Thread by @ModernHeretic9

Stalin’s Apologists (31 March 1933). News Not Fit to Print.

On 29 March 1933 Gareth Jones broke the news of the Communist genocide in the USSR that we now call the Holodomor. Two days later the New York Times and its Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty called it fake news. 🧵

For Jones breaking the story, see my two previous threads here:

And here:

As for Duranty’s and the New York Times’s attack on Jones, the best source is S. J. Taylor’s book, from which I’ve obviously pinched the title for this series of threads.

Referring to Jone’s first article and speech at Chatham House in London on 30 March that I refer to in the threads above, Taylor then relates how another American correspondent in Moscow, Eugene Lyons, later claimed Duranty and others decided to attack Jones.

Lyons was a fairly famous journalist back then and here’s a little from Wiki before we get to his account in Taylor’s book.

TASS — Russian News Agency

CPUSA — Communist Party of USA

Now for Taylor, picking up the story after Jone’s first article and speech at Chatham House:

P. 206-7: archive.org/details/stalin…

Here’s the infamous article that appeared in the New York Times on the morning of 31 March 1933 (I'll blow it up below):

"A big scary story" is one of the most infamous lines from it.

And top right you can see the most infamous line: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs."

Note that had probably been a common expression amongst Communists for some time by then as I previously posted here:

Mind you Duranty had been awarded a Pulitzer Prize the previous year.

pulitzer.org/prize-winners-…

So we shouldn’t be surprised that the New York Times was recently awarded this Pulitzer Prize for doing its part in the Russia Hoax Coup.

pulitzer.org/prize-winners-…

History is about continuity and change, and sometimes the more things change the more things stay the same.

nytimes.com/2018/04/30/opi…

At this point I would conclude by linking to a previous thread about Stalin rewarding Duranty for his services with a private interview on 25 December 1933, but because @elonmusk's Twitter banned my old page, the link is dead and I haven’t recreated it yet.

I will post some of it now, however. This is how Duranty himself later told the story:

P. 166-7: archive.org/details/iwrite…

Yet there was more to it than that. Duranty wasn't just writing as he pleased. Nor was he just writing as Stalin pleased. Above all he was writing as President Roosevelt pleased. Indeed, Duranty had met with Roosevelt in July 1932 as the New York Times reported on 26 July:

I don’t think we know what was said, but it’s safe to assume they were coordinating a media strategy to manufacture consent for America’s official recognition of the USSR. Never mind they were murdering millions.

I can imagine Roosevelt laughing if Duranty used his line on him: “You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”

Roosevelt was certainly chummy with Stalin. In fact, Roosevelt’s ambassador to Russia, William Bullitt, told another American Communist and journalist Louis Fischer in 1933:

“The President, Jack Reed [another American Communist], and I are of the same strain.”

Quote in Dennis Dunn’s Caught Between Roosevelt & Stalin, p. 22

Our Republic and press are indeed certainly falling together.

pulitzer.org