'There is Never a Reckoning for the Left'

“The Left’s Mess in Venezuela,” as analyzed by Kevin D. Williamson:

There is never a reckoning for the Left. An entire generation of American intellectuals found itself enraptured by the brutal, repressive, terroristic political apparatus of the Soviet Union — not only journalistic enablers like Walter Duranty of the Times and the various Hollywood reds and Communist party operatives, but the purportedly enlightened liberals at The New Republic, who were consistent apologists for Soviet brutality at home and abroad at the height of Joseph Stalin’s reign of terror. Scores of Americans, some of them in high government office, were working on behalf of one of history’s most murderous and repressive regimes — and the bad guys in that story are, in the popular imagination, the people who worked to expose that conspiracy, rather than the people who worked to advance it.

Noam Chomsky has for decades been in the business of peddling excuses for every gang of murderers flying his preferred flag — the Khmer Rouge, the Sandinistas, and Mao Zedong’s regime among them. Professor Chomsky was, while it suited him, literally a holocaust denier — a denier of a Communist holocaust rather than a National-Socialist one. Jane Fonda was a game propagandist for the murderous Beijing-backed regime in Vietnam and proclaimed that if we really understood Communism we’d be “on our knees praying” for it. (On our knees: The Left always tells us what it wants, if we’re listening.)

The sundry Communist regimes coddled and celebrated by the American Left managed to kill something on the order of 100 million people during the 20th century. Consider that a lesson unlearnt: In our own time, the anti-fracking movement does the bidding of ex-KGB boss Vladimir Putin’s regime, and so-called progressives such as Thom Hartmann are quite pleased to work hand-in-glove with a Kremlin-backed propaganda network.

Things will come to a bad end in Venezuela. Sean Penn won’t be there for it, and neither will Chaka Fattah. Perhaps the ghost of Walter Duranty will file a report.

Certainly the successors to Fox Butterfield, a more recent bassackwards socialist Timesman have been filing their reports:

“Venezuela is now the world champion of inflation, homicide, insecurity, and shortages of essential goods–from milk for children to insulin for diabetics and all kinds of indispensable products. All this despite having the greatest oil reserves in the world and a government with absolute control of all state institutions and levers of power.”–Moisés Naim, TheAtlantic.com, Feb. 25

—As spotted by James Taranto in his Best of the Web column last year.

And for those who can’t spot the glaring logical fallacy in the quote above, a rereading of Kevin’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Socialism is well in order.