The Duranty affair is not over yet. All that follows is from
the Weekly Standard:
"There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be."
--New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1
"Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda."
--New York Times, August 23, 1933
"Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin's program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding."
--New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6
"You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
--New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18
"There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition."
--New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13
I would like to add another Duranty quote, not in his dispatches, which is reported in a memoir by Zara Witkin, a Los Angeles architect, who lived in the Soviet Union during the 1930s. ("An American Engineer in Stalin's Russia: The Memoirs of Zara Witkin, 1932-1934," University of California Press ). The memoirist describes an evening during which the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get out the story about the Stalin-made Russian famine. To get around the censorship, the UP's Eugene Lyons was telephoning the dire news of the famine to his New York office but the was ordered to stop because it was antagonizing the Kremlin. Ralph Barnes, the New York Herald Tribune reporter, turned to Duranty and asked him what he was going to write. Duranty replied:
Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
And this was at a time when peasants in Ukraine were dying of starvation at the rate of 25,000 a day.
Senator Joseph McCarthy warned of Soviet agents in the State Department, but it would be forty years before the Venona decrypts confirmed this.
Duranty carried Stalin's water, and Hammer carried the latter's cash.
Gore father and son ran interference for Hammer. Hillary interned under Robert Treuhaft; Bill made improbable journeys to Czechoslavakia and Moscow in the company of Strobe Talbott, the Russia man at State, warning Kapitan Man to depart its spy station at our boomer pen.
The Clinton Janus embraced the grandson of Hitler's mufti, and she who railed at the FJB embraced Suha after the latter's blood libel.
A nest of vipers intertwined with the persistent genocidal trends of human sewers, collaborating with the nation's enemies in capitals from Tehran to Beijing, controls the national media, the national legislature and soon the seat of executive power.
The left and its ministry of truth sees no islamist enemy at the gate, only the weakened president and his bridge too far.
Will another democracy elect a demagogue in the guise of democrat.