gave up on capitalism in the wake of the Depression and the two most popular alternatives were communism/socialism and Nazism/fascism. Of the four fascism worked best, but all they really needed to do was be a little patient.
Posted by: oj at December 9, 2003 7:52 PMThere should be some way to disentangle fascism and Nazism, as there is to disentangle socialism and Communism.
Posted by: Paul Cella at December 10, 2003 10:12 AMPaul:
Yes, fascism like that of a Franco or a Pinochet is a good thing in that it re-imposes order on the way to democracy. Nazism is interested only in rule of the Party.
Posted by: OJ at December 10, 2003 10:52 AMBrian, you wouldn't say that if you hung out in Birch circles. True, it is uncommon to find respectable people saying "I like Hitler," but it is not nearly so uncommon to find them expressing the same views without Hitler. My Bircher uncles used to talk like that, especially after they started doing business in South Africa.
And Naziism was presented as idealistic. Not only by Moral Rearmament, either.
I still well remember my shock at first reading an attack by a liberal Jewish writer (it may have been Berlin, but I've since seen the sentiment so often that I cannot remember where I first saw it) on idealism. Jews learned by hard experience that idealism is a bad thing.
Posted by: Harry Eagar at December 10, 2003 11:35 PM