NYT Op-Ed: Communism Gave Americans ‘Sense of One’s Own Humanity’

[WestVirginiaRebel]

NY Times

In anticipation of May Day, the international communist holiday, the New York Timespublished an opinion piece celebrating the American communists of the twentieth century, arguing that communism – an ideology that has killed 100 million people – gave Americans a “sense of one’s own humanity.”

The column, titled, “When Communism Inspired Americans,” lionizes communism as a religion with a “founding myth” that helped the “educated middle class” feel relevant in national politics. The author, Vivian Gornick, quotes her mother expressing gratitude for communists and crediting them with America’s thriving republic.

Save for a passing reference to the Soviet Union, however, the article fails to mention how communism ravaged the democratic order of every country it touched, leaving a trail of millions of bodies in its wake. The article also fails to mention the New York Times‘ role in helping promote communism globally, from publishing lies about Soviet genocide to fabricating news stories about Fidel Castro.

Gornick writes that she grew up in a “progressive” household where communists “spoke and thought within a context that lifted them out of the nameless, faceless obscurity into which they had been born, and gave them the conviction that they had rights as well as obligations.”

“They were not simply the disinherited of the earth, they were proletarians with a founding myth of their own (the Russian Revolution) and a civilizing worldview (Marxism),” she remarks wistfully, praising the Communist Party’s “moral authority.” She notes that, for these individuals, accepting the realities of Stalinism proved difficult.

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Ah, the morality of dictatorship...