I haven’t been much of a fan of conservative columnist Mona Charen, but her book Useful Idiots is an excellent look at the cast and crew of Left-liberals who were willing to look the other way or make excuses toward the Soviet Union. Unfortunately I didn’t get very far into it before I got a book recall notice from the library here, but I can’t return it without repeating a quote she digs up from then-ambassador to the United Nations Andrew Young.
According to Charen, Young spoke at a New York church on “Human Rights Sunday” and explained to the audience that,
We must recognize that they [the Soviets] are growing up in circumstances different from ours. They have, therefore, developed a completely different concept of human rights. For them, human rights are essentially not civil and political, but economic. . . . One lives in a land where, in most of that land, the sun sets as early as three o’clok in the afternoon, and where the planting season is minimal. Under those circumstances the struggle for human rights inevitably becomes far more economic in its expression that it would in a country such as ours, where we almost take it for granted that anything can grow almost anywhere year ’round.
As Charen notes, this was pretty much a straight-ahead parroting of Soviet justifications of their human rights abuses and failed economic policies. As Charen puts it (emphasis added),
It may not have occurred to a single one of his listeners in that fashionable church in Manhattan that day, but there was something almost obscene about an officer of the United States government lecturing the U.S. on sympathy towad the Soviet Union’s farmers. For in donig so he was not actually seeking sympathy for ordinary Russians — a sympathy richly deserved — but toward the government that enslaved them. The peoples of the Soviet republics were not deprived because the growing season is short and the sun scarce in that part of the world (the country had been relatively well fed under the last tsar); they were deprived because their government had committed genocide against its farmers for more than a decade beginning in 1920 and stretching into 1933.
Just take out that “almost” up there, and Charen nails it.