I am catching-up on my reading this morning and just read the story from Tuesday’s New York Times covering the life of Boris Yeltsin, the first democratically-elected President of Russia. One of the high points in Yeltsin’s life was helping to turn-back a USSR Communist Central Committee plot to overthough Mikhail Gorbachev, and the Times ran a big five column landscape picture of Yeltsin atop one of the tanks sent by the Communists, imploring the people against the "coup."
But the Times refers to the "coup" as a "right-wing coup." Twice. In a summary of events it refers to it as a "hard-line coup," which is way more accurate. The "coup" was hardly right-wing — it was being carried out by the most Communist of Communist leaders in the Soviet Union, whom Gorbachev was pushing away from. If anything, it was a "left-wing coup!"
I’ve seen the MSM use this "right-wing coup" language before in reference to what are really communists. Are any folks out there as irked as I am about this confusion of symbolism, and do you think it is done on purpose, or are the writers just political idiots?
April 27th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Let me provide an additional correct use of the terms. I am currently reading “China, Fragile Superpower” by Susan Shirk. She quotes Deng Xioaping as stating that a policy problem in China has been that the “right” position in Chinese Communist Party decisions is reflexively never adopted. Only the “left” position was adopted, reflecting the Maoist position, as opposed to the “right” position, sometimes reflected by Deng when he was sure the radical left-wing Red Guards weren’t going to kill him. Would the New York Times considered a Mao-inspired coup a “right wing” coup? Well, what about Tiananmen Square? Ever hear the media refer to that as “right wing?”
April 27th, 2007 at 12:00 am
Just as Nazis are referred to as right wing when they were the National Socialist Party! The left never wants to admit that the most terrible dictators and mass murderers to ever walk the planet have been those with socialist/communist agenda.
April 27th, 2007 at 12:00 am
And of course the looniest figures in the Middle East are also called
“ultra conservative.”
For the MSM, the Bad Guys are always conservative. And they are
innocent of the irony in oxymorons like “conservative communists.”
In 1 short year (1991-92) Boris Yeltsin undid generations of work by
Joseph Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, by terminating the Soviet Union
and peacefully returning the soverignty of more than a dozen republics,
including the Ukraine, Armenia, Lithuania, and many more.
It was no accident that Yeltsin picked Christmas Day 1991 as the
Soviet Union’s final day. He vigorously defended Russian Christianity
throughout his presidency.
God Bless Boris Yeltsin. He’s one of the great figures in Russian history.