The Times provides Gorbachev praise for his role as a doer employing the active-voice words “transformed” and “presided.” That is, The Times is giving the dead communist plaudits for ending the Cold War and liberating Eastern Europe. This is not someone like, for instance, an anti-communist Ronald Reagan or other heroes of the anti-Soviet struggle.
Breitbart News already put up an obituary on behalf of Gorbachev. Let's look at how Gorbachev's The Times‘ obit has chosen to honor his life. We'll discover that the primary focus is on paying tribute to Gorbachev as a hero and minimizing the part of oppositional-communists who were able to more or less end communism.
The Times provides the evidence to Gorbachev within the article. According to the paper, it claims that Gorbachev “set in motion a series of revolutionary changes that transformed the map of Europe and ended the Cold War that had threatened the world with nuclear annihilation.” Did you catch this? Gorbachev not only freed Europe from communism, he also decreased the likelihood that nuclear conflict could occur. Of course, if The Times graciously describes Gorbachev in the form of “a man of openness, vision, and great vitality,” how could he be any other than that?
According to The Times' view, his legacy can be described as “decisively altering the political climate of the world.” Sure, absolutely and it's true that the Times is putting it on top of the fact that Gorbachev wasn't ideal, as the article acknowledges however, he wasn't an unpopular Republican.
There is a different approach to Gorbachev, who was the leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991. He was a career communist who made up to reach the highest levels of bureaucratic power in Moscow by snoozing. As an example, when he was an apparatchik in the making, he expressed his opinion on the memoir written by a ghostwriter by one of the former colleagues at the Kremlin corner office, Leonid Brezhnev. He told the younger Gorbachev: “Communists and all the workers of Stavropol express limitless gratitude to Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev for this literary work of deep philosophical penetration.”
When he was appointed to the highest position at the top of the pyramid in the USSR, Gorbachev could see that his empire was slipping further behind the U.S. and the West. This was made more pronounced by the vigorous policies of American President Ronald Reagan. In 1983, Reagan was advancing the Strategic Defense Initiative, an advanced anti-missile initiative that the lower-tech Soviets could not touch, and they were aware of that. (In the month of May, this writer described the details of this story and the crucial support role of the president's national security advisor The famous Robert C. McFarlane.)
In order to avoid leaving the reds to rot, Gorbachev resolved to try something different. The Times remembers the sequence of events, but is astonished by an absence. The article mentions that Gorbachev is credited for his de-communicating concepts like the concept of glasnost (openness) along with Perestroika (restructuring) and it's true.
But the Times doesn't say that the first of Gorbachev's ideas for the future was uskoreniye which translates to “acceleration” in Russian-as in working harder. That is, the initial plan of Gorbachev's wasn't actually reform, but it was in American terminology, to speed up the line. This is a great idea if it's combined with greater pay like is the case in the U.S., but if it was just a matter of working longer for the same drab Post Office of a system that the Soviets were using, it wasn't a heaven for the workers. It's not surprising that uskoreniye was not a success. Then, Gorbachev experimented with ideas that were completely different from the old Sovietism: glasnost and perestroika.
And uskoreniye isn't the only thing that the Times did not mention as it tried to give Gorbachev praise for overcoming communism. It also left out the contributions in the lives of Russian rebels Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Andrei Sakharov, and Natan Sharansky who all were instrumental in destroying Soviet power. Soviet system. In addition, the historical significance of Polish worker activists Lech Walesa. He unified the working class against communism.
One could argue that this article was on Gorbachev and not the other people. Yet by not even taking them into consideration in this article by the Times removes Gorbachev's work from the necessary context. In the end, the piece is designed to leave readers feeling that Gorbachev was the mastermind in the active voice of the events and not the passive victim of an avalanche of events.
Of course it's true that the Time boasts a lengthy record in which it has whitewashed reds. In 1932, its Moscow journalist, Walter Duranty, was a communist sympathizer as well as a thief. In 1932, he was given the Pulitzer Prize for his “journalism.” In actual fact it became evident that Duranty was covering the work of Josef Stalin and the Soviets and, most notably, concealed the truth regarding the deliberate massive starvation of Ukraine that claimed millions of lives.
In contrast, honest journalists revealed the truth. One example is Malcolm Muggeridge, a fellow reporter who was a correspondent in Moscow in the 1930s. Since Muggeridge was not a communist, Muggeridge did not get the Pulitzer. Muggeridge declared about Duranty: “He was not only the greatest liar among the journalists in Moscow, but he was the greatest liar of any journalist that I ever met in 50 years of journalism.”
Today, The Times is still mumbling about the long-delayed Pulitzer for the man who won it; the statement states that it is offensive that the Pulitzer board discovered “no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception.” The covering-up continues. (For an objective view of Duranty's story and the scale of the mass murder that he hid, watch the film of 2019 about a heroic journalist who exposed an infamous Ukraine tragedy, named Mr. Jones.)
This is the way that it is that the New York Times handles history. It's the method. The liberal method. And, it seems to be the only method.
