Word: humanites
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Communist newspapers in the West are too dull even for Communists. At a meeting of France's Communist Central Committee, Party Secretary Etienne Fajon, 48, explained why the circulation of France's Communist L'Humanité has slipped from 500,000 to 120,000 in the past nine years. Said he: "L'Humanité is boring. The paper suffers from a series of consecrated formulas and stereotyped vocabulary . . . Our journalistic language is frightfully poor. This comes from a paralyzing fear of not using the same terms as the party's official documents...
...seeming response to Fajon's orders, L'Humanité promptly filled its columns with sports news, nonpolitical features, and sensational six-column spreads on murders. Last week the paper even used what it would have regarded in the past as a "bourgeois" circulation slogan, suggested by a suburban Paris party cell. The slogan: "Every morning, your bread, a good cup of coffee and L'Humanit...
...monster is dead . . . the era of the lie is ended," proclaimed the leftist Combat. The Communist Humanité crowed: "A great victory." Pro-EDC critics charged bitterly that Mendès had allowed the 99 Communist votes to decide the fate of France. Mendès apologists insisted that had the debate continued to the bitter end, the anti-EDC majority would have swelled to about 115, enough to kill EDC even without Communist help...
...retorted: "I don't care if they're ambassadors, priests, pastors, rabbis, or candy salesmen. If they take part in an illegal demonstration, they will suffer the consequences.") Last April Baylot's cops, on his own responsibility, seized 213,000 copies of the Communist L'Humanité, because of a cartoon showing John Foster Dulles about to drink a glass of French blood, and captioned: "Fill it; I'll pay in dollars." The Communists sued, accusing Baylot of "stealing" papers...
...Bastille Day parade. Though he was being kicked upstairs, Baylot was not disturbed. Said he: "We have broken the back of the Communist Party here. They would not dare stage a big demonstration now." His parting gift last week came, ironically, from the Communists: not only did L'Humanité lose its suit against him, but it was ordered to pay Baylot 300,000 francs ($857) for "the offensive character of its unfounded assertions...