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From the article.. "Communists do not follow the rules when it comes to captions" (For some reason this line in the article almost doubled me over with laught

by jqm 13y ago

From the article.. "Communists do not follow the rules when it comes to captions" (For some reason this line in the article almost doubled me over with laughter. I guess it's hard to remember how bad the red scare actually was, but the repeat blanket statements about "communists" just struck me as funny.)

dimitar 13y ago
While biased, it is not unfair; There was only a limited number of Soviet publications and they were official official organs of either the Communist party or the government (obviously 100% communist party members). So it was that simple. Of course, it would be unfair to communists living in democracies, since they often expressed their own personal views and a variety of party lines differing from the one in the USSR.
charlieh 13y ago
They murdered 100 million people, and are continuing to murder people to this day. Yeah, really funny.
reality_czech 13y ago
1969 was not anywhere near the "red scare" which was in the early 1950s. Anyone living in 1969 would have been well aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in which a nuclear war almost broke out, and the USSR's brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the pro-democracy protests there. Pretty much the opposite of "funy." Anyone reading this document would have known full well that "communists" in this context meant government officials of the USSR, North Korea, or China. All of those regimes had (and two still do) highly censored presses that were indeed not "careful with captions" -- or the lives of people who dared to expose the truth about the government in general.
- jqm 13y ago
  Please settle down my friend. I'm not suggesting the Russians didn't abuse the Czechs. It's just the blanket statements and rhetoric (yes, it is rhetoric) used in the article strike me as funny
  - charlieh 13y ago
    Stalin was the worst mass murderer in human history, with Mao not far behind. Between them they enslaved almost all of Asia and half of Europe, with no sign that they were content to stop there. They had a nuclear gun pointed at the West's head for several decades. But you think the "rhetoric" was "funny". Just paranoia, no doubt. I've encountered this attitude before (generally, though not exclusively, among those who are too young to remember the heydey of the Marxist slave state), but never quite understood it. So, tell us: just what more could they have done that would have made the threat serious?
  - reality_czech 13y ago
    Do you also read the Diary of Anne Frank and then post "LOL this girl really thought the nazis were after her haha" to Facebook? Because that is how you are coming across here.
prof_hobart 13y ago
It's interesting that an article about misreporting in the media is doing such a good job of misreporting (or at least being rather selective in its presentation of facts) itself. The reality is that all media My single favourite bit of misreporting came from the UK's Sky News back in 2000, during the anti-globalisation protests in Prague. They had a reporter live in Prague talking about the protests and stating that the whole of the centre the city was in lockdown as the citizens were barricading themselves against the protesters. I may well have believed him if I hadn't been watching it sat in a coffee house in the centre of Prague at the time.

by jqm 13y ago

dimitar 13y ago

While biased, it is not unfair; There was only a limited number of Soviet publications and they were official official organs of either the Communist party or the government (obviously 100% communist party members). So it was that simple. Of course, it would be unfair to communists living in democracies, since they often expressed their own personal views and a variety of party lines differing from the one in the USSR.

charlieh 13y ago

They murdered 100 million people, and are continuing to murder people to this day. Yeah, really funny.

reality_czech 13y ago

1969 was not anywhere near the "red scare" which was in the early 1950s. Anyone living in 1969 would have been well aware of the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, in which a nuclear war almost broke out, and the USSR's brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 to crush the pro-democracy protests there. Pretty much the opposite of "funy." Anyone reading this document would have known full well that "communists" in this context meant government officials of the USSR, North Korea, or China. All of those regimes had (and two still do) highly censored presses that were indeed not "careful with captions" -- or the lives of people who dared to expose the truth about the government in general.

jqm 13y ago
Please settle down my friend. I'm not suggesting the Russians didn't abuse the Czechs. It's just the blanket statements and rhetoric (yes, it is rhetoric) used in the article strike me as funny
- charlieh 13y ago
  Stalin was the worst mass murderer in human history, with Mao not far behind. Between them they enslaved almost all of Asia and half of Europe, with no sign that they were content to stop there. They had a nuclear gun pointed at the West's head for several decades. But you think the "rhetoric" was "funny". Just paranoia, no doubt. I've encountered this attitude before (generally, though not exclusively, among those who are too young to remember the heydey of the Marxist slave state), but never quite understood it. So, tell us: just what more could they have done that would have made the threat serious?
- reality_czech 13y ago
  Do you also read the Diary of Anne Frank and then post "LOL this girl really thought the nazis were after her haha" to Facebook? Because that is how you are coming across here.

prof_hobart 13y ago

It's interesting that an article about misreporting in the media is doing such a good job of misreporting (or at least being rather selective in its presentation of facts) itself. The reality is that all media My single favourite bit of misreporting came from the UK's Sky News back in 2000, during the anti-globalisation protests in Prague. They had a reporter live in Prague talking about the protests and stating that the whole of the centre the city was in lockdown as the citizens were barricading themselves against the protesters. I may well have believed him if I hadn't been watching it sat in a coffee house in the centre of Prague at the time.