I learned a great new term of disparagement from an
L.A. Times opinion piece: "smoked salmon socialists".
I think this must be akin to "limousine liberal",
"brie-and-chardonnay liberal", etc. Most of the
references to the term seem to be Irish or English.
The meaning is obvious: comfortable upper income
hypocrites of the left, advocating "socialism" while
enjoying the fruits of capitalism that the poor people
they pretend to champion would never enjoy if the upper
income leftist hypocrites ever succeed in implementing
their socialist dystopia.
Here's the commentary, from the 11/27 L.A. Times:
Oh, the Company They Keep
* Some leftists never met a U.S.-hating tyrant they
couldn't love.
In the early 1930s, while an estimated 6 million
Ukrainians were dying in a famine, New York Times
correspondent Walter Duranty was depicting Stalin's
Five-Year Plan as a resounding success. For this
misreporting, he won a Pulitzer Prize. To its belated
credit, the Times disowned Duranty's articles more than
a decade ago. Though the Pulitzer committee decided
last week not to revoke his award, Duranty's reputation
has become hopelessly tarnished, his very name a byword
for "craven stooge."
You would think there would be a lesson here for the
present day, but Durantyism — "progressive" Westerners'
habit of licking the boots of repressive tyrants — has
long outlived Duranty himself.
Fidel Castro is one strongman who has never quite lost
his charm for the smart set. In 1957, New York Times
correspondent Herbert Matthews was assuring his readers
that the bearded rebel "has strong ideas of liberty,
democracy, social justice, the need to restore the
constitution, to hold elections." In 1989, anchorman
Peter Jennings declared that "for much of the Third
World, Cuba is actually a model of development." And
just this year, director Oliver Stone was praising
Castro for being "a very moral man" and "one of the
Earth's wisest people." Unfortunately, in the weeks
before Stone's fawning film, "Commandante," was to air
on HBO in May, his hero jailed 75 dissidents. The
documentary was mercifully shelved.
It's not that the left is indifferent to the sins of
all tyrants. Chat up any smoked-salmon socialist and
you'll get an earful about the crimes of Chile's
Pinochet, Indonesia's Suharto, the shah of Iran and
other Cold War allies of the West. One gets the
distinct sense that their biggest crime was not
oppressing their own people but being in cahoots with
the United States. As long as a dictator hates the
U.S., all his minor, or not so minor, lapses can easily
be overlooked.
That phenomenon was on vivid display in the streets of
London last week as protesters toppled a papier-mâché
statue of George W. Bush, who was branded "the greatest
threat to life on this planet" by Mayor Ken
Livingstone. The timing of this comment was a bit
unfortunate because it came the very week that car
bombs were killing more than 50 people in Turkey. But
the protesters don't care about the threat posed by
Islamist terrorists, even when their victims are fellow
Muslims. The only casualties they care about are those
inflicted by American or Israeli bombs.
The fact that Saddam Hussein murdered more than 300,000
of his own people is a matter of complete indifference
to the "Stop the War" brigade. So is the fact that, if
the coalition were to stop the war, murderous thugs
would seize power in Baghdad. Iraqi lives are no more
important to them than Ukrainian lives were to Walter
Duranty; all that matters is advancing their own
ideological agenda.
As appalling as the London protesters were, they were
outclassed for sheer moral obduracy by an article in
the Nov. 22-23 edition of Britain's Financial Times
called "Our Friends in the North." Given that the
subject is North Korea one might think the headline is
sarcastic, but, no, it's an accurate reflection of what
follows: a review of "North Korea: The Hermit Kingdom"
by University of Chicago professor Bruce Cumings. The
reviewer, Michael Church, is full of praise for this
"riveting book" that sees "the beleaguered North in a
sympathetic light."
Your image of North Korea might derive from a recent
human rights report that documented how Kim Jong Il
keeps hundreds of thousands of prisoners locked up in
slave labor camps. Or maybe you've read stories about
the Stalin-like famines that have killed millions of
people in recent years. Cumings is here to tell you
that you're missing the bigger picture. According to
Church's summary of his argument, North Korea's
"transitions first to communism, then to post-communism
have been — in terms of social organization — so
extraordinarily smooth."
Church does admit that "well-documented aspects of the
North Koreans' darker behavior … find no mention here."
But he cheerily concludes, "Never mind: In the battle
to open closed Western minds, this tart and witty
broadside makes an excellent start."
It's hard to know which is more appalling: that a
professor at a reputable university would write an
apologia for the worst dictatorship on the planet or
that an influential newspaper would praise it. The
spirit of Walter Duranty lives.
