Better late than never to recognize this laudatory non-OpEd piece from the New York Times from this last week.
Chávez Restyles Venezuela With ’21st-Century Socialism’:

CARACAS, Venezuela – Firmly in power and his revolution now in overdrive, President Hugo Chávez is moving fast to transform Venezuela’s economy by bucking free-market planning with what he calls 21st-century socialism: founding state companies, seizing abandoned private factories and establishing thousands of cooperatives and worker-run businesses.
[...]
The new measures – which include the seizure of factories, mines and fields the government says are unproductive – are playing well domestically. Mr. Chávez has an approval rating topping 70 percent.

“I’m not afraid of socialism and never have been,” said Rivas Silvino, who works in a diaper factory run by workers and managers under a state co-management plan. “The world is afraid. I say, don’t be afraid.”

If Rivas says “don’t be afraid of socialism”, well that’s good enough for me. Fitting that they quote someone at a diaper factory when advocating a system that prevents people from learning how to wipe their own ass. I mean, it’s not like I’m one of the hundred million or so that socialism killed this last century. Leaving aside the abject poverty that Venezuela is trapped and being a bit skeptical that Chavez, like Castro, will ever allow any unflattering news to come out.

For example:

Caracas, Venezuela, October 14, 2005—Venezuela’s National Institute of Statistics (INE) says that poverty will drop by 8% points by the end of 2005, relative to the previous year. Similarly, unemployment dropped 0.6% points, from 12.1% in August, to 11.5% in September of this year.

What foresight! Poverty in Venezuela is going to drop 8% before the end of the year. From what soothsayer do such prognostications come forth? Fuck Greenspan, we need whoever Venezuela’s got. And they’ve got an unemployment rate lower than the industrialized world! Some people may disagree with those numbers but hey, that’s what jails are for, right?

Just a week before, Nicholas Kristoff was giving a similar outlook on the history of Mao Tse Tung (h/t TimesWatch):

“My own sense is that Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China….But Mao’s legacy is not all bad. Land reform in China, like the land reform in Japan and Taiwan, helped lay the groundwork for prosperity today. The emancipation of women and end of child marriages moved China from one of the worst places in the world to be a girl to one where women have more equality than in, say, Japan or Korea.

Assuming you’re not aborted immediately, I guess things can only go up from there.

Now that Kristoff piece was in a book review for Mao’s biography but it is still too reminiscent of The Times review for the 150th Anniversary of The Communist Manifesto:

A decade after those world-historical occurrences, the Manifesto continues to yield itself to our reading in the new light that its enduring insights into social existence generate. It emerges ever more distinctly as an unsurpassed dramatic representation, diagnosis and prophetic array of visionary judgments on the modern world . . . . A century and a half afterward, it remains a classic expression of the society it anatomized and whose doom it prematurely announced. (emphasis mine)

Oh sure there were some bad things, but….

The Times historical relationship with the subject is too glaring to ignore. When Walter Duranty won the Pulitzer prize for shilling for Stalin’s murder of millions in the Ukraine famine of the 1930s, the Times writer famously said, ” “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the “mess” of collectivization. “But — to put it brutally — you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” To this day, the New York Times has twice refused to revoke Duranty’s Pulitzer.

To Pinch & Co., just because you guys haven’t gotten the hang of capitalism yet doesn’t mean we all deserve to die a peasant’s death.

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