In 1936, as the Great Purge was underway and the Moscow Trials were getting started, the leftist magazine The Nation declared that “there can be no doubt that dictatorship in Russia is dying and that a new democracy is slowly being born.”
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| The Left: just the other side of the coin called Nazi. |
In 1946, after even much of the American left had broken with the Soviet Union, Walter Duranty used The Nation’s pages to describe Stalin’s latest purge as “a general cleaning out of the cobwebs and mess which accumulate in any house when its occupants are so deeply preoccupied with something else that they have no time to keep it in order.” People, unlike cobwebs, scream when they are cleaned out,
After Stalin’s death, The Nation published an essay on Stalin by Browder praising the bloody tyrant for “overcoming all obstacles whatever the cost, driving the entire nation along the marked path, imbuing it with his will, mercilessly sacrificing the laggards.” As the decades passed, The Nation’s ugly track record remained unchanged. In the 70s, Chomsky’s denial of the Cambodian genocide appeared in The Nation. “In the first place, is it proper to attribute deaths from malnutrition and disease to Cambodian authorities?” he asked.
(c) Daniel Greenfield.
