Walter Duranty ought to be one of the most reviled figures in Western history. His newspaper should share in his shame. Yet most Americans have never heard of him, and probably never will.
Duranty worked for the New York Times during the years of Joseph Stalin’s Ukrainian famine. Stalin literally starved millions of people in 1932 and 1933 so that they would not seek independence from the tyrannical Soviet Union. More than seven million died in Stalin’s genocide.
The British-born Walter Duranty was there. His behavior as he witnessed mass murder on a then unprecedented scale was ghastly and despicable.
Duranty was a correspondent in Moscow while the famine raged and he knew it was happening. He not only turned a blind eye, but vilified the few Western journalists who did report on it, branding their dispatches as anti-Soviet lies.
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When stories about the famine began to surface in Moscow, Duranty dismissed them as ‘exaggerated or malignant propaganda’, and in one report employed the phrase ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’. However, British Foreign Office documents show that Duranty confided to a diplomat at the British Embassy in Moscow that he believed around 10 million people had perished.
Malcolm Muggeridge, then the Manchester Guardian ‘s Moscow correspondent, travelled secretly and at great risk to Ukraine. He was appalled at the scenes of mass starvation and heaps of dead bodies that he witnessed and described them in his reports. Duranty attacked Muggeridge and debunked his reports. Duranty was ‘the greatest liar of any journalist I have ever met’, retorted Muggeridge.
Duranty and his New York Times can never be exposed too much. They aided a monster and attacked those who tried to tell the truth. Duranty was an accessory to mass murder.
PJ boss Roger Simon and his wife Sheryl Longin have written a play that exposes Duranty, called The Party Line. No surprise, as Jennifer Rubin reports at the Post, that the bulk of the mainstream media is ignoring the play. Duranty’s life story isn’t a narrative that they want to touch. It hits too close to home.
The “Party Line” is, on one hand, a historical piece, one that also looks at Pim Fortuyn, the Dutch politician who focused on the threat of radical jihadist and was assassinated by a radical environmentalist in 2002. The play mixes these historic figures with fictional ones. I talked to Simon and Longin about their play (which, unsurprisingly, the mainstream media have ignored):
Why a play about Walter Duranty?
We were struck by the similarities between what happens in the media now vis a vis world events — for example, the cover-up of Saddam Hussein’s crimes against his people so that reporters could remain in Iraq — the quid pro quo arrangement — and Duranty’s cover-up of Stalin’s genocide against the Ukrainian people. It seemed to us as though Duranty was a prototype of the modern correspondent and we wanted to explore the origins of that behavior.
Indeed he was. Just look at PolitiFact today, rating a garden-variety campaign trail falsehood as a greater lie than the serial lies told by President Obama and his lieutenants in the wake of the terrorist attack in Benghazi that left four Americans dead. Duranty would have fit right in with today’s left-wing blogosphere, probably starting out at Talking Points Memo or Firedoglake before moving on to the Times or the Washington Post. Duranty was rewarded similarly in his own day, with a Pulitzer Prize that still stands today.
There will come a time when what is being written about Duranty today will be written about many, many current
media whores. But not just about the correspondents and not just about the left. There are many republican pundits
willing to toe THEIR party line rather than speaking truths to power. I look at the shambles made of this election cycle
and ask myself: Isn’t it time for either a political revolution in the GOP or (dangerously) a third party? Perhaps the only
clarity offered by ANY political candidate for the presidency was Ron Paul. And I am by no means, a Ron Paul supporter.
Hey Chicago Tribune, what kinda Journalism is that?
http://illinoispaytoplay.com/2012/12/12/hey-chicago-tribune-what-kinda-journalism-is-that/
I’ve begun to think, too, that the GOP has outlived its usefulness. It’s too compromised, too dedicated to “peaceful coexistence” with the leftist tide and too weak when it comes to explaining how leftism is wrecking the country. The Romney debacle would seem to prove that the Republicans are spent and need to be replaced ASAP.
As for the Paulites: They’ll never be mainstream. But somehow the freedom agenda has to come back to the fore, including in the economic realm. If the Paulites could drop their crackpot isolationism, which they probably can’t, they might provide a starting point. While we’re at it, we need a new media, a new academe and a new public education model.
Could it be that Americans missed their best chance since Ronald Reagan for contender representing what America was, is and still stands for with many people in the world not just to make their fortunes.
Dismissed by established gentlemens club “Republicans” as not one of them. Too forthright, too challenging to the powerful in both political factions. Hunted and speared and particularly reviled by bien pensants in the known fellow traveller Media. Example the Gray Lady’s “all the news that’s fit to print” when libelling anyone threatening the place at the head table. Or unable to mount effective counter offensive.
Duranty and the New York Times. One if not the most credited news corporation within the past century. Duranty not the only agent of their Pravda. Other reporters and author/commentators visited Russia as guests of Stalin. Sophisticated “compassionate” playwrights as Lillian Hellman. What a festival the New York Times and Washington Post had with Watergate and that evil Richard Nixon. But not a whisper about Stalin.
My initial reference is to Sarah Palin, a model if ever there was one of what Americans can do ethically legally, in compliance with law, ALL law, with their minds, backs, intentions. and perseverance.
Whatever the sex, race, ethnicity, class, disadvantages. Was there some fateful message had we but understood in the appearance of this nationally unknown in her appearance on the national stage at the election of 2008?
PALINGENESIS from Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary: a new birth, the development of an individual germ in which it repeats that of its ancestors. regeneration.
Two-Track Corporate Justice Is Not the American Way
http://www.thedailybell.com/28445/Two-Track-Corporate-Justice-Is-Not-the-American-Way
Who is John Galt?
Walter would be proud of today’s state-aligned media. Back in his day one writer could filter the truth coming in from a distant country as effectively as he did.
To accomplish the same effect today in the U.S. takes numerous Duranty’s in key media outlets. Misdirection and journalistic sins of omission can still be successfully employed in the great progressive cause. It’s a crime and a shame…
Which is worse?
Serial lies to coverup the horrific crimes of a political entity that eventually and inevitably collapsed because it couldn’t compete in any repect with people living in free societies, or serial lies to coverup criminals who are activitely destroying the greatest of those free societies from within.
you decide.
I highly recommend a book by Tim Tsouliadis, called “The Forsaken”, about Americans who travelled to the “Workers’ Paradise”, the Soviet Union, in the ’20′s and early ’30′s to find work and better lives only to wind up in the GULAG. Mr. Tsouliadis writes at length about Walter Duranty: how he cultivated working friendships with Soviet officials, particularly NKVD (secret police – forerunners of the KGB) officers. He even had a sedan equipped with a special NKVD siren that he would have his driver activate while driving about Moscow, watching with glee as terrified residents either froze along the street or ducked into the nearest alley or doorway.
“Drug addict, sexual predator on both sexes and apologist for Stalin, British reporter Walter Duranty still managed to win America’s most coveted award for journalism, the Pulitzer prize, for his coverage of Soviet life in the Thirties”
Sounds like the classic description of a Soviet agent involved in a disinformation campaign, in this case highly successful.
Perhaps some enthusiastic M.A / Ph. D history student will explore this man’s biography and discover some heretofore links to other Brit. communists of the period like the Cambridge Five spy ring.
http://vault.fbi.gov/Cambridge%20Five%20Spy%20Ring
Until then any pertinent information remains locked in soviet era files now closed by the Putin regime.
P.S: Next time you hear or see a reporter with a Brit accent commenting on events in some far away place — middle east, you name it! — ask yourself who they might be and from where they derive their biases. Old traditions die in Blighty.
Sorry. Careless proof reading.
“discover some heretofore links”…. insert: discover some heretofore UNKNOWN links…
“ld traditions die in Blighty.”… insert: Old traditions die HARD in Blighty.
Duranty actually wasn’t a communist. He was an amoral narcissist. His ideology was “pro Duranty.” Any means necessary to further his own success.
Hmmm. you called him an amoral narcissist. And while I was reading the article, I came across this line, “in one report employed the phrase ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’”.
Put the two together and it seemed a jarring similarity to our Commander in Chief’s reference to “bumps in the road”.
After the Austro-Prussian War in 1866, Bismarck grabbed and sequestered the personal funds of the Kings of Hannover. He used the income from these funds, which he called the Reptilienfonds (Reptile Fund) to bribe the press—-and Ludwig II of Bavaria. (After Bismarck left office, his successor, Leo Caprivi, restored the funds to the Hannoverian family.) When word of the Reptile Fund got to Vienna, old Prince Schwarzenberg wondered aloud why Bismarck should bribe the Press. What they did unbribed was bad enough. The expression, ‘reptile’, crept into British journalism later on—to describe some of themselves. I use it nowadays to describe the whole of the mainstream media. Most fitting of the whole crowd, no?
So the Soviets SEALED documents from public review. Documents of history, methods and goals of persons sympathetic to, in central roles in, activities of leaders furthering their political system of International Communism? Operative word international.
Is it non sequitur to remember the present occupant of the US White House also sealed docouments we might suppose of history, associations, methods, and goals of persons in central roles in development of “fundamental transformation” of the USA. Protected from public review with Executive Order. Protected in perpetuity.
As virtually his first official act on taking office. (before or after sending the bust of Churchill back to Great Britain?)
Follow the money. They always sell out for the money. They will swear that its something else, but I’ll bet they these JournOListers sell out for the money. And by parade of noseeums,I’ll bet that they are well paid to see no evil in Demoncrat land while savaging the opposition. Now they are so brazen that they actually go to the Whitehouse to set up strategy sessions. Can the end be far off? I keep expecting one day to say that the stock market blew up, the U. S. can’t borrow any money, and inflation if 20%+. Oh and you can’t buy anymore guns or ammo or food.
Why ever would the MSM consider what Duranty did anything but part of the machinery to overcome liberty and self-determination? Nothing to see here. The only question is will the MSM drive themselves into bankruptcy and oblivion before they succeed in snuffing out freedom. The narrative is going to be hard to control going forward. The Durantys in residence at the MSM have partnered up with a government narrative that has run out of bullshit.
I do wish they would run out of BS, bit after watching Bernanke today I realize that total BS has become an accepted reality in our deluded world.
Latma TV, a brilliant Israeli site, has posted a satirical piece on how Hitler just wanted to save the world. It should “go viral” and to that end is featured in today’s article at my blog.
Marxism means famine. it has always meant famine; it necessarily means famine. Walter Durany couldn’t have known this, since he wrote before Mao, Pol Pot, and the Kim Dynasty. Today everybody ought to know, but nobody does.
Famine is one of the most powerful arguments against Marxism. Why isn’t it being used?
http://www.jochnowitz.net/Essays/TheGreatLeapBackwards.html
Watching today’s so-called news, and the ever-continuing white wash on Obama’s failed policies and foreign policy blunders I feel Duranty would be right at home today with his own show on either MSNBC or CNN. That is if he was not chosen as press secretary for the White House.
I found a novel of Duranty’s in a Plymouth, MA thrift store a few years ago. It was titled ‘One Life, One Kopek’ and I bought it and read it.
The book was about a Bolshevik soldier and the Russian Revolution. It was an OK read if you don’t mind a story wherein the Marxists are the protagonists. The book had three words I had to look up: dewlap, raddled, and volpine.
Duranty maybe reviled by name, but today’s MSM behave just like him.
Malcolm Muggeridge wrote about Duranty in his memoirs, but he also wrote a novel in the ’30s called “Winter in Moscow.” It deals in part with the willful dishonesty of western intellectuals when faced with the horrors of Stalin’s rule; it sank with little trace but has recently been back in print. The play be Simon and Longin sounds interesting, and I wish for it more success than Muggeridge enjoyed when engaged in exposing left-wing cant.
Déjà vu?
Quoting Malcolm Muggeridge from pg. 105 in Winter In Moscow — “Bolshevism, as Ouspenski boasted, had to destroy. It set out to destroy everything formerly in existence. This meant destroying people because people are indissolubly connected with things. It would mean, it was carried through to the end, destroying everyone, since people’s lives have their roots in the past, and in institutions, and customs and beliefs that have grown out of the past; and if the past is to be destroyed they have to be destroyed as well. The past and the people stand or fall together.
Even in Russia, however, the destructive force innate in Bolshevism cannot be carried through to the end. It gains impetus; proceeds more and more frantically and hysterically, but must at last spend itself. It cannot be carried through to the end because it depends on hate, or of class war. Certain individuals; sadists and some Jews and cripples; frustrated intellectuals, can hate all their lives; base their lives on hate; and a whole society can be propagandized into hating for the duration, say, of a war or a general election; but not whole society can hate indefinitely. There comes a limit. No whole society can hate long enough to destroy itself; and self destruction is the only conceivable end of Bolshevism and of the class war. Thus Bolshevism must, by the nature of things and by its own nature, be an uncompleted process.”
sounds like a great & badly needed play. hope it does well. the sequel can be about thomas friedman and his deep faith in whatever factotum he speaks to from china, and his abiding loyalty for that nation’s dictators.
Duranty had the right idea; if you are a committed Marxist and want to destroy the West, don’t attack it with violence. Use a pen. That’s a lesson he passed on to today’s Marxists posing as journalists. What puzzles me is that these young Commies didn’t learn that they will be among the first to be disposed of if they are successful in helping establish a Soviet-style dictatorship here.
However, now the Walter Duranty is being exposed, and the truth told, maybe the truth will come out about others.
Who knows, maybe a great American hero, a man reviled by the Left will one day have his statue on the National Mall…Senator Joe McCarthy. They can put a simple inscription on it: “He Was Right”.
Can we not see the picture yet? When communication was basically in written words (with no talking heads endlessly speaking the same thoughts), thinking souls could recognize “good” and “evil”. The perpetual scheme of those whose minds deny God is to “frame” and “re-frame” the thinking of the masses. Names and labels are continually being applied to that Godless ideology- communism, Marxism, liberal, progressive, social justice- all have the same goal. To overcome good with evil. Our form of government is good, however, those who predominate in leadership have “evil” goals for this nation. When will it dawn on every individual to take responsibility for our “loving your neighbor as yourself”? We Americans take for granted the good, the immeasurable blessings we have. What will it take to bring us to truth and reality?
S.J. Taylor’s biography, “Stalin’s Apologist – Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man In Moscow”, is devastating.
Where is the coverage of the Enviro-nazis in outrage, and taking to the streets? I know because there is nothing mentioned in our US Pravda! US Nuke Test Draws Few Protests December 10, 2012
http://consortiumnews.com/2012/12/10/us-nuke-test-draws-few-protests/