Sunday, November 23, 2008

A Distant Mirror

UPDATE: I forgot to mention something about Malcolm Muggeridge. One of the things he said during one of his television appearances that impressed me and made me think was a criticism of the main stream media. I can see why he would want to criticize.

(Apologies to Barbara Tuchman)

Telling the Truth About the Ukrainian Famine

Two British men, both now dead, received the Ukrainian Order of Freedom on Saturday, for their role in reporting the truth about Ukraine during the Stalinist Russia era. I remember one of these men, Malcolm Muggeridge, from his occasional appearance on television, a socialist and atheist as a young man, he later became a devout Christian. The other is Gareth Jones.

Their award came late because, as the article states:
"They told the truth when all around them their press colleagues were inadvertently (or, in one case, deliberately) misleading the public."
This is an excellent example of media's complicity, of their willingness to be influenced by political ideology or to be sycophants rather than news gatherers and truth tellers, and most distressingly, to suppress the voices that do report the truth.

So what did they report on?
"As the world now knows (although it took more than half a century and the opening of Soviet archives to confirm), approximately 10 million people were deliberately starved to death by the collectivization policies pursued by Joseph Stalin."
[---]
"The Moscow press corps was then led by Walter Duranty of The New York Times. For two decades, Duranty had been the most influential foreign correspondent in Russia. His dispatches were regarded as authoritative; indeed, Duranty had helped to shape U. S. foreign policy. His biographer has demonstrated that Duranty's reporting was a critical factor in FDR's 1933 decision to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union. When the Pulitzer Prize committee conferred its prize on Duranty (in 1932, at the height of the famine), they cited his "scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgment and exceptional clarity."

Duranty, an unattractive, oversexed little man with a wooden leg, falsified facts, spread lies and half-truths, invented occurrences that never happened and turned a blind eye to Stalin's man-made famine."
Why does this have a familiar ring to it? Well worth the read.

h/t Uncle Meat

Directly related: Setting the Bar

h/t Sleepy Old Bear

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