Communism had some good parts, and the New York Times is on it.
Pegged to the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the nation’s paper of record is running a series called Red Century, revisiting the “history and legacy of Communism.” That’s actually a pretty good idea: It’s certainly worth analyzing and commemorating a murderous ideology that resulted in the deaths of tens of millions of people over the course of the 20th century.
Many of the pieces are interesting and rigorous. Yet, in some of them, there’s a strange attempt to rehabilitate various aspects of Communism. Here’s the tell: The pieces pay lip service to the Communists’ depravity, before repairing to a “for all its flaws” or “to be sure” construction. It’s as if the Times is attempting to rehabilitate the posthumous reputation of its staffer Walter Duranty, who infamously denied Stalin’s starvation of the Ukrainians when he served as the paper’s Moscow bureau chief in the 1930s.
The very first piece in the series gave a glimpse of what was to come. Not for indulging in a “for all its flaws” argument but for its obvious pining for a new era of Communist glory:
Since then, we have learned that sure Eastern Europe under Communism may have been a stifling dystopia, but “women had better sex under Socialism.” And Lenin, by the way, might have been a nasty guy—but part of his “legacy” worth celebrating includes some fabulous nature preserves! The Soviet Union was a “global pioneer in conservation,” you see.
And then on Tuesday, the Times informed us that, for all of Mao’s flaws (among those, presumably that he murdered 70 million people) “the Communist revolution taught Chinese women to dream big.”
Sure, there are “caveats.” For example:
And:
But hey, Mao once said “Women hold up half the sky” so it’s all good. Just wait until the Times gets a look at North Korea’s fabulously low carbon footprint!
The parodies almost write themselves: “For all his flaws, Hitler built some fabulous infrastructure.” But it’s worth wondering why it’s Communism, of all ideologies, that gets the kid-glove treatment from the Times.
Suffice it to say, after all, that in our current Orange Century, the Times has never even mustered a “for all his flaws” construction about the current occupant of the White House.
