What is it with the establishment press and communism? The earth's most murderous political philosophy and its most murderous practitioners still get undeserved and occasionally even complimentary attention, while their crimes against humanity get brushed aside, ignored, or downplayed.
A Christmas Day item from Romania at the Associated Press illustrates the point. The first six of its eight paragraphs follow the jump (underlines are mine):
Seriously, the nation's leading wire service, which also fancies itself as the world's leading wire service, gave the okay to publish a story about 15 people fondly remembering communism as a "necessary evil" on the silver anniversary of the inglorious end of one of its more ruthless tyrants.
People unfamiliar with the country's history might believe that in citing the carnage which occurred just before Nicolae Ceausescu's overthrow and death, Alison Mutler, whose LinkedIn profile indicates that she's a 21-year AP veteran, was identifying that country's worst atrocity under communism, or that it was perhaps even a glaring, last-gasp exception to a mostly uneventful record.
Hardly.
After World War II, Ceausescu "headed the ministry of agriculture, then served as deputy minister of the armed forces under Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (the country's communist dictator from 1947-to-1965 when Ceausescu took over), becoming a major-general."
Ceausescu's early involvement with agriculature is important, because during the first 20 years after the end of World War II, certainly tens of thousands, but perhaps as many as "60,000 to 300,000 people may have been killed in Romania ... as part of agricultural collectivization and political repression." Though he wasn't the country's leader at time, Ceausescu was certainly no innocent bystander.
But it's internationally important news that 15 people remembered Ceausescu fondly enough to visit his grave. Give us all a break, Alison. Go out and find relatives of people he and his secret police murdered or others who were imprisoned but are still alive, and come back when you have a real story.
Remember this propaganda-driven complete waste of time and effort when you next read about an establishment press organization laying people off or whining about its alleged "lack of resources."
Cross-posted at BizzyBlog.com.
