NYT Smears Apollo Triumph by Pushing Old Soviet Propaganda
The New York Times knows how to spoil a party.
For the Fourth of July holiday, the “newspaper of record” decided to distribute a video headlined “Please stop telling me America is great.”
For the 50th anniversary of the moon landing, one of the greatest technology victories of the Cold War, it’s going a step better.
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall heralded the USSR’s coming demise, The New York Times is still pushing Soviet propaganda.
Rehashing the “glories” of communism isn’t unheard of for the relentlessly liberal Gray Lady — who can forget that essay extolling the sex lives of women in enslaved Eastern Bloc countries behind the Iron Curtain?
But while the rest of the country is celebrating the end of the Space Race that came when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the American flag on the moon, the patriots behind The Times opinion section were thinking about all those lucky women and minorities who were privileged to be part of the Soviet space program.
Because in Times-thought, the greatest, freest country on earth making a huge advancement in human history is nothing — at least when it’s compared to the totalitarian regime that managed to put an Asian man, a black man and a woman into space first.
For The New York Times, that’s really something to celebrate.
The column is headlined “How the Soviets Won the Space Race for Equality,” with a summary headline: “The U.S.S.R. sent women and people of color to space years before the U.S.”
Its seriousness borders on satire: Allowing the Americans to put the first woman in space would be “be an insult to the patriotic feelings of Soviet women,” the director of the cosmonaut program wrote in a diary in 1961, according to The Times.
The Times lauds a hero pilot of the Vietnamese People’s Army whom the Soviets sent into space in 1980. The first human of African descent, a Cuban went up in 1980 as well.
He was welcomed back by a speech by the noted human rights campaigner Fidel Castro — who took a break from managing the island prison’s notorious gulag system to praise the cosmonaut’s “African ancestry,” according to contributing writer Sophie Pinkham.
As the headline would indicate, the piece has nothing but praise for the Soviet system, which killed countless millions of its own citizens. There’s no word about the death toll, the chronic shortages, the poisoned social world where citizens were subjects of a police state and rewarded for informing on each other.
Fortunately, even in an internet world bent against conservatives, there was plenty of pushback at The Times:
The USSR also murdered millions and starved millions more, and nearly brought the world to the brink of extinction through incompetent and malicious nuclear policies. They made everyone equally enslaved and miserable under the socialist system.
But sure, diversity & equality.
— Mattison Brooks (@MBPRDC) July 18, 2019
I didn’t think it was possible but this by far the dumbest tweet and article of the week and THAT is saying something.
I guess living under a brutal, oppressive socialist regime is worth it as long as you get the phony equality you want.
Well played @nytimes pic.twitter.com/4s9x0aVDd6
— Teapot Dome = Fake News! (@HarrenGWarding) July 18, 2019
“But the dissident purges, even as they killed millions, were very ethnically diverse.” – @nytimes
— Aldous Huxley’s Ghost™ (@AF632) July 18, 2019
The points of the critics are probably lost on The Times editors as well as its millions of readers.
But to Americans who know how both read and appreciate the greatness of the United States and its history, the point of The Times piece was not just lost, it was irrelevant.
It takes nothing different in terms of rocket power or technology to put a white man, a black man, an Asian or a woman into space.
But it took the United States — alone among the nations of the world — to marshal the technological genius and wealth to reach the moon and plant the flag.
The party celebrating that achievement will climax this weekend.
And not even The New York Times can spoil it.
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