Fellow-Traveling in Mozambique

I am sure there was no lack of American reporters in the 1930s, no doubt including some from the New York Times, who were capable of writing long, glowing articles about Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia without mentioning such embarrassments as concentration camps, the secret police, or the treatment of the Jews. But I have no doubt that a present-day reporter from the New York Times who came back from a trip to, say, Chile and handed in two sprawling pieces in which he ignored the existence of a government intelligence service and devoted his space to fulsome praise of General Pinochet and to descriptions of how, wherever he went, people shouted “Viva la junta!” would be out of a job within minutes.

I call in evidence two almost interminable reports, published in the New York Times on November 11 and 14, by one Michael Kaufman, who seems to be competing for the title of Fellow- Traveler of the Year. He certainly has little to learn from Lincoln Steffens. The object of his enthusiasm is Mozambique, whose Marxist regime appears tometobeas civilized as a machete chop. But Kaufman has seen the future, and, according to him, it works. Mozambique is now “fertile ground for the nurturing of socialism’s ‘new man’ ” —a sort of greenhouse where the “seeds of scientific socialism” can flower “without repression or economic chaos.”

RM

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Robert Moss

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I am sure there was no lack of American reporters in the 1930s, no doubt including some from the New York Times, who were capable of writing long, glowing articles about Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia without mentioning such embarrassments as concentration camps, the secret police, or the treatment of the Jews. But I have no doubt that a present-day reporter from the New York Times who came back from a trip to, say, Chile and handed in two sprawling pieces in which he ignored the existence of a government intelligence service and devoted his space to fulsome praise of General Pinochet and to descriptions of how, wherever he went, people shouted “Viva la junta!” would be out of a job within minutes.

I call in evidence two almost interminable reports, published in the New York Times on November 11 and 14, by one Michael Kaufman, who seems to be competing for the title of Fellow- Traveler of the Year. He certainly has little to learn from Lincoln Steffens. The object of his enthusiasm is Mozambique, whose Marxist regime appears tometobeas civilized as a machete chop. But Kaufman has seen the future, and, according to him, it works. Mozambique is now “fertile ground for the nurturing of socialism’s ‘new man’ ” —a sort of greenhouse where the “seeds of scientific socialism” can flower “without repression or economic chaos.”