Stalin's Cheerleader

Around the same time last week, I encountered (1) a story from the New York Times whose headline still has me at a loss for words: "Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism," and (2) an audio clip of Yaron Brook commenting on the oddly different moral status of communism and Nazism within the dominant intellectual establishment (the entertainment industry in particular).

From the second, I'll paraphrase a few observations of Brook's concerning the entertainment industry's double standard:

• For every movie depicting the evils of communism, there are a thousand depicting the evils of Nazism.
• Communists killed over 100 million people, and yet you have avowed communists in the entertainment press.
• Hollywood stands behind the communist regime in Venezuela, even now, as political opponents are being rounded up.

That's bad, but Kristen R. Ghodsee's piece in the Times was breathtaking even by comparison. Ghodsee cherry picks quotes from an acquaintance and some government researchers, for example, but never gets around to addressing how either comports with a quote like the following, from the survivor of a planned famine:

At that time I lived in the village of Yaressky of the Poltava region. More than a half of the village population perished as a result of the famine. It was terrifying to walk through the village: swollen people moaning and dying. The bodies of the dead were buried together, because there was no one to dig the graves.

There were no dogs and no cats. People died at work; it was of no concern whether your body was swollen, whether you could work, whether you have eaten, whether you could -- you had to go and work. Otherwise -- you are the enemy of the people.

Many people never lived to see the crops of 1933 and those crops were considerable. A more severe famine, other sufferings were awaiting ahead. Rye was starting to become ripe. Those who were still able made their way to the fields. This road, however, was covered with dead bodies, some could not reach the fields, some ate grain and died right away. The patrol was hunting them down, collecting everything, trampled down the collected spikelets, beat the people, came into their homes, seized everything. What they could not take -- they burned.

There is more about the Times story at the blog Human Progress, where Marian Tupy notes the following after also revealing that this incredible piece in the Times was part of an entire series:

I would have chosen to commemorate 100 years since the Bolshevik Revolution and the birth of the Soviet Union in a different way. Over 100,000,000 people have died or were killed while building socialism during the course of the 20th century. Call me crazy, but that staggering number of victims of communism seems to me more important than the somewhat dubious claim that Bulgarian comrades enjoyed more orgasms than women in the West. But as one Russian babushka said to another, suum cuique pulchrum est. [formatting and link added]

Tupy ends on the following note:

But don't take my word for it. You can still visit a few communist countries, including Cuba and North Korea, and compare the social status and empowerment of their women with those in the West. Had the esteemed editors of the Times done so, they would have, I hope, thought twice about publishing a series of pro-communist excreta.

That's putting things charitably, to say the least. This article is obscene on many levels, not the least because it attempts to prostitute what can and should be a sublime and joyous experience for the purpose of not just whitewashing, but celebrating barbarity.

-- CAV