The writer reminds us of Journolist, btw, and adds comments on the NYT’s pivot from Trump-as-traitor to Trump-as-racist.

The American people are the smartest people in all history. That’s not opinion, that’s fact. Queue the numbers. They’re smart enough to ignore the blatherings emanating from the box in the corner.

True story: An agronomist from a local university went to a farm to teach the farmer how to get more yield from his crops. The farmer posed the following question, “Horses, cows and rabbits all eat the same food yet their scat is variously chunks, patties and pellets. Why is that?”. The agronomist answered that he didn’t rightly know. The farmer said “You don’t know shit and you’re going to teach me how to farm?”.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2009/09/07/the-passionate-reporter-how-castro-got-his-job-through-the-ny-times/#comment-124290

Stupid Hippie on September 8, 2009 at 3:24 pm said:
I once read a book extolling Fidel and hs utopian Cuba, where literacy was close to 100%, healthcare was universal, and all the Cubans were “happy,” according to a leftist propagandist. I actually believed that tripe until I read Armando Valladeros’ excellent book “Against All Hope,” exposing Fidel’s brutal island prison, a Cuban “Gulag Archipelago.” Thank God for the survivors who speak out at great personal risk to counter the propaganda.

Thank God for the bloggers and radio talkers and the few honest journalists who counter the NYT and MSM. I am trying to research Hugo Chavez and how he managed to take control of Venezuela. The parallels to Obama are striking.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2009/09/07/the-passionate-reporter-how-castro-got-his-job-through-the-ny-times/#comment-124246
Nolanimrod on September 8, 2009 at 7:05 am said:
It’s usually the intellectuals who possess sufficient intellect to rationalize the brutality, tyranny, and sadism which always goes along with regimes of this sort.

Luckily I was never an intellectual. I fervently believed in the promise of communism until 1968 when the tanks rumbled into Prague.

The world had just seen the answer to “Communism with a human face.”

Since then the Prague nightmare has happened again and again and again. Each time the intelligentsia has chided us to get over our reactionary resistance.

William Ayers is designing curricula for America’s children. His pal is having them think really, really hard how they can help the cause.

https://www.thenewneo.com/2009/09/07/the-passionate-reporter-how-castro-got-his-job-through-the-ny-times/#comment-124244
Gringo on September 8, 2009 at 5:15 am said:
Hitler, Chavez, and Castro all had unsuccessful coup attempts before assuming power. How much better the world would have been if all three had been executed for their coup attempts. Mercy at times is not mercy. Calderan Venezuelan President who pardoned Chavez is still living, in his 90s. One Venezuelan blogger wrote that he wanted Caldera to live until he was 150,to longer live with the consequences of having pardoned Chavez.

to create for the right-thinking non-Communist West . . . the belief that . . . to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and mankind by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.

I just finished reading a post linked by Edward on the “slavery” thread, and it was eerily relevant — the Democrats have not changed since the 1800s.

https://no-pasaran.blogspot.com/2019/08/1619-wondering-why-slavery-persisted.html

And 150 years ago, when an Illinois Republican felt the necessity to address himself to Southerners and Democrats (during his Cooper Union speech in 1860), guess which term Abe Lincoln reached for:

…when you speak of us Republicans, you do so only to denounce us as reptiles [!], or, at the best, as no better than outlaws. You will grant a hearing to pirates or murderers, but nothing like it to [Republicans]. In all your contentions with one another, each of you deems an unconditional condemnation of [Republicanism] as the first thing to be attended to. Indeed, such condemnation of us seems to be an indispensable prerequisite — license, so to speak — among you to be admitted or permitted to speak at all. Now, can you, or not, be prevailed upon to pause and to consider whether this is quite just to us, or even to yourselves? Bring forward your charges and specifications, and then be patient long enough to hear us deny or justify.

“Reptiles, outlaws, pirates, murderers”… How often have Republicans been called terrorists in the past seven years? (And in the years, in the decades, before that?)

There was also William Safire, moderate-to-conservative columnist for the Times for over 30 years.

He certainly wasn’t as suave as Buckley, and I don’t recollect anything particularly special about his point of views, but he would reliably give the conservative “common wisdom.” The thing I liked a bit about him was his curmudgeon personality and the feeling that he didn’t suck up to anyone.

Duranty deserves his own throne. But it’s a different throne than the one I was referring to when I mentioned Cronkite. Cronkite purposely mixed opinion journalism with reporting.

Duranty did something somewhat different. He lied in a coverup of what was really happening in the Soviet Union.

And then there’s this guy.

Koch’s Double Lives: Stalin, Willi Münzenberg and the Seduction of the Intellectuals is a treasure house of information about a time in which famous American and European intellectuals knowingly supported a murderous totalitarian regime in the name of democracy. In America, the Communist slogan became “Communism is Twentieth-Century Americanism,” and banners so inscribed were mandatory exhibits during the Popular Front era. (There was even a ribald parody, composed no doubt by a Trotskyite, called “The Girl with the Popular Front.”)

History is more entertaining than Netflix…

The ‘Innocents’ Clubs’

Despite the formal collapse of Communism in 1989, the legacy of Stalin’s strategy of destroying the West by propaganda has an increasing hold through the cult of ‘political correctness.’ The undermining of our society by the media has steadily intensified since then.

Münzenberg’s spectre hovers as vital as ever in contemporary life. At a time when Communism has little remaining formal influence, Münzenberg’s techniques of propaganda and disinformation pervade our lives.

His legacy had far outlasted the formal cause it served, and now works for new masters. The opinion-formers who so misjudged Communism still claim legitimacy in dictating political ideals. Their track record is little considered. Marx wrote in 1857, “It is possible I’ve made a fool of myself, but that can always be remedied with a little bit of dialectics.” The malady lingers on.

above i will file under, do you Know what you think you Know?
however, this next excerpt is real entertaining as to forming “public opinion”

Munzenberg’s men
http://www.aei.org/publication/munzenbergs-men/

In Koch’s telling, Münzenberg’s particular genius was to recognize how ostensibly nonpolitical attitudes and impulses among Western intellectuals, clergy, artists, and also society leaders, businessmen, and politicians could be put to use for covert Soviet purposes. Münzenberg’s goal, Koch writes, was

to create for the right-thinking non-Communist West . . . the belief that . . . to criticize or challenge Soviet policy was the unfailing mark of a bad, bigoted, and probably stupid person, while support was equally infallible proof of a forward-looking mind committed to all that was best for humanity and mankind by an uplifting refinement of sensibility.

Münzenberg was also the first Communist operative to grasp how social snobbery and high fashion could be marshaled to serve Soviet purposes. This was particularly true in the Popular Front period (1935-39), which, Koch acidly observes,

wed high political righteousness to the drape of a sable coat, the Revolution with a perfect crease, confident with the easy aromatic grace that comes with a look of complete success . . . the Communism of country houses, the anti-fascism of evening gowns.

Once a fashionable opinion was launched, it could be depended upon to reproduce of its own accord; Münzenberg accurately referred to the creation of front groups as “rabbit breeding.”

He created the lefts youths superiority complex over knowing communism and socialism is the answer, how could anything else be so..

funny how we will pay attention to Goebbels who did his work on German minds
Willi was so slick, we forget him – cause we might be afraid of what he did to American and Western minds

In an especially audacious claim, he writes that Stalin sought an understanding with Hitler not in 1939, as most historians think, but from the very beginning of the Nazi regime. To justify this assertion, Koch produces what appears to be incontrovertible evidence: continuous contacts between the two dictators—hidden even from their own diplomats—from 1934 on.

Stalin’s real objective, he writes, was to deflect Hitler westward, while reaching an agreement with him on the division of Eastern Europe. Thus, the “anti-fascist” pose so vigorously upheld by the Soviets was intended not to stem the spread of German power, but merely to ensure the pro-Soviet allegiances of “enlightened” circles in the West.

better than the plot of the latest female 007 Jane Bond…

that’s a bit late… Walter Duranty would be upset to lose the throne..
[not to mention Willi Muzenberg and Harper… ]

Denial of the Holodomor is the assertion that the 1932–1933 Holodomor, a man-made famine in Soviet Ukraine, did not occur or diminishing the scale and significance of the famine

It is their opinion that this is untrue..

This denial and suppression of information about the famine was made in official Soviet propaganda from the very beginning until the 1980s. It was supported by some Western journalists and intellectuals. It was echoed at the time of the famine by some prominent Western journalists, including The New York Times’ Walter Duranty and Louis Fischer. The denial of the man-made famine was a highly successful and well orchestrated disinformation campaign by the Soviet government. According to Robert Conquest, it was the first major instance of Soviet authorities adopting the Big Lie propaganda technique to sway world opinion, to be followed by similar campaigns over the Moscow Trials and denial of the Gulag labor camp system.

and the nail in the proverbial coffin?

Rather than just repeating the Stalinist viewpoint, Duranty often admitted the brutality of the Stalinist system then proceeded to both explain and defend why dictatorship or brutality were necessary. In addition, he repeated Soviet views as his own opinion, as if his ‘observations’ from Moscow had given him deeper insights into the country as a whole.

His opinion got him a Pulitzer…
and that reward for such opinion became de rigeur

if your curious..
Statement on Walter Duranty’s 1932 Prize
https://www.pulitzer.org/news/statement-walter-duranty