And This Year's Walter Duranty Award Goes To...

...Barbara Demick, Los Angeles Times staff writer, for her splendid defense of North Korean Dear Leader, National Father, Brilliant Commander and Beloved Party Chairman Kim Jong Il's heretofore insular and besieged Communist regime. Excerpts from her award-winning piece:

[The North Korean representative] believes that Americans have the wrongheaded notion that North Koreas are unhappy with the system of government under Kim Jong Il. "We Asians are traditional people," he said. "We prefer to have a benevolent father leader."

The most important point the North Korean said he wanted to convey in the conversation was that his nation was a place just like any other."There is love. There is hate. There is fighting. There is charity. People marry. They divorce. They make children," he said."People are just trying to live a normal life."

Bravo, Barbara! You've succeeded in capturing the soul of that much misunderstood country and its benevolent father-leader. We salute you, Comrade!

The Walter Duranty Award ("The Walty") was established in 2005 to honor the memory of one of the America's most revered defenders of socialism's vision for humanity. He won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism in 1932 for his insightful reporting on the so-called Ukrainian terror famine, and on the efforts of the international bourgeoisie to exagerate this necessary and benevolent expression of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat. True keepers of the flame worldwide owe Mr Duranty, and all those who follow in his footsteps, a deep debt of gratitude.

Update:Ms Demick may well be the best since Duranty himself. We had a crowd of left-leaning journalists carrying the banner of true communism forward to the new dawn back before the Evil Warmonger Reagan and his sinister cabal of bourgeois exploiters and international financiers destroyed the Soviet Union--that last, best hope of mankind. Sadly, there are very few such journalists left today. But Ms Demick deserves a Lenin Medal for her consistent walk down the Shining Path. Her story today is another fine example, faultlessly portraying the world as the Maximum Leader and Dear Father himself sees it. And then there is this remarkable piece, from Harvard's Neiman Reports last fall. A few nuggets should prove her usefulness to the Cause:

What might be written from inside North Korea could hardly be worse than what’s now written from the outside. In some cases, journalists might actually be helpful. Iraq, which I covered in the late 1990’s as Middle East correspondent for The Philadelphia Inquirer, used to se-lectively admit journalists with the hope that they would publicize the impact of U.S.-imposed economic sanctions. Indeed, the sanctions had contributed to rising deaths of young children, and journalists dutifully reported this, which led to the easing of sanctions. Similarily, the dire lack of electricity in North Korea could make for a moving feature story that might lend credence to Pyongyang’s pleas for foreign energy assistance.

I try to interview as many of the aid offcials coming through Seoul as possible. They tend to present a more positive and less caricatured portrait of North Korea than outsiders. If I were to generalize, I would say they describe not an "axis of evil," but a flawed country trying to cope with a failed ideology and economy, desperately seeking a place for itself in the world.

Again, kudos, Comrade Demick!

Comrade Monk