Lenin is supposed to
have referred to blind defenders and apologists for the Soviet Union in
the Western democracies as "useful idiots." Yet even Lenin
might have been surprised at how far these useful idiots would carry
their partisanship in later years -- including our own times. Stalin's
man-made famine in the Soviet Union during the 1930s killed more
millions of people than Hitler killed in the Holocaust -- and Mao's
man-made famine in China killed more millions than died in the USSR. Yet
we not only hear little or nothing about either of these staggering
catastrophes in the Communist world today, very little was said about
them in the Western democracies while they were going on. Indeed, many
useful idiots denied that there were famines in the Soviet Union or in
Communist China.
The most famous of these was the New York Times' Moscow
correspondent, Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer prize for telling
people what they wanted to hear, rather than what was actually
happening. Duranty assured his readers that "there is no famine or
actual starvation, nor is there likely to be." Moreover, he blamed
reports to the contrary on "rumor factories" with anti-Soviet
bias.
It was decades later before the first serious scholarly study of that
famine was written, by Robert Conquest of the Hoover Institution, always
identified in politically correct circles as "right-wing." Yet
when the Soviets' own statistics on the deaths during the famine were
finally released, under Mikhail Gorbachev, they showed that the actual
deaths exceeded even the millions estimated by Dr. Conquest.
Official statistics on the famine deaths in China under Mao have
never been released, but knowledgeable estimates run upwards of 20
million people. Yet, even here, there were the same bland denials by
sympathizers and fellow travellers in the West as during the earlier
Soviet famine. One celebrated "expert" on China wrote: "I
saw no starving people in China, nothing that looked like old-time
famines." Horrifying as the pre-Communist famines were, they never
killed as many people as Mao's famine did.
Today, even after the evidence of massive man-made famines in the
Communist world, after Solzhenitsyn's revelations about the gulags and
after the horrors of the killing fields of Cambodia, the useful idiots
continue to deny or downplay staggering human tragedies under Communist
dictatorships. Or else they engage in moral equivalence, as Newsweek
editor and TV pundit Eleanor Clift did during the Elian Gonzalez
controversy, when she said: "To be a poor child in Cuba may in many
instances be better than being a poor child in Miami and I'm not going
to condemn their lifestyle so gratuitously."
Apparently totalitarian dictatorship is just a lifestyle, like
wearing sandals and beads and using herbal medicine. It apparently has
not occurred to Eleanor Clift to ask why poor people in Miami do not put
themselves and their children on flimsy boats, in a desperate effort to
reach Cuba.
Elian Gonzalez and his mother were only the latest of millions of
people to flee Communist dictatorships at the risk of their lives. Some
were shot trying to get past the Berlin wall and hundreds of thousands
of "boat people" were drowned trying to escape a Communist
Vietnam that many useful idiots were celebrating from inside free
democracies. Many who escaped from the Soviet Union to the West during
the Second World War were sent back by American authorities, except for
those who committed suicide rather than go back.
Yet none of this has really registered on a very large segment of the
intelligentsia in the West. Nor are Western capitalists immune to the
same blindness. The owner of the Baltimore Orioles announced that he
would not hire baseball players who defect from Cuba, because this would
be an "insult" to Castro. TV magnate Ted Turner has sponsored
a TV mini-series on the Cold War that has often taken the moral
equivalence line.
Turner's instructions to the historian who put this series together
was that he wanted no "triumphalism," meaning apparently no
depiction of the triumph of democracy over Communism. Various scholars
who have specialized in the study of Communist countries have criticized
the distortions in this mini-series in a recently published book titled
"CNN's Cold War Documentary: Issues and Controversy," edited
by Arnold Beichman.
Meanwhile, that moral-equivalence mini-series is being spread through
American schools from coast to coast, as if to turn our children into
the useful idiots of the future.
