Better Off Red?
Table of Contents:
- Better Off Red?
- Introduction
- Before the Fall:Seeing Communism as a "Success Story"
- The Liberation of Eastern Europe: Missing the "Safety" of Communism
- "The Workers' Paradise Has Become a Homeless Hell"
- Whitewashing the Communist Record on Human Rights
- Journalists Distressed by China's Shift Towards Capitalism
- North Korea: Singing Along With Diane Sawyer
- Enthralled with Fidel Castro's Communist Paradise
- Scorning the Anti-Communists: "Nobody Likes a Snitch"
- Journalistic Gorbasms Over the Last Soviet Dictator
- Conclusion: Nostalgic for Totalitarian Communism
Journalistic Gorbasms Over the Last Soviet Dictator
Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh coined the phrase “Gorbasm”
for the ecstasy that many reporters felt when covering Soviet dictator
Mikhail Gorbachev. While Gorbachev was obviously less brutal than
previous communist rulers, his Soviet Union was hardly an enlightened,
peace-loving democracy. While Gorbachev relaxed the repression of
previous years, he did not shut down the Gulag, or allow a free press,
or permit the free expression of religion. When the Baltic republics
pushed for sovereignty in early 1991, Moscow’s Brezhnev-esque response
was to use tanks to suppress pro-democracy forces in Lithuania and
Latvia, killing eighteen.
Yet journalists elevated Gorbachev far
above the freedom fighters, dissidents and anti-communist leaders like
Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Time magazine thought it
insufficient to name him merely the “Man of the Year,” so in 1990
Gorbachev became their “Man of the Decade.” Few, if any, democratic
politicians have ever received the plaudits that were flung by
journalists towards the last dictator of the Soviet Union.
“Gorbachev is the symbol of democracy around the world.”
— Newsweek reporter Eleanor Clift on The McLaughlin Group, May 20, 1989.
“The supreme leader of an atheistic state was baptized as a child.
Now, in a sense, Gorbachev means to accomplish the salvation of an
entire society that has gone astray....Much more than that, Gorbachev
is a visionary enacting a range of complex and sometimes contradictory
roles. He is simultaneously the communist Pope and the Soviet Martin
Luther, the apparatchik as Magellan and McLuhan. The Man of the Decade
is a global navigator.”
— Time Senior Writer Lance Morrow, January 1, 1990.
“Gorbachev has probably moved more quickly than any person in the history of the world. Moving faster than Jesus Christ did.”
— CNN founder Ted Turner, “TV chieftain with an outspoken conscience,” celebrated in the January 22, 1990 Time.
“He
has, as many great leaders have, impressive eyes...There’s a kind of
laser-beam stare, a forced quality, you get from Gorbachev that does not
come across as something peaceful within himself. It’s the look of a
kind of human volcano, or he’d probably like to describe it as a human
nuclear energy plant.”
— CBS anchor Dan Rather on Mikhail Gorbachev, as quoted in the May 10, 1990 Seattle Times.
“In
five years, Mikhail Gorbachev has transformed the Soviet Union from a
rigid police state to what he describes as a kind of freewheeling
infant democracy.”
— Dan Rather’s introduction to a story on making criticism of Gorbachev illegal, May 15, 1990 Evening News.
“He seems to me to have done more good in the world than any other national leader of my lifetime.”
— Moscow reporter Bob Abernethy on the December 24, 1991 NBC Nightly News.
“By American presidential standards, Mikhail Gorbachev accomplished
enough in his seven-year term to qualify for a bust on Mount Rushmore.”
— NBC’s Jim Maceda, December 25, 1991 Nightly News.
“What
do you do for an encore after ending the Cold War and reversing the
arms race? How about saving the planet? That’s the latest assignment for
Mikhail Gorbachev, having assumed the presidency of the International
Green Cross, a new environmental organization...”
— Time’s “The Week” section, May 3, 1993.
“I
like this kind of man and I think we need more of them,’ gushed Maria
Shriver, speaking of Gorbachev, not [her husband] Arnold
[Schwarzenegger].”
— October 31, 1994 People article on the NBC reporter meeting Gorbachev at the Hollywood launching of Global Green USA.
“He
can still light up any room that he walks into. The eyes are flashy,
you know, and the great command of the language and the feel that he
has, the very physical presence of him. It’s still fun to be around
him.”
— NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw on PBS’s Charlie Rose, May 2, 1996.
“Perhaps
one day again we’ll see you in political office in Russia. We know
that you’ve devoted your life to peace and to changing your country and
those of us who have gotten to know you count ourselves among the
privileged.”
— Tom Brokaw closing his October 29, 1996 MSNBC InterNight interview with Gorbachev.
“He’s only the most important political leader alive in the
world today, historically speaking....If you look over the course of
our lifetimes, who was the most, well, you go back to Lincoln and
Franklin Roosevelt....If I look back over my lifetime, who is the world
leader who changed things the most, and I don’t actually think it is a
close call.”
— Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter on Gorbachev, April 27, 2001 Imus in the Morning on MSNBC.
“With
a Western-style politician’s charm and a homey touch, he became, as
Time put it, ‘a symbol of hope for a new kind of Soviet Union: more
open, more concerned with the welfare of its citizens and less with the
spread of its ideology and system abroad.’ What did spread, at home and
abroad, was a fever of democratic reform.”
— Time in its
double-issue dated Dec. 31, 2001/Jan. 7, 2002, explaining why it
selected the former Soviet dictator as “Man of the Year” in 1987 and
1989.