← Autodidact Archive · Original Dissent · weisbrot
Thread ID: 7258 | Posts: 8 | Started: 2003-06-11
2003-06-11 00:04 | User Profile
What's going on here?
This goes beyond competitive instincts or urges for absolution. Whatever the motivation, I'm not so sure I'm buying the 7MM figure (Oy, it's just a few more than our own 6MM, and they were just peasants, anyway...!)
It's all a bit too late for the 7 to 20 MM killed by Stalin and his Marxist/Communist Jewish invention...
Pulitzer Prize Board Probes 1932 Award to NY Times reporter [url=http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-bc-ny--pulitzerprobe0610jun10,0,2827482.story?coll=ny-ap-regional-wire]http://www.newsday.com/news/local/wire/ny-...p-regional-wire[/url]
By LARRY McSHANE Associated Press Writer
June 10, 2003, 5:17 PM EDT
NEW YORK -- A Pulitzer Prize awarded in 1932 to a New York Times correspondent is under review and could be revoked because of complaints that he deliberately ignored the forced famine in the Ukraine that killed millions.
The review of Walter Duranty's work was launched in April by a Pulitzer subcommittee. No Pulitzer has ever been revoked in the 86 years that the prize has been awarded.
Members of the Ukrainian Congress Committee of America joined Ukrainians worldwide this year in urging the withdrawal of Duranty's award, said President Michael Sawkiw Jr., adding that more than 15,000 postcards and thousands more letters and e-mails were sent to the Pulitzer Board.
"Exactly like Jayson Blair, the heart of all this is journalistic integrity and ethics," said Sawkiw, referring to the Times reporter who was found to have falsified and plagiarized dozens of stories.
The effort was timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of the famine, which claimed as many as 7 million Ukrainian lives. Josef Stalin's regime created the famine to force Ukrainian peasants into surrendering their land.
"Like any significant complaint, we take them seriously," Sig Gissler, administrator of the Pulitzer Board, said Tuesday of the charges against Duranty. "They are under review by a board subcommittee, and all aspects and ramifications will be considered."
Gissler said the decision to review the Duranty award was made before most of the postcards and letters arrived.
Duranty covered the Soviet Union for the Times from 1922 to 1941, earning acclaim for an exclusive 1929 interview with Stalin.
But Duranty was eventually exposed for reporting the Communist line rather than the facts. According to the 1990 book "Stalin's Apologist," Duranty knew of the famine but ignored the atrocities to preserve his access to Stalin.
The Times has also distanced itself from Duranty's work. The reporter's 1932 Pulitzer is displayed with this caveat: "Other writers in the Times and elsewhere have discredited this coverage."
"The Times has reported often and thoroughly on the defects in Duranty's journalism as viewed through the lens of later events," said Toby Usnik, director of public relations at the Times.
This was not the first time that the Pulitzer Board has reconsidered its award to Duranty. A similar probe in 1990 ended with a decision to let the Pulitzer stand.
Gissler pointed out that most of the complaints related to Duranty's coverage of the forced famine, which began in 1932. Although the foreign correspondent won the Pulitzer that year, it was for stories he had written a year earlier.
In addition, he noted, the Pulitzer is awarded for work in a single year rather than "a winner's body of work over time."
Although the Pulitzer has never been revoked, it was once returned. Washington Post reporter Janet Cooke surrendered her prize in 1981, after admitting she had fabricated stories. Copyright é 2003, The Associated Press
2003-06-11 17:49 | User Profile
Duranty was a communist sympathizer writ large. He ignored plenty of what was going on. Times don't change.
2003-06-11 22:34 | User Profile
The New York Times and the national media have long known of Duranty's lying. From my book War, Money and American Memory> In the American press the prime mover of this sordid state of reporting was Walter Duranty of the New York Times.ÃÂ [color=red]That Duranty was a long time liar and apologist for the Soviets has long been known, but what does bother to this day was the purblind faith which justified his treachery to the faithful.[/color]ÃÂ These vile apologists were people who believed progress demanded smokestacks, an industrial approach to all life situations and an abiding hatred and contempt for those who talked of virtues of a slower paced rural life.
[color=red]Even Duranty, a British subject, gave a vastly different account of the famine to William Strang, the charge d'affaires of the British chancery in Moscow.ÃÂ In a report to John Simon, the Foreign Secretary, on September 26, 1933 Mr. Strang wrote that Duranty thought it possible that as many as 10 million may have died directly or indirectly in the past year in the Soviet Union.ÃÂ To his newspaper colleague, Eugene Lyons, Duranty gave an estimate of 7 million who died. [/color] Writing the book *USSR *in 1944, Duranty reprised the time of the famine and said Stalin was never as great as when he assumed control of the USSR during the famine of 1933.ÃÂ Although admitting he was the New York *Times *correspondent in the Soviet Union for 10 years prior to the famine, Duranty did not pretend to know what was going on.ÃÂ Duranty excused the famine for which Stalin was accused of causing the deaths of 4 to 5 million peasants because the Red Army required food reserves to fight the Japanese.ÃÂ In the spring of 1932 the Red Army had to have two million tons of grain within thirty days to forestall a Japanese attack.ÃÂ The resultant collection of the grain caused many millions of Russian acres to be untilled and deserted with millions of Russian peasants begging for bread or dying.ÃÂ But this sacrifice ensured the Japanese did not attack.ÃÂ Casually mentioned by Duranty was the great purge of 1937 and 1938 when two-thirds of the Soviet diplomatic corps were liquidated, and casualties were equally severe among the high command of the Soviet army and navy.ÃÂ The absence of these officers contributed greatly to the great debacle and slaughter of the Red Army in the beginning stages of World War II.ÃÂ What also was acknowledged by Duranty was that much of Russian industrial training and even Red Army training had been aided by German experts.ÃÂ Duranty passed along the rumor that one Red Army maneuver exercise near Kiev had been conducted by General von Hammerstein, Commander-in-Chief of the Reichswehr.ÃÂ This exposure to the German War College and Staff School enhanced the professionalism of the Russian officer corps.
So great was the deference of Duranty to Stalin that he proudly recounted his first interview with old Joe and how he had submitted his copy of the dispatch for correction.ÃÂ Stalin emended references to himself as being "inheritor of Lenin's mantle' to "Lenin's most faithful disciple and the prolonger of his work".ÃÂ Duranty praised Stalin as a great man, but one who recognized Lenin as his superior and followed his teachings with dog-like devotion.ÃÂ Revealing some pertinent background information about Stalin through his mother, Duranty wrote of Stalin, then known by the Georgian name of Dzhugashvili, winning a scholarship to a religious seminary at Tiflis. His mother who was buried with Christian rites when asked how proud she must be that her son was sitting in the throne of Peter the Great replied that if Stalin had not been naughty in school, her son might now be a bishop.
*[color=blue]Some five years later in 1949 Duranty wrote another book in which he obviously felt the need to relieve himself about past lies and vicious half-truths. [/color]*ÃÂ "Whatever Stalin's apologists may say, 1932 was a year of famine in Russia with all the signs of peasant distress which I had seen in 1921", wrote Mr. Duranty, perhaps thinking of himself as one of the apologists.ÃÂ Later he wrote of the collective farms established in 1931 and 1932 as being shockingly mismanaged.ÃÂ As a further revelation Mr. Duranty told of seeing in 1933 former grainfields in the North Caucasus being replaced by miles of weeds and desolation.ÃÂ A more exhaustive confession from Mr. Duranty revealed the collectives were run by poorer peasants whose greed and numbers the Russians had relied on for their campaign against the kulaks.ÃÂ The triumph of communism had abolished the kulaks as a class, deprived them of their belongings; and driven them into exile.ÃÂ Once when explaining the famine and deaths to American reporters, Mr. Duranty was quoted as excusing and rationalizing the deaths and carnage by saying, "...but they're only Russians".ÃÂ A decade hence people would say the same thing about Jews, but they would not be working for the New York *Times.***
A great, great myth is the lying by Duranty was a secret. He has long been known as a mendacious liar to anyone who looked.
2003-06-12 09:01 | User Profile
*Originally posted by weisbrot@Jun 11 2003, 00:04 * ** "The Times has reported often and thoroughly on the defects in Duranty's journalism as viewed through the lens of later events," said Toby Usnik, director of public relations at the Times.
**
Now we know how the Times says "the dog ate my homework."
2003-06-13 09:08 | User Profile
It's not that I think the prize won't be revoked (though it won't). It's that the damage is already done. Not just to the kulaks, for whom revoking Duranty's Pulitzer would be akin to sprinkling the antidote on the patient's grave, but to the Pulitzers themselves - which for decades have been handed out to reward lefty-agitprop footsoldiers regardless of merit or accurate content.
Sorry, but every year the Pulitzer committee goes out of its way to find somebody, anybody "of color" to garland with honors. Your jaw would drop at some of the dusky mediocrities awarded a feel-good, me-a-Pulitzer-Prize-winner-too quota-filler. Same goes for the white winners: it helps, come Awards Day, if you're leading the initiative towards white self-hatred (and extinction).
2 years ago, the NYT took home a passel of these cereal-box prizes for their multi-part series on Race in America, one of the most thuddingly heavy-handed and repetitive jeremiads against white people ever published in this country. Why should I be satisfied with a probe into Duranty's award when a recent series, totalling nearly a million words and stretched out over a month solid....that revisited every lynching in America in minute detail, playing up the 4000 or so blacks put to death by whites over an 80-year period, yet never once mentioned the 45, 000 white people slaughtered (for the crime of being white, by blacks) over the last 35 years alone...more urgently requires discrediting?
I don't mean to make light of the suffering of the Russian peasantry, nor the evil that Duranty's know-nothingism helped loose upon Europe & Asia. But you and I both know that even should Duranty's door-prize be rescinded, The Official, Pulitzer-sanctified Times Version of racial reality in America will become the new Duranty Prize......a monstrous lie rammed down the throats of future generations as a truth that may not be questioned under penalty of social ostracism, imprisonment or death. We may only speak of black-on-black violence (which can be molded like clay in the hands of any competent con-man-with-byline into a further indictment of Whitey) or...of course!....white-on-black violence (sure, it's comparitively non-existent, but, hey, we all know that dog-bites-man isn't news, right?)
To my mind, it's those Pulitzers - and not Duranty's - that sapped the will to resist of the Wichita Four, and allowed Kris Kime to be stomped to death before hundreds of white onlookers too afraid to raise a finger to help him...including police officers! And that's the merest sliver of the tip of the iceberg: five down, 44, 995 to go. It is those Pulitzers that have turned the once-great, once-uniquely-individual American cities into lookalike, smellalike urban hellholes fit only for abandonment.
If we're going to revoke literary prizes as a way to tell the defamed dead 'sorry about that', let's begin with apologizing to our own countrymen first and begin righting our sinking ship before we join the kulaks already in Davy Jones' locker. Better to be thought a bastard and be left standing than to be eventually eulogized as victims by weaselly collaborators after we're worm-food.
2003-06-13 13:27 | User Profile
Better the slow truth than no truth, IR. Although, as usual, you are correcto mundo, as that tough jew boy Henry Winkler used to say when in character.
Speaking of black on white outrages, O'Reilly had just got finished beating up on yet another hapless arab spokesman when he showed the video of the black kid sucker punching that nerdy white art school student.
As much as I despise Big Bill he does a public service by devoting 10 minutes air time to something that is a daily occurrence yet remains the truth that dare not be spoken. He must have showed the clip 4 times.
Course, he immediately squandered his goodwill by refusing to even comment on the obvious racial connotations. His whole thing was why are "kids" so violent, not why black kids are so violent.
2003-06-13 14:02 | User Profile
*Originally posted by eric von zipper@Jun 13 2003, 09:27 * ** As much as I despise Big Bill he does a public service by devoting 10 minutes air time to something that is a daily occurrence yet remains the truth that dare not be spoken. He must have showed the clip 4 times.
Course, he immediately squandered his goodwill by refusing to even comment on the obvious racial connotations. His whole thing was why are "kids" so violent, not why black kids are so violent. **
My comment on this to my wife was, "Who do they (meaning O'Reilly and the Jewish law professor in the segment) think they're fooling by not mentioning race?" Then I thought some more.
I think the educator thought he was doing his earnest liberal best by telling mean ol' "conservative" O'Reilly that ten- that's right, ten- years was too much time and wouldn't teach any lessons. Neocon that he is, I still think O'Reilly- to the extent that he influences/produces his segment's directions- fully realized the impact of making zero mention of race. Just about anyone watching this would gain far more insight from O'Reilly's total blackout- yup, intended- on inclusion of race in this topic. The far left most likely give smug congratulations to themselves for their success in intimidating the extremist right into not mentioning race; so what, they're too far gone to reach, anyway. By not mentioning the obvious, and allowing the kosher law professor to be the "extreme", O'Reilly showed either some real savvy or just basic dumb luck.
I think the style of this segment- featuring savage, unprovoked bonobo violence, coming live from the jungle- will do more mindbending than any number of spittle-flying O'Reilly monologues could do. He's still a numb-brain neocon on foreign affairs and many other issues, but I think O'Reilly has sniffed out some market share by using race and is at least helpful. Not that he wouldn't jump out of the boat at the first survey showing a ratings dip; but for now he's a good initial shock to the minds of herd whites needing to have some truth strapped on- on race issues, anyway.
2003-06-13 14:21 | User Profile
You are probably right. That clip will never be shown on the networks, I'll wager.
I'd like to see Bill introduce the film by saying "and now from our Joys of Diversity file here's this..........".