"Stalin's Apologist: Walter Duranty"

[Willi Z.]

Has anyone read this book?

http://www.amazon.com/Stalins-Apolog.../dp/0195057007

[Willi Z.]

Interesting comment from the New York Times;

http://www.nytco.com/new-york-times-...alter-duranty/

[Robert Shoaf]

I haven't read the book, but I have known about this vile, incompetent hack for some time.
The fact that the Pulitzer committee refuses to retract his award speaks volumes about their integrity, or lack therof.

Bob Shoaf

[stonemint]

Agreed.

At least the National Geographic Society had the decency to reject Douglas Chandler, who wrote an article in 1937 in N.G. called "Changing Berlin":

http://societymatters.org/2010/11/22...al-geographic/

[Mil-Archive]

I haven't read the book, but I have known about this vile, incompetent hack for some time.
The fact that the Pulitzer committee refuses to retract his award speaks volumes about their integrity, or lack therof.

Bob Shoaf

There was another very prominent American journalist who also knowingly denied the Holdomor, and peddled the bolshevik propaganda line, Louis Fischer :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louis_Fischer

It's scary to think what could have happened without Gareth Jones the Welsh journalist who told the truth about the Stalin manufactured famine.

I haven't read the book 'Stalin's apologist' but it looks interesting.

[Willi Z.]

It's scary to think what could have happened without Gareth Jones the Welsh journalist who told the truth about the Stalin manufactured famine.

It didn't matter what Jones had to say. The information was still supressed.

http://www.ukrweekly.com/old/archive/1988/038822.shtml

'There can also be no doubt that both the State Department and the White House had access to plentiful and timely intelligence concerning the famine of 1932-33 in Ukraine and made a conscious decision not only to do nothing about it, but to never acknowledge it publicly. For political reasons largely related to FDR's determination to establish and maintain good relations with the USSR, the U.S. government participated, albeit indirectly, in what is perhaps the single most successful denial of genocide in history. And in this we were hardly alone: the British record, for example, has also been partially told and was, if anything, worse.

The U.S. government was made aware of conditions in the USSR by its embassies and legations throughout Europe, which sent extensive reports based on interviews with American workers and visitors to the USSR, Soviet officials, the foreign press, Soviet citizens and foreign nationals, all of whom understood the gross inefficiency of the Soviet system, the mediocrity of local Soviet management and increasing hostility of the peasants long before diplomatic relations were established with the USSR. State Department officials were aware of thousands of Soviet citizens fleeing to Poland and Rumania and of soldiers and civilian brigades being sent into Ukraine to assist with the harvest. Washington even received letters from hungry Ukrainian peasants, asking for assistance. The official response to all queries regarding the horrors of life in the Soviet Union was to refer to them as "alleged conditions."

The term "famine" was used in diplomatic dispatches as early as November 1932. Inundated by queries and information regarding the famine, the State Department sought and received confirmation from Athens and from Riga, the premier U.S. listening post for Soviet affairs, a month before FDR recognized the Soviet government.
There can be little doubt that American journalists collaborated with the Soviets in covering up the famine. Duranty, who privately admitted his role as a semi-official Soviet spokesman as early as 1931 and who after the famine told British diplomats that as many as 10 million might well have perished, seems to have played an especially crucial role. Even as a candidate, it was Duranty with whom FDR first publicly broached the issue of recognition.

Duranty seems to have been determined that American public opinion not be negatively influenced on the eve of the Roosevelt-Litvinov negotiations. He thought it imperative that the United States and the USSR establish diplomatic relations and the famine, especially if it was the result of Stalin's malevolence, was a stumbling block that had to be removed. His influence on Roosevelt's perception of the Soviet Union was profound. As Joseph Alsop wrote:
"The authority on Soviet affairs was universally held to be The New York Times correspondent in Moscow, Walter Duranty... The nature of his reporting can be gauged by what happened in the case of the dire Stalin-induced famine in the Ukraine in the early 1930s... The Duranty cover-up, for that was what it was, also continued thereafter; and no one of consequence told the terrible truth.

"This being the climate in the United States, Roosevelt and Hopkins would have had to be very different men to make boldly informed judgements of the Soviet system and Stalin's doings and purposes in defiance of almost everyone else who was then thought to be enlightened."