Posted on 01/26/2021 9:28:19 PM PST by lowbridge
You’ve probably never heard of Gareth Jones.
You’ve certainly heard of the writer he inspired, and the classic dystopian novel that writer created. You were forced to read it, or at least the Cliff’s Notes, in high school. But shorn of its context, that novel lacks the full punch it could deliver. Mr. Jones (2019), starring Peter Sarsgaard and James Norton, directed by Oscar nominee Agnieszka Holland and written by Andrea Chalupa, provides that context in a must-see film. Mr. Jones is powerfully relevant today, even more than when it premiered in 2019.
You have undoubtedly heard of “cancel culture,” in which one comment or tweet, or even silence, can cost anyone their job and turn their life upside down. Cancel culture appears to be a recent phenomenon from our college campuses. It isn’t. It sometimes appears to target the famous, but it usually doesn’t. The obscurity of a given target is part of cancel culture’s message intended to terrify everyone. No one is safe.
Mr. Jones tells the true story of speaking real truth to actual power, be it a government or an all-powerful newspaper. Gareth Jones (Norton) was a young idealistic Welsh journalist who wanted to interview Stalin, whom many in the West regarded as a savior of mankind. That’s not an exaggeration. In 1933, when Mr. Jones takes place, both Hitler and Stalin were widely regarded as men who were delivering the future: socialism. Collectivism. The new man as global citizen. They had the intelligentsia’s ear from Paris to London to Washington and Hollywood and points between.
Jones despises Hitler and travels to the Soviet Union to try to score the big get, the interview with Stalin. He also wants to probe the possibility of an alliance with the Soviets against Hitler’s Germany.
(Excerpt) Read more at pjmedia.com ...
This is a great movie. Its depiction of scumbag leftist Walter Duranty is absolutely brutal.
The Ukrainian people haven’t forgotten this either.
Bookmark
bmp
Good movie. Walter Duranty should have at least lost his Pulitzers, if not worse.
I hate the NYT to my bones
Agreed. If the NY Slimes were to print that the sun rises in the east, I would still feel the need to check every morning before I'd believe anything in that rag.
Mark
The commissar of the Ukraine was Nikita Khrushchev.
Probably best followed by “The Death of Stalin” movie
opps that’s a horror movie by the same title
If you like reading footnotes, try these.
Robert Conquest books:
The Harvest of Sorrow — Details the starving of Ukraine
The Great Terror - A Reassessment — Covers Stalin’s purge
“Walter Duranty the Godfather of fake news. The Times later employed Herb Matthews another communist sympathizer who ran cover for Fidel.”
While I won’t disagree that Duranty was a scumbag who deserved to have his awards revoked instead of kept on (and the NYT wasted a very good opportunity to do so when it came), he unfortunately wasn’t the Godfather of fake news. That title is reserved strictly for Walter Lippmann, who wrote Public Opinion and thus literally wrote the entire concept out for everyone to follow. And that’s just going by America. You could argue the French Philosophes were the true godfathers of fake news with how they ended up hijacking France’s Education System and spewing lies via their Encyclopedie to gin up a lynching against Christians via the Jacobins.
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