In the following essay, Don Pesci writes that Walter Duranty, The New York Times' notorious and late Moscow correspondent, should have his Pulitzer Prize rescinded.
-- Tim Machesney
FAMINE, LIES AND JUSTICE
by Don Pesci
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, I was contacted by a Ukrainian in New Britain, Connecticut who wanted to send me a film on the 1932-33 famine in that country. He asked me to view the film and let him know if I could think of any reason why it should not be shown in the United States. The film, Harvest of Despair, had been widely shown in Canada. That was my first exposure to the greatest man made disaster ever recorded, and the first time in history that famine on such a scale was used as an instrument of war and oppression.
I was stunned by Harvest of Despair. It contained footage of both the famine in 1932-33 and an earlier famine that was stopped in its tracks by Lenin, who imported food into the stricken areas. The 32-33 famine -- the Ukrainians call it the Holodomor, roughly translated as "famine-genocide," the "H" intentionally capitalized to emphasize a parallel with the Holocaust -- was caused by Joseph Stalin, who used the famine to break the resistance of Ukrainians to Soviet rule. The terror-famine, as historian Robert Conquest called it, was caused by Stalin's first Five Year Plan. This was a program designed, its Communist proponents claimed, to modernize an antiquated agricultural community, particularly in Ukraine. Between 6 and 10 million people died.
I took the film and showed it to Chris Powell, Managing Editor and Editorial Page Editor of the Journal Inquirer, located in Manchester, Connecticut, and put to him the same question that had been asked of me: Is there any reason the film should not be shown? He encouraged me to do a few columns on the famine, which I did. In the last column, I mentioned that PBS was balking at showing the film and suggested that Ukrainians in Connecticut should withhold pledges to PBS until the film had been aired. I received a call from an alarmed Bob Douglas, then the head of PBS in Connecticut, who told me that PBS was in negotiations to show the film. I told him to call me back when an affirmative decision had been made and I would write a final column praising PBS for having the courage to do the right thing. He did, and I did.
Somewhat later, as result of the columns, I was asked to attend a panel discussion of the famine and its aftermath at the University of Hartford. The conference was well attended, and the panelists included two representatives from news magazines, myself and the religion editor of The Hartford Courant. In such company, I felt a little like a fish out of water. A hand went up in the audience. The questioner wanted to ask Mr. Pesci something: "We have suffered so much during the years; everyone has neglected this story. So, what do you recommend? What should we do? Do we have to march on the newspapers with stones in our fists?"
It was not the question so much that got to me; it was the man's whole demeanor. His question tumbled hotly out of him. Perhaps he had rehearsed it a few dozen times. I knew this man: He was all the old-country Italian men I had met and respected as a boy growing up in Windsor Locks, Connecticut, honest and forthright. Perhaps he was a carpenter or a foreman in a mill, passionate but with none of the polish of the college graduate about him. And he wanted to know! I told him that he and others like him should continue to confront newspapers and keep the rocks in his pocket -- just in case.
They're at it still. Lately, they've demanded that the Pulitzer Prize Board rescind the award it had given Walter Duranty in 1932 for his reports on Stalin's first Five Year Plan. The board refused once but is now reconsidering their refusal.
Duranty was the The New York Times' man in Moscow before and after the famine. By all accounts, he was something of a character. He was called, by journeymen newspaper reporters, "The Great Duranty."
Duranty played a prominent role in the recognition of the Soviet Union during Franklin Roosevelt's administration. The newsman thought of himself as an interpreter whose business it was to explain the ways of Stalin and the Soviet Union to men. His character comes through with great clarity in J. P. Taylor's biography, Stalin's Apologist.
Duranty thought moral questions clouded reportorial vision. Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few heroes among Western reporters in Moscow at the time, thought otherwise: He said Duranty was the most accomplished liar he had met in his (sixty) years of journalism. Taylor's book is a masterful study of reportorial groups operating in authoritarian countries and should serve as a cautionary tale for modern reporters. CNN recently apologized for withholding stories in its reporting on Saddam Hussein's Iraq. Hussein's favorite dictator was Stalin.
In his reports, Duranty temporized -- when he should have been saying the truth and shaming the Devil. By 1933, the famine was fully under way in Ukraine and the North Caucasus. The famine was directly related to Stalin's Five Year Plan, which involved the forced collectivization of agriculture. Under the plan, kulaks or small land owners were dispossessed of their property and either shot or sent to Stalin's Gulag, there to die of exposure or starvation.
Small villages resisted collectivization. Stalin sent in his stormtroopers to bend their necks to the yoke. Grain was forcibly collected from them and a kind of war was waged by Communist Party cadres against the villagers. Whole villages were wiped out by the famine.
Robert Conquest, author of Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, pointedly describes villages where the trees were stripped of leaves, boiled by starving peasants and eaten in soup.
The actual number of deaths caused by the famine probably will never be known for certain. Stalin canceled routine census taking during the period. Most scholars place it between 6 and 10 million, the larger number being the more accurate.
Now, that was the truth of the matter: Stalin's plan killed 10 million people; and the truth was available to any of the Western reporters in Moscow who, like Muggeridge, could have purchased train tickets and gone to the countryside to view the ravages of Stalin's terror-famine any time they liked. Muggeridge smuggled his reports to the British Embassy in diplomatic pouches, and they were printed in the Manchester Guardian, a liberal if not a socialist newspaper.
Gareth Jones, a British journalist, was first out of the pack and into the countryside. Duranty was the little pig who stayed home, and his dispatches reflected the party line fed to Western reporters by the Soviet press office: There was no famine; reports to the contrary were lies.
Months after Jones' and Muggeridge's reports were printed, Duranty finally took a tour of the countryside, and reported that he saw no signs of a famine -- no signs that 10 million people had died of starvation. Afterwards, Duranty himself, in a private conversation with British Embassy employees, placed the number of dead at 10 million. But he still temporized in his news dispatches. Duranty claimed that moral vision should play no part in reporting. If not morals, then what had obstructed Duranty's stunted reportorial vision?
Stalin was a masterful juggler of men, even more accomplished in this regard than Duranty. The Western news crew in Moscow knew that if they told too much truth, they would be out of a job. Even so, there was a reportorial line drawn in the sand that men of conscience would not cross. Muggeridge -- a committed socialist married to the niece of Beatrice and Sidney Webb, both Fabian socialists and admirers of the Soviet utopia -- was determined upon his arrival in Moscow to live and work there. He quickly became disillusioned.
There was a line of division among Western reporters in Moscow represented by A.T. Cholerton and Duranty. Once asked by Western visitors whether the Soviets respected the principle of habeas corpus during their show trials, Cholerton famously responded that it had been replaced by the concept of habeas cadaver. It was the kind of witticism that, finding its way into the Western press, was likely to earn a reporter a ticket home from the cadaver makers.
Oddly enough, it may have been the sight of a small woodland chapel, converted to proletarian uses in one of Russia's vast forests, that turned Muggeridge around.
Duranty, who had little use for chapels or peasants, passed off the deaths caused by Stalin as collateral damage: "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," he said, convinced -- and convincing others -- that the deaths were the result of errors in Stalin's plan of forced collectivization.
Harrison Salisbury thought that Duranty "was simply incapable of reporting something that broke the pattern he had established." He trimmed the truth to conform to notions he had advanced and promoted in his stories. If 10 million starving peasants refuted one of the nostrums he had been peddling, so much the worse for the peasants. Prior commitment, as Pulitzer himself very well knew, is the great enemy of honest journalism.
Ukrainians, both in the United States and elsewhere, are calling upon The New York Times and the Pulitzer committee to right this ignoble wrong. We can make all this right by not being Duranty. Wrongs are undone through a process of reversal, seasoned by repentance. It is never too late to make amends.
The Times should return the prize to the committee; the present committee should rescind the prize -- and give it to, some suggest, Gareth Jones, the first Western journalist to report the famine, or Muggeridge, or both.
Jones' reports left no room for doubt. "I walked alone through villages," he wrote, " . . . everywhere was the cry, `There is no bread. We are dying.'" Muggeridge described peasants ravaged by hunger, kneeling in the snow and begging for a crust of bread. "Whatever I may do or think in the future," Muggeridge wrote in his diary, "I must never pretend that I haven't seen this. Ideas will come and go, but this is more than an idea. It is peasants kneeling down in the snow and asking for bread. Something that I have seen and understood."
Eugene Lyons, a repentant journalist, confessed that the Moscow clan got together after Jones' reports had appeared and conspired to dispute his information. Jones later died in Mongolia, a 29 year old casualty of honest reporting and Chinese bandits.
Muggeridge's reports were discredited. He was fired, his reputation as a reporter slandered. In an August 1933 New York Times story, Duranty called Muggeridge's and Jones' work "an exaggeration of malignant propaganda."
The Pulitzer committee rejected an entreaty to return the Duranty prize once before. The committee temporized; it seems to be catchy -- first Duranty, now the Pulitzer board. The committee offered two reasons for rejecting the plea. It refused the petition on the grounds that a great deal of water had passed under the bridge since Duranty peddled his lies in the Times. The Pulitzer had been awarded, the committee said "in a different era and under different circumstances."
The committee also pointed out that it makes its decision as to who wins the prize a whole year in advance of the presentation of the award. They had decided to award the prize to Duranty in 1931; the famine didn't occur until 1932-33.
This, to me, is a kind of public washing of the hands. The first point would prevent the remediation of a crimes against humanity, provided enough time passed since their commission. It should be understood that remediation in this case is hardly severe or unreasonable. Ukrainians are not asking for reparations: They are asking only that a prize awarded to a fraud be withdrawn.
The second point would matter only to people who see no connection between Stalin's first Five Year Plan and the famine it produced. But there is a causal connection, and the committee cited Duranty's reports on the Five Year Plan as deserving of special recognition. Allowances must be made for the correction of mistakes, even if they are not obvious at first. Even the Supreme Court reverses itself on occasion.
The Western Mail in Cardiff, Wales, reported in June that Mr. Jones's niece, Dr. Siriol Colley, and her son Nigel Colley have written a letter to the committee, which has committed itself to a serious review of the Duranty award.
"The Pulitzer Prize should be revoked from Walter Duranty," Jones' relatives wrote, "not just for his falsification of Stalin's ruthless execution of the Five Year Plan of Collectivization, but also for his complete disregard for journalistic integrity. Through abusing his position of authority as The New York Times' reporter in the Soviet Union, he villainously and publicly denigrated the truthful articles of my uncle, and ashamedly did so, whilst being fully aware of the on-going famine."
The Ukrainian at the University of Hartford who asked me whether he had to march on the newspapers with rocks in his hand to obtain justice is still awaiting justice. It's time.
---
Editor's Note: We have made efforts to find a copy of the movie,Harvest of Despair from traditional retail outlets such as Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com, but it appears to be unavailable through them. With further digging, we did find a copy available at International Historic Films. If anyone knows where this film may be found on DVD, we would love to hear from you.Also, for further reading, you may want to read Marco Carynnyk's The New York Times and the Great Famine, which is available online for free.
Finally, let it be known that we fully support the Campaign to Revoke Walter Duranty's Pulitzer Prize, and encourage you to participate. --Eds.
I don't spend more than a minimal part of my life agonizing over holocausts past or present, regardless of the numbers and the injustice of it all. Call me hard-hearted if you want. But the point is, what is the point?
Death itself is the ultimate injustice, and you, I and every other living person and even every living organism is doomed to this ultimate injustice regardless of anything you do in attempts to ameliorate it, anything or anybody you pray to or any philosophy you follow, or, most likely, any evasions or lies you tell yourselves. And it never repeats itself with any individual organism. There is no soul, no divine spark, no return from the dead, no reincarnation. Nothing.
So none of the 6-10 million starved Ukrainians that Walter Duranty lied about in the New York Times, none of the 6 million Jews put to death in Hitler's murder factories or starved in the artificial ghettos he created for them (the news of which the same New York Times obscured on its back pages early in World War II), none of the 1.5 million starved and murdered Armenians in Turkey in World War I, nor the victims of perhaps thousands of other big and little largescale mass deaths throughout known history, are ever going to be restored to life or given a new one to start over, on the basis of a bunch of comfortable Americans waxing indignant over the brutality of it all.
There are still other mass deaths going on in our own time that will kill many more people than the all the well known holocausts combined, and which, like AIDS, fester in the transpersonal, transregional, transnational and transcontinental microbial soups that characterize a planet getting overly crowded with people. How many people will die of AIDS before the end of this century? One hundred million? Because there is no cure, and viral variants evolve into increasingly more virulent strains, and the fact is, there never will be any cure except absolute quarantine of those infected. In other words, concentration camps from which no internee ever is permitted to emerge.
They tell me that cemeteries set up more for the comfort of the living than for any specific service to the dead. I suspect that this battle over the reputation of Walter Duranty, the feuds with PBS over its reportage, and much else connected with this story is more or less the same. If it is a comfort to the Ukrainians of the world, who probably care most about all this, they now have an independent Ukraine, ruled from Kiev rather than from Moscow, such as their people and their freedom fighters dreamed about. The same for the Jews. The now have an independent state and their numbers are growing again around Europe, where the troubles began.
Walter Duranty was a king size liar. Or maybe he wasn't, and just didn't care. But retroactive de-Pulitzering? Who gives a damn?
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Arnold,
The point is that the future behavior of reporters in such situations may be influenced by de-Pulitzering. Also I would say death sucks but I don't see how something that always happens to everybody can be an injustice. It just sucks.
Jim
I'm not sure how the first story and the second relate. As a Canadian, and a Canadian who lives in a province with a significant Ukrainian population, I'm familiar with both the film and the famine. I'm quite shocked that the film hasn't been shown in the US, and am not sure why it falls to PBS to show it, or indeed why PBS was reluctant. Is there somewhere I can read more?
Now as for the second story: I'm not sure about prize revocation of any sort, whether it's Duranty or Arafat or some scientist whose research is later proven wrong. To my mind, it's all part of that litigious mindset that seeks to redress wrongs in the courts. The court of public opinion and sullied reputations can suffice.
Jim, I regard Pulitzer prizes, Oscars, Emmies, and all the rest of their type simply as self-congratulatory crap invented by one form or another of the various entertainment industry. And make no mistake, most of journalism is simply an adjunct to popular entertainment.
I was a working journalist on a large community newspaper in Chicago before I got my journalism degree in 1962, and for a local bureau of United Press International for six months after that time. The first thing I came to learn was that all it was -- and ever would be -- was the news business.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
If you don't give a damn, why argue?
As for Duranty: fact of the matter is this man was complicit in covering up a crime. Things may have gone differently had he not only covered up for the regime, but actually blasted reporters who tried to tell the truth.
Heaping shame on his head is perfectly appropriate.
As for not giving a damn about genocides: I do give a damn, and I wish to see them avoided in future. That won't happen with people shrugging and saying they don't give a damn.
So I'll give a damn for you. You go have a beer and let us bleeding hearts worry about these things.
I for one would never expect a film about the Famine in the Ukraine to be shown on PBS, anymore than I would expect them to show a documentary on the Katyn Forest Massacre
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Troy/1791/
Certainly during the Cold War I never saw anything that showed the Soviets in a bad light -- why start now?
As for finding the film, I would ask him; here's his home page
http://www-hoover.stanford.edu/bios/conquest.html
But don't expect the film to get on PBS, when asshats like this guy can write rubbish like this:
http://www.etext.org/Politics/Staljin/Staljin/articles/lies/node7.html
Jane, I think the importance of the prize revocation is that it would show that the organization granting the prize (Pulitzer committee) and the organization employing the recipient (NYT) recognize at last the truth of history. Courts are not involved; I don't see what this has to do with the issue of litigiousness.
During the 1930s, Tom Watson senior (creator of IBM) received a "peace" medal from Hitler. He returned it in 1940. Should he have kept it? Should it be displayed at IBM headquarters? (As I understand that Duranty's Pulitzer is displayed at the NYT, albeit with some form of disclaimer).
Excellent!
The Harvest of Despair VHS can be purchased online. Visit www.buyindies.com and search for the title.
It should be noted that Pulitzers have been rescinded for journalistic fraud before. It's just never been this long after the case.
What I think would mean a lot more, to me anyway, would be if the New York Times would publicly acknowledge Duranty's crimes (they still have not), to return the prize, and to publish an asterisk by his name every year when they brag about their Pulitzer winners.
Dean, of course you want the world to avoid future genocides, and I want the same. But the pattern in which the world is organized almost assures more of the same, with even greater ferocity. And "caring" about all this accomplishes about as much as soothing the head of a victim of some deadly tropical fever with a damp towel. Shortly the victim will just another corpse to dispose of, even if the towel is still moist.
The root problems are associated with the certainty that the world's population continues to expand at the same time that world trade, international transportation and communications speed up the pace at which everyone is beginning to squat on everyone else's turf. This spreads diseases, cultural clashes, resentments, wars and mass death. Proliferation of weapons of largescale and mass destruction cannot and will not be contained.
Maybe the USA should have thought about the long-term prospects of all this before introducint the first nuclear weapons in 1945. Who knows? Now it's far too late. Once a rogue government has such weapons and the means of delivering them onto a planned target, they instantly become a superpower no longer subject to the threats of this country and its allies, and certainly not the blandishments of the UNO.
North Korea is an excellent example. We did nothing before but bluster with them. Now they have nuclear weapons and missiles, and they therefore are in position to destroy Seoul and Tokyo within minutes. Unless we are willing to engage in pre-emptive nuclear strikes against them. Which we plainly are not. So nobody is going to join us in a crusade of threats against them. The only likely outcome is that any country that feels threatned by North Korea, including South Korea and Japan, will reciprocate by developing their own nuclear weapons of mass destruction, because no other answer has any practical meaning. This is why India, Pakistan and Israel all have nuclear arsenals and means of delivery.
And if a large, autonomous state such as China chooses to mass murder a large number of Chinamen, Tibetans, or whomever, what do you think we in the west are going to do about it? The answer is nothing except cajole and holler. But we won't interrupt trade with them, because money never stinks, as the Romans said.
I would remind you of the time during the Peloponnesian war in 416 BC, when the victorious and powerful Athenians were preparing to lay siege to Melos, a Spartan colony which made the mistake of resisting them. As related later by Thucydides, the Athenian envoy said to his Melian counterpart:
"You know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must".
(The Melians resisted, the Athenians conquered them. They butchered all the male Melians, enslaved all their women and children, and repopulated Melos with Athenian colonists.)
Might may not always equate to right, but the strong are still the ones who survive the war, are in position to differentiate right from wrong, and haul the losers before war crimes tribunals. There is no other measurable standard, and probably shall never be.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Mr. Harris,
“I don't spend more than a minimal part of my life agonizing over holocausts past or present, regardless of the numbers and the injustice of it all. Call me hard-hearted if you want. But the point is, what is the point?”
How about: Cause and effect. How about the understanding of past causes helping one to avoid future, similar, effects. A matter of volitional choices.
You have (nihilistically and with excessive equivocation, in my opinion) failed to consider the future. In this context, meaning the existence and future of Man. This future will be carried out through and by our children and the decisions they make, based on the knowledge they have. Just as we are trying to do now.
True, the millions of Ukranian, Jewish, and Armenian dead—all dead through the actions of certain individuals—will not be brought back to life by anyone merely “waxing indignant over the brutality of it all.” But that isn’t the point. The point is, though no longer alive, those dead can speak to us. Exploring the causes of their deaths lets them tell us what kinds of people, and what ideas to avoid if we want to reduce these kinds of results and, to ultimately keep them from happening at all. Idealistic? You’re damn right! How else do you expect to affect the inertia of customary notion? But that takes a commitment to study and honesty from US. Now.
Walter Duranty did not lie without reason. One can ask “What did he have to gain by lying? or “What would he lose by telling the truth?” To me though, the question to ask is, what decisions were made as a result? I’m not talking about “high level” policy stuff here, though that is certainly important. No, what of the content of the millions of decisions and chains-of-decision in the minds of individuals comprising the public, which came about as a result of his lies? What positions were taken, strengthened, weakened, or abandoned as a result of his lies? What were the effects? Hard to discern, but not impossible.
The value of a Pulitzer or any other award (and of journalism itself) is solely a matter of what standards for it are insisted upon by individuals. Walter Duranty must be de-Pulitzerized, as you put it, simply because he perpetrated a fraud to receive that award. To allow his award to stand is to dishonor any and all who have received it legitimately. That is prime. But, behind that is the necessity of upholding the ideals of journalism; the legitimate ideals involved in honestly discovering and telling the STORY. This must be maintained and encouraged, lest the future Stalins and Hitlers of the world—and those who give them physical and moral support—get the idea that nobody is looking and nobody cares. That nobody “gives a damn.” Then, lots of people die.
This, I think is what journalism should be about and, incidentally, what parts of the Blogosphere are aiming at.
Stephen,
I celebrate and commemmorate victories and the lives and actions of heroes, survivors and creators. Not mass deaths and the inactions of victims. Generally speaking, I do not serve the dead, and with the exception of members of my own close family, I memorialize only such dead as spent their lives in purposeful achievement.
I am not interested in the endless retellings of the holocausts of the Jews of Europe, the Ukrainians, the Armenians of Turkey, the Cambodians, the north American Indians, the Irish of the potato famine, the eastern Germans (14 million murdered and expelled in 1945-1947), the mass-starved Somalis, the Hutus and Tutsis, and others too numerous to mention. These mainly serve the purpose of seeking sympathy in place of purposeful remedial action to avoid such fates.
Conversely, I am greatly interested in the story of the Jews who clawed their way out of Europe and built a tough new Jewish state on the site of their original ancient homeland.
I am greatly interested in the Ukrainians who found a way to survive Stalin and even the entire Soviet empire, and who are building a fine new and large independent state on the ruins of the old.
I am more interested in the modern Armenians and their efforts to build a modern and prosperous Armenia.
Victimology does not interest me in the slightest. Only survivorhood. Because I view life as a process of the natural selection of the cream of the crop who will dominate, but also of permitting and even facilitating the survival of the rest who will adapt.
If people spent more time studying and living by a wholesome and useful philosophy, they would have less time to spend in fruitless arguments over the endless lies of the mass news media, and they would have less need to believe such lies in the first place.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
I was first aware of Walter Duranty’s perfidy years ago when watching Bill Buckley interview Malcolm Muggeridge for his show “Firing Line.” This is where Muggeridge called Duranty an accomplished liar. Why this story receives coverage only now is a mystery to me.
Yes, the Pulitzer Committee should revoke Duranty’s prize for all the reasons already stated. If nothing else, doing so will certainly right a wrong and signal to everybody that the Pulitzer Prize just might stand for something other than a popularity contest amongst a few elite newspapers.
I believe it is entirely appropriate that Malcolm Muggeridge should receive the Pulitzer instead. Since Duranty received his prize for the way he misreported a terrible crime, Muggeridge deserves the Pulitzer instead for telling the truth about it. Does anybody actually believe the Pulitzer Committee has the stones to do so?
One of the reasons not much fuss has been made about the return of the Pulitzer is that newspapers and news magazines are very much interested in winning Pulitzers, and one does not do this by biting the gifting hand.
The film was first shown in the United States on William F. Buckley's Firing Line program.
The notion that one should not be overly concerned with the correcton of injustices that affect other people is a council of despair. People upon whom injustices are committed are rarely in a position to correct them themselves.
Ukrainians did, in fact, let the dead bury their dead; they moved on, as nations and people must do who have suffered grievious wrongs. Still, time punched a hole in their hearts. I am the most unsentimental of men. But even now, after all these years, that strangled cry of the Ukrainian I mentioned in this article, claws my conscience, and I cannot forget his question: "Do we have to march on the newspapers with stones in our hands?"
While I flatter myself to believe that I understand my friend Arnold Harris' arguments, I can never accept them. We are at a time in human history and development that we both are able to understand human genocide's wrongness, and to document and understand its causes.
I understand the mentality which says that it is unhealthy to demand recompense for the wrongs done to your ancestors. There is no human being alive--none, nowhere--who has no such ancestors. That is not the point. Indeed, understanding that there is no human being alive who has no ancestors who have witnessed it is probably the most important lesson of all.
But we most know what it is, we must recognize what it is, so we may teach others why it is not acceptable, and why it must be remembered, opposed, and condemned. Not because this, that, or the other party has suffered it, or is guilty of it--because we have both types of ancestors in our blood. Every single one of us does.
No, it's about recognizing that we are all the descendents of boths its victims and its perpetrators. All of us, no matter who we are. We must therefore remember when it's happened, and be true to the idea that it should never be tolerated.
Arnold,
Using that logic, there isn't much point in sending people to jail for murder, either.
Look, the point isn't to harm Duranty (although it sort of will, via his posthumous reputation) - it's to protect the prize. If they refuse to remove this tarnish, the Pulitzer could start to have the same diminishing value as the Nobel Peace Prize.
Dean,
"Should not be tolerated" is a meaningless expression, except as a moral standard, if we are discussing actions that constitute statutory crimes. That means a world government that can dictate equal standards of behavior to all cultures and governments. If I have a choice between living under such a world government and having to read about faraway holocausts, I will without hesitation accept the holocausts.
The fact is, the only society for which I agree to assume any responsibility and to pay taxes to, is the United States of America. What happens to the rest, I care less about, fading into I care nothing at all in the case of the islamic states, most of Africa, south America and much of central Asia.
Joe,
Walter Duranty and his reputation meant nothing to me 60 years ago, and means nothing to me today. I learned long ago about his lies finding their way into the New York Times. It only confirmed my already set opionion that news dissemination is a business and not a public service.
The Pulitzer Prize meant nothing to me when I was a working journalist, and means nothing to me today. To revoke it on someone, even a proven asshole such as Walter Duranty, would have about as much significance to me as to strip some kid of his blue ribbon for first place in the southern Wisconsin pissing championship.
Both of you, and all the rest.
The mass murders, purposeful starvations and other calamities that beset the human race will never cease unless and until laissez-faire capitalism, reason, and a philosopy that promotes both -- to the exlusion of faith and altruism -- are universally accepted as values by which mankind should run its affairs.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
The Pulitzer Prize is still considered to be a respected mark of achievement to many people. I think that it is disrespectful to those of Ukrainian descent and to other prize-holders to give Duranty's memory this recognition. I am not a supporter of tinkering with the past, but I believe that there is sufficient cause in this case to warrant rescinding the award.
On a personal note, I come from a Ukrainian Catholic family in an area of Canada mainly settled by Ukrainians. I think that it is interesting to note that there is little discussion of the famine, or of other problems that Ukrainians have had. As a child, I learned about it in school, but it is rarely mentioned otherwise and I cannot recall ever discussing it with family.
Nathan,
No particular offense to Ukrainians intended, but I would not make historical revisions, revoke Pulitzer prizes, insist on descendants of people who received them giving back their Soviet or Nazi medals, or any such thing. By the same token, if I were a white southerner, I would display the Confederate flag by my front door and proudly display a photo of general Robert E Lee in my parlor and laugh at anyone who took offense.
"Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me."
I simply don't care about political correctitude, or about victimology, regardless of the cause, the anguish, whatever. People ought to get over this stuff and get on with their lives.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Revoking the Pulitzer won't bring the dead back to life. To the extent that death cannot be corrected and any attempts at correction benefits the living more than the dead, I agree with Arnold. But this is so obvious that most people are unlikely to be thinking about undoing the famine by revoking Duranty's Pulitzer. What isn't so obvious is how the finality of some wrongs, like death, should instruct the living to let go of righting wrongs. Rather, the irrevocability of death is probably the most compelling reason for correction in the living. The 6 to 10 million dead Soviet farmers surely can never ever be resurrected; but just as surely, the Pulitzer board can still correct an injustice while it remains a living institution. It can make a correction because it is alive; therefore it must. And for the rest of the living, indeed their only consolation is saving the memory of their dead or make some self-righteous pronouncement about dwelling on the present. But if they fail even in that present simple, doable task, indeed they can neither change the past nor promise to change the future - they haven't even really dwelt on the present either.
Arnold, if you "don't care," why six posts (so far) to this thread? I call Troll :o)
Because folks like you keep arguing with me, Old Grouch. And I never quit.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Nobody has mentioned the role of current politics on this debate. Today, the right-left split is as deep as it ever was during the Cold War. Nobody these days wants to defend Duranty or Stalin and few want to defend the Soviet Union or the ideas of Collectivisation. But ideological debates over the greyer areas of the Cold War, such as America's role in Latin America and SE Asia, continue. These, in turn, have direct ramifications on today's policies.
Do the crimes of Stalin (and Mao, Pol Pot, the Kims, et al) justify America's own brutal and aggressive opposition to Communism? Our views on this question are extremely likely to shape our views of America's current campaign against Radical Islam and Arab Nationalism.
I'm not saying this is entirely logical, the comparison between today's conflicts and yeterday's conflicts are sometimes strained. But nevertheless, our politics and worldviews are deeply tied to these arguments.
The story of Duranty and the Ukranian Famine have obvious symbolic parallels today. Reporters on the scene in Baghdad, Tehran, Washington D.C. and other places have to know that whatever they report, positive or negative, will be highly politicized, could cost them access and may shape public opinion back home for or against war. It's unforturnate the History and the Truth will suffer because of this. Revoke the Prize!
Arnold, I admire your unflinching fighting spirit for something you believe is right. You shouldn't have to explain that spirit to anyone because you are as entitled as anyone to free expression. But I hope you realize the irony in committing 7 posts to a small internet debate while suggesting all should just accept the underlying history in this debate, especially when the underlying history has already been widely accepted to be false. The irony in the urgency and seriousness of 7 necessary posts in a non-Pulitzer internet site while arguing that the Pulitzer committee itself shouldn't be bothered is deeply, deeply obscene. At the most basic level, the implication is that your need for expression is at least 7 posts more important than the sentiments of actual survivors and descendants of the famine.
This is not a matter of political correctness, no more than exonerating a man falsely accused of rape and murder 15 years ago is a matter of political ideology. It is the just thing to do. It seems to me then that there is a similar responsibility to correct rewards as there is to correct punishments, especially if those rewards are inconsistent with their purpose, and more importantly, if they contributed to the continuation of someone else's suffering. Even from a strictly materialistic point of view, someone lost the Pulitzer because Duranty unfairly won it. But that injustice isn't nearly as morally compelling as the suffering of a people because of the world's ignorance and negligence which Duranty actively helped foster and protect.
Arnold,
Would you happen to be an Objectivist (a supporter of Ayn Rand) ? She had a tone-deafness to some of reality's tunes, only hearing her harsh, crashing cymbals. She confused her limited perception of reality, and the clarity due to simplicity that that brought with a heightened insight and a greater logic than the 'evil altruists'. Indeed some of her enemies were evil, Duranty would no doubt have been cursed by her. But many simply heard better and clearer than her.
Tadeusz
Note the crimes against humanity are not limited to just one country, but to humanity as a whole. The Armenian pogrom by Turks,the Ukrainian pogrom by the Soviets, the Abyssinian pogrom by the Italians, the Jewish pogrom by the Nazis, The Chinese pogrom by the Japanese and many other that have taken place in our livfetime, plus the many massacres of people's in Latin America by the US forces and their surrogates, who is there to make them answer for their crimes? So the best way for some was to sweep it under the carpet, little knowing that one day it would come out again to haunt them.