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
Conclusion: Nostalgic for Totalitarian Communism
Ten years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, reporters marked the
anniversary by focusing on how much worse life had become for those
freed from communism. CNN’s Christiane Amanpour actually scolded Mikhail
Gorbechev in a November 8, 1999 interview. “Ten years later, many are
saying the unbridled capitalism that followed communism has unleashed
misery on citizens who had all their social needs taken care of,
especially in the former Soviet Union,” Amanpour asserted.
She
lectured Gorbachev: “Mr. President, you are regarded by many people in
this world as a hero for causing the end of tyranny and the collapse of
communism. But you are also criticized heavily by those who say you
opened a Pandora’s Box. And they say, ‘Look at the strife now, look at
the economic chaos, look at the Mafia structure, look at the
corruption.’ They say that you opened and started a plan that you did
not know how to finish.”
The next night on ABC’s World News Tonight,
anchor Peter Jennings struck the same note: “It is probably hard for
most Americans to imagine anyone feeling nostalgic about living behind
the Wall. It may also be hard to imagine that anyone in the Western part
of Germany would miss the Wall either. But miss it, some people do.”
Five years later, Moscow was one of the stops for NBC’s Matt Lauer during his annual “Where in the World Is Matt Lauer?” Today
show feature. Lauer suggested that, for many Russians, the decades
spent under communism were the good old days: “We’re gonna be talking
about the New Russia, how a few people are doing very well and the fear
that others are being left very far behind,” he teased on the February
12, 2004 morning news program. He later declared: “Russia’s rush to
capitalism left the vast majority scrambling to survive. For many, life
is worse than it was in Soviet times.”
In the October 12, 2009, Newsweek wondered: “Was Russia Better Off Red?” The magazine answered its own question with a full-page graphic
showing that Russia today has fewer hospitals and movie theaters, but
more crime and divorce. “Since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991,
Russia has seen an increase in oligarchs and Louis Vuitton outlets.
But by many other measures, Russians are worse off.”
When the
Soviet Union existed, the embarrassing puff pieces sat alongside
reports of military crackdowns, belligerent speeches from the Kremlin
wall, and occasional reports on dissidents and other abuses. But with
the Soviet Union gone, the gauzy nostalgia took on an increasing share
of what the media continued to say about communism.
The pop culture also contributed to the softening of communism’s image. As the Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby noted in a 2006 column,
“The glamorization of communism is widespread. On West 4th Street in
Manhattan, the popular KGB Bar is known for its literary readings and
Soviet propaganda posters. In Los Angeles, the La La Ling boutique sells
baby clothing emblazoned with the face of Che Guevara, Fidel Castro’s
notorious henchman. At the House of Mao, a popular eatery in Singapore,
waiters in Chinese army uniforms serve Long March Chicken, and a giant
picture of Mao Zedong dominates one wall."
Communist chic hit the national media, too. In April 2006, an
entertainment reporter on the NBC-produced Access Hollywood wore a
hammer and sickle shirt on camera two weekdays in a row. New York
correspondent Tim Vincent (shown at right), a veteran of the BBC, wore a
jacket over the red shirt with the communist symbol clearly visible
inside a gold-outlined red star which (sans the hammer and sickle)
would match the Soviet’s Red Army emblem.
As Jacoby wondered,
“How can people who wouldn’t dream of drinking in a pub called Gestapo
cheerfully hang out at the KGB Bar? If the swastika is an undisputed
symbol of unspeakable evil, can the hammer-and-sickle and other emblems
of communism be anything less?”
One answer may be that the news
media have painted communism as far more benign than it really was —
an “uplifting idea,” as CBS’s Andy Rooney described it in 1989, but it
“got in with a bad crowd when it was young and never got the chance.”
Many reporters seem sympathetic to the idea that state control is
preferable to a free economy. In the mid-1990s, researchers Stanley
Rothman and Amy Black surveyed journalists and found strong support for
government intervention, including making sure that everyone has a job
and working to “reduce the income gap between the rich and the poor.”
Writing in the Spring 2001 Public Interest,
Rothman and Black concluded: “Despite the discrediting of centrally
planned economies produced by the collapse of the Soviet Union and other
communist regimes, attitudes about government control of the economy
have not changed much since the 1980s.”
The too-fond
reminiscences of Soviet communism are at odds with the realities of
history. As an economic model, communism was an utter failure. Over the
decades the two existed side by side, citizens in the capitalist world
enjoyed increasing standards of living, technological innovation, and
growing wealth, while the communist world stagnated or worse. But as a
political system, totalitarian communism was a true horror, with
casualties numbering in the tens of millions. There is nothing in the
true record of communism that merits romantic reflection.
Before
the revolutions of 1989, journalists informed us that communism was
truly popular among the people of Eastern Europe and the U.S.S.R. After
that fallacy was demolished, the media insisted that capitalism was the
real catastrophe, with workers victimized by the lack of the “safety
net” provided by the ex-dictators. Most perverse, some reporters even
cast the Soviet Union’s absence — not its 70-year presence — as the real
threat to human rights.
As the anniversary of the toppling of
the Berlin Wall approaches, it’s worth celebrating the end of European
communism. But it’s also worth recalling at this time how the liberal
media failed to accurately portray the evils of communism, with coverage
that too often tipped in favor of the oppressors, not the oppressed.
At the very least, journalists should take this opportunity to
investigate the human rights abuses and oppression that still exists in
the world’s last totally communist states, Cuba and North Korea. The
gauzy, romantic coverage of the communist regime in Cuba needs to end —
unless the media once again wish to be on the wrong side of history
when that dictatorship, too, is finally swept away.