PLAYING DUMB WITH UNCLE JOE:

PLAYING DUMB WITH UNCLE JOE: Cathy Young of Reason focuses on Stalin and his continuing admirers, in her review of British novelist Martin Amis’ new book Koba the Dread: Laughter and the Twenty Million.

She ends with this quote, but be sure to read the rest of the article, to see how she gets there:

Today, the issues raised in Koba the Dread could be seen as purely academic; but they are not. The left’s reluctance to acknowledge that Communism wasn’t just a failure but an evil is due to more than stubbornness. Such an acknowledgment would amount to (1) validating a view of the West, Communism’s Cold War adversary, as good (albeit imperfect), and (2) admitting that the left spent much of the 20th century cozying up to mass murderers and therefore has precious little moral authority to criticize the West today. And that’s very relevant to present-day global conflicts.