The New York Times’ creepy obsession with Communism has reared its ugly head once again.
The same newspaper whose Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Walter Duranty once wrote that the Soviet Holomodor, which resulted in approximately seven million deaths, was a myth (“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda”) is now back to pumping Marxism with enthusiasm. In the past several months, The New York Times has run op-eds with these titles:
- “When Communism Inspired Americans” (April 29, 2017)
- “When The Harlem Renaissance Went Communist” (August 21, 2017)
- “Socialism’s Future May Be Its Past” (June 26, 2017)
- “Why Women Had Better Sex Under Socialism” (August 12, 2017)
Today’s entry:
Yes, Communism taught women to dream big. They could one day be commissioners of reeducation, breeding machines, or victims of forcible abortion. They could also be slaughtered en masse — Chinese communism resulted in 65 million dead at minimum — and killed via abortion in utero (some reports suggest at least 191 million female babies have been killed, resulting in a shortfall of women by approximately 30-40 million).
But here’s the glowing reminisces of one Chinese woman who lived under Mao:
“The Communists did many terrible things,” my grandmother always says at the end of her reminiscences. “But they made women’s lives much better.” That often-repeated dictum sums up the popular perception of Mao Zedong’s legacy regarding women in China. As every Chinese schoolchild learns in history class, the Communists rescued peasant daughters from urban brothels and ushered cloistered wives into factories, liberating them from the oppression of Confucian patriarchy and imperialist threat.
Hmmm, what might capitalism have accomplished?
This sort of language is reminiscent of all the paeans written today regarding Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez — before the collapse of Venezuela, that is. Socialism is always praised for its “accomplishments” — accomplishments that have been surpassed in every area by capitalism, from relieving global poverty to the rise of women’s rights. That’s merely a way of romanticizing a terrible system of thought.
And that’s just what this op-ed does by downplaying the evils of Maoism this way:
While the Communist revolution brought women more job opportunities, it also made their interests subordinate to collective goals. Stopping at the household doorstep, Mao’s words and policies did little to alleviate women’s domestic burdens like housework and child care. And by inundating society with rhetoric blithely celebrating its achievements, the revolution deprived women of the private language with which they might understand and articulate their personal experiences.
The mass murder and forced abortion? No biggie. The big problem is that these women didn’t have washing machines or nannies. And Mao? He was just terrific:
Forty years after Mao’s death, this aspect of his legacy is still understood through his famous pronouncement on gender equality, “Women hold up half the sky.” It is a slogan my grandmother utters in the same breath as the chairman’s other sins and deeds.
Women didn’t hold up half the sky in Communist China. They died by the millions and lived under a slave regime if they didn’t.