Vaclav Havel’s Obituary…Guardian Style.
I’m sure many bloggers and journalists feel self-conscious about writing in a public forum but this article on the passing of playwright and statesman Vaclav Havel from the Guardian’s Comment is Free (but facts are absent?) section shows that literally any old tripe can get published. I can assure you that it isn’t a parody and is one-hundred percent genuine. Here’s a snippet:
“Havel’s anti-communist critique contained little if any acknowledgement of the positive achievements of the regimes of eastern Europe in the fields of employment, welfare provision, education and women’s rights. Or the fact that communism, for all its faults, was still a system which put the economic needs of the majority first.” (Neil Clark 19.12.11)
Just take a minute to savour the undiluted Marxism.
Don’t know about you but I’m already looking forward to reading his take on the death of Kim Jung-il and his impressive record of reducing income inequalities.
December 19th, 2011 at 6:49 pm
I noticed something else. On Yahoo.com headline news for this they lead in with the first three or four sentences devoted almost entirely to him being a “chain smoker” and he died of “lung disease” and etc. and so on. So anyone who wasn’t that much aware of who he was or much interested, other than a headline saying someone famous had died, would only have seen the lead-in sentences and it would have been a strong anti-smoking message and nothing to do with his background.
Then alternatively, when today’s headlines came out on the death of North Korea’s communist dictator, the first several lines doted on his background and accomplishments but there was nothing said about him being a strident anti-smoker – which he was as he outlawed all smoking on college campuses and anyone who was a smoker was not allowed to attend the state run colleges at all – period.
So two deaths, two opposites of the spectrum, the freedom fighter gets the lead in of being “a smoker” and “dead from smoking” – as “the big story”, where-as the dictator from North Korea got a free ride into glory.
That was how Yahoo.com treated it and I’m certain other MSM, being left-wing biased, will be presenting things the same.
December 19th, 2011 at 7:49 pm
I really deplore that obituary. Usually obituaries are used to exaggerate the importance or effect of the one who passed away. Here it is used to smooth down the side-effects of communist rule. I mean, certainly did communism put the economic needs of the majority first, or at least it would have, were it not for the fact that lack of resources hampered the communist economies at all times . e.g. the GDRs leaders usually had to compromise between producing goods for individual consumption, needless things like washing machines or cars and producing goods that benefited economic progress like a computer chip … As an individual your personal needs had to adapt either to one or the other.
However, as can be seen in the Soviet Unions treatment of peasants and dissidents, you could overcome shortages in goods by simply letting famine do away with the former and giving ample opportunity to increase GDP to the latter by concentrating them for joint efforts in a Gulag. And since in each case bare economic needs of survival have been put first by communism, I suppose the commentator in the Guardian is right.
December 19th, 2011 at 9:44 pm
This is the same Neil Clark who used a Staggers piece in January to praise the Belarussian regime. The man is odious: not content with being an apologist for tyranny, he even knows exactly what he is doing.
“Lukashenko’s rule is unquestionably authoritarian, as he has conceded, but … [he is] hugely popular with the majority of ordinary Belarusians, as his election results testify.” A more useful idiot never existed. When people make these sorts of comments about the Nazis, they get slated, and rightly; when they make them about the Communists, they get invited to write for the Guardian.
http://www.newstatesman.com/europe/2011/01/belarus-economy-lukashenko
Tom: Yahoo! said that Kim Jong-Il was a chain smoker.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/who-was-the-real-kim-jong-il-.html
December 20th, 2011 at 4:42 am
To PW: Interesting. That, I never saw, it was a different Yahoo headline and I hadn’t seen that about him in the past either, only that the he ordered the North Korean colleges to no longer enroll smokers. Hmmm, I wonder then if he did, but then he quit – and then he became authoritarian, banning smoking for college students after he may have quit. I say “may”, I don’t know, but curious detail about the man. No, I hadn’t seen that one. Thanks.