Again, Useful Idiots

The Conning Tower ^ | 3/8/03 | Trentino

[Davis]

For those of you who don't have the time or the inclination to read Mona Charen's excellent book, Useful Idiots, yes, the book I recommended to you in this space a couple of weeks ago, you can take the short course: read Arnold Beichman's succinct essay on the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Josef Vissarionovich Stalin.

Mr. Beichman covers those useful idiots who could not or would not see the enormity of the famine deliberately caused in the Soviet Union in 1932-1933, somewhere around 5,000,000 lives. Walter Duranty reported it falsely to his useful idiot bosses at the New York Times and they repeated it to the world, earning a Pulitzer Prize therefore which they have never returned.

Beichman wonders about those visitors from the West, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Bloomsbury patrician Fabians, Bernard Shaw, too, and FDR's Ambassador to the Soviet Union, Joseph P. Davies, among others, who could not pierce the mask of the Soviet purge trials, could not comprehend the evil they were staring at. A paradox, he says, these educated and otherwise intelligent people not catching on, not seeing the purge trials for what they were, monstrous blood baths.

Beichman's account of Paul Samuelson's ridiculous treatment of communist economies in his standard college textbook on economics, now in its umpteenth edition, is genuinely amusing. Beichman traces through several of those editions Samuelson's profound and total ignorance of that discipline--for which Samuelson was awarded a Nobel prize...more

[Davis]

Another bunch of leftists HERE

[SMEDLEYBUTLER]

Useful idiots

[Davis]

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