Demonic_ How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America - Ann Coulter [131]
Even at America’s premier university, Harvard, the history department offers only one course on the French Revolution. There are three classes on Germany, two on Vietnam—and seven history courses on “women” or “gender,” including “Women Acting Globally” and “Gender, Migration and Globalization in 20th Century U.S. History.”3
It would be as if the nation’s math departments decided algebra was superfluous knowledge. The French Revolution is not only a gripping story, full of warnings for any civilized society, but remains the template for every bloody totalitarian dictatorship to this day. France was one of the most advanced, sophisticated, important nations in the world in the eighteenth century. And then the rabble destroyed it. Isn’t that an interesting story?
In the blink of an eye, a great civilization was reduced to rubble, its most valuable citizens dead or living elsewhere. In the course of France’s short revolution, 600,000 French citizens were killed and another 145,000 fled the country.4 That’s in a country with between 24 and 26 million people, about the current population of Texas. In terms of population loss, that would be the equivalent of the United States having a 9/11 attack every day for seven years.
In the American Revolution, fewer than 10,000 died in battle and another 10,000 died of disease or exposure during the war. And our king was fighting back! France’s king capitulated immediately, but the revolutionaries proceeded to liquidate more than half a million of their fellow citizens anyway, in what the revolutionary leaders themselves called the “Terror.” Tories fled America during our Revolution, but no one tried to massacre their remaining relatives.
How did the nation of Voltaire, Descartes, Pascal, and Molière transform itself into a bloody saturnalia overnight? This is a question liberals don’t want us to think about.
The inheritors of the French revolutionary tradition always adhere to the same basic program. Psychopaths from Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Zedong to Kim Il Sung, Pol Pot, and Fidel Castro have used the rabble to grab power, with essentially the same justification, the same objectives, and the same bloody results.
All these monsters were praised in the pages of the New York Times and enthusiastically supported by the Democratic Party.
Stalin’s crimes were lied about in the famous reportage of the Times’s Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for calling the forced starvation of an estimated 15 million Ukrainians a false rumor.5
In 2003, the Pulitzer Prize board came under pressure from Ukrainians—those Stalin hadn’t killed—to revoke the prize based on Duranty’s having covered up genocide. That’s a rare transgression even among Times reporters.
In response, the New York Times hired a Columbia University history professor, Mark von Hagen, to review Duranty’s articles and recommend whether the Times should return the prize. Von Hagen, an expert on early-twentieth-century Russian history, reviewed most of Duranty’s articles from 1931 and produced an eight-page report.
He concluded that Duranty had uncritically parroted “the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime”; that his objective had been to goad the United States into establishing formal relations with the USSR; that he had a lover working for the Soviet secret police; that he inflated Stalin’s accomplishments while hiding mass murder; and that he gave his imprimatur to a “dull and largely uncritical recitation of Soviet sources.” Von Hagen concluded, naturally, that the prize should be rescinded, saying, unironically, “They should take it away for the greater honor and glory of the New York Times.