Posted on 09/17/2015 7:58:15 PM PDT by SkyPilot
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtYcDE-Nw2M
A Tale of Truth and Two Journalists
by Ian Hunter Report Magazine, March 27, 2000
http://faminegenocide.com/resources/2journalists.html
It is hard to credit that a decade has slipped away since the death of Malcolm Muggeridge on November 14, 1990. The most compellingly readable of journalists, hardly a day goes by that I do not recall one of Muggeridge’s insights or marvel afresh at his prophetic vision.
Muggeridge’s journalistic integrity was shaped by one searing experience; in 1932 he went to Moscow as correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. Joseph Stalin’s twin manias - collectivization of agriculture and dekulakization of peasants - were then at their bloodthirsty zenith, but few Westerners could have guessed it from the sycophantic foreign reporting.
The Dean of the Moscow press corps was Walter Duranty of the New York Times. Joseph Alsop would later say of him: “Lying was Duranty’s stock in trade.”
For two decades Duranty was the most influential foreign correspondent in Russia. His dispatches were regarded as authoritative; indeed Duranty helped to shape U.S. foreign policy. His biographer, Susan Taylor (Stalin’s Apologist, Oxford University Press, 1990) has demonstrated that Duranty’s reporting was critical factor in President Roosevelt’s decision in 1933 to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union.
Duranty, an unattractive, oversexed little man, with a wooden leg, falsified facts, spread lies and half truths, invented occurrences that never happened, and turned a blind eye to the man-made famine that starved to death more than 14 million people (according to an International Commission of Jurists which examined this tragedy in 1988-90). When snippets of the truth began to leak out, Duranty coined the phrase: “You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”. This phrase, or a variant thereof, has since proved useful to a rich variety of ideologues who contend that a worthy end justifies base means. Yet when the Pulitzer committee conferred its prize on Duranty (in 1932, at the height of the famine) they cited his “scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment, and exceptional clarity.”
One story that circulated among Moscow correspondents trying to explain Duranty was that he was necrophiliac; in exchange for favourable reporting, the Soviet authorities may have allowed him unsupervised night access to the city morgues. Whether true or not (and Duranty’s biographer, Susan Taylor, leaves this question open), certain it is that the regime had some sort of hold on Duranty; they showered benefits on him, - a fancy apartment, an automobile, and fresh caviar daily.
Enter Malcolm Muggeridge. In the spring of 1933 Muggeridge did an audacious thing; without permission he set off on a train journey through what had formerly been the breadbasket of the Soviet Union, the Ukraine and North Caucusus. What Muggeridge witnessed, he never forgot. In a series of articles smuggled out in the diplomatic pouch, he described a man-made famine that had become a holocaust: peasants, millions of them, dying like famished cattle, sometimes within sight of full granaries, guarded by the army an police. “At a railway station early one morning, I saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded into cattle trucks at gunpoint - all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet.” At a German co-operative farm, an oasis of prosperity in the collectivized wilderness he saw peasants kneeling down in the snow, begging for a crust of bread. In his Diary, Muggeridge wrote: “Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven’t seen this. Ideas will come and go; but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood.”
But few believed him. His dispatches were cut. He was sacked by the Guardian and forced to leave Russia. Muggeridge was vilified, slandered and abused, not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, where sympathy to what was called “the great Soviet experiment” was de rigour. Walter Duranty’s voice led the chorus of denunciation and denial, although privately Duranty told a British foreign office acquaintance that at least 10 million people had been starved to death - adding, characteristically, “but they’re only Russians.”
Beatrice Webb (Muggeridge’s aunt by marriage) admitted that “In the Soviet Union, people disappear,” but she still denounced Muggeridge’s famine reports as “base lies”. The Very Reverend Hewlett Johnson, Dean of Canterbury, applauded Stalin’s “steady purpose and kindly generosity.” George Bernard Shaw made a whirlwind tour and pronounced himself fully satisfied that there was ample food for all in the worker’s paradise.
If vindication was a long time coming, it cannot have been sweeter than when Duranty’s biographer, Susan Taylor, wrote in 1990: “But for Muggeridge’s eyewitness accounts of the famine in the spring of 1933 and his stubborn chronicle of the event, the effects of the crime upon those who suffered might well have remained as hidden from scrutiny as its perpetrators intended. Little thanks he has received for it over the years, although there is a growing number who realize what a singular act of honest and courage his reportage constituted.”
Alas, when these words came to be written, Muggeridge had died. Still, they are worth remembering.
Outstanding. Thanks for this post. We should never forget that our officially sanctioned “romance” ironically began before even before Muggeridge’s reporting, which never saw the light of day. Duranty’s lies put the NYT stamp of approval on Stalin and he’s a prime example that journalistic integrity, to this day, is easily set aside for the sake of “access”. Muggeridge on TV is one of the earliest and most delightful memories I have from decades ago.
Good post. I loved Buckley’s program and young as I was I loved Muggeridge.
Well, 1980. I guess I wasn’t that young.
Malcolm Muggeridge was 77 years old in that interview.
indeed [Stalin pawn] Duranty helped to shape U.S. foreign policy.
Great post. Ravi Zacharias quotes Malcolm Muggeridge often. What a great man with a great mind.
This again proves that for 100 years our newspapers were controlled by evil Stalinists or Marxists or Leninists-——Lies and more Lies to hide the Truth.
It is like Diane West proves in America Betrayed-—that we “think” certain people are “heroes” and they were evil, and some people who were demonized by the MSM were true heroes.
All the Common Core history taught to our children is the Duranty version, by the way.
Malcolm Muggeridge QUOTES :
“Never forget that only dead fish swim with the stream.”
“The depravity of man is at once the most empirically verifiable reality but at the same time the most intellectually resisted fact.”
“People do not believe lies because they have to, but because they want to.”
“There is no such things as darkness, only a failure to see.”
“I myself am convinced that the theory of evolution, especially to the extent to which it has been applied, will be one of the greatest jokes in the history books of the future. Posterity will marvel that so very flimsy and dubious an hypothesis could be accepted with the incredible credulity it has.”
“Whereas other civilizations have been brought down by attacks of barbarians from without, ours had the unique distinction of training its own destroyers at its own educational institutions, and then providing them with facilities for propagating their destructive ideology far and wide, all at the public expense. Thus did Western Man decide to abolish himself, until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over—a weary, battered old brontosaurus—and became extinct.”
“Every happening, great and small, is a parable whereby God speaks to us, and the art of life is to get the message.”
“Deliberate,” “diabolical” starvation
Malcolm Muggeridge on Stalin’s famine
by Marco Carynnyk
http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1983/228321.shtml
PART I
“The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind, ... without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering,” Malcolm Muggeridge said. He was talking about the genocidal famine that swept Ukraine and the adjacent North Caucasus, two of the most abundant lands in all of Europe, in the winter of 1932 and the spring and summer of 1933.
The harvest of 1932 had been a fair one, no worse than the average during the previous decade, when life had seemed a bit easier again after three years of world war and five years of revolution and famine. But then, as the Ukrainian peasants were bringing in their wheat and rye, an army of men advanced like locusts into every barn and shed, and swept away all the grain. The few stores that the peasants managed to put away were soon gone, and they began eating leaves, bark, corn husks, dogs, cats and rodents.
When that food was gone and the people had puffed up with watery edema, they shuffled off to the cities, begging for bits of bread and dying like flies in the streets. In the spring of 1933, when the previous year’s supplies were gone and before the new vegetation brought some relief, the peasants were dying at the rate of 25,000 a day, or 1,000 an hour, or 17 a minute. (In World War II, by comparison, about 6,000 people were killed every day.) Corpses could be seen in every country lane and city street, and mass graves were hastily dug in remote areas. By the time the famine tapered off in the autumn of 1933, some 6 million men, women and children had starved to death.
Malcolm Muggeridge was there that terrible winter and spring. As a correspondent for the Manchester Guardian in Moscow, he was one of the few Western journalists who circumvented Soviet restrictions and visited the famine regions - and then honestly reported what he had seen.
Shortly before Mr. Muggeridge’s articles appeared in the Guardian, the Soviet authorities declared Ukraine out of bounds to reporters and set about concealing the destruction they had wreaked. Prominent statesmen, writers and journalists - among them French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, George Bernard Shaw and Walter Duranty of The New York Times - were enlisted in the campaign of misinformation.
The conspiracy of silence was largely successful. For years to come Stalinists and anti-Stalinists argued whether a famine had occurred and, if so, whether it was not the fault of the Ukrainian peasants themselves. Today, as Ukrainians throughout the world (except in the Soviet Union, of course, where the subject cannot even be mentioned) commemorate the 50th anniversary of the famine, the events of 1933 are still largely unknown.
Mr. Muggeridge and I talked at his cottage in Sussex, England. I was particularly anxious to know why he, unlike other foreign correspondents in Moscow in 1933, took the trouble to investigate the famine.
* * *
Q: Why did you decide to write about the famine?
A: It was the big story in all our talks in Moscow, everybody knew about it. There was no question about that. Anyone you were talking to knew that there was a terrible famine going on. Even in the Soviets’ own pieces there were somewhat disguised acknowledgements of great difficulties there: the attacks on the kulaks, the admission that the people were eating the seed grain and cattle.
You didn’t have to be very bright to ask why they were eating them. Because they were very hungry, otherwise they wouldn’t. So there was no possible doubt. I realized that that was the big story. I could also see that all the correspondents in Moscow were distorting it.
Without making any kind of plans or asking for permission I just went and got a ticket for Kiev and then went on to Rostov. The Soviet security is not as good as people think it is. If you once duck it, you can go quite a long way. At least you could in those days. Having all those rubles, I could afford to travel in the Pullman train. They had these old-fashioned international trains - very comfortable, with endless glasses of hot tea and so on. It was quite pleasant.
But even going through the countryside by train one could sense the state of affairs. Ukraine was starving, and you only had to venture out to smaller places to see derelict fields and abandoned villages.
On one occasion, I was changing trains, and I went wandering around, and in one of the trains in the station, the kulaks were being loaded onto the train, and there were military men all along the platform. They soon pushed me off. Fortunately, they didn’t do more. They could have easily hauled me in and asked, “What the hell are you doing here?” But they didn’t. I just cleared off. But I got the sense of what it was like.
I’ll tell you another thing that’s more difficult to convey, but it impressed me enormously. It was on a Sunday in Kiev, and I went into the church there for the Orthodox mass. I could understand very little of it, but there was some spirit in it that I have never come across before or after. Human beings at the end of their tether were saying to God: “We come to You, we’re in trouble, nobody but You can help us.”
Their faces were quite radiant because of this tremendous sense they had. As no man would help them, no government, there was nowhere that they could turn. And they turned to their Creator. Wherever I went it was the same thing.
Then when I got to Rostov I went on to the North Caucasus. The person who had advised me to go there was the Norwegian minister in Moscow, a very nice man, very well-informed, who said, “You’ll find that this German agricultural concession is still working there. Go and see them, because they know more about it than anybody, and it’ll be an interesting experience.” So I went there. It was called the Drusag concession.
Q: What difference did you see between Drusag and the collective farms in Ukraine and the North Caucasus?
A: The difference was simply that the agriculture in the concession was enormously flourishing, extremely efficient. You didn’t have to be an agronome, which God knows I’m not, to see that there the crops, the cattle, everything, was completely different from the surrounding countryside.
Moreover, there were hordes of people, literally hordes of people trying to get in, because there was food there, which gave a more poignant sense to the thing than anything except that service in the church. The German agronomes themselves were telling me about it. They’d been absolutely bombarded with people trying to come there to work, do anything if they could get in, because there was food there.
Q: I have read in a British Foreign Office dispatch that Drusag employed five people simply to pick up bodies of peasants who had come in and died of hunger.
A: Yes, that’s what I’d heard too, if not more. The peasants staggered in and dropped dead.
Q: Were the Germans able to do anything for the peasants?
A: They could help them with a little food - they were quite charitable in their attitude - but of course they couldn’t do more than that flea-bit.
Q: What were you thinking and, more importantly perhaps, what were you feeling when you saw those scenes of starvation and privation in Ukraine? How does one respond in such a situation?
A: First of all, one feels a deep, deep, deep sympathy with and pity for the sufferers. Human beings look very tragic when they are starving. And remember that I wasn’t unaware of what things were like because in India, for instance, I’ve been in a village during a cholera epidemic and seen people similarly placed. So it wasn’t a complete novelty.
The novelty of this particular famine, what made it so diabolical, is that it was not the result of some catastrophe like a drought or an epidemic. It was the deliberate creation of a bureaucratic mind which demanded the collectivization of agriculture, immediately, as a purely theoretical proposition, without any consideration whatever of the consequences in human suffering.
That was what I found so terrifying. Think of a man in an office who has been ordered to collectivize agriculture and get rid of the kulaks without any clear notion or definition of what a kulak is, and who has in what was then the GPU and is now the KGB the instrument for doing this, and who then announces it in the slavish press as one of the great triumphs of the regime.
And even when the horrors of it have become fully apparent, modifying it only on the ground that they’re dizzy with success, that this has been such a wonderful success, these starving people, that they must hold themselves in a bit because otherwise they’d go mad with excitement over their stupendous success. That’s a macabre story.
Q: There were kulaks throughout the Soviet Union, and they were “liquidated” as an entire class. Collectivization also took place throughout the Soviet Union. And yet the famine occurred at the point when collectivization had been completed, and it occurred not throughout the Soviet Union, but largely in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. How do you explain that?
A: Those were the worst places. They were also the richest agricultural areas, so that the dropping of productivity would show more dramatically there. But they were also places, as you as a Ukrainian know better than I, of maximum dissent. The Ukrainians hated the Russians. And they do now. Therefore, insofar as people could have any heart in working in a collective farm, that would be least likely to occur in Ukraine and the North Caucasus.
Q: Given the deliberate nature of the famine in Ukraine, the decision on Stalin’s part to proceed with collectivization and to eliminate resistance at any cost and to get rid of the kulak, vaguely defined as that category was, and given the fact that food continued to be stockpiled and exported even as people dropped dead on the streets, is it accurate to talk about this as a famine? Is it perhaps something else? How does one describe an event of such magnitude?
A: Perhaps you do need another word. I don’t know what it would be. The word “famine” means people have nothing whatsoever to eat and consume things that are not normally consumed. Of course there were stories of cannibalism there. I don’t know whether they were true, but they were very widely believed.
Certainly the eating of cattle and the consequent complete destruction of whatever economy the farms still had was true.
I remember someone telling me how all manners and finesse disappeared. When you’re in the grip of a thing like this and you know that someone’s got food, you go and steal it. You’ll even murder to get it. That’s all part of the horror.
It’s time journalism’s ‘greatest liar’ lost his prize
The Gazette, Montreal Thursday, May 1, 2003 By Lubomyr Luciuk
http://www.ukemonde.com/news/duranty.html
Clever in crafting words, a bon vivant, ever-engaging as a dinner companion, he was much in demand in certain circles. He satiated other needs as a novice necromancer, pervert and drunkard. His name was Walter Duranty, The New York Times’s man in Moscow in the early 1930s. For supposedly objective reporting about conditions there, Duranty was distinguished with the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence. What he was really was Stalin’s apologist, a libertine prepared to prostitute accuracy for access, ever-ready to write whatever was necessary to secure him in his various cravings.
Much of this was known at the time, hence the deprecating references to him as “Walter Obscuranty.” More tellingly, Malcolm Muggeridge, a contemporary, said that Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met.” Despite being one of the few eyewitnesses to the politically engineered Great Famine of 1932-1933 in Soviet Ukraine, Duranty nevertheless spun stories for The New York Times dismissing all accounts of that horror as nothing more than bunk or malicious anti-Soviet propaganda.
He knew otherwise. On 26 September 1933, at the British Embassy in Moscow, Duranty privately confided to William Strang that as many as 10 million people had died directly or indirectly of famine conditions in the USSR during the past year. Meanwhile, publicly, Duranty orchestrated a vicious ostracizing of those journalists who risked much by reporting on the brutalities of forced collectivization and the ensuing demographic catastrophe, Muggeridge among them. Even as the fertile Ukraine, once the breadbasket of Europe, became a modern-day Golgotha, a place of skulls, Duranty plowed the truth under. Occasionally pressed on the human costs of the Soviet experiment he did, however, evolve a dismissive dodge, canting “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs.” Not his eggs, of course.
To hallow the memory of the many millions of victims of this Communist crime against humanity, good men and women are, on this very day, May Day 2003, calling for the posthumous revocation of Walter Duranty’s Pulitzer Prize. From around the world tens of thousands of postcards are being mailed to the Pulitzer Prize Committee in New York, recalling the 70th anniversary of the Terror-Famine, underscoring Duranty’s perfidiousness and how his duplicitous reports, as published in The New York Times, helped cover up one of the greatest acts of genocide in 20th century Europe.
There are, I’m told, sophists who shall reply that Duranty’s Prize was awarded for what he wrote before he bore false witness about this man-made famine. Those willing to be so indulgent with Duranty seem oddly comfortable with ignoring how he betrayed that most fundamental principle of journalism, the obligation of reporting truthfully on what is observed. However good a scribbler Duranty may have been, the man was a teller of lies, not a reporter of reality. He willingly served as a shill for the Soviets, as millions died. By one calculation the death rate during the Great Famine reached 25,000 souls per day. My home town of Kingston would, at that rate, have been emptied of all life in under a week.
The men and women whose principled labours have earned them the honour and distinction of a Pulitzer Prize should be revolted at knowing that within their ranks there remains a blackguard who, Janus-like, turned a blind eye to one of history’s greatest atrocities while casting the other about in wrath against any journalists who reported that truth. Quite simply put, Duranty’s continuing grasp on a Pulitzer Prize soils all Pulitzer Prizes.
Dr Lubomyr Luciuk is director of research for the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association (see www.uccla.ca) and author of Searching For Place: Ukrainian Displaced Persons, Canada, and the Migration of Memory (University of Toronto Press, 2000).
The Pulitzer Prize Committee can be reached at pulitzer@www.pulitzer.org
A fellow journalist on a visit from Ukraine, begged me to take him to the grave of Malcolm Muggeridge, in a small East Sussex village called Whatlington.
The literary editor of the Kyiv-based Ukraine magazine, Anatole Bilenko, laid flowers on the headstone to the man who exposed to the world a man-made famine, which was to cost more lives than the Jewish Holocaust a few years later.
This year marks the centenary since the birth of the Malcolm Muggeridge. It is also coincidentally the 70th anniversary of the Ukrainian famine.
BRAMA, Oct 1, 2003 by Tony Leliw
http://www.brama.com/news/press/2003/10/031001leliw_muggeridge.html
Vilified, slandered and abused for telling the truth about Communism
Muggeridge’s insatiable urge to visit the Soviet Union led to his arrival in Moscow in 1933, as London correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. A left-wing journalist, excited by the experiment of Soviet Communism, he was soon to become disillusioned, particularly when he had heard reports of a famine, circulating around the Russian capital.
Stalin, as Muggeridge was later to discover, had artificially engineered a collectivisation programme to crush the peasantry and snuff out any notions of Ukrainian independence.
His plan included the killing and deportation of millions of ‘better-off’ peasants known as kulaks; as well as setting grain quotas for the rest of the peasantry, which were impossible to reach. When these were not met, special brigades made up of soldiers and party officials were sent in to remove food by force.
Keen to investigate, Muggeridge managed to evade his minders and get himself onto a train, and travel to Ukraine and North Caucasus, where he witnessed the mass starvation first hand.
In order to avoid state censorship, Muggeridge smuggled out a series of despatches in a diplomatic pouch. In one he wrote: “At a railway station early one morning, I saw a line of people with their hands tied behind them, being herded into cattle trucks at gunpoint - all so silent and mysterious and horrible in the half light, like some macabre ballet.”
A diary entry read as follows: “Whatever else I may do or think in the future, I must never pretend that I haven’t seen this. Ideas will come and go, but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread.”
© S.Muggeridge
FAMILY PHOTOGRAPH: The Muggeridges, from left to right, Sally, niece of Malcom Muggeridge, Leonard, eldest son of Malcolm Muggeridge, Malcolm Muggeridge himself, and his wife Kitty, at Park Cottage, Robertsbridge, taken around 1984.
However, some journalists succumbed to various pressures placed on them. Those, for example, who had been in Moscow for a time, had formed relationships with Russian women. They feared that if they wrote something that upset the authorities they would be sent home.
One correspondent managed to get hold of information proving that political prisoners were being used as forced labour in timber camps. He was promptly told to either contradict the report or leave the country within thirty-six hours. He retracted the story.
Other journalists such as Gareth Jones, son of a Welsh headmaster, and former political secretary of Lloyd George, who also wrote about the famine in the Guardian, had their work discredited by fellow professionals.
Constantine Oumansky, the head of the Press Office, knew how keen the Western press were on covering the Metro-Vickers trial, so he made a deal that they would be permitted to cover the trial of six British engineers accused of spying, as long as they repudiated the famine stories of Muggeridge and Jones.
British-born Walter Duranty, who at that time was working for The New York Times, as its Moscow correspondent, flatly denied the famine at every juncture to curry favour with the Communist regime.
Richard Ingrams, in his biography of Muggeridge, writes that with Duranty “creating a smokescreen of doubt”, “editors had focused their attention, as far as Russia was concerned, on the trial of the Metro-Vickers engineers.
“The fate of six British citizens was considered more newsworthy than that of six million or so Russian peasants.”
Malcom Muggeridge
His articles and opinions had far-reaching repercussions. They influenced many people in British society such as George Bernard Shaw, H.G. Wells and Fabians Sidney and Beatrice Webb.
The Webbs, in particular, were not only regarded as the ‘self-styled icons of Communist Russia’, but had considerable clout in the formation of Labour Party social policy. Sidney Webb was a Labour minister in Ramsay McDonald’s Government.
Duranty was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his Five-Year-Plan dispatches - the panel describing his stories as “marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgement and exceptional clarity.”
Duranty was even given an hour-long interview with the Soviet leader for keeping his nose clean, while privately telling William Strang (British Embassy, September 26, 1933) that “it is quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.”
Back at the Manchester Guardian, few wished to believe Muggeridge’s despatches, which were severely edited, and he was forced to leave Russia. Ian Hunter, Malcolm Muggeridge’s first biographer writes: “He was sacked, then vilified, slandered and abused, not least in the pages of the Manchester Guardian, whose sympathy to what was called ‘the great Soviet experiment’ was de rigeur.”
Muggeridge called Duranty “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism”. Duranty further justified Stalin’s actions by coining the phrase “you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs”.
Various reasons were given why Duranty chose to become an apologist for Stalin. One was that he regarded Stalin as “the world’s greatest living statesman”.
Duranty could also have been blackmailed by the soviet secret police over his sexual activities, which reputedly included bisexuality and necrophilia.
This memorial to the 7 million Ukrainians who perished in the famine stands outside the Ukrainian Orthodox Church in west London.
For Ukrainians, their disdain for Duranty is such that part of their anniversary actions this year is to get his Pulitzer Prize revoked posthumously. They have sent thousands of postcards to its committee, and the board is currently reviewing the case.
Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Prize, said: “Complaints have arisen from time to time. In 1990, the Board gave extensive consideration to requests for revocation of the prize to Mr Duranty - which would have been unprecedented - and decided unanimously against withdrawing a prize awarded in a different era and under different circumstances.
“However, the Board is aware of the most recent complaints and, we take them seriously. They are under review by a Board subcommittee and all aspects and ramifications will be considered.”
Earlier this year the Ukrainian Government conducted a special hearing about the famine, and pledged to build a National Famine Memorial Complex. It is also in the process of drafting a resolution for the 58th Session of the General Assembly of the United Nations in September, to “secure recognition of the famine in Ukraine as an act of political genocide against the Ukrainian people”.
The recently formed Malcolm Muggeridge Society, set up by his niece Sally, was formally launched on March 24th, the centenary date and aims to bring Muggeridge’s writing to a new generation.
As president of the society, she said: “He was the foremost journalist of the last century. Malcolm was never afraid to court criticism by taking an unfashionable or unpopular stance.”
Robert Conquest, the greatest authority on Stalin and author of The Harvest of Sorrow, chillingly wrote more than two decades ago: “Fifty years ago as I write these words, the Ukraine and the Ukrainian, Cossack and other areas to its east - a great stretch of territory with some forty million inhabitants - was like one vast Belsen.
“A quarter of the rural population, men, women and children, lay dead or dying, the rest in various stages of debilitation with no strength to bury their families or neighbours.
“At the same time, (as at Belsen), well-fed squads of police or party officials supervised the victims.”
Conquest adds: “It was not only a matter of pure Russophiles, but also a large and influential body of Western thought.
“The scandal is not that they justified the soviet actions, but that they refused to hear about them, that they were not prepared to face the evidence.”
Ukrainians want pro-Stalin writer stripped of Pulitzer
Askold Krushelnycky, Prague Saturday 3 May 2003
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2003/may/04/russia.usa
Drug addict, sexual predator on both sexes and apologist for Stalin, British reporter Walter Duranty still managed to win America’s most coveted award for journalism, the Pulitzer prize, for his coverage of Soviet life in the Thirties.
Now a campaign has been launched to strip him posthumously of the award by Ukrainians, who insist that Duranty, who was born in Britain and worked for the New York Times, helped Stalin to cover up an extermination campaign that claimed millions of lives, mostly in Ukraine.
snip
STALIN’S LIAR IN NEW YORK
“Duranty was the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met...”
“Lying was his stock in trade.”
Stalin’s apologist
New York Times scandal sparks memories of far worse one
By PAUL JACKSON — Calgary Sun, May 20, 2003
http://www.orwelltoday.com/stalinliar.shtml
A New York Times journalist wins the famed Pulitzer Prize as a reward for covering up and fabricating reports about one of the greatest atrocities of the 20th century.
This particular villain’s name was Walter Duranty and what he did fully 70 years ago was convince most of the world that allegations claiming Soviet dictator Josef Stalin engineered the mass starvation of as many as 12 million Ukrainian peasants and farmers was simply anti-communist propaganda.
We now know this appalling crime of genocide — akin to the Nazi persecution of the Jews of Europe in Adolf Hitler’s death camps — was true.
Yet Duranty was hailed at the time as the dean of foreign correspondents and a man whose reports could be trusted absolutely. They actually convinced President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to give official recognition to the communist government that seized power in Russia.
Under Stalin, now accepted to be one of the most brutal dictators of all times, Duranty reported peace and prosperity were sweeping the Soviet Union and communism was the vanguard of the future. There were no Gulags, no secret trials of dissidents.
The Soviet Union was truly becoming a worker’s paradise.
Yet the opposite was true.
One man, the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, actually revealed Duranty’s deceit back in 1933 when he took a secret and dangerous excursion across the Soviet Union and witnessed Stalin’s campaign of slaughter for himself.
Men, women and children — skin and bones — were begging for pitiful handfuls of grains while Stalin’s henchmen stood guard over full granaries and turned them away.
Muggeridge, who became a legend in later life, was vilified for his truthful reports. He actually lost his job on the Manchester Guardian, and it took years to regain his reputation.
Duranty was honoured not only by Stalin, but by his masters at the New York Times.
What a charade.
I write about the Duranty deceit now for two reasons: One, the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association has launched a campaign to have the New York Times strip Duranty posthumously of his Pulitzer Prize, and because the New York Times is now embroiled in yet another huge scandal of one of its staff members plagiarizing and fabricating stories over a long period of time. The journalist — or I should say so-called journalist — is one Jayson Blair — who incredibly now stands to make a stack of money by penning a book on his shameful exploits!
In comparison to Duranty’s betrayal, Blair is rather small fry. But what should anger all of us is that the lib-left New York Times is perhaps the most arrogant and egotistical daily newspaper in the U.S.
It regards itself as better than any other metropolitan daily newspaper. Now, once again, it has egg all over its face — well-deserved egg, too.
Many readers know I have championed the cause of both Ukrainian freedom and the great contributions Ukrainian-Canadians have made to our own country. Lubomyr Luciuk, head of the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, is a fine man and a great friend of mine. He and his associates, such as Marta D. Olynyk, have worked tirelessly to reveal the awful nature of this man-made famine, and the attempts to cover it up. In Calgary, in 1999, a monument was erected on Memorial Drive to the victims of this unforgivable atrocity.
Sally Taylor, author of Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty, The New York Times Man in Moscow (Oxford University Press 1990) fully documented how Duranty covered up the truth and distorted matters to ingratiate himself to Stalin and his murderous henchmen. Malcolm Muggeridge himself described Duranty as the “Greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met.” Famed American commentator Joseph Alsop would later say of Duranty that “lying was his stock in trade.”
For his falsifications, Jayson Blair has been banished from the New York Times, but Walter Duranty paid no penalty for his outrageous behaviour. The Times and the Pulitzer Prize Committee still claim Duranty received his award for work before his sham reporting in the Soviet Union in 1932-33. This is like suggesting an apologist for Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime should still be honoured for earlier endeavours.
Ukrainians the world over deserve justice, and the Times should give them that justice by stripping Duranty of his Pulitzer Prize now. Right now.
Journalist Jones exposed Stalin famine (to be honoured by Ukraine posthumously on November 22, 2008). WalesOnLine, Nov 10, 2008
...Gareth Jones, who wrote for the Western Mail, exposed the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine. Millions died, but the Soviet authorities – and many western journalists – denied the catastrophe had even happened....Discussion of the famine, in which as many as 10 million people died, was strictly suppressed, and Ukrainians themselves have only become fully aware of the events since the fall of communism. When Jones announced at a press conference in Berlin on March 29, 1933, that millions were starving in Ukraine as a result of Stalin’s five-year-plan, several foreign correspondents rushed to rubbish the story. The most vocal was Walter Duranty of the New York Times, who had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1932 for his own reports on Stalin’s Russia. He dismissed Jones’ eye-witness account as “a big scare story” and insisted there was “no actual starvation”. In May 1932 the New York Times printed Mr Jones’ response to the controversy. In a furious attack on the coterie of foreign correspondents, Mr Jones congratulated “the Soviet Foreign Office on its skill in concealing the true situation in the USSR”....In the 1930s he travelled through Russia and Ukraine – where his mother had lived – and was shocked at the famine conditions he encountered. An estimated five to 10 million people died between 1932 and 1933, an event Ukrainians call the Holodomor. His career survived the controversy over the Ukrainian reports but his life was tragically cut short when he was murdered in 1935 while travelling in Inner Mongolia. He was just 29 years old....
I have had the honor of meeting Dr. Zacharias twice and also spending several days with him. He is as much an intellectual and spiritual giant as one imagines.
In private, he is even more gentle and lovely. Almost "angelic" if I can use that word. His gift of speech and intellect is almost breathtaking, however, he demeanor is so loving. I have never met anyone like him.
By the time of the Summit in 1945, Churchill and FDR were prepared (for “services rendered”?) to hand over large chunks of Europe to Stalin, another catastrophic mistake.Regardless of our largesse,the Cold War started to take shape, and anybody of a certain age knows the fatal tensions that flowed from that. It is unfortunate that the Summit didn’t occur on April 1st, with the ultimate joke played on Stalin. Or maybe it did....for us.I have always wondered just how and when this “deal” was decided upon, and WHY no other choices could have been considered.
FDR was basically non functional at that time, much like Woodrow Wilson at the end of his presidency, where Col. House was the acting president.
Notice in many of the photos at the Yalta conference, Alger Hiss is hovering very close behind FDR.
The left has tried to paint Hiss as a minor, unimportant figure, but the opposite appears to be true.
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