The day that the NY Times shuts down will a great day for truth.
Posted on 11/24/2008 12:56:34 PM PST by Tailgunner Joe
Is the New York Times "airbrushing" history again? It would seem so. On Saturday, November 22, Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko presided over a commemoration in Kiev of the 75th anniversary of the famine genocide of 1932-1933 that took the lives of 7-10 million Ukrainians. Known as the Holodomor (Ukrainian for "murder by hunger"), it is one of the greatest mass murders in history, and one of the cruelest. Joining President Yushchenko for the event were official delegations from 44 countries, including the presidents of Poland, Lithuania, Estonia, Macedonia, Georgia, Latvia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina.
The New York Times prides itself on being the national "newspaper of record" and still carries its longtime motto, "All the News That's Fit to Print" in the upper left-hand corner of its front page. If we are to believe the Times' motto, the week-long Holodomor commemoration didn't take place, or at least it didn't qualify as "news." A search of the Times website — using both visual scan and their own search engine — yielded zero results for current or recent stories.
Using the Times' search engine and various combinations of "Holodomor," "Ukraine," and "Ukrainian famine," brings up a number of articles, most of which are years or decades old. The most recent entry was a September 6 article covering a visit to Ukraine by Vice President Dick Cheney and his wife. They are shown in a photograph with President Yushchenko and his wife. The caption for the photo reads: "Vice President Cheney, his wife Lynne, left, and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko and his wife at the memorial for the victims of the Holodomor in Kiev, Ukraine, on Friday." However, there is no explanation of Holodomor for the Times' readers, 99 percent of whom have never seen or heard the word before.
The photograph accompanies an article entitled, "Cheney Pledges Support for Ukraine," which reports on the conflict between Russia and Ukraine over Ukraine's desire to join NATO. However, there is no mention of Holodomor or famine in the article.
There was plenty of Times coverage of other breaking European and World "news" on November 22: an increase in boar hunting in Germany, the semi-retirement of famed French chef Olivier Roellinger, Russian President Medvedev's trip to Venezuela, an inquiry into the alleged crimes of General Franco in Spain during the 1930s, etc.
The Times neglect of the 75th anniversary of the Holodomor is especially inexcusable, inasmuch as the Times served as an indispensable handmaiden to Stalin as he carried out this horrendous crime against humanity. While the communists carried out the mass annihilation of the Ukrainian farmers, the Times assured the Western world that all reports of starvation in Ukraine were merely anti-Soviet propaganda. Times reporter Walter Duranty, known as "Stalin's Apologist," became a willing tool for the Kremlin and denounced as liars those heroic journalists who dared to report the truth — that Ukrainians were dying by the millions, their bodies filling the streets of many towns and villages. The two most notable of those journalists were Gareth Jones of Wales and Malcolm Muggeridge of England, both of whom are revered in Ukraine and were posthumously awarded the country's Order of Freedom on November 22 at a ceremony in Westminster.
Jones, who wrote for The Western Mail, The Times [of London], The Manchester Guardian, and other European and American newspapers became a "marked man," due to his outspoken and fearless exposés of Soviet atrocities, corruption, and failures. In 1935, he was kidnapped and murdered in Mongolia. Although authorities claimed his death was the work of bandits, evidence showed the deed was actually an assassination, carried out by the NKVD, forerunner of the KGB.
Meanwhile, the Times' Walter Duranty, basking in the glory of a Pulitzer Prize for his sychophantic pro-Stalin reportage, continued to promote the communist line. Without the Times and Duranty providing cover, it would have been politically impossible for President Franklin Roosevelt to grant recognition to the Soviet regime. Four presidents before him and as many Secretaries of State had adamantly refused recognition because of the numerous crimes and atrocities of the communist regime and because of its continuing sponsorship of communist subversive activities within the United States. However, with the Times covering up Stalin's crimes, including the famine genocide in the Ukraine, Roosevelt was free to arrange official U.S. recognition for the U.S.S.R. on November 16, 1933.
No mea culpa from the Times
The New York Times got away with its perfidy for decades, though this publication and its predecessors (American Opinion and The Review of The News), along with other conservative publications, had been exposing the Times'' key role in the Holodomor cover-up for years. Ukrainian groups had been demanding that the Times admit its deception, but to no avail. It was not until 2003, when it was reeling from a scandal involving another of its star reporters, Jayson Blair, that it appeared the Times might be forced to come clean on one of the biggest journalistic crimes of all times.
Under pressure from the Ukrainian community to return Duranty's ill-gotten Pulitzer to the Pulitzer Prize Board, the Times hired Professor Mark Von Hagen of Columbia University to make an independent assessment of Duranty's coverage of the Soviet Union during the 1930s. Dr. Von Hagen called Duranty a "disgrace" and criticized his work for its "uncritical acceptance of the Soviet self-justification for its cruel and wasteful regime.'' He recommended that the Pulitzer Board take back Duranty's Pulitzer Prize. Reporting on Von Hagen's verdict on October 23, 2003, Times writer Jacques Steinberg attempted to give the appearance that the Times had already issued a sufficient pronouncement of public contrition. Steinberg wrote:
That The Times regretted the lapses in Mr. Duranty's coverage was apparent as early as 1986, in a review of Robert Conquest's The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine (Oxford University Press). In the review, Craig R. Whitney, who reported for The Times from Moscow from 1977 to 1980, wrote that Mr. Duranty "denied the existence of the famine in his dispatches until it was almost over, despite much evidence to the contrary that was published in his own paper at the time."
That, apparently, is the Times' idea of justice: a one-sentence half-apology to make up for reams of propaganda enabling and covering up the murder of millions. Steinberg cited a letter by Arthur Sulzberger, Jr., the publisher of the Times, to the Pulitzer Board. In the letter, Sulzberger referred to Duranty's reporting merely as "slovenly," as though he had been careless, rather than deliberately and criminally mendacious. Steinberg then went on to reiterate a theme propounded by Sulzberger, who argued, incredibly, that to strip Duranty and the Times of the Pulitzer would be to engage in Stalinism. Steinberg reported:
Mr. Sulzberger wrote that the newspaper did not have Mr. Duranty's prize, and thus could not ''return'' it. While careful to advise the board that the newspaper would ''respect'' its decision on whether to rescind the award, Mr. Sulzberger asked the board to consider two things. First, he wrote, such an action might evoke the ''Stalinist practice to airbrush purged figures out of official records and histories.'' He also wrote of his fear that ''the board would be setting a precedent for revisiting its judgments over many decades.''
Bill Keller, the Times' executive editor repeated the same line, telling Steinberg, "As someone who spent time in the Soviet Union while it still existed, the notion of airbrushing history kind of gives me the creeps.''
Professor Von Hagen responded to the Times' twisted and deceptive excuse for failing to relinquish the Pulitzer, pointing out the obvious:
Airbrushing was intended to suppress the truth about what was happening under Stalin. The aim of revoking Walter Duranty's prize is the opposite: to bring greater awareness of the potential long-term damage that his reporting did for our understanding of the Soviet Union.
The Times' Airbrush Still Working Overtime
The Times ran out the clock on the Duranty-Pulitzer-Holodomor issue in 2003, simply allowing it to die down, apparently confident that only diehard Ukrainian activists would remember. In so doing, the Times compounded its culpability. Not only is the Times the principal agent in the western media responsible for airbrushing of Stalin's crimes out of existence, it continues to use the airbrush to prevent any exposure of its past involvement in those deeds. An important case in point is its suppression of a document that has come to be known as the "Gordon Dispatch." This is a recently released memorandum by George A. Gordon, U.S. Charge d'Affairs in Berlin, Germany, to the U.S. Secretary of State. Gordon said of Duranty, who had just come from the Soviet Union and had stopped by the embassy before going on vacation, "Duranty pointed out that 'in agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities' his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own."
The Times' defense in recent years — that Duranty pulled the wool over the eyes of the Times — is shown to be likely false. The Gordon Dispatch indicates that it was the Times itself, not merely Duranty, that was responsible for the pro-Stalin, pro-Soviet slant in the Times' pages. But in the case of Holodomor the Times was guilty of far worse than "slanting" the news; it was a willful collaborator in a "crime of the century," a willful collaborator in blatant propaganda to cover up that crime. The Times has never mentioned the Gordon Dispatch. According to Ukrainian scholars like Dr. Walter Zaryckyj, an adjunct professor at New York University, the management of the Times has not attempted to atone for paper's egregious sins in the Holodomor-Duranty case by thoroughly airing the facts, admitting its guilt, publicly apologizing, and unequivocally denouncing Duranty and returning the Pulitzer Prize. "They were allowed to get off in 2003," on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of Holodomor, Dr. Zaryckyj told The New American, because not enough other members of the media, academia, and the public pressed the issue, when the Times was most vulnerable. "Now it is the 75th anniversary and the Times shows no sign of changing its ways," he said. "This would have been the perfect time to interview the remaining survivors of the Holodomor and to cover the commemoration [in Kiev, New York City, and elsewhere] and bring world attention to this terrible crime and its victims. The survivors are in their 80s and 90s; five years from now, at the 80th anniversary, most of them will have passed away."
As far as the Times is concerned, apparently, they will be airbrushed out of history, along with the Holodomor commemoration this year and the original victims of the Holodomor 75 years ago.
You don’t REALLY expect the NYT to publish something that would make Josef stalin look BAD, do you?
He was (and still IS) their HERO!
I’ve never been fully convinced that the famine was on purpose. I just figured communists are really, really bad at organizing things.
If Communists were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of their decisions would serve their country’s interests.
The day that the NY Times shuts down will a great day for truth.
One of the great tragedies of the Second World War is that, although we defeated the Japanese and Hitler, we enabled Stalin to move into the vacuum, taking over the Kurile Islands and all of Eastern Europe.
That was mostly Roosevelt’s doing. But as this article shows, he could never have done it without the help and complicity of the New York Times, Stalin’s most trustworthy agent in America.
“If Communists were merely stupid, the laws of probability would dictate that part of their decisions would serve their country’s interests.”
Not so. I mean, wanting to serve your country’s interests and actually serving your country’s interests are two different things. I can accept the definition of the communist regime as a criminal conspiracy against its people to a certain point, but somewhere in his darkest of hearts Stalin had accepted Marxist dogma enough to view at least some small sliver of the population as deserving of existence. Those poor souls who did not fit the definition of loyal citizen were hounded rather directly in what can be described as one great purge over the course of Stalins administration (not to mention before and after), lest they ruin it for the rest of the country.
However, the famine is another matter altogether from midnight arrests. It lacks the obvious intentionality of the holocaust, and has all the signs of the impossibility of economic calculation under socialism. Without prices, an economy is unable to move goods from where they are to where they are most highly valued. I think that’s what happened.
“That was mostly Roosevelt’s doing”
I recently read a book, “The Roosevelt Myth,” that argued FDR was basically an invalid during his entire last term. That’s not to say that when he had his head about him he could see through Stalin’s facade. He certainly was all too trusting when of sound mind. But it could ony have helped us avoid 50 years of conflict to have a leader of sound mind in office at the single most important epoch of the last century. Someone in his party should have had the guts to demand someone else run in ‘44.
Well you’re wrong. All of their grain was confiscated and they were starved to death intentionally in order to destroy their nation and enslave it to the USSR.
Well, we really don’t know for sure hwo many died, though it was certainly a lot. Estimates range from 2.2 million to 14 million. I suspect that the reason is because different researches used different criteria.
“Estimates vary since some assess the number of people who died within the 1933 borders of Ukraine; while others are based on deaths within current borders of Ukraine. Other estimates are based on deaths of Ukrainians in the Soviet Union. Some estimates use a very simple methodology based percentage of deaths that was reported in one area and applying the percentage to the entire country. Others use more sophisticated techniques that involves analyzing the demographic statistics based on various archival data. Some question the accuracy of Soviet censuses since the may have been doctored to support Soviet propaganda. Other estimates come from recorded discussion between world leaders like Churchill and Stalin. For example the estimate of ten million deaths, which is attributed to have been circulated from within Soviet official sources, could be based on a misinterpretation of the memoirs of Winston Churchill who gave an account of his conversation with Stalin that took place on August 16, 1942. In that conversation, Stalin gave Churchill his estimates of the number of “kulaks” who were repressed for resisting collectivization as 10 million, in all of the Soviet Union, rather than only in Ukraine. When using this number, Stalin implied that it included not only those who lost their lives, but also forcibly deported. Some estimates count death toll from the political repression including those who died in the Gulag while others refer only to those who starved to death. Many of the estimates are based on different time periods. So to come up with a definitive answer is impossible but what all the estimates have in common is the death toll was large. Millions died.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holodomor
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I was a small boy during the Second World War. I knew that Roosevelt had earlier suffered from TB, but what I didn’t know, what nobody but a large number of insiders knew, was that Roosevelt was a cripple who was confined to a wheelchair from before the start of his first term.
The press, the Secret Service, and the FBI saw to it that NO PHOTOGRAPHS of FDR in his wheelchair were ever published. He would be wheeled in, or he would sit in a chair before the cameras for his fireside chats, and the voters never knew what the real story was.
I wonder if they would have covered up for him like that if he had not been a Communist? I don’t think he was actually a card-carrying member of the Party, but many of his closest associates were, and there’s no question that he was basically a marxist ideologue who did as much as he could while president to make the US more like the USSR.
Of course you were speaking of his later years, when he was much more seriously ill, and may not have been in his right mind. Being in a wheelchair would not in itself disqualify him from carrying out the duties of a president. But it does suggest how far in the tank with him the press were. I have heard that one photographer snapped some pictures of him in his wheelchair, but the FBI confiscated the film.
And it was not respect for the presidency that made the press toe the line. they certainly didn’t treat Herbert Hoover with respect. But FDR was a god to them.
Ukraine is one of the great agricultural regions of the world.
Naturally-occuring famine there is akin to Hawaii running short of seawater.
Not bloody likely.
“Not bloody likely.”
It’s not as if the Ukraine was in charge of feeding itself; the distribution of its produce was under central control. Stalin wanted to use it like the breadbasket of the Soviet Union.
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