The Soviets had a problem. On March 5, 1940, Stalin had given the order to massacre 14,700 Polish officers, which his vicious secret police NKVD happily did. Job well done; until they lost Poland to the Nazis, who discovered some mass graves in the Katyn forest. Goebbels began using this to paint Britain’s ally as monsters (which, in hindsight, was fair). This was a disastrous public relations problem! And so, they turned to the press, and those like Ralph Parker of the Times of London, who traveled by caviar-supplied trains to Katyn, bedded Soviet honeypots and came back repeating the Soviet line.

This is the topic of Alan Philps’s new book, The Red Hotel; and as I watch TikTok influencers walk through Shein’s polished up sweatshops, attesting to how wonderful they are, despite the false and mean rumors of the West, I hear an eerie echo of that depressing, pathetic past. The reality — that Shein is the bleakest end of sweatshop-fueled fast-fashion, whose budget online offerings are made by workers paid less than four cents per item, working eighteen-hour days with no weekends — is an inconvenient marketing problem, to be polished out by our generation’s positive Parkers. …

The chief example in Shein’s now-infamous TikTok campaign is a body-positive “confidence activist” from Los Angeles, who goes by the name Dani DMC.

[It’s a must-read. The TikTok influencer industry may be new and novel, but as Anderson argues, the process of selling out is as old as time. At the end of this article, I was reminded of a line from ‘A Man for All Seasons,’ in which Thomas More discovers that Richard Rich had sold him out for a political appointment. “Why Richard,” More says, “it profits a man nothing to give his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?” Maybe that’s a lesson that ‘influencers’ should heed.

In Dani DMC’s slight defense, she’s hardly the first American to go to a communist country and see only what she wanted to see, and then report what benefited her to report. She appears to have been duped; Walter Duranty knowingly lied about Stalin’s genocidal crimes. Later, we had no end of celebrities and bien pensants extol the Soviets before the fall of the Berlin wall and collapse of their regime. Some of those idiots help popularize the murderous Che Guevara as a fashion icon, too. — Ed]