John Barron, RIP

We haven’t taken notice of the passing of John Barron, the great anti-Communist journalist. It was Barron who was among those most responsible for Susan Sontag’s famous observation in 1982:

Imagine, if you will, someone who read only the Reader’s Digest between 1950 and 1970, and someone in the same period who read only The Nation or the New Statesman. Which reader would have been better informed about the realities of Communism? The answer, I think, should give us pause. Can it be that our enemies were right?

Click here for the Washington Post obituary by Matt Schudel. Among the fine remembrances of Barron are the NRO column by John Miller, “He shot down Commies,” the Human Events article by William Schultz, “Remembering long time Communist conspiracy fighter John Barron,” and the note by his former co-worker Lowell Ponte at Moonbat Central, “John Barron, RIP.”
UPDATE: A reader writes:

As a former colleague of John’s (a bit younger), I want to thank you for the kind mention of John’s death. It was a challenge getting even the Washington Times to run an appropriate obituary on him. He was a great journalist, a fine man and a loyal friend, who saw first hand the grave threat to freedom and used his talents to help win the war. We missed him in the Washington Bureau in the ’90s, though he would stop by the office now and again.
One ironic note: Just to show you how far Reader’s Digest has slipped ideologically, I heard that John Miller had called RD in Pleasantville for comment on John’s passing, and they claimed to have no record that John ever worked there. In a way he would have appreciated knowing his existence at RD had wiped clear in truly Stalinistic fashion.

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