Another Teflon Communist

Its one thing for political naïfs to condemn capitalism and celebrate Communism, but it’s another for reputable media to publish their nonsense.

Recently, Macleans – Canada’s leading newsmagazine – actually published a column headlined “The left must stand against capitalism. Now.” The author, Andray Domise, began by explaining that an environmental activist had recently asked him to recommend books about working-class rights, decolonization, and other issues. Domise suggested The Communist Manifesto. The activist, however, did not respond with enthusiasm. This bugged Domise, who saw it as typical of many members of the left, who, alas, “cannot quit kidding themselves by believing that capitalism exists as a benevolent or even neutral social arrangement.”

His argument was that if the left wants to triumph, it “must stand in principled opposition to capitalism.” As far as Domise is concerned, capitalism is at the root of pretty much every problem on earth: capitalists “pollute oceans with plastic, fill the air with smog and accelerate climate change via carbon emissions.” They warp environmental policies “to the point of immorality.” They make housing unaffordable. They cause income inequality to increase. They have no concern for working-class people. How to put an end to it? Only through “organized, large-scale resistance” to the “capricious free market.” Fortunately, maintained Domise, “58 per cent of Canadians have a favourable view of socialism,” which bodes well toward the possibility of encouraging them to “expand” their “political vision…beyond capitalism” by embracing Communism wholesale.

And that was pretty much all he had to say. Bottom line: one more fool who’s willing to drop the entire bloody history of the twentieth century down the memory hole, turn his gaze away from the nightmares that are today’s Venezuela and North Korea, and plunge right back into the maelstrom.

Who is Andray Domise? Well, for one thing, he was arrested in 2016 and charged with one count of mischief and three counts of domestic assault, all of them involving alleged physical abuse of his then girlfriend. An article about the case, which was settled out of court, described Domise as a “darling of the progressive scene in Toronto” who, despite a reputation as a stalwart supporter of feminism, “is known to have harassed and attacked feminists online for years, particularly those who speak out against male violence, misogyny, pornography, objectification, and the sex industry.” The response of Macleans to this courtroom episode was to suspend Domise’s column for a week.

Another commentator on Domise’s brush with the law described him as a “self-celebrating prat” (British and Canadian for “idiot”) whose “self-promotion drive” had ended up in a “ditch” as a result of his arrest. The commentator provided some info on Domise’s background: born Andre, Domise “switched to the more Caribana-inflected ‘Andray’ when he realized that ‘Andre’ comes with all sorts of inferences, none of them flattering.” When he ran for a Toronto city council seat, he served up a “fable about being raised in poverty” by a “single mother in a social housing complex”; in fact, his mother divorced and remarried and the family moved to West Palm Beach, and shortly after their relocation to Toronto Domise was a university student. As for his arrest, both Macleans and The Toronto Star knew about it at the time, but kept mum; not until months later did the National Post find out and break the news.

So it goes. Another day, another shameless apologist for the evils of Marxism being protected by his leftist media cronies – even when it becomes clear to everyone that he’s the very opposite of the pillar of honesty and virtue that he pretends to be.

Posted on January 14, 2020January 4, 2020 by usefulstooges 3

Will Owen Jones ever get it?

As we noted back in April, Owen Jones, perhaps the best known leftist commentator in Britain, “still looks like a high-school kid” even though he’s 34. Maybe it’s because his brow hasn’t been furrowed by deep thoughts. Although he is considered highly influential, it’s impossible, we wrote, to grasp why “anyone, anywhere, could possibly be influenced by him.”

But there he is, this Oxford grad who is the son and grandson of Communists, constantly pontificating in the pages of the Guardian and all over British TV, endlessly reiterating his one-dimensional, ideologically lockstep message that “capitalism is a sham” and “socialism is our only hope.” He is constantly condemning Islamophobia, which he has called “a European pandemic” and “the most widespread…form of bigotry of our times,” but won’t breathe a word in criticism of Islam or in acknowledgment of the ongoing worldwide oppression of Christians Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, women, gays, and others in the name of Allah.

A gay man, Jones is eternally on the lookout for the slightest hint of right-wing homophobia, but simply refuses to talk about the fact that sharia law orders the execution of gays. Appearing on Sky News after the June 12, 2016, jihadist massacre at the gay Pulse nightclub in Orlando, he was mainly concerned with shutting down any mention by his host and fellow panelist of the atrocity’s Islamic roots, and when they refused to be silenced, he walked off in a now-famous huff.

Jones was also a devout fan of Hugo Chávez and Fidel Castro. And – oh, yes – he’s an ardent follower of Jeremy Corbyn, the anti-Semite who led the Labour Party to a historic defeat in the UK’s December 12 parliamentary elections. In the hours after the loss, Jones tweeted that voters had abandoned Labour because of its wishy-washy position. A few days later, in his post-election column, Jones presented a longer list of reasons for the loss, citing a series of misguided strategies and tactics. This supposedly influential voice of the left had utterly failed to recognize that the problem was a pure matter of ideology: the sometime reformist party of the working class had, quite simply, been taken over by radical elites who live in a north London bubble, who look down on the proles, and who love the idea of socialism even though they’ve never, of course, lived in a socialist country or seriously studied the subject.

And Jones is one of them. Which is the only reason any of these people read him and take him seriously: because he shares, and affirms, their own shallow, puerile worldview. “I don’t think anyone on the left should regret our enthusiasm for the transformative programme on offer,” Jones wrote in his column. “These are the right policies for the country and the planet, and a bad campaign hasn’t changed that.” While Labour, he asserted, needed to win back elderly voters, it must not give up “the progressive social values that are articles of faith to its young supporters.” Which is to say the hip, privileged, urban young, many of whom have never had a job, run a business, or paid income taxes, and who have embraced a certain set of political propositions not because they know anything about the actual lessons of modern history and economics but because adherence to those propositions is de rigueur in their social circle.

Posted on January 2, 2020December 24, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Surprise: The Guardian loves AOC!

The Guardian‘s Christmas gift to Alexandria Ocasio Cortez was a splashy profile running more than 1600 words that could have written by her own PR team. There wasn’t even a pretense of balance: this was a love letter, pure and simple. The paper quoted one “progressive leader” as saying that AOC’s “presence in Congress has been seismic.” She’s “convinced every major 2020 presidential candidate to support her Green New Deal” (never mind that it’s a ludicrous set of proposals rooted in extreme socialist ideology rather than in any realistic understanding of anything), “galvanized opposition to a deal with Amazon in New York” (hence depriving tens of thousands of New Yorkers of terrific jobs), and inspired innumerable would-be AOCs around the country to, as another fan put it, “challeng[e] the status quo – by taking on politics as usual in Washington.”

But AOC isn’t just taking on “politics as usual.” That’s what Trump is doing. AOC? She’s taking on reality itself. Although she graduated from Boston University with a degree in economics, she seems to have no grasp whatsoever of the most basic economic principles and no awareness of the history of the ideas she’s pushing – which are, in any event, far to the left of the American electorate. Appearing at a Bernie Sanders campaign event in Los Angeles the weekend before Christmas, AOC asked the crowd: “Are you ready for the revolution?” Her goal, and Bernie’s goal, she said, echoing generations of founders of what turned out to be totalitarian regimes, was to “establish a loving society in the United States of America.” America, she insisted, is “not an advanced society,” but is a “fascist” state that, among many other horrible things, “allows people to die because they can’t afford their insulin,” and so on. Emblematic of her intellectual confusion was her ability to charge, in one moment, that America is imperialistic, and, in the next moment, to say that part of America’s duty is to change the world for the better. Among much else, she called for “black liberation” and “queer liberation” and “a policy that honors indigenous wisdom and leadership.” Joining her on the platform, and praised by her lavishly, was Marxist race hustler Cornel West – no surprise there. Such is the company she keeps. Where was that other frequent Sanders stand-in, pro-sharia “feminist” Linda Sarsour?

In Britain, the Labour Party just experienced a historic defeat at the polls because British voters, it turned out, don’t want their government going full Commie. Americans don’t want that for their country either. But the flagship rag of the UK’s Corbynista left doesn’t seem to have learned its lessons. Here’s how The Guardian described AOC’s politics: she’s “wary of the excesses of capitalism” has an “uncompromising clarity of vision,” and is a “political and cultural icon on the progressive left” who “has also transfixed the right.” The Guardian even described her as being “witty,” a word it would never occur to us to apply to AOC, who, when she moved into her new apartment after being elected to Congress, was baffled by that contraption in her sink drain: she had never seen, or, apparently, heard tell of, a garbage disposal. This is the woman who wants to change the entire way in which Americans live their lives – using more or less the same blueprint that has made Castro’s Cuba and chavista Venezuela such roaring successes. Let us hope she ends up on the same trash heap of history to which UK voters, in their wisdom, have consigned Jeremy Corbyn.

Posted on December 31, 2019December 24, 2019 by usefulstooges 2

Nigeria stones gays; CNN cheers Nigeria’s “traditional weddings”

For those of us who live in the Western world, it can seem as if gay rights have won the day. Having been legalized in Germany in 2017 and in Austria in 2018, same-sex marriage is the law of the land in every major Western country except Switzerland, which seems to be on the verge of approval. It’s still verboten, to be sure, in the microstates of Liechtenstein, Andorra, Monaco, and – surprise! – the Vatican City State.

Monaco: every modern amenity except gay marriage

There are odd exceptions and gray areas. Another microstate, San Marino, in the name of tourist profits, permits foreign gay couples, but not same-sex Sammarinese citizens, to wed within its borders. Also, although the 2015 U.S. Supreme Court ruling on gay nuptials applies to Puerto Rico, Guam, and the U.S. Virgin Islands, the jury is still out on whether it applies to American Samoa. And while gay marriages are already recognized in most of the U.K. and in the nation of Ireland, gays in Northern Ireland won’t enjoy the right to marry until this coming January. There are other curiosities: the Netherlands was the first country in the world to permit same-sex marriage, but the status of gay unions is still a gray area in Aruba, Curaçao and Sint Maarten, even though they are fully constituent parts of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The two large islands making up the bulk of New Zealand have recognized same-sex marriage since 2013, but it’s still banned in the rest of the so-called Realm of New Zealand — namely, the Cook Islands and the islands of Niue and Tokelau.

Some may find it surprising that so many Latin American countries – Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Uruguay – have same-sex marriage. Even more surprising, perhaps, is that there are beginning to be legal breakthroughs in gay rights in countries where public hostility toward gays is still through the roof. In June, for example, laws criminalizing same-sex relations were – quite remarkably – ruled unconstitutional in Botswana. This followed similar actions in Angola, Mozambique, and the Seychelles – and, last year, in India.

But in some part of the world, things are going the other way. Take Nigeria. In 2014, that country’s then president, Goodluck Jonathan, signed an act prohibiting same-sex marriage and “amorous relationships,” the latter of which apparently refers to any sort of intimate same-sex conduct. Violation can result in a long jail term – which, according to the Guardian, is 10 years. On December 11, the Guardian‘s Jason Burke reported that no fewer than 47 men had just gone on trial for this transgression, having been arrested in a police raid on a Lagos hotel where they were attending a meeting of a gay club. Although the law has previously been used by Nigerian authorities to harass, detain, intimidate, and extort money from gays, this is reportedly the first time that suspected offenses have led to actual prosecution.

A “traditional Nigerian wedding” as depicted by CNN

In a way, the 47 gay defendants were lucky to have been arrested in Lagos, which is in southern Nigeria, rather than in one of twelve states in northern Nigeria that have adopted sharia law, under which homosexuality is punishable by stoning to death. Given these grim facts about the status of gays in Nigeria, some readers who are aware of the truth about the situation might have been surprised on October 1 to read an article on the CNN website headlined “10 Things Nigeria Does Better than Anywhere Else.” The author of the piece, Noo Saro-Wiwa, began by admitting that “Nigeria has something of an image problem” but went on at once to insist that Nigeria, for several reasons, is an absolutely terrific tourist destination. Ironically, the very first reason given was the country’s “traditional weddings”: After gushing for several sentences about the terrific way in which Nigerians perform marriage ceremonies, Saro-Wiwa concluded: “If you haven’t experienced a traditional Nigerian wedding, you haven’t experienced Nigeria.” In true CNN fashion – the international “news” network loves to whitewash African and Arabic countries, perhaps because it derives much of its income from African governments, in the form of advertising revenue from their national airlines and tourism boards, and despite the fact that these countries are the toughest on earth on their gay citizens – there wasn’t a word about the way in which non-traditional couples are treated in Africa’s most populous country. This is CNN.

Posted on December 24, 2019December 25, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Crazy, they call him

Recently, in what, in other times, would have been considered a sensational development, news media published a leaked account of an editorial meeting at the New York Times at which that newspaper’s top editor, Dean Baquet, essentially explained to his colleagues that since the Gray Lady’s all-out effort over the past couple of years to paint President Trump as a tool of Vladimir Putin had failed ignominiously, the paper’s new approach would be to intensify efforts to smear Trump as a racist. The account of the meeting underscored the already obvious fact that in the age of Trump, actual journalism, in many of the nation’s formerly most respected news media, has increasingly given way to the systematic distortion, suppression, and invention of facts in pursuit of a partisan agenda.

If the Times and the Washington Post, under the ownership of Silicon Valley mega-billionaire Jeff Bezos, have both been accused in recent years of choosing this kind of radical activism over reportage, so has CNN. In what may well be the most egregious example yet of CNN’s over-the-top approach to the Trump presidency, Brian Stelter, on last Sunday’s edition of his laughably named program Reliable Sources, had as his guests two psychiatrists who had been invited on to discuss the supposed problems with Trump’s psychiatric health. This topic seemed a particularly curious choice, especially at a time when 76-year-old Joe Biden, at present the leading candidate to challenge Trump for the presidency on behalf of the Democratic Party, seems daily to be showing signs of possible senile dementia, giving speeches in which, among much else, he has stated his preference for “facts over truth,” placed the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy in the “late 1970s,” and misidentified New Hampshire as Vermont. Admittedly, Biden has always been a gaffe machine (and a serial plagiarist of other hack politicians’ speeches), but the frequency and weirdness of his misstatements seems to have undergone a serious uptick during his current campaign. But the psychiatrists weren’t there to discuss Biden, of course; they were there to talk Trump. And to bury him, not praise him.

Both headshrinkers were highly credentialed. Dr. Bandy X. Lee, a psychiatry professor at Yale School of Medicine, complained sourly that “concerns” expressed by her and other psychiatrists about the mental state of President Trump had been routinely ignored by the news media and charged that the American Psychiatric Association, in its refusal to entertain diagnoses of Trump by professionals who had never met him – a violation of the so-called “Goldwater rule” – had become more or less a tool of the state. You would think that the news media had been walking on eggshells to avoid criticizing Trump’s often bumptious conduct, rather than highlighting it at every opportunity.

What was stunning was that the other psychiatrist, Dr. Allen Frances, former chair of psychiatry at Duke University, who had been brought on purportedly to provide “balance” to Lee’s readiness to psychoanalyze the president, turned out to have an even more outrageous take on the issue. His line was that we shouldn’t call Trump crazy, because “medicalizing politics…stigmatizes the mentally ill.” Frances said that he had known thousands of such patients, and that most of them had been “well-behaved, well-mannered, good people. Trump is none of these. Lumping the mentally ill in with Trump is a terrible insult to the mentally ill.” A couple of points. First, to say that most people with serious psychiatric issues are “well-behaved” and “well-mannered” is to sentimentalize mental illness: a full-blown psychotic, for example, is rarely either “well-behaved” or “well-mannered.” Second, has Frances ever met Trump? If not, what business does he have pronouncing on his virtues or lack thereof?

But Frances had more to say. “Calling Trump crazy hides the fact that we’re crazy for having elected him and even crazier for allowing his crazy policies to persist.” Some psychiatrist! We thought the word “crazy” was a no-no in the psychiatric game. But not, apparently, when you’re describing the millions of deplorables across the United States who put this reprehensible creature in office. Apparently in Frances’s view, actually calling actual crazy people crazy is insensitive, but calling people whose politics you disapprove of is not.

But Frances’s most extraordinary assertion was yet to come: “Trump is as destructive a person in this century as Hitler, Stalin and Mao were in the last century. He may be responsible for many more million deaths than they were. He needs to be contained, but needs to be contained by attacking his policies and not his person.” To call this hyperbole is to realize that sometimes even the word hyperbole isn’t strong enough. All told, Hitler, Stalin, Mao took over a hundred million lives. You can like or dislike Trump’s politics or his personal style, but to compare him to these three is, in a word, crazy. And to follow this flagrant personal attack by saying that we should attack Trump’s “policies and not his person” sounds, if we may join the club and start handing out diagnoses, like a contradiction that only some kind of schizoid wacko would be capable of.

But insulting though all this nonsense is to the president of the U.S., we’re not offended on his behalf. He’s a big boy and this sort of thing rolls off his back like water off the back of a duck. No, what appalls us about Frances’s comparison of Trump to the three most murderous creatures of the twentieth century immeasurably diminishes the scale of their evil and destructiveness. At a time when so many Americans, especially younger Americans, know little about Hitler except that he was a bad guy who killed Jews, who know nothing about Mao, and who have perhaps been told by their history teachers and professors that the Soviet Union was a good idea and Stalin a well-meaning socialist who perhaps got a bit too carried away, nothing could be more irresponsible than Frances’s glib equation of Trump with this villainous trio.

To top it all off, Brian Stelter, who is, frankly, a buffoon, sat through Frances’s whole nutty rant without so much as offering up a mild challenge to Frances’s kooky claims. Later, when attacked widely for sitting there with his mouth shut, Stelter blamed his silence on some technical goof. Whatever. The mistake was inviting these two shrinks on in the first place to discuss such a topic. The whole thing was yet another a black mark on CNN’s record, and it must have caused many discerning viewers to wonder, and worry, about the kind of “education” in matters psychiatric being provided to med students at Yale and, especially, Duke.

Posted on August 29, 2019August 30, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Cuban defectors? Who cares?

We’ve spent plenty of time on this website discussing celebrities from the US and other free countries who have gotten a big kick out of going slumming in Cuba, chumming around with Fidel Castro, and the like. We’ve written about how current New York Mayor (and presidential hopeful) Bill de Blasio honeymooned in Havana. About how another one of the current crop of presidential candidates, Bernie Sanders, has praised Castro and visited Cuba. About how the mayor of New Orleans went to Havana for tips on economic development. About Barbara Walters’s cozy relationship with Fidel. About the quasi-romance between Fidel and another American TV “journalist,” Lisa Howard. About a UCLA art professor’s fascination with Che Guevara. About a fun trip made by Prince Charles and his wife, Camilla, to the island prison. About how Karl Lagerfeld used rundown Havana as a backdrop for a fashion show. About the movie that director Bob Yari filmed in Cuba. About celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain’s admiration for the Castro regime. And about heroic whitewashes of Cuban Communism by Time Magazine and other media.

The point has consistently been the same: that it’s easy for people living in democratic countries to romanticize tyranny. It seems especially easy, somehow, for rich and privileged folks who like to make the most of their wealth and their ability to travel at will to any spot on earth. There’s something about visiting a dictatorship and consorting with a dictator that just tickles their fancy. Somehow they’re able to take in the terrible spectacle of fellow human beings living under economic and political conditions that they themselves would chafe under and yet praise the system, and the thugs, that forces these conditions upon them. The whole business is an eternal reality and an eternal puzzle.

Yet however blinkered so many people in the West may be about the reality of a place like Cuba, the Cubans themselves have no illusions. They know what it is to live every of their lives without liberty. So it is that last month, six members of Cuba’s youth soccer team who were in New York on their way from Cuba to the U.S. Virgin Islands – where they were scheduled to play a game on July 17 against the team representing that possession – defected. Six! This was, of course, hardly a unique event: only a month earlier, four Cuban soccer players defected while in the U.S. for a tournament.

This report first appeared in the official Cuban government daily Granma. It was picked up by the news service Agence France-Presse. We read about it at the reliable Babalu Blog, which had found the story at the website of a Pakistani newspaper. A roundabout way, don’t you think, for a story from Cuba to reach American readers? (Even more roundabout, in fact, than the idea of having to go through New York to get from Havana to the U.S. Virgin Islands.) But this is what happens when major Western newspapers simply aren’t interested in such stories – such, alas, is their admiration for, or at very least readiness to cover for, the Cuban system. We checked: even though the defection took place in New York, none of that city’s major dailies appears to have reported on it. Well, disgraceful enough for them. But whether covered in the media or not, there were six Cubans who freer when they went to bed that evening than when they’d woken up that morning – and that’s what matters.

Posted on August 8, 2019August 9, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

More praise for the USSR at the Times

On this site, where our task is to record the antics and inanities of those who have taken it upon themselves to defend the indefensible, all roads, or at least so it can sometimes seem, lead back to the New York Times. It was the Times, after all, that gave us our mascot, the world-class lickspittle (and Pulitzer Prize winner!) Walter Duranty, who while serving as the Gray Lady’s Moscow correspondent during the Stalin era shamelessly defended Uncle Joe’s evil Gulag, his brutal policy of farm collectivization, and his outrageous show trials – and, not least, covered up his deliberately engineered Ukrainian famine, the Holodomor. Millions died; Duranty lied. And what makes things all the worse is that, far from being an exception to the rule at the Times, which countless low-information readers continue to view as a newspaper of record, Duranty was a proud and consistent exponent of an ignoble and longstanding Times tradition: the reflexive whitewashing of totalitarian regimes.

The Nazis, too, benefited from the Times’s weird compulsion to sugarcoat monstrous tyranny – reports on the Third Reich’s treatment of Jews were routinely suppressed, softened, and relegated to short articles in the newspaper’s back pages. Decades later, similarly, Times correspondent Herbert L. Matthews gave so much positive coverage to Fidel Castro’s Communist revolution that the National Review, borrowing a familiar classified-ad tag of the day – “I got my job through the New York Times” – ran a parody ad featuring El Comandante himself; in 2007, Reason ran a piece about Matthews headlined “Fidel’s Favorite Propagandist.”

Three decades after the fall of the Iron Curtain, the Times hasn’t stopped looking for aspects of Soviet life to hold up for praise. A couple of years ago we took note of a sickening Times piece by Vivian Gornick entitled “When Communism Inspired Americans” – a serious effort on Gornick’s part to paint American Stalinists as heroic believers in noble ideals, rather than as the unquestioning toadies of (and lying apologists for) a mass-murdering dictator. Also in 2017, we commented on an instant classic entitled “Why Women Had Better Sex under Socialism.” In this masterpiece of buffoonery, Kristen R. Ghodsee, a professor (what else?) at the University of Pennsylvania, maintained that women in the Soviet Union not only had more rights than women in the democratic West but also had more orgasms.

Gornick’s and Ghodsee’s pieces were part of a Times series commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. Now, to celebrate the fiftieth year since Apollo 11, the ever-reliable Times has run a piece by one Sophie Pinkham arguing that, even though America beat Russia in the race to put a man on the moon, the U.S.S.R. won what she calls “the Space Race for Equality.” Meaning what? Quite simply, that the Soviets “sent women and people of color to space years before the U.S.” As Pinkham explains: “The Cold War was fought as much on an ideological front as a military one, and the Soviet Union often emphasized the sexism and racism of its capitalist opponents — particularly the segregated United States. And the space race was a prime opportunity to signal the U.S.S.R.’s commitment to equality.”

Pause for a moment, if you will, over those last words: “the U.S.S.R.’s commitment to equality.” Not its alleged or claimed or supposed or pretended commitment. Pinkham – a grad student at Columbia University who has written for such far-left organs as The Nation and London Review of Books – is apparently trying to sell the Soviet Union to us as a beacon of equality. Yes, in a way we suppose men and women were equal under Soviet Communism – equal, that is, in their utter lack of human rights and democratic freedoms. Men and women alike were woken in the middle of the night by KGB agents and beaten, tortured, or imprisoned, without being officially charged or tried, for having been overheard voicing some complaint or for having otherwise found their way onto the government’s radar. Men and women alike were condemned to death by starvation in the Holodomor, were sent away for years at a time to the Gulag, or were simply lined up against walls and shot in cold blood.

That’s Soviet equality, folks. Yet after Columbia awards a Ph.D. to Pinkham – who, in her recent photos, appears to be too young ever to have experienced Communism firsthand in the U.S.S.R. or its European satellites – she will earn a living telling generations of students at some prestigious college or other that Soviet Communism was synonymous with social equality. Caveat emptor.

Posted on July 30, 2019July 30, 2019 by usefulstooges 0

Those adorable Communists

In late June, when the Guardian sent a reporter to cover the annual convention of the Communist Party USA, the article that resulted was surprisingly sympathetic. No, let’s revise that a bit: the level of sympathy would have been surprising had the piece appeared in some other British newspaper – say, the Telegraph or the Times. But it would probably be naïve to be surprised by a friendly account of a CPUSA clambake in the Guardian.

Written by one Eric Lutz, the article said nothing particularly negative about the party or its ideology. On the contrary, Lutz seemed to strive to present the CPUSA as a longtime victim of unfair prejudice. The subhead, for example, noted that the party had been “derided and feared for 100 years.” The first sentence called the party “one of American politics[’] biggest historical bogeymen.” Lutz quoted, without comment, a line from a CPUSA official’s convention speech in which he assured America that “the [C]ommunist [P]arty isn’t out to hurt you….It will set you free.”

Moreover, Lutz seemed pleased to be able to state that the party was looking to “a brighter future…at a moment in American politics in which democratic socialism and progressive ideas are increasingly finding a home in the mainstream of the Democratic party.” And when he reported that convention delegates “sought to send the message that their party has been the most consistent champion of [progressive] ideas [and] has been on the right side of some of the most consequential ideological battles of the last hundred years,” there was no indication whatsoever that Lutz wasn’t totally convinced. Neither he nor his editors found it necessary to remind readers of the hundreds of millions of human lives snuffed out by murderous twentieth-century Communist regimes. In a time when the vast majority of mainstream news media in the U.S. and Britain seem incapable of reporting on Donald Trump or the Republican Party or Brexit voters without a condescending sneer, there was not a whiff of skepticism in Lutz’s report on the American Communists.

Far from it. Apparently to show that Communists have been in the vanguard of the advancement of black Americans, Lutz noted that the father of one convention speaker, Pepe Lozano, had “rallied Mexican and Puerto Rican voters to support Harold Washington, the first African-American mayor” in the 1980s. Lutz went on to quote, again without a hint of doubt or dispute, Lozano’s claim that the CPUSA had played a major role in “profound American struggles for democracy.” For anyone who knows anything about the subject, the very idea that American Communists ever sought to advance democracy is obscene on the face of it. Whole books – extremely well documented books, some of them based on Soviet archives – have vividly shown just how thoroughly controlled the Cold War-era CPUSA was by the Kremlin and just how determined the party was to crush liberty and destroy its enemies. For the Guardian to drop all these facts down the memory hole is disgraceful.

“Communism,” wrote Lutz, “has long been regarded with fear in the US, viewed as antithetical to American values and democracy.” The implication here, of course, is that Communism isn’t antithetical to American values and democracy. What to say about the fact that a sentence like this could appear, in the year 2019, in a major British daily? Is Lutz a fool or a liar? “[I]t can be striking,” he observed, “to hear Americans openly discuss their support for communism.” Not “appalling”; not “disgusting”; not “vomit-inducing” – no, “striking.” Imagine a writer for any major conservative newspaper reporting on a neo-Nazi rally in this way. Nazism is – as it should be – beyond the pale. Why does Communism – an equally evil totalitarian ideology, and one that caused even more deaths than Nazism did – still get this kid-glove treatment?

Posted on July 11, 2019July 1, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

Baba Wawa & Fidel: a love story?

Okay, so she’s not a full-fledged, 100%, dyed-in-the-wool stooge. As we noted in a posting in December 2016, Barbara Walters was one of perhaps two of the upscale Manhattan guests at Leonard Bernstein’s 1970 Black Panthers fundraiser – the one that Tom Wolfe made famous in Radical Chic – who didn’t drool all over the thugs in a repulsive display of limousine liberalism and nostalgie de la boue. While glamorous folks like high-society bandleader Peter Duchin and New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers oohed and aahed over the Panthers’ plans for an armed revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, Walters actually asked a sensible question: “I’m talking as a white woman who has a white husband, who is a capitalist, or an agent of capitalists, and I am, too, and I want to know if you are to have your freedom, does that mean we have to go?” No, she didn’t give them a dressing-down and then storm out of the party, but at least she stood apart from fellow guests who looked at the gun-toting gangsters and, somehow, saw angels about to usher in a golden utopia.

Similarly, when she interviewed Fidel Castro in 1977, she at least – to her credit – said on the record that she disagreed with him on “the meaning of freedom.” But that statement came at the end of a nauseating puff piece in which Walters did a marvelous job of presenting the murderous dictator as a world-class charmer. She interviewed him again in 2002. And over the years she spoke frequently about her encounters with the Caribbean tyrant, her main point invariably being that he was, as she told Harpers Bazaar in 2014, “very charismatic – very charming and funny.” (Following his death, she said the same thing:“The word ‘charismatic’ was made for him.) Once her 1977 interview with Fidel was in the can, she recalled, “Castro took us into his kitchen and made us grilled cheese sandwiches.” Walters laughed. “That’s an experience you don’t have anymore.” Adorable! During the same Cuba trip, Walters and Castro “dined outdoors on roast pig and Algerian wine at Castro’s mountain retreat.” It’s good to be the dictator. That night, at least two people in Cuba ate well.

As the Harpers Bazaar writer observed, “One thing that seemed clear to everyone was the chemistry between Walters and Castro.” Walters herself said: “People did tease me after that, asking if this was a romance.” When he dropped her at the Havana airport, “I reached up to kiss him on both cheeks, and he all but pushed me away. It was a friendly European goodbye, but I was in Cuba, not France.” We checked with a couple of friends who’ve been interviewed by major newspapers and TV networks. They say that the reporters who interviewed them didn’t lean in for a smooch at the end of the interchange – not once! Interesting that Castro seemed to understand, as Walters didn’t, that, under such circumstances, osculation (European or not) was unprofessional.

“Cuba is a very different country because of Fidel Castro,” Walters told Harpers Bazaar, “and I don’t know what he is proudest of or what he wishes he could have accomplished.” Proudest of? Accomplished? What planet has this woman been living on for the past half century? Even to think along such lines is to buy into this despot’s propaganda. Looking back on her meetings with Fidel, we’d have loved to see her lean over with a smile, put a hand on his knee, and coo confidentially: “What’s your favorite prison?” or “Whose execution made you happiest?” We certainly wouldn’t expect this fatuous talking head – this purported feminist media pioneer who long ago gave up any pretense of being a real journalist and has spent the last few decades lobbing softballs at airheaded celebrities and chatting about the latest gossip on morning TV – to actually interrogate somebody like Fidel, confronting him boldly about his monstrous crimes, his outrageous hypocrisy, and his blatant propaganda. Instead, Walters parroted his propaganda, echoing the oft-repeated claim that he’d given his people first-rate health care and education. Lies, lies, lies. And although she did, yes, admit that he was an autocrat who’d robbed his people of their freedom, nobody has given Fidel and his regime better press in the U.S. than this silly, overrated woman.

Posted on April 25, 2019April 14, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

AFP whitewashes the Castros

From time to time on this site, we’ve examined various public figures who had a soft spot for the Castro regime in Cuba and media organizations whose reports from Cuba routinely focused on its purported charms rather than its totalitarian government. We’ve written about director Bob Yari, who filmed a movie in Cuba; designer Karl Lagerfeld, who used Havana’s crumbling buildings as a backdrop for a glamorous fashion show; and celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, who, notwithstanding his own wealth, made a point of castigation capitalism while celebrating the Castros. We’ve told the tale of Fidel’s affair with compliant ABC reporter Lisa Howard, noted the chummy relationship between Jesse Jackson and the Castros, and, not least, the shamelessness and fatuity with which Time Magazine, again and again, has glorified the island prison.

On January 2, Agence France Press demonstrated that the perverse impulse to whitewash the Cuban regime is not dead in 2019. Under the headline “Cuba celebrates 60 years of revolution amid challenges and change,” AFP described Cuba as a longtime “source of inspiration for leftist Latin American governments,” but added that the nation faces “increasing isolation in a region dominated by a resurgent right,” notably the new Brazilian government led by “far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.”

AFP reported that Bolsonaro had “made a point of not inviting” the new Cuban President Miguel Diaz-Canel and Venezuela’s Nicolas Maduro to his inauguration, a decision that some of us might consider principled but that AFP seemed to want readers to regard as churlish.

Typically, AFP labeled Bolsonaro – a pro-American, pro-Israeli conservative who has been dubbed the Latin American Trump – as “far-right,” and characterized Argentina, Chile and Peru as having “all swung to the right in recent years, unseating leftist governments.” A more objective media outlet might have put it a bit differently – might have said, that is, that the voters of those countries have rejected socialism in favor of democratic capitalism.

Meanwhile, in its references to Cuba’s leaders, AFP was careful to avoid the word “dictator,” obediently referring to Raul Castro as “[e]x-president” and as “first secretary of the Communist Party,” identifying the late Fidel Castro as “Cuba’s revolutionary leader,” and giving the current thug-in-chief, Miguel Diaz-Canel, his official title of “President.” AFP also reported that Maduro had “paid tribute to the ‘heroic Cuban people,’” whom he praised for their “’resistance and dignity’ in the face of ’60 years of sacrifices, struggles and blockade.’” In addition, according to AFP, “[a]nother surviving leftist leader, Bolivia’s Evo Morales, said Cuba’s revolution gave birth to ‘the light of hope and invincible will for the liberation of the people.’” This effusive rhetoric by Maduro and Morales was presented by AFP without context, so that an ill-informed reader would never know that the Cuban people have spent the last six decades not as stalwart patriots who have bravely resisted a U.S. blockade but as downtrodden subjects of a totalitarian tyranny.

To be sure, the word “dictator” did eventually appear in the AFP article – but only as a means of describing Castro’s predessor, Fulgencio Batista. To its credit, moreover, AFP also mentioned, toward the end of its article, that Cuba is a communist state. It also quoted a dissident, but that dissident, as it happened, was not an anti-Communist who opposed the Cuban Revolution from the start but a diehard Communist named Vladimiro Roca, whose father was a sidekick of Fidel Castro, who himself had run afoul of authorities and spent several years in prison, and whose complaint was therefore that the Cuban Revolution “died a long time ago.”

Moreover, while AFP acknowledged that Cuba “has faced heavy criticism” abroad, it presented the Cuban people not as decades-long victims of a brutal autocracy but as having “had to contend with an increasingly hostile administration under Trump these last two years.” There’s no hint that the Trump administration is hostile not to the Cuban people but to their unelected masters. In 2019, alas, such full-scale misrepresentation continues to be par for the course for all too many Western media.

Posted on January 8, 2019January 8, 2019 by usefulstooges 1

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