Jeff alerts us to an interesting piece of idiotarian lunacy in the Globe and Mail.
Amazingly this very piece came up in a conversation I had yesterday with a customer, one who also happens to read this blog. I’ll call him Dave to disguise the intrusion of the real world into the blogosphere (Hi David !) and I should probably make sure to check my email sig file each time I send a business mail (removing the link to here): not sure that the various screeds here will resonate with the customer base of Taiwanese bicycle manufacturers and German plane makers.
Dave’s question on the phone was first whether I had read the piece (No) and second, what was the Globe and Mail? It was like a Canadian version of The Onion, right? Sadly, no, it isn’t, it is in fact one of the major papers of the Friendly Giant to the North (trademarked description by PJ I think).
Go have a look at the piece, it’s a tremendous example of getting everything completely arse backwards. Apparently the collapse of the Soviet Union was really all to do with Gorby being a democratic genius. Now Splotchtop did have some saving graces but this might be slightly over egging the pudding:

It was Mikhail Gorbachev, who with a sweeping democratic revolution at home and one peace initiative after another abroad, backed the Gipper into a corner, leaving him little choice — actors don’t like to be upstaged — but to concede there was a whole new world opening up over there.

Now our Mr Martin states that he worked as a journalist in both Washington and Moscow, giving him a unique insight. I have worked as a bartender in Washington DC, and as is well known we are, ex officio, the fount of all knowledge. If this were not true why do so many drunks ask us what they should do about their lives? I also pitched up in Moscow in 1991 and lived there until 1997 doing various jobs, the sum total of which I would argue give me a much better view of reality than an expense account cosseted journalist. For example, when I first arrived food rationing had ended a few weeks before. I had $100 a day to spend on living expenses, something like a month’s wages for the average Soviet. It still took 2 hours a day to find the 3,000 calories to keep you going in a Russian winter. The food just wasn’t there, I mean just a few weeks before even beetroots and turnips were rationed: can you imagine how badly you have to screw up an economy for that to be necessary? Gorby was in fact in charge of Agriculture before he became General Secretary.
Oh, and by the way, the democratic revolution was the work of Yeltsin, not Gorby. The SU actually fell when Boris had Russia declare independence. Yes, really, the Empire finally fell when its creating country washed its hands of it, leaving Gorby as President of the SU, something that didn’t exist any more.
Sorry, Martin just isn’t worth the attention I’m paying to him. This line:

He released the dissident icon Andrei Sakharov and hundreds of other political prisoners.

Well, he did allow Sakharov to leave his house arrest in Gorky, this is true. There seems to be no comment on a system that actually had political prisoners, no recognition that the mere existence of such people is enough to condemn a system outright. Nor, sadly, an admission that during the Gorby years more such prisoners were sentenced, in fact the last ones left the Gulag in 1993.
There also seems to be a little glossing over of a few facts: like the truth that it was Gorby who sent paratroops into the Baltics to kill demonstrators with spades.
Nah, sorry Laurence, you’re barking, a complete barking moonbat. As usual, Jeff said it better than I.

Update. Commenter Ed Derbyshire sent in a riposte to this piece in the National Post which contains the withering (by the polite standards of discourse in Canada) final line:

We can ignore Gorby in his gloriously pathetic irrelevance. But it is critical that the enormous achievements of Ronald Reagan not be buried by the kind of sloppy, self-serving, left-liberal, amnesiac pap peddled by Lawrence Martin and his ilk.