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To the editor: This one is radioactive - but I believe that if you check the sources yourself, that the charge of revisionism that I level is well justified in light of both the inordinately close quotations of the individuals involved, and their failure to examine any of the copious evidence which would refute their attempts to sweep a broad brush attack into a general repetition of a condmenation of FDR as a Stalinst apologist and their failure to cite other evidence which directly contradicts their thesis of Roosevelt's complicity. http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20030602-065939-1967r WASHINGTON, June 2 (UPI) -- As the U.S. media still digests the shock and lessons of the Jayson Blair affair at The New York Times, a far older and far worse journalistic wrong may soon be posthumously righted. The Pulitzer Prize board is reviewing the award it gave to New York Times Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty more than 70 years ago for his shamefully -- and knowingly -- false coverage of the great Ukrainian famine. The reviling of Duranty is justified for having lied to the public about a matter of stupifying importance, but it is also part of a right wing campaign to discredit Roosevelt, one can find a dozen of stories from far rightwing publications which never fail to bring up the connection between Duranty and Roosevelt, including Newsmax and the National Review. That it has kicked into high gear recently does not, to me, seem coincidental. The level of revisionism about this particular incident is high - it is clear from the Morgenthau diaries that Roosevelt believed there was a severe grain shortage in Russia, and that trade could be negotiated on that basis, to do so required diplomatic recognition, and also a series of deals. It is a case of, as the joke runs, diplomacy being the art of saying "nice doggie" until you can find a rock. And yet there is overt misrepresentation of this in several publications surrounding this issue. Duranty should lose his Pulitzer, the famine of 1929-1933 did happen, but, it should be pointed out, it was not Roosevelt who was President in 1929-1933, and as soon as he took office he began the steps to attempt to both aid American farmers sell grain, and also alleviate the famine of those who desperately needed it. The claim in the right wing press is that Duranty's reports were the "reason" or "important cause" of Roosevelt recognizing the USSR. The record indicates otherwise - Roosevelt knew the situation was desperate in the Soviet Union and recognized the USSR because it was both a fact on the ground, and because it was the only means by which he could in anyway shape events there. The implications of such publications as Newsmax is that Duranty was the key man on Soviet Policy in the Roosevelt administration, and one other source attempts to paint Davies as the first ambassador to the Soviet Union. In fact it was Morgenthau who negotiated the recognition with the USSR and Bullitt was the first ambassador. Instead of rosy and affirming reports, Bullitt sent a series of diplomatic letters back to his superior - Secretary Hull, which repeatedly emphasized the terror that the Soviet Government inflicted on its people, the view in the Soviet government that war in the West was an opportunity for expansion, and that "we should give up the cherished hope" of normal relations with the Soviet Union. Bullitt's collection For the President lays to rest any notion that FDR was either ill informed, or taken in, by events in the USSR. Consider the following paragraph as an example of the revisionism being practiced by Joseph Sobran, syndicated by Universal Press Syndicate in 1997: Roosevelt's ambassador to the Soviet Union during the 1930s, Joseph Davies, became a great enthusiast of Stalin. Davies was ambassador only from 1937-1938. Or of more recent vintage, The Ukrainian Weekly, March 2, 2003, Roma Hadzewycz, Editor-In-Chief: So, who was this man, who was invited in July 1933 by Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt, a Democratic candidate for President to a luncheon? The question is not irrelevant when we consider that only four months later, on November 16, 1933, Roosevelt, the newly elected President, recognized the Soviet Union. Was Duranty, as some Britishers thought,. "in the pay of the Soviet Government" or was he a willing convert? Implying something very different from the facts. One luncheon becomes a deep and pervasive influence in FDR's administration. Obviously Hoover hadn't been reading the papers from 1929-1933. More disturbing is another key supporter of this campaign - a well known right winger who has Susan Talyor's book as a top 10 read, right next to David Irving's works of revisionist history on the Holocaust and the well known right wing screed The Roosevelt Myth. The charges leveled by the National Review are also repeated, more or less verbatim, at Lewrockwell's right wing site, and at newsmax.com. What is interesting about the UPI report is that after bringing up the Jayson Blair affair, which is about plagarism, it seems to avoid giving credit to the following source, while it mentions it, it does not cite it as the source of its own parallel to Jayson Blair: May 15, 2003, 8:55 a.m. Times and Again Bogus journalism did not start with Jayson Blair. By Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley Fraudulent reporting by Jayson Blair should dislodge the New York Times as the paper of record. Such a downsizing should have happened long ago because of a writer whose lapses were worse. Mr. Blair filed stories from places he had not been, freighted with fabricated quotes and information either bogus or stolen. His work is in the tradition of Janet Cooke of the Washington Post, whose celebrated tale of a youthful junkie proved to be fiction, and fabulist Stephen Glass of The New Republic, now attempting to cash in on his fraud in a new book. But none of these writers can match the Times's worst offender. Walter Duranty was the New York Times's Moscow correspondent during the hey-day of Soviet adulation. He covered the collectivization campaign in the Ukraine, which aimed to eliminate "as a class" the independent farmers known as kulaks. The ensuing man-made famine in 1932-33 caused deaths in the millions. Mr. Duranty's reports for the New York Times covered up the mass atrocity and denied that any famine was going on at all. Mr. Duranty, who won a Pulitzer in 1932, titled his autobiography I Write as I Please but he wrote what the Stalinist regime wanted him to write. There is evidence that Duranty indulged bizarre sexual practices, and that the Soviets used this to blackmail him. Not that he needed the motivation. Malcolm Muggeridge of the Manchester Guardian, who broke the story of the Ukraine famine, called Duranty the worst liar he had met in 50 years of journalism. Duranty used to say "I put my money on Stalin," and dismissed Stalin's mass murder with the quip, "you can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." While Muggeridge was assailed for his truthful reporting, Duranty became one of the first celebrity journalists, toasted by Franklin Roosevelt. Duranty's bogus reports played a role in U.S. recognition of the USSR in 1933. And both of these, after moralizing about Blair neglect to mention their source, Susan Taylor's book on Duranty Stalin's Apologist , which originally made the contention that FDR believed Duranty and recognized the USSR on that basis. Which would be odd for him to immediately dispatch Morgenthau to negotiate a grain deal to a country which wasn't having any food problems, or to send Bullitt, a very Soviet Skeptical ambassador as his first appointment. With the errors that has caused the pulping of Pandora's Keepers and other high profile events in scholarship, it seems rather odd that the very error which is being used to make a report topical is, first of all, not related to the kind of direct lying about events which Duranty engaged in, and that the sources seem closely tied together in not mentioning either their source of information, mutual borrowings, and counter-sources which directly contradict their attempt to spatter the smear farther than the facts allow. Instead, if there is any good correlation, it might be to reporters taking the side of a politically powerful ruling party to curry favor with that party's government and directly lying, or unquestioningly parroting that party's line about facts on the ground which, on examination, are not born out by later inspections. Genocide remains a stark and present problem, there was in the 1990's a genocide in the lakes region of Africa, which, I have contended elsewhere, has continued in the form of the wars in the Congo, where many of the same tribal groups live and continue to attack each other. There is a currently sitting war crimes tribunal in the Hague on Crimes in the Former Yugoslavia. Other incidents of systematic execution, murder or starvation of whole populations have occupied world headlines with distressing regularity through out the last 70 years. The presences of revolution, famine and genocide hung like a shadow over Western Governments in the 1930's and 1940's, who were dealing with famine or near famine conditions in their own territories and colonial possessions. So, as well, is the problem of famines generated by malicious or stupid government policies - as any competent survey of recent African history will attest to. Duranty's failure to publish what he knew for reasons of his own is a violation of the basic ethical fabric on which any society rests, as are the cover ups of famines by other governments or press officials since then. His case is peculiar, in that he received a prize for his deceptions, the most prestigious prize in American Journalism. However, it is no credit to scholarship that the attempt is being used to help certain groups and indivduals grind a political axe, which includes holocaust denial and historical revisionism on the New Deal and its policies. stirling s newberry stnewberry@earthlink.net http://www.mp3.com/ssn
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