Scandal, Lies, Terror -- and
The New York Times
May 28, 2003
By Toby Westerman
Copyright 2003 International News Analysis Today
www.inatoday.com
The New York Times, America's "newspaper of record," continues to be rocked by scandals undermining the accuracy and truthfulness of its reporting, while a memo from Times management - and reported by USA Today -- is circulating among staff promising a "comprehensive review" to uncover "the failure of our journalism."
The failure of Times' "journalism," however, extends far back into the newspaper's history, and includes complicity in the cover-up of one of the most horrendous crimes ever perpetrated in the history of the world. Current policies of The New York Times contribute to the crime, which remains a virtual footnote in history.
Seventy years ago this May 2003, a politically inspired artificial famine, a terror-famine, killed as many as eleven million people gripped much of the Soviet Union, but the greatest devastation descended upon the fertile agricultural regions of Ukraine and the still independent peasantry which raised its crops.
Prior to the terror-famine's most destructive phase, the harvest of 1932 was bountiful, but was confiscated by Soviet authorities. The peasants who raised the crops were forbidden to keep what they produced for sale, or consume any other food grown on their land. Food was plentiful in the cities, but the peasantry was restricted to their land, and city dwellers forbidden to offer food to any peasant who may have secretly entered a city.
At the same time the terror-famine was destroying millions of Soviet citizens, the USSR exported food.
The world outside the Soviet Union, however, never gained a true picture of what occurred, and much of the blame rests with The New York Times Pulitzer Prize winning Moscow correspondent, Walter Duranty.
Duranty, who won his Pulitzer in 1932 for a series of articles on the Soviet economy, was an enthusiastic admirer of communist dictator Josef Stalin. His admiration of Stalin was so unshakable that Duranty's biographer, S.J. Taylor, entitled her book on Duranty, "Stalin's Apologist," (Oxford University Press, 1990).
Duranty not only minimized the disastrous effects of the terror-famine, but also cynically remarked about reports of starving peasants, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."
Considered the leading authority on the Soviet Union, Duranty's failure to report or confirm stories of the terror-famine effectively hid the extent of the atrocity until Robert Conquest published "Harvest of Sorrow" in 1986.
The Ukrainians are only now beginning to investigate the extent of the atrocities that Stalin inflicted upon them. Even today not all official records on the terror-famine are available, and some fear retaliation from former Soviet officials still in positions of power.
The director of research at the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association, Lyubomyr Luciuk, identified Duranty as the individual most responsible for keeping the reality of the terror-famine hidden from the world, according to a recent report from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Luciuk has sought to have Duranty's Pulitzer Prize revoked, but a spokesman for the Pulitzer board stated that the Duranty's award was given for "a discrete set of stories," and that the Pulitzer is "not a lifetime achievement award." The Pulitzer board may, however, reconsider its decision, according to Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty.
Despite repeated appeals, The New York Times continues to list the notorious Duranty as one of its Pulitzer Prize winners, giving implicit endorsement Duranty's activities.
Neither Duranty's sympathy for the brutal communist dictator Stalin, nor the New York Times correspondent's lies concerning the deaths of many millions of innocent people, has moved the "newspaper of record" during the past seventy years to admit or apologize for the "failure" of its "journalism," which misled - and to a large extent still misleads -- the world regarding a pivotal era in history.
Copyright 2003
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