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New York Times correspondent Walter Duranty chats during an Association of Foreign Correspondents luncheon honoring him on April 16, 1936 in New York (AP)
Walter Duranty, star reporter for The New York Times, Pulitzer Prize winner, stooge of Joseph Stalin: was he too credulous, poor chap? That's what David P. Kirkpatrick, writing in the Times, said yesterday. Reporting on the Pultizer Prize Board's decision not to rescind Duranty's award, Kirkpatrick described Duranty as "credulous" but not culpable. Really?
In the early 1930s, when he was head of the Times's Moscow Bureau, Duranty was awarded a Pulitzer for a series of 13 articles on the Soviet Union. In 1932, the great famine began. The horror and brutality of that episode can hardly be exaggerated. The famine was not simply a natural disaster: it was planned and prosecuted by Stalin and his goons. Millions died in lingering agony. The whole story is ably told in Robert Conquest's classic The Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine.
With peasants dropping like flies everywhere around him, Duranty cheerfully cabled back to New York that although there were some occasional food shortages, there was "no actual starvation." That's good news, Walter! Just what we wanted to hear. Have a Pulitzer. We knew we could count on you to tell the people back home about the wonderful strides Joe Stalin is making--no need to exaggerate the dark side of things. Progress is hard work: idealists need all the help they can get!
There was some hope that Duranty's mendacity might finally have caught up with him. Recent protests in the Ukraine reached the Pulitzer Board. They convened. They deliberated. They decided. In an official statement, the Pultizer Board said that although Duranty's work fell short of "today's standards for foreign reporting," there was "no clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception."
It took me a while to stop laughing, too. Two whoppers in a single statement! One: as if "today's standards" of Pultizer-Prize winning reporting were something to write home about and, two: as if it were not patently clear that Duranty was a mendacious philo-Soviet hack who deliberately twisted the truth to suit the demands of the Kremlin.
I was hoping to repay you for that wonderful scoop you gave me in Manchuckua. I thought after the Bush Election we could take a ride down to Texas -perhaps Dallas - you know, see the sights, ride past the Book Depository - We'll get a convertible - take in the fresh air.
There will only ever be one "official" Holocaust of the World War 2 era, and Duranty's ethics not only didn't end with him, they set the benchmark for journalistic integrity when it comes to that dark and bloody era of "history".
The more we whitewash the war crimes of our allies during that time, and the more we embellish those of our enemies, the better we feel about our role in the whole sorry affair. As the 21st century gets to really rolling on in earnest, we shall all inevitably discover, to our dismay, that there is in history no room for truth -- because political expediency has taken its place.
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