Pravda Times
As America celebrates Apollo, NYT cheers Soviets
AS America prepares to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing, The New York Times is busy celebrating the Soviet space program and bashing America’s.
A Times op-ed Thursday highlighted how the Soviet Union was oh-so-diverse, sending women and people of color into space long before stuffy, old America got around to doing the same.
As the USSR retreats into the rearview mirror of history, there is a growing tendency to romanticize its disastrous reign through the lens of contemporary wokeness. Sure, Communists tortured and executed dissidents, starved their own people by the millions and operated gulags — but have you heard about their amazing space feminism and space intersectionality?
“Cosmonaut diversity was key for the Soviet message to the rest of the globe,” the writer, Sophie Pinkham, wrote. Her piece reads like something from an old issue of the Soviet newspaper Pravda boasting of the achievements of the Soviet space program.
Pravda, meaning “truth,” rarely offered what its name advertised. It functioned as a propaganda organ for the broken, failing state. But even Pravda might have demurred at publishing Pinkham’s hilarious follow-up line: “Under socialism, a person of even the humblest origins could make it all the way up.”
Someone should alert Pinkham to the news that the Soviet system collapsed and the Marxist tyranny lost the Cold War, its pretend-diversity notwithstanding. People of the “humblest origins” making it “all the way up” were just a show for the West. That old American leftists like Bernie Sanders fell for it then is sad. That hip young columnists for The New York Times continue to fall for it now is downright scary.
Fact is, the Soviets promoted minorities to burnish their international image and check boxes — exactly the kind of fake representation modern liberals claim to disdain.
Pinkham’s article was only one of (at least) two published by the Times bashing the US space program ahead of the 50th anni
versary of the Apollo landing. Also this week, the newspaper published an essay headlined: “To Make It to the Moon, Women Have to Escape Earth’s Gender Bias.”
It slammed the space program for forcing male and female astronauts to wear the same space suit, deemed problematic, since the two sexes have “different sweat patterns.”
She added: “Men sweat more than comparably fit women, and the areas where they sweat the most occur in different parts of the body. In other words, when it comes to temperature-controlling garments, the needs are different for men and women.” Outer-space sexism, she went on to suggest, is much like office-space oppression: “We are already aware of this in relation to office temperatures. Temperatures are set for men, which leaves women carrying sweaters to work.”
Astonishingly, amid this endless America-bashing and gender-griping, the essay didn’t pause to mention Margaret Hamilton, the remarkable computer scientist, systems engineer and Medal of Freedom recipient who played a leading role in developing software for the Apollo project.
Hamilton received no attention, but the Times essay did mention that, yes, the Soviet Union beat the United States when it came to sending women into space.
This was par for the course for the Times. It’s become increasingly important for the American left to portray failed socialist states like the Soviet Union as feminist paradises. In 2017, Kristen Ghodsee, a professor of Russian and East European studies at the University of Pennsylvania, penned a Times op-ed arguing that even sex was better in the Soviet Union.
Wrote Ghodsee: “Some might remember that Eastern bloc women enjoyed many rights and privileges unknown in liberal democracies at the time, including major state investments in their education and training, their full incorporation into the labor force, generous maternity leave allowances, and guaranteed free child care.”
Education was free, that’s true. And when your education was completed, the state would send you to where you were needed. You had no “rights and privileges” as it extended to your free will. My mother, raised in central Russia, became a teacher and was shipped to Turkmenistan, 30 hours away from her home.
It’s a tedious habit of modernday liberals to examine and judge and lament all American history by today’s woke standards. Trashing the American space program, which succeeded in putting men on the moon, because it doesn’t appeal to present-day virtuousness is bad enough. Comparing it unfavorably to the Soviet Union’s is morally inexcusable.