A frightening thought: The New York Times: An Army of Durantys
Commentary’s Abe Greenwald notes that the New York Times has a habit of referring to “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, the homegrown Sunni insurgent group that American intelligence officials say has foreign leadership.” Greenwald notes that al Qaeda in Iraq’s leaders have in fact been Jordanian, Egyptian and Saudi Arabian.
Greenwald could have added that referring to AQI as “Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia” is one way to divert the casual reader from the fact that al Qaeda has been active in Iraq.
Duranty was a Stalin apologist who purposely hid the deaths of millions, enabling Stalin to continue killing free from criticism. There’s no evidence that any nation would have intervened, but we’ll never know what the response to the genocide would have been, because Duranty deliberately hid the facts. Here are a few quotes from an article by Arnold Beichman:
“There is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be.” –New York Times, Nov. 15, 1931, page 1
“Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” –New York Times, August 23, 1933
“Enemies and foreign critics can say what they please. Weaklings and despondents at home may groan under the burden, but the youth and strength of the Russian people is essentially at one with the Kremlin’s program, believes it worthwhile and supports it, however hard be the sledding.” –New York Times, December 9, 1932, page 6
“You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” –New York Times, May 14, 1933, page 18
“There is no actual starvation or deaths from starvation but there is widespread mortality from diseases due to malnutrition.” –New York Times, March 31, 1933, page 13
And here’s one more from Beichman’s article, from a memoir by Zara Witkin, an American who lived in the Soviet Union at the time. One evening the Moscow correspondents were discussing how to get the story of Stalin’s engineered famine out in spite of oppressive government censorship, reporter Ralph Barnes asked Duranty what he was going to write. Duranty said,
Nothing. What are a few million dead Russians in a situation like this? Quite unimportant. This is just an incident in the sweeping historical changes here. I think the entire matter is exaggerated.
Duranty’s acknowledgement of “a few million dead” shows that this was no simple misunderstanding. It was a cover-up. And he didn’t simply “dismiss more diligent writers’ reports.” He went out of his way to call them liars by calling their accurate reports “scare stories.” This was done deliberately and maliciously, as Duranty privately acknowledged that the reports he had denounced were correct.
Contradicting what he had written in the New York Times, on September 26, 1933 in a private conversation with British Diplomat William Strang, Duranty said, “it is quite possible that as many as 10 million people may have died directly or indirectly from lack of food in the Soviet Union during the past year.”
The damage dishonest reporting can do ripples out for decades. Even when Stalin finally died in 1953, his crimes were not detailed by the New York Times, and today if you asked the average man on the street which dictator in history killed the most people, they would say Hitler, even though both Stalin and Mao eclipse him. The failure to acknowledge the truth about the war – on a number of levels, not just in accurately identifying the enemy – has a huge impact on American politics. And that’s really the point, isn’t it? The Times continues to shield murderous thugs in order to manipulate politics at home.
