The Blair affair fuels a 70-year-old scandal (LA Times on Walter Duranty, Stalin and the NYTs)

LA Times ^ | 6/14/03 | Tim Rutten

[DPB101]

The New York Times' Walter Duranty won a Pulitizer for reports promoting Stalin.

Among all the unforeseeable permutations of the Jayson Blair affair, none is more unexpected -- or more problematic -- than its role in reviving the 13-year-old campaign to strip the New York Times' Walter Duranty of the Pulitzer Prize he won in 1932 . . .

But the Times has forthrightly confronted its institutional complicity, most recently in the 150th anniversary issue it published two years ago. In that same issue, former Times Executive Editor Max Frankel commented at length and with equal candor on what he called "the century's bitterest journalistic failure" -- the Times' refusal to print what it knew about the Holocaust that consumed 6 million European Jews a decade after the Ukrainian famine . . .

[DPB101]

Stalin's apologist : Walter Duranty, the New York Times man in Moscow, by S.J. Taylor, (New York : Oxford University Press, 1990)--Review by Mark Y. Herring

Full text Moscow dispatches from Walter Duranty, Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge here

'Revoke Walter Duranty's 1932 Pulitzer Prize' - International Protest Campaign:

If you feel that Duranty did not deserve to keep his 1932 Pulitzer Prize and you wish to add your voice to this protest campaign then PRESS HERE, complete the email form that appears and submit it online to the Pulitzer Prize Committee in New York.

[Cicero]

Let's see. We aren't allowed to criticize the Times or Duranty unless we blame the Ukrainians of being Nazi Jew killers. Well, probably some of them were, but on the whole the smaller countries of Central Europe were more victims than perpetrators, caught between Hitler and his Nazi murderers to the West and Stalin and his Communist murderers to the East.

In any case, that's hardly a sufficient reason to overlook the guilt of The New York Times and Walter Duranty in continuing to cover up the murder of 8 million innocent Ukrainians, who died well before the Holocaust occurred.

[What Is Ain't]

Curiously, the same organizations and commentators who are pressing the issue of Duranty's prize have been resolutely silent about one of the Holocaust's darkest chapters -- the collaboration by tens of thousands of Ukrainians with the Nazi murderers of Eastern European Jewry.

I fail to see what the Ukranians complicity in Germany's "final solution" has to do with the willful deceit of a NYT reporter who, for his efforts, was rewarded a Pulitzer prize trumpeted for decades by the "newspaper of record."

They are separate and distinct events which must be addressed individually.

This argument smacks of Clintonism.

[DPB101]

Vile, isn't it? Well, at least we know what tactic the left will use to defend Duranty and the Times: the 7 plus million murdered in the Ukraine were Nazis.

[kezekiel]

Excuse me, but is this the Left Angeles Times speaking out about journalistic integrity?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

>> This argument smacks of Clintonism.


It's know as an "Et tuque", (and you, too) argument or fallacy. When accused of anything, rather than address the charges make another charge, true or not, against your accuser. Been around a lot longer Clinton.

[jimbo123]

The LA Times is hysterical that their Stalin-loving hero Duranty is going to lose his Pulitzer. So they're pulling a Hitlery and attacking the entire Ukrainian people for the actions of a few. Typical behavior for the liberal media. Attack the victims.

[HISSKGB]

The LAT's article is a slick piece of deception designed to diffuse and minimize the guilt of the owners of the New York Times.

The NYT and its sister organization, the ACLU, have long been in the business of covering up serious bolshevik crimes.

[DPB101]

This story got legs when Andrew Nynka, an editor at The Ukrainian Weekly, called an an administrator of the Pulitzer Prizes on May 20th and asked if they were considering revoking Duranty's Pulitzer. Nynka's article was posted on FR here. Shortly after, the story was picked up by Newsmax, Worldnet Daily, The New York Sun and, a few days ago, AP.

Nynka was a Washington D.C. advisor to Gov. George E. Pataki.

I suspect he and others at his paper would be interested in the LA Time's view of the campaign to pull the prize from Duranty. I've emailed but haven't heard back yet. If you wish to contact the paper, here is how:

The Ukrainian Weekly, 2200 Route 10,
P.O. Box 280, Parsippany, NJ 07054
phone: (973) 292-9800; fax: (973) 644-9510

The Weekly's editorial staff:
staff@ukrweekly.com

[Liz]

This is kind of discouraging....I thought we had only to clean up the Clintons' eight-year mess. The Duranty atrocity goes back to the beginning of time.

[aristeides]

Relativization cuts both ways. The Nazis probably would not have come to power in Germany if a lot of people in Germany, most significantly the formerly ruling class (which still dominated such institutions as the Army and the civil service) had not been petrified at the prospect of a Communist takeover. You just have to read Hitler's speeches from 1932-3 to see what advantage he took of this fear.

When the German philosopher-historian Ernst Nolte pointed this out, he got in a lot of trouble. But that doesn't stop him from being right on this matter.

[aristeides]

Of course a people is sensitive when genocide practiced against it is ignored. I'm Irish, and I see the sensitivity among my own people for what Cromwell did some 350 years ago. The Jews are obviously sensitive about what happened 60 years ago. So are the Armenians, about what happened 90 years ago. Why shouldn't the Ukrainians have a right to feel similarly, about what happened 70 years ago?

[HISSKGB]

This is a good thing. For far too long the NYT has been able to dominate discourse in order to spin a warped version of reality.

Sooner or later the machinations of the NYT's owners and other like minded culprits will be revealed.

[DPB101]

New York Times Sunday Magazine has a tribute to Brooklyn communists today: Playing with History

Substitute the word "Nazi" for communist and it doesn't read so nice.

My browser won't allow me to copy it or I'ld post it.

[HISSKGB]

The NYT again celebrates low talent types whose only angst revolves around their obsessive need for viagra or their confusion because of cat fights between Leninists and Trotskyites.

It's a shame the NYT owners never learned to adopt decent American values.

[MEG33]

The Communists were so powerful after the war that France and Italy were in danger.They are still a threat throughout the world.Stalin and Hitler had a lot in common but Stalin was more sucessful at killing than Hitler.The left distances itself from Stalin now but only to advance their ideology.