The Washington Post and its journalism lecturers like Margaret Sullivan have strongly denounced "both-sidesism" in covering American politics, insisting Donald Trump and his supporters should be treated like destroyers of democracy. So it looked ridiculous on Sunday when The Washington Post Magazine found the urgent need to be "fair and balanced" when it came to...the new Victims of Communism Museum in Washington, DC.
The magazine article was headlined "A New Museum Spotlights the Crimes of Communism." In an otherwise unexceptional review of the museum, Post writer Justin Moyer insisted the history of American communism "gets complicated." Can anyone imagine the Post absolving American Nazis by saying it's more "complicated" on the domestic front?
In the United States, however, unpacking the history of communism — an ideology associated with John Reed, Woody Guthrie, Isadora Duncan, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Paul Robeson, Lucille Ball, the Hollywood 10 and Rage Against the Machine — gets complicated quickly. This philosophy that killed tens of millions also inspired generations of activists.
Roberta Wood, 73, joined the U.S. Communist Party in 1969. At the time, the nation was in the throes of the Vietnam War, mired in persistent segregation, and awash in revolutionary rhetoric among youth. The daughter of a steelworker, Wood was no hippie; she just wanted to join the labor movement. She moved to Chicago to work for U.S. Steel and later became a mechanic in Chicago’s sewage treatment plants. In retirement, she became the labor editor at a Communist Party-affiliated newspaper. Now the grandmother of eight children, she’s a party spokesperson. It has been, she told me recently, “a really wonderful life.”
Wood says communists are “against the victimization of anyone under any system.” “I can’t defend everything that’s been done in the past century-and-a-half in the name of communism. ... Humans are always going to make mistakes,” she argues. Wood has never been to the museum, but, “judging from its website,” she says, “this museum could be the basis of a whole other museum called ‘Lies About Communism.’ ”
You could put the Nazis in every spot in this "balancing" passage to note how sick it sounds: Nazism "inspired generations of activists," being a lifelong Nazi is a "really wonderful life," and then maybe the Holocaust Museum could inspire another museum devoted to "Lies About Nazism."
There are few things in life more annoying than the idea that the systematic mass murder of millions is just "humans making mistakes," like it's an oops? And you can never put this horrific mountain of communist violence "in the name of communism."
What "lies" are in the museum? The commie didn't need to specify. She didn't even have to go to the museum. They would never do this when a conservative is opposing a museum or its exhibits....like one where ants crawled over the crucifix of Christ. The Post found "intolerance" in protesting that trolling.
