The below video reminds me of what I consider the most shameful aspect of Western intellectuals and journalists of the last 50 years: the failure to tell the truth about Communism. This failure, in my view, has fatally undermined any appeal to authority or morality that academics of elite journalists might make.
The failure of simply telling the truth is staggering. Western intellectuals, by and large, knew that Lenin was guilty of mass murder. They knew what Stalin was doing. They chose to sympathize with Hiss and Rosenberg and vilify Chambers. They knew that 'cultural leaders' like Sartre and his ilk supported mass murderers and, by and large, did not blacklist or censure such star academics; academics had no qualms with turning, en masse, on Mencken in the '30s when he vilified the New Deal. By and large they chose not censure Duranty and other apologists, knowing that these 'reporters' were not telling the truth. Western academics and journalists knew about Mao and Ho Chi Minh and Ceasescu; even when confronted with the enormity of the crimes of these mass murderers, Western academics and journalists did not even come close to a united front in simply telling the truth.
The learned members of our society have discredited their generation, forever, as a source of authority and morality by engaging in the most consequential dishonesty in the history of the world. The magnitude of the resultant moral injury will always be with the Learned West until it uniformly refutes the blood and horror of the 20th century.
The effects of such dishonesty are with us daily, even if we don't recognize them, and it creates a Kafkaesque sense of incongruity. This is why in the United States our students will study Anne Frank and the Holocaust (rightfully so) in middle school and high school, but will graduate without ever hearing of what Mao did in the late 50s or what Stalin did in the 30s or what has gone on a hundred miles off Florida for the past 60 years. This is why college students will be censured for wearing a t-shirt with a swastika on it but will receive bemused smiles when they were t-shirt emblazoned with Mao or Che. This is why there is (rightfully so) a national monument to the Holocaust in DC; a testament of truth, that the blood of the innocent that cries from the ground will be heard. Where is the monument for the millions deliberately murdered by Mao? Where is monument to the millions of Ukrainians and Russians killed by Stalin? Where is the monument.
This is why something like Oliver Stone's asinine paean to a murdering thug like Che can get funded, produced, and reviewed by the NYtimes. This is why Michael Moore can do the same with his recent film about Cuban healthcare. This is why the Hammer and Sickle, instead of being viewed as the symbol under which more innocent civilians were murdered than under any other simple is not condemned. Nazism, slavery, fascism, Japanese Militarism are all rightfully censured and condemned. That communism has not been condemned as widely and forcefully as the other crimes against humanity is the great dishonesty of the 20th century. Why? I think Orwell was correct when he said to the effect that people overlook the crimes committed in the names of causes they approved of; it is hubris and pretention to imagine that we dispassionate observers simply reporting the truth. Psychologists in later decades would identify Confirmation Bias as a major cognitive bias (although the observation of the prevalence of Confirmation Bias goes back to the ancient world). The desire for utopia here on earth - as well as the necessary corollary truth that such a Platonist utopia will have to ministered by someone, say, intellectuals - has been so strong that Western academics and journalists have been unable, for nearly 100 years now, to simply tell the truth.
At some basic level, the man in the street will wonder, "why is some mass murder bad and other mass murder not worthy of condemnation? Why are some dictators worthy of revulsion but other dictators are not?" And the man in the street will then conclude with Machiavelli, that if the cause/goal is just, then the means do not really matter.
Which leads us to the video. Only now in 2014 are statues to a murderous dictator being pulled down in Ukraine. These statues are not being pulled down by blowhard intellectuals like French philosopher Bernard Levy, but by common people. Why is it that such statues were not pulled down decades ago?
http://live.wsj.com/video/ukraine-protesters-topple-lenin-statues/AD94C51C-921B-46DA-9AE0-B1B6B876D9C9.html?mod=trending_now_video_4#!AD94C51C-921B-46DA-9AE0-B1B6B876D9C9
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