The New York Timesarchives Twitter account wanted to mark the anniversary of the death of Mao Zedong, the brutal Chinese dictator who oversaw and caused the deaths of at least 45 million of his own people.

It’s reasonable for the New York Times to commemorate the man’s death, considering the fact that he’s a tragic blight on China’s history.  But, it’s all in the execution, pardon the pun.

The archives account tweeted out a 1976 obituary from the paper’s history, with a most alarming caption:

 “Mao Zedong died on this day in 1976. The Times said he ‘began as an obscure peasant’ and ‘died one of history’s great revolutionary figures.’”

That’s like saying Hitler was a “charismatic leader who knew how to get people to follow him” and omitting the whole genocidal maniac thing.

The Twitter outrage was swift and fierce, causing the paper to delete the tweet.

“We’ve deleted a previous tweet about Mao Zedong that lacked critical historical context.”

Ha!  “Critical historical context” in this sentence is a euphemism for “45 million dead Chinese people.”  

I guess this is the closest thing to an apology we’ll get from the New York Times.  However, I imagine the person running the Archives Twitter Account is a young person who was educated at a modern university which has attempted to downplay the dangers of communism and socialism for years.

This kind of negligent falsehood is the inevitable result of such strategic mis-education campaigns in higher education.

Image Credit: Twitter screen grab

About The Author

Mark was a co-founder of the Tea Party Patriots, and served as the national coordinator. He left the organization to work more broadly on expanding the self-governance movement beyond the partisan divide. Mark appears regularly on television in outlets as diverse as MSNBC, ABC, NBC, Fox News, CNN, Bloomberg, Fox Business and the BBC. He’s highly sought after for the tea party perspective from print and electronic media outlets, from the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, L.A. Times, Washington Examiner, Politico and the The Hill. Mark blogs at MarkMeckler.com, and his opinion editorials regularly run in many of the leading political newspapers both on and offline. Mark has a BA in English from San Diego State University and graduated with honors from University of the Pacific, McGeorge School of Law in 1988. He practiced real estate and business law for almost a decade. For the last eleven years of his legal career he specialized in Internet advertising law. When not fighting for the future of our nation, Mark is an avid horseman, and lives in rural northern California with his wife Patty and two children.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

13 − 10 =