Oh, the Company They Keep

In the early 1930s, while an estimated 6 million Ukrainians were dying in a famine, New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty was depicting Stalin's Five-Year Plan as a resounding success. For this misreporting, he won a Pulitzer Prize. To its belated credit, the Times disowned Duranty's articles more than a decade ago. Though the Pulitzer committee decided last week not to revoke his award, Duranty's reputation has become hopelessly tarnished, his very name a byword for "craven stooge."

You would think there would be a lesson here for the present day, but Durantyism -- "progressive" Westerners' habit of licking the boots of repressive tyrants -- has long outlived Duranty himself.

Fidel Castro is one strongman who has never quite lost his charm for the smart set. In 1957, New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews was assuring his readers that the bearded rebel "has strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice, the need to restore the constitution, to hold elections." In 1989, anchorman Peter Jennings declared that "for much of the Third World, Cuba is actually a model of development." And just this year, director Oliver Stone was praising Castro for being "a very moral man" and "one of the Earth's wisest people." Unfortunately, in the weeks before Stone's fawning film, "Commandante," was to air on HBO in May, his hero jailed 75 dissidents. The documentary was mercifully shelved.

It's not that the left is indifferent to the sins of all tyrants. Chat up any smoked-salmon socialist and you'll get an earful about the crimes of Chile's Pinochet, Indonesia's Suharto, the shah of Iran and other Cold War allies of the West. One gets the distinct sense that their biggest crime was not oppressing their own people but being in cahoots with the United States. As long as a dictator hates the U.S., all his minor, or not so minor, lapses can easily be overlooked.

That phenomenon was on vivid display in the streets of London last week as protesters toppled a papier-mache statue of George W. Bush, who was branded "the greatest threat to life on this planet" by Mayor Ken Livingstone. The timing of this comment was a bit unfortunate because it came the very week that car bombs were killing more than 50 people in Turkey. But the protesters don't care about the threat posed by Islamist terrorists, even when their victims are fellow Muslims. The only casualties they care about are those inflicted by American or Israeli bombs.