| We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Useful idiots, then and now | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Mar 16 2013, 11:14 PM (144 Views) | |
| Berton | Mar 16 2013, 11:14 PM Post #1 |
![]()
Thunder Fan
![]() ![]() ![]()
|
Useful idiots, then and now ON THE 60th anniversary of Josef Stalin's death last week, the Associated Press reported that admirers of the Soviet dictator, one of history's bloodiest tyrants, were flocking to the Kremlin to venerate him as a great leader despite his ghastly record of repression. With polls showing a rise in Russians' admiration and nostalgia for Stalin, observed AP, "experts and politicians puzzled and despaired over his enduring popularity." As many as 7 million Ukrainians were deliberately starved to death under Josef Stalin. That didn't deter prominent Americans from hailing Stalinist rule as the "moral light at the top of the world." That some Russians express approval for a despot who has been dead since 1953 is distressing, though perhaps not surprising given the ongoing campaign to burnish Stalin's image by Russia's autocratic president, Vladimir Putin. But even more of a reason for puzzlement and despair is the enthusiastic for Stalin by influential American liberals when he was at the height of his bloody reign -- and the willingness of similar propagandists, naifs, and true believers today to sing the praises of other thugs and dictators.In the 1930s, as millions were being murdered in Stalin's terror-famine and Great Purge, Walter Duranty was assuring readers of The New York Times that the Soviet ruler was "giving the Russian people … what they really want, namely joint effort, communal effort." The renowned literary critic Edmund Wilson extolled Stalinist Russia as the "moral light at the top of the world." Upton Sinclair, who would later win a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, vigorously defended the integrity of the "confessions" extracted by the secret police from many of Stalin's victims: It "seems obvious," Sinclair wrote, that they would not have "confessed to actions which they had not committed." The adulation of left-wing dictators and strongmen by Western intellectuals, journalists, and celebrities didn't begin with Stalin (in 1921 Duranty had hailed Lenin for his "cool, far-sighted, reasoned sense of realities"), and it certainly didn't end with him. Mona Charen chronicled the phenomenon in her superb 2003 book Useful Idiots, which recalls example after jaw-dropping example of American liberals defending, flattering, and excusing the crimes of one Communist ruler and regime after another. Fidel Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao Tse-tung, the Khmer Rouge, Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Il Sung, the Sandinistas: Over and over the pattern was repeated, from the dawn of the Bolshevik Revolution to the collapse of the Iron Curtain – and beyond. And the useful idiocy lives on. When Venezuela's America-hating caudillo Hugo Chávez died last week, Human Rights Watch summarized his legacy starkly: "a dramatic concentration of power and open disregard for basic human rights guarantees." Over his 14-year rule, Chávez succeeded in rewriting the constitution to abolish the Venezuelan Senate and repeal the one-term limit for presidents. He stifled judicial independence, cracked down on freedom of speech, and used his power to "intimidate, censor, and prosecute Venezuelans" who opposed his political agenda. Chávez cemented Venezuela's alliance with Cuba – "the only country in Latin America that systematically represses virtually all forms of political dissent," Human Rights Watch noted – and vocally backed dictators elsewhere, including Syria's Bashar al-Assad and Libya's Moammar Qaddafi. Hugo Chavez, an America-hating megalomaniac, stifled human rights, jailed critics, vocally supported dictators, and ravaged Venezuela's economy. But useful idiots in America gushed over him as a humanitarian and a moral hero. None of that troubled the ideologues who raced to praise the dead bully. Chávez "understood democracy and basic human desires for a dignified life," gushed US Representative José Serrano of New York. Former President Jimmy Carter saluted his "commitment to improving the lives of millions of his fellow countrymen." And former Massachusetts Congressman Joseph Kennedy II, a longtime Chavez booster, eulogized Chávez as a humanitarian who cared about the poor. All this was preceded by Dennis Rodman's return to the headlines, as the former basketball star traveled to North Korea, where the planet's most ghastly regime presides over a Stalinist hellhole in which hundreds of thousands of people are imprisoned in slave-labor camps. But Rodman, whose trip was financed by Vice Media, an American documentary production company, wasn't there to see a human-rights nightmare. He came to watch some basketball, to hang out with the country's new dictator, Kim Jong Un, and – in a country where starvation is a leading cause of death -- to eat 10-course meals that participants described as "an epic feast." All in all, the trip's organizer said, "they had a grand old time." So much so, apparently, that before a crowd of thousands, Rodman assured Kim: "You have a friend for life." Indeed. It's a shameful thing, but dictators like Kim always do. (Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe.) LINK |
![]() |
|
| Deleted User | Mar 16 2013, 11:26 PM Post #2 |
|
Deleted User
|
Another boring copy & paste. What are you, a left over dictaphone machine? |
|
|
| tomdrobin | Mar 16 2013, 11:40 PM Post #3 |
|
Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
![]() ![]() ![]()
|
Trying to make a case that the evil libs idolize horrible dictators. More food for the real "useful idiots" who slurp up the propaganda from the Koch funded right wing spin machine. |
![]() |
|
| Deleted User | Mar 16 2013, 11:49 PM Post #4 |
|
Deleted User
|
I see it leaves out a few. Pinochet, Somoza, Marcos, etc. I guess they were the "good" despots in Betrudes mind. |
|
|
| campingken | Mar 17 2013, 12:57 AM Post #5 |
Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
![]() ![]() ![]()
|
Hard to imagine someone who lives in Oklahoma calling others an idiot.... The weather is so bad there that even global warming would be an improvement... |
![]() |
|
| Mountainrivers | Mar 17 2013, 12:59 AM Post #6 |
|
Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
![]() ![]() ![]()
|
The "now" useful idiots are the right wingers who watch, listen to and believe everything they're told on Faux News and talk radio even in the face of facts. |
![]() |
|
| Brewster | Mar 17 2013, 01:27 AM Post #7 |
![]()
Fire & Ice Senior Diplomat
![]() ![]() ![]()
|
Drinking Koch-a-Cola dulls the thinking process. Or is it that dull thinkers drink the stuff? |
![]() |
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
| « Previous Topic · Fire And Ice General Discussion · Next Topic » |






![]](http://z3.ifrm.com/static/1/pip_r.png)
for Stalin by influential American liberals when he was at the height of his bloody reign -- and the willingness of similar propagandists, naifs, and true believers today to sing the praises of other thugs and dictators.




3:06 AM Jul 12
