THE NYT HAS BEEN A PROMOTER OF TYRANTS FOR A LONG TIME

We all know about the lying Duranty and Stalin but here is more:

The late New York Times journalist Herbert L. Matthews is now an almost forgotten name, except, perhaps, among journalism students and those who remember the earliest days of the Cuban Revolution. It was Matthews who, while covering Cuba for the Times in February 1957, got the scoop of a lifetime. Fulgencio Batista, Cuba's authoritarian ruler, had announced that Castro and his small band of rebels had been killed by Batista's troops three months earlier. Not trusting the official sources, Matthews sought out the truth. Claiming to be a tourist, he penetrated Batista's military lines and made a harrowing journey through the jungle on foot, eluding government troops and eventually holding his now-famous rendezvous with the young revolutionary.

Matthews's front-page story altered the fortunes of Castro and his beleaguered rebels. Opponents of Batista's regime smuggled copies of the banned paper into Cuba, and within a short time Cuba's people learned that Castro had not been defeated, and that he had more troops and followers than anyone had believed. For Americans, the story offered proof that conditions in Cuba were not as stable and calm as Batista had claimed, and that the charismatic young bearded guerrilla fighter was the new democratic hope for a nation tired of tyranny. Castro, after all, had told Matthews he sought only democracy, and was not interested in power for himself. Smitten by Castro, Matthews saw him as a heroic future liberator, a man whose cause he could make his own; Matthews would not just write a newspaper story, but help to make history.

Nor was this the first time that Matthews saw himself as the chronicler of activist heroes. In the 1930s, biographer Anthony DePalma points out, Matthews was a supporter of Mussolini, whose invasion of Abyssinia he backed and whose Fascist armed forces he extolled. By 1936, the civil war in Spain was the new hot story, and - moved by the valiant effort of the defenders of Madrid against Franco - Matthews switched his allegiances and wrote accounts meant to awaken the sympathies of American readers to the Republic's cause. His stories won him the lifelong friendship of the American Communist volunteers who fought Franco in the so-called Abraham Lincoln Brigade.

As a boy, Matthews had admired the danger-defying journalist Richard Harding Davis, whose reporting on the Spanish-American War came to define Theodore Roosevelt's reputation as the hero of San Juan Hill. Castro offered the perfect opportunity for Matthews to make his own left-wing version of TR. Moreover, Matthews was candid that his sympathies lay with Castro's rebellion. "I feel about Cuba somewhat as I did about Spain," he confessed. "One . . . wants to share . . . if only as a sympathizer, what the Cubans are suffering." Thus Matthews, in his own words, became "the man who invented Fidel." Of course, as DePalma notes, that was simple bragging. Castro did not need Matthews to create him; he needed Matthews as a propaganda and publicity tool in Cuba.

More here

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ELSEWHERE

Leftist Susan Estrich attacks the NYT: "Turn to the editorial page of the same day's paper and what you'll find is not the objective media wrapped in the First Amendment, but a sad exercise in name calling by the local bullies who own the biggest microphone around."

Buying freedom from the UAW: ""Indiana became the winner yesterday in a short five-way race to land the Honda Motor Company's newest assembly plant in North America. . . . The project will cost the State of Indiana about $140 million. Of that, $40 million will go directly to Honda; about $45 million will be spent on roads and other infrastructure to serve the plant, and another $50 to $55 million will go to improvements in the region in anticipation of growth caused by the plant."

The elderly Japanese: "Japan has overtaken Italy to become the world's most elderly nation, fuelling concern over the effects of a rapidly aging population on the world's second-largest economy. Census results released yesterday have outdone even the most pessimistic projections. Having spent their lives on a healthy diet of fish, green-tea and rice, Japan's increasingly long-lived ranks of over-65s now constitute a record 21 per cent of the population - an army of 26.82 million pensioners in a country where the birth-rate continues to sink well below replacement levels. A record 25,606 people are over 100 years old, a segment of the population that has been expanding for 35 years. One in every 5,000 Japanese is now a centenarian."

Libertarians should embrace the Christian Right "Yet despite their political impotency, the libertarian Right appears bent on bringing down the one political movement that has tolerated its know-it-all-ism and has in fact dragged it into the halls of political power along with it, rather like a ball and chain: the Christian Right. It is beyond arguing that a Democrat Congress would ever grant a hearing to small government libertarians come budget time. Under a Republican majority, made possible by the rise of politically active conservative Christians, the libertarian Right has had every opportunity to appeal for smaller government. That its appeals have been -- and continue to be -- unpersuasive cannot be the fault of Religious conservatives."

The Duke case keeps unravelling: "With a judge's decision to reduce the bond for one of the three Duke University lacrosse players charged with raping an exotic dancer in March comes the first sign that the criminal justice system can, and will, self-correct the ongoing travesty in Durham. District Attorney Mike Nifong had a threadbare case weeks ago and now, in light of new information, it is clear that he is straying into prosecutorial misconduct. "Unless he has a player from the team who is going to testify that this rape occurred, there is no way he will win this case and there is no way this case should have ever been brought," Mark Edwards, a Durham criminal defense lawyer tells the Raleigh News & Observer."

Lenin's expulsion of the Russian intellectuals: "On September 29 1922, the Oberburgermeister Haken left Petrograd and sailed into the Baltic, destined for Stettin. Six weeks later, a sister ship, the Preussen, set out on the same course... Aboard were 50 or so of the most eminently qualified men in Russia, plus family members. Handpicked by Lenin for deportation, they were - as Lesley Chamberlain puts it - the victims of a process of "deliberate negative selection" of an intelligentsia that was "erudite, professional and cosmopolitan as never before". And yet the Philosophy Steamer (as the two transports came to be known) slipped moorings with little more than a brief mention in Pravda and a huff and a puff in the Times. It was a scandalous event, the more so for being ignored. As Chamberlain grimly notes: "What Leninism stripped out of the Russian fabric was what those ships carried away, in terms of cultural decency and intellectual independence." The unwilling passengers included writers, lawyers, historians, an agronomist, a railway specialist and a number of engineers"

For more postings, see TONGUE-TIED, EDUCATION WATCH, GREENIE WATCH, POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH, GUN WATCH, SOCIALIZED MEDICINE and AUSTRALIAN POLITICS. (Mirror sites here, here, here, here, here, here and here).

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"All the worth which the human being possesses, all spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State." -- 19th century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Hegel is the most influential philosopher of the Left -- inspiring Karl Marx, the American "Progressives" of the early 20th century and university socialists to this day.

The Big Lie of the late 20th century was that Nazism was Rightist. It was in fact typical of the Leftism of its day. It was only to the Right of Stalin's Communism. The very word "Nazi" is a German abbreviation for "National Socialist" (Nationalsozialistisch)

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