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
Whitewashing the Communist Record on Human Rights
In her 2003 book Useful Idiots,
conservative writer Mona Charen described the communist state as a
“comprehensive tyranny. The Soviet Union was not so much a state as a
vast criminal conspiracy. Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, Vladimir Bukovsky,
Natan Sharansky, and others are the great chroniclers of the grotesque
inhumanity of the Gulag and Communist rule....[The record shows] mass
murders, deportations, political persecutions, abuse of psychiatry, and
other depredations committed by the Communists.”
Yet during the
Cold War, the harsh repression that invariably accompanied communism
was often given short shrift in favor of stories about the need for
detente or peaceful coexistence. Some correspondents working in the
Soviet Union were not eager to shine their spotlight on the plight of
anti-communist dissidents. Nicholas Daniloff, the Moscow correspondent
for U.S. News & World Report, told the Washington Journalism Review
in June 1985: “I don’t consort with dissidents. The magazine considers
them a passing phenomenon of little interest.” Ironically, Daniloff
himself was imprisoned by Soviet authorities in September 1986 as a
supposed “spy,” in retaliation after the U.S. arrested a Soviet spy
working in Washington, D.C. The Reagan administration secured his
release after three weeks of confinement.
In spite of communism’s
appalling human rights record, journalists perversely suggested that
the repressive totalitarian system was somehow superior — better for
women’s “rights,” for example, or better than the “conservative”
Catholic Church.
“Yes, somehow, Soviet citizens are freer these
days — freer to kill one another, freer to hate Jews....Doing away with
totalitarianism and adding a dash of democracy seems an unlikely cure
for all that ails the Soviet system.”
— Co-host Harry Smith on CBS This Morning, February 9, 1990.
“One
year after crowds swept through the streets of Eastern Europe toppling
communist dictators with demands for more freedom, the region’s women
have found democracy a less than liberating experience....Part of the
reason many women feel let down by their revolutions is the emergence of
conservative forces, including the Catholic Church, following the
toppling of communist regimes.”
— Boston Globe reporter Jonathan Kaufman in a December 27, 1990 front-page news story.
“But most of his fellow countrymen do not share John Paul’s concept
of morality....Many here expect John Paul to use his authority to
support Church efforts to ban abortion, perhaps the country’s principal
means of birth control. And this, they say, could deprive them of a
freedom of choice the communists never tried to take away from them.”
— CBS reporter Bert Quint on the June 1, 1991 Evening News.
“Like
many other women in what used to be the German Democratic Republic,
she worries that political liberation has cost her social and economic
freedom....The kindergartens that cared for their children are becoming
too expensive, and West Germany’s more restrictive abortion laws
threaten to deny many Eastern women a popular method of birth
control....East Germany’s child-care system helped the state
indoctrinate its young, but also assured women in the East the freedom
to pursue a career while raising a family.”
— U.S. News & World Report special correspondent John Marks, July 1, 1991.
“There
is a danger that the forces of democracy, as they are called, will now
go too far. There is a spirit of revenge in the air [after the failed
Soviet coup].”
— Former New York Times reporter Hedrick Smith, August 26, 1991 Good Morning America.
“The economic and political turmoil that has swept the former
Communist East Bloc has hit women the hardest. There’s been a strong
backlash against the idea of women’s equality....Under the Communists,
women in the workplace were glorified. And if they needed time off to
give birth and raise families, they got it at full pay.”
— ABC reporter Jerry King, April 6, 1992 World News Tonight.
“Open
societies, it turns out, haven’t been as generous as socialism and
communism to women who want to serve in public office. From Albania to
Yemen, the number of women in power plummeted after the transition from
socialist governments, which sought to develop female as well as male
proletariats. As those governments died, so went the socialist ideals of
equality and the subsidies for social programs that aided women. In
many countries, traditional patriarchal cultures resurfaced.”
— Los Angeles Times correspondent Robin Wright, October 2, 1997 Philadelphia Inquirer op-ed.