Stossel on the Russian "Revolution"

John Stossel does a much better job, in terms of both brevity and appraisal, than Walter Duranty's old rag of marking the recent centenary of Communism as a political force:

Communist regimes went on to kill about 100 million people. Most died in famines after socialist tyrants forced people to practice inefficient collective farming. Millions of others were executed in political purges.

...

Under Mao, [Lily Tang] Williams nearly starved. "I was so hungry. My uncle taught me how to trap rats. But the problem is, everybody is trying to catch rats. Rats run out, too."

Still, she says she was so brainwashed by Communist propaganda that she "cried my eyes out when Mao died." [bold added]

Williams was one of the lucky ones: She survived and eventually overcame her early indoctrination enough to see this ideology for the threat to human life and happiness that it is.

The piece deserves a full read not just for getting to the point about the results of Communism put into practice, but also for its nice summary of the "journalism" of Duranty, particularly for anyone young enough not to have heard of him. Stossel notes that even Times eventually admitted Duranty's reporting was some of its worst.

-- CAV