Thomas Sowell
                     August 31, 2000

                     'Useful idiots'

                     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.

                     ©2000 Creators Syndicate, Inc.

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