Posted on 11/09/2013 5:53:14 PM PST by Dqban22
The Won can now take away even our dog’s food
http://www.foodrenegade.com/president-can-now-seize-control-of-all-food-production/
“Those are not beef cattle sir, we raise rodeo bulls.”
(Of course we can eat them but they are a little tough) :)
Visualize the executive order granting the fubar-in-chief full authority over food supplies and the means of production.
Conquest’s Harvest of Sorrow is excellent and describes
the complete plan.
For a good first person account one can read
“Execution by hunger” from Miron Delot.
The tactics used by the communists to break up communities
and collectivise them, is mirrored in the infestation of
socialism in our society today. The soviets of course
were much more heavy handed as they gained control, which
is what we can look forward to as the democrats consolidate
their position.
The use of young komsomol members from the cities to search and seize grain and food stuffs from the farmers in isolated
communities, lead to starvation,cannibalism, and death.
All while mountains of grain stolen for export, lay
rotting beside the rail heads for lack of transportation.
The Ukraine was also cordoned off so that even when peasants
could travel to the cities to sell or trade their family
heirlooms for food, it would be confiscated on the way
back and many times they would just be sent to the gulag
and never return. It became law that possession of gold
was a crime although it could be sold or exchanged for
food at government offices only. Search parties would
invade homes, looking for grain, or valuables, encluding
the grain kept as seed for the coming spring so there
was no crop that year and theft of crops from the
collective farm even gleanings of left over turnips
and grain was subject ot imprisonment or death from
guards posted around the fields.
The people ate everything, dogs, cats, small birds,rodents.
The government agents even went so far as to kill the
song birds so that the people would not know when it
was spring time.(the national bird of Ukraine.)
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
Thanks tet68.
Roosevelt: he had a love affair with the Soviets during the 30s.
Most of Russia's land had been held by aristocrats in vast estates worked by serfs, who were only freed in the mid-19th Century. It was fairly easy for the Communists to reassemble estates into communes. In contrast, Eastern Ukraine had been part of Lithuania and later Poland for centuries. Russia only acquired Eastern Ukraine in the Partitions of Poland late in the 18th Century. That history produced a land ownership pattern of small holdings by independent farmers. The farmers were understandably reluctant to let the Communists steal their land and assemble communes. So, what this was really about was using famine to break the will of the Ukrainians to end any opposition to the Communists extending their program of communal farming under tight Party control. And they killed millions doing it.
Walter Duranty won his prize in 1932, early in Pulitzer history. While his celebrity faded long ago and his name is largely unknown to younger generations, Duranty occupies what his biographer, S. J. Taylor, considers to be a uniquely infamous place in history.
By 1932, the Briton had served 10 of his 14 years as the Times Moscow correspondent, achieving international renown as the foremost journalist of his day. Duranty’s eminence was such that Franklin D. Roosevelt, a candidate for president, deemed it politically prudent to summon him publicly to confer with him on the state of Soviet affairs.
Duranty’s autobiography, published in 1935 and ironically titled “I Write As I Please,” would become a best-seller. And when the United States formally recognized the Soviet Union in 1933, the first public toast went to President Roosevelt; the second went to Walter Duranty.
But when presented with the biggest story of his career - the Ukraine famine of 1932-33, one of greatest man-made disasters in history in which millions perished during the forced collectivization of agriculture - Duranty chose not only to miss the story but to cover it up.
And, Taylor believes, by virtue of the reporter’s clout and his paper’s prestige, that meant the tragic loss of an opportunity “to change the course of history for the better.”
“There was the chance to save, millions of lives,” she says. “And he did not do it.”
Her recently published biography of Duranty, “Stalin’s Apologist” (Oxford University Press), sets out to explain why. Duranty’s journalistic sins of omission and distortion, as cataloged by Taylor, are staggering. Never a Marxist, Walter Duranty believed only in Walter Duranty.
After Stalin indirectly boosted Duranty’s star by succeeding Lenin in 1924, as the reporter had predicted, the murderous dictator could do no wrong in Duranty’s eyes.
This fact soon earned The New York Times the nickname “The Uptown Daily Worker.” Conversely, Duranty could do no wrong in his host country - or else risk the hobnailed boot.
And leaving his post would mean leaving the life of sybaritic luxury - women, caviar and opium - that he enjoyed in Moscow and risking the fame he had chased after with such success.
And so, the show trials of 1928, 1934 and 1936 according to Duranty? Nothing more than justice served. Stalin’s purges? Duranty had an answer for every atrocity: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” All this, compounded above all by his refusal to report the slaughter of millions in the Ukraine, made British writer Malcolm Muggeridge tell Taylor that Duranty was “the greatest liar of any journalist I have met in 50 years of journalism.”
Muggeridge should know. He was there. Then a young, zealous socialist who went to the Soviet Union with the intention of settling there, he saw the Ukraine famine, wrote about it and sent his dispatches to the Manchester Guardian, a socialist newspaper in Great Britain.
Buried in the back pages of the paper, Muggeridge’s searing story of monumental tragedy was dismissed all around. No one wanted to hear bad news about the brave new world. “His reward was he couldn’t get work,” says Taylor.
“Mostly bunk” was the phrase Duranty chose to describe the famine. Even after he finally ventured into the devastated regions, his dispatches remained optimistic in tone.
His private report to the British Embassy was another story, grimmer and far more realistic, estimating that “as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food.”
As Taylor notes in the book, “This estimate was the highest ventured of the famine of 1932-33.” Why the British Embassy, among others with more than an inkling of what was going on, did nothing is yet another travesty.
Duranty was not alone in his behavior, although his special position made him unique. James E. Mace, staff director of the Commission on the Ukraine Famine, puts it this way: “Duranty was probably the most effective public relations agent that Stalin had in terms of making his denial of the famine stick in the West.”
With this background in mind, the irony in the citation that appears in the Times Pulitzer pantheon is all the more mordant: Duranty is commended for “dispassionate interpretive reporting of the news from Russia.”
Duranty, who died in 1957, “actually won that Pulitzer for economic reporting, and his economic reporting was very good indeed. Right after he won it, the famine occurred,” explains Taylor, a native Oklahoman, in a telephone interview from London, where she has lived for the past 10 years. “If he had told the truth, he quite possibly would have faced the same problems as Malcolm Muggeridge. But if he had, he would have been one of the greatest figures in the 20th century. But he didn’t.”
There is a trace of wistfulness in Taylor’s voice, a note of sadness that out of her decade of research on Duranty emerged so amoral and reprehensible a figure - in spite of his legendary charm.
“I have to tell you I read his autobiography and was completely taken in,” she says. “Each time I saw evidence to the contrary [disproving his word], I looked for excuses. It came as a shock when I found the opposite to be true. I felt I was personally betrayed. It caused me personal pain.”
After Taylor journeyed to the Ukraine herself, “the pain cut deeper than before. I didn’t see how anyone could see these human beings and continue to operate out of self-interest. I don’t think he ever regretted anything in his life except having fallen from the pinnacle of his success.”
With the Soviet Union struggling to reveal and revise the distortions and lies from which its history is fashioned, Duranty’s largely forgotten case becomes increasingly pertinent. Is there anything The New York Times should do about him? Drop his name from the honor roll (a Stalinist technique in itself)? Add an asterisk? Return the Pulitzer?
Abe Rosenthal does not care to give much thought to the subject. A Times man since 1944, Rosenthal served as executive editor from 1977 until 1986, snagging his own Pulitzer for “perceptive and authoritative reporting” from Poland in 1960. Sure, he knows who Walter Duranty is, and yes, he is familiar with “Stalin’s Apologist” through a book review or two, but no, he does not want to discuss the matter - not, he adds, because he finds the matter too controversial but because “I don’t know much about it.”
“Thank God, [it was] before my time,” says Rosenthal. “I have really given no thought to Walter Duranty. I assume he was a lousy correspondent.” (Does this remind us of Pontius Pilot washing his hands prior to the Jews killing Jesus Christ?)
That’s more than Executive Editor Max Frankel will say. Although the 38-year veteran of the Times is reading the book, Frankel, 60, declines to comment on the subject except to say, through his secretary, “He didn’t know him and doesn’t know his writing, so you’ll have to look elsewhere.”
Some Times men are better acquainted with the subject. Karl E. Meyer , 62, a member of the paper’s editorial board (which, in Duranty’s day, was in disagreement with its Moscow correspondent), wrote a June editorial about the correspondent and his work - “some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper” - which ran on the same Sunday the newspaper (favorably) reviewed the biography.
“I think it’s fabulous they’ve done the review,” says Taylor. “I think it’s wonderful they’re bringing attention to it. It’s important that everyone know what happened in that decade. I’m really happy at long last it’s happening.”
What is no longer happening, according to writer Peter Braestrup, is the creation of Duranty-style reporters. “When I was starting out in the ‘50s, everybody knew Duranty had been a shill for the Soviets. That was no big deal,” says Braestrup, a former journalist whose two-volume study, “Big Story,” chronicled the rampant misreporting of the Vietnam War’s Tet offensive. “I don’t think anybody at The New York Times would leave anybody like Duranty in place now. The mystery to me is how they left him there so long at the time.”
Today, Braestrup points out, foreign correspondents rotate with a frequency that prevents one from digging in for 14 corrupting years. In addition, he says, the “semimonopoly” The New York Times used to have on the news is long broken. “The importance of any single news organization or correspondent is vastly diminished,” he says.
Still, Taylor sees in Duranty a cautionary tale that remains relevant.
“We attribute to our newspeople almost godlike status, and they’re only human beings.
Today we seem to have transferred our adulation to the broadcast media, and there’s simply no basis for this. When we consider these people’s interpretations of reality, we should always look a little at who they are and what their motivations may be.”
Chandlers of the Los Angeles Times
Grahams of the Washington Post
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