{"id":11207,"date":"2010-06-03T07:28:21","date_gmt":"2010-06-03T12:28:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11207"},"modified":"2010-07-07T19:48:30","modified_gmt":"2010-07-08T00:48:30","slug":"the-spirit-of-walter-duranty","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/?p=11207","title":{"rendered":"The Spirit Of Walter Duranty"},"content":{"rendered":"

In the 1930’s, New York Times <\/em>correspondent Walter Duranty <\/a>earned himself a place in literary infamy by whitewashing Stalin’s forced famine of Ukraine.<\/p>\n

Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias can at least take comfort in the fact that their junketeering whitewash of China’s authoritarian assaults on human rights<\/a>\u00a0has historical precedent, but will probably not lead to a Pulitzer that gets contested fifty years after their deaths:<\/p>\n

Klein and Yglesias\u2019 group was taken to tour a spanking-new village built on the outskirts of the northern city of Dalian. As Yglesias describes<\/a> it, \u201cback in 2006 the former \u201cvillage\u201d of rudimentary structures was razed and the government constructed a large and extremely nice park (it\u2019s in a very scenic area), reforested the hillsides, and constructed a series of apartment complexes. The former villagers now live in modest but up-to-date structures.\u201d But don\u2019t worry about the forcibly displaced, Yglesias admonishes us, because, \u201c[w]e spoke to one retired couple who was given four apartments\u2014they live in one and rent out the other three to families who\u2019ve either moved out to Cha\u2019an from the central city or else moved to the area from less prosperous regions of China. The town\u2019s current party boss said he was given five apartments.\u201d Klein\u2019s coverage on the website of the Washington Post <\/em>was equally credulous. He informed<\/a> his audience, \u201cA conversation with some residents revealed that they didn\u2019t just get one free apartment in the new building. They got\u00a0four<\/em> free apartments, three of which they were now renting out. And medical coverage. And money for furnishings. And a food stipend. And \u2014 I\u2019m not kidding, by the way \u2014 birthday cakes on their birthdays. Sweet deal.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The problem is, it’s not a “sweet deal” for most of the millions of Chinese displaced by development projects every years.\u00a0 China has no real concept of private property; every hovel is considered state property, for the state to destroy as needed for any reason.<\/p>\n

Big hydroelectric dam?\u00a0 Millions relocated (with no documentary evidence of “sweet deals”).\u00a0 Beijing holds the Olympics?\u00a0 Over a million relocated.<\/p>\n

Sweet.<\/p>\n

Yglesias and Klein are on a junket managed and staged by a public relations firm based in Hong Kong called the China-United States Exchange Foundation<\/a>. While the firm claims on its website it is a \u201cnon-government\u201d organization, it would be impossible for it to operate without strictures imposed by the Chinese government. China has no concept of freedom of the press, and there is simply no way that the Beijing government would tolerate a group of American journalists traveling around the country with impunity. In other words, Yglesias, Klein, and their \u201cfellow travelers\u201d are being shown precisely what the Beijing government wants them to see. It is a non-governmental tour in name only. The fact that Klein and Yglesias report back on such obviously staged scenes without a hint of doubt raises serious doubts about their journalistic competence. The \u201csweet deal\u201d that Klein alluded to above is obviously too \u2013 in fact, sickly \u2013 sweet. It is plainly obvious to anyone who knows a whit about China that they were visiting a stage-managed potemkin village.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The “Potemkin Village” – named after a Czarist minister who built a fake village to show Western visitors how well the Russian serfs were being treated (they were treated like slaves elsewhere in Russia) – is a great totalitarian tradition; dictators build a really, really nice demonstration of something controversial, to show how benign, even wonderful, it is.\u00a0 Hitler even built a “Potemkin” concentration camp, Theresienstadt, to show visiting human rights dignitaries and, one presumes, the 1940’s anscestors of Klein and Yglesias, how good <\/em>concentration camp inmates had it.<\/p>\n

Sad to say, they bought it back then, too.<\/p>\n

Leftyblogs:\u00a0 Speaking “sweet deal” to power.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In the 1930’s, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty earned himself a place in literary infamy by whitewashing Stalin’s forced famine of Ukraine. Ezra Klein and Matt Yglesias can at least take comfort in the fact that their junketeering whitewash of China’s authoritarian assaults on human rights\u00a0has historical precedent, but will probably not lead to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[63,4,51],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11207","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lefty-alt-media","category-media","category-liberal-tyranny"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11207","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=11207"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11207\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11837,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11207\/revisions\/11837"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=11207"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=11207"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=11207"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}