What The Media Is Not Telling About The

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Issues & Insights

Bad Company

Posted 9/23/2005

The Home Front: The media have pushed the idea that the demonstration this weekend at the White House was an "anti-war" gathering. What they didn't say was who was behind it.

No doubt, many fine, sincere people demonstrated this weekend against the U.S. liberation of Iraq. Being Americans, they're certainly entitled to do so.

Maybe they even endorsed the view of those who organized the demonstrations. On Thursday, the organizers ran a two-page ad. On one, they called the Bush administration liars. On the other, they ran the names of all those who have died in Iraq.

But we'd be surprised if those well-meaning folks understood whose banner they were marching under, because the media aren't reporting it. For the record, the lead organizer is ANSWER, which the media routinely refer to as an "antiwar group."

It is nothing of the sort.

In fact, ANSWER is a front group for the Stalinist Workers World Party. And any group that qualifies for that epithet in front of its name deserves special scrutiny, since Josef Stalin was responsible for the murder of as many as 25 million human beings.

Well, you might ask, does it really matter? It sure does.

Imagine for a moment it was a different group that sponsored the demonstration — say, a neo-Nazi group. Think The Washington Post and other media would report that? You bet they would.

After all, Adolf Hitler and his thugs were some of the worst mass murderers of all time. We would expect — no, demand — media to report that a demonstration attended by hundreds of middle class moms, concerned fathers and pacifist students was in fact organized by Brownshirts.

So why do communists — particularly those who march under Stalin's flag — get different treatment? And why do thousands of average people feel comfortable marching arm in arm with them?

It's a puzzle. After all, according to the "Black Book of Communism" — a widely cited and respected compendium of communism's crimes in the 20th century — communist regimes murdered as many as 100 million people over the last century.

That's quite a record. Indeed, all the century's great mass murders — Mao Zedong (65 million), Stalin (25 million), Hitler (21 million), Pol Pot (2 million) — were communists or socialists.

Yet many well-meaning people who marched this weekend perhaps didn't know all this. Or perhaps they don't mind having their cause besmirched by people who aren't really anti-war at all, but anti-America, anti-West, anti-freedom and anti-capitalist.

It's disappointing that so many marchers will demonstrate, heedless that they're being used by people who hold them — and their bourgeois pacifism — in contempt.

Maybe it proves the old adage: Lie down with dogs, wake up with fleas.

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