American links

[erudito]

Datelines from the war on sex in public, semi-public and some private places.

Another reminiscence about a victim of cancer who seemed to be one of nature’s gentlepersons.

Difficulties with restraining orders.

The Pentagon develops strategic policy on humanitarian aid and “soft power”. Suggesting that Obama just admit that the Surge worked

Comments

[jordan179]

From the Tzouliadis article:

Many had been lured by the reports of fellow travellers such as Paul Robeson, or George Bernard Shaw, who returned from Russia in 1931 to broadcast a lecture on American national radio in which he portrayed the Soviet Union as the workers' only salvation; or by journalists such as Walter Duranty, the Moscow bureau chief of the New York Times, who praised Stalin's economic achievements but closed his eyes to the famine of 1932-34 and to the slavery of the Gulag labour camps.

By the mid-1930s, there were 15,000 American citizens living in the Soviet Union, enough to form a baseball league, with Sunday games in Gorky Park. Most were soon deprived of their US passports by the Soviet authorities, which thereby claimed them as their own, but they were never really accepted as “Soviet” and many were arrested as potential “spies” during the Great Terror of 1937- 38. They vanished into the Gulag.

IMO Duranty, Robeson and Shaw et al have a lot to answer for. This article shows how their lies led directly to immense and easily preventible suffering, on the part (in the case of Duranty and Robeson) of their fellow Americans.

They are neither as often nor as severely condemned for this as they should be.