New York Times veteran foreign reporter John Burns has retired after 40 years with the paper, closing a career of covering hotspots like Afghanistan, China, and Iraq, where Saddam Hussein threatened his life for his brave reporting from Baghdad for the Times and CBS News.
As documented by the Media Research Center in 2003, Burns tried his best to outwit Saddam Hussein's minders in his 2003 pre-war reporting from Baghdad, drawing the attention of Hussein's thugs in the process.
Burns' close friend and fellow foreign correspondent Tiziano Terzani gave him the title to this essay of recollections of some of the most terrible places on Earth, from the front of the paper's latest Sunday Review: "It's not how far you’ve traveled, it’s what you’ve brought back."
What Burns brought back "was an abiding revulsion for ideology, in all its guises," from apartheid South Africa to the Communist dictatorships of China, North Korea, and the Soviet Union -- a revulsion some of his fellow reporters have never learned.
From Soviet Russia to Mao’s China, from the Afghanistan ruled by the Taliban to the repression of apartheid-era South Africa, I learned that there is no limit to the lunacy, malice and suffering that can plague any society with a ruling ideology, and no perfidy that cannot be justified by manipulating the precepts of a Mao or a Marx, a Prophet Muhammad or a Kim Il-sung.
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The commitment to fairness and balance, and to shunning conventional truths when our reporting leads us in unexpected directions, has been our gold standard -- and one that I, like other reporters, undoubtedly failed on occasions when my passions, and the passions of those around me, ran at their highest.
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My impatience with ideology has carried over in recent years to my encounters with the societies in the West that are my home: to the widespread propensity, as I have sensed it, for people who lack the excuse of brutal duress that is a constant in the totalitarian world to fall sway to the formulaic “isms” of left and right, each of them full of Yeats’s “passionate intensity,” that excuse, and indeed smother, free thinking.
The bankruptcy of the approach that divides the world into camps of left and right was a lesson learned early. An assignment to China in the early 1970s exposed me to the murderous doctrines of Mao Zedong “Thought,” with victims that numbered in the millions; and a posting to Moscow in the early 1980s, 30 years after Stalin’s death, was redolent of the miseries that a perverted form of Marxism-Leninism imposed on Soviet Russia, with its own ghastly toll in the millions.
If only more of Burns' Times colleagues felt the same, instead of issuing bizarre headlines, like this one from a review of the 2012 movie Barbara, about a persecuted doctor in East Germany: "Summoning Halcyon Days Of Failed Ideals." "Failed Ideals"? Can one imagine the paper running a headline that suggested a fascist society like Nazi Germany was built on "failed ideals"? The Times also ran this jaw-dropping headline over an October 29, 2008 book review: "East Germany Had Its Charms, Crushed by Capitalism." And this infamous headline appeared on February 12, 1992, over a story about the last Soviet political prisoners being released: "A Gulag Breeds Rage, Yes, but Also Serenity."
My five years in South Africa carried their own lessons. The more I saw of the ugliness of apartheid, the more evident it became that the apparatus of right-wing repression -- the twisted ideology, the pervasive role of the secret police, the dehumanization of an entire population -- was little different from left-wing dictatorships, save in the sheer number of victims.
Burns was scathing and detailed, in a way the Times rarely is, on the true inhumanity of Communist North Korea.
If ideology was the scourge of the 20th century, so it has continued to be in many of the worst places of the 21st. Perhaps the most murderous of all states in our time is the North Korea of the Kim family, with millions dead from hunger and the deprivations of vast, hidden prison camps. And the beheadings, mass shootings and burnings-alive committed by the Islamic State have their origins in yet another kind of corrupted, extremist thought.
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Elsewhere, the lunacy was of an order that invited a response of laughing mockery, if that were not potentially fatal to the system’s loyalists, or those pretending to be so. In North Korea, while Kim Il-sung was still alive, there was a brand new, high-tech hospital built in his name in Pyongyang, floor after floor laden with tens of millions of dollars in the latest American, Swiss and German equipment, but no patients to be seen. And why not? “As we have explained,” the most senior comrade-physician responded, “the Korean people’s great leader Comrade Kim Il-sung has taken such care for the health of his beloved people that none of his people gets sick.”
