America’s Left has had a sordid history of pseudo-intellectualism, gross incompetence and stultifying naivete. While many Americans are probably familiar with 30’s NY Times’ reporter, Walter Duranty, who called Stalin’s USSR “A worker’s paradise,” at the very same time Stalin was murdering over 30 million Russians, he’s only one among many legendarily dumb American Leftists.
Incredibly enough, Duranty actually won a Pulitzer Prize for his works of fictional news. Surely that proves that both Duranty and the NY Times weredumb, but perhaps the single most moronic statement ever by an American journalist may have been made by Lincoln Steffens’, in his time a famous American radical.
In 1919 Steffens was sent to the fledgling USSR to see how Russia was doing under the Communists, Steffens breathlessly reported back, "I have been over into the future, and it works."
Incredibly enough, Duranty actually won a Pulitzer Prize for his works of fictional news. Surely that proves that both Duranty and the NY Times weredumb, but perhaps the single most moronic statement ever by an American journalist may have been made by Lincoln Steffens’, in his time a famous American radical.
In 1919 Steffens was sent to the fledgling USSR to see how Russia was doing under the Communists, Steffens breathlessly reported back, "I have been over into the future, and it works."
2 comments:
Yes... and how DID that "communism" work out for the USSR?
It's amazing to me when I hear a co-worker speaking to another about how she thinks socialism is better and that now she feels she can finally speak out to the fact.
She's ill informed, if nothing else.
The problem the USSR had was the same one that Mao's China and Pol Pot's Cambodia had - in order to impose a government-run economy, without private property rights, those who own property and businesses must have the things they built (all those homes and businesses) taken from, almost always by force.
That tends to necessitate mass murder.
Beyond that is the absolute inefficiency and inability to produce any degree of prosperity of socialism and that's why socialist socieities are almost always tyrannies, built on mass murder and rife with incredible poverty and massive deprivation.
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