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Seven million died in the forgotten holocaust Toronto Sun 11/16/03 ERIC MARGOLIS Posted on 11/16/2003 10:05:24 AM PST by freedom44 Five years ago, I wrote about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my column, they knew nothing of the 1932-33 genocide in which Josef Stalins Soviet regime murdered seven million Ukrainians and sent two million more to concentration camps. For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraines population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into historys black hole. So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the communists in the 1920s, the Volga Germans in 1941 and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalins gulag held 55 million prisoners, 23 of them Ukrainians and 6 Baltic peoples. Almost unknown is the genocide of two million of the USSRs Muslim peoples: Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkirs and Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters who today are branded as terrorists by the United States and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps. Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945-47 of at least two million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which two million German girls and women were raped. Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people in 1932, sending Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch and NKVD secret police chief Genrikh Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization. Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch - virtually the Soviet Unions Adolf Eichmann - set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. During the bitter winter of 1932-33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or died of starvation and cold. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergen-Belsen death camp. The mass murder of seven million Ukrainians, three million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of two million more where most died was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like The New York Times Walter Duranty, British writers Sidney and Beatrice Webb and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet agrarian reform. Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded fascist agents. The United States, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically and for their own cynical and self-serving reasons, Hitler and Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and some other senior Communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitlers absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across a fearful Europe. Roosevelt and British PM Winston Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitlers extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty. Though Stalin murdered three times more people than Hitler, to Roosevelt he remained Uncle Joe. The British-US alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime. Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve historys most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of Europe in 1945.
Post Reply Private Reply To 1 View Replies To: freedom44 Revoke Durantys Pulitzer July 2, 1999 Mr. Seymour Topping Administrator The Pulitzer Prizes Columbia University Dear Mr. Topping: As you may know from your days at The New York Times, Accuracy in Media has been critical of award of the Pulitzer Prize to Walter Duranty for many years. He said he would gladly do so if the Pulitzer Prize Committee withdrew it, and we twice suggested to Robert Christopher, the Pulitzer Prize administrator, that the prize be revoked. Since you have covered the Soviet Union, I need not tell you the many reasons why the prize should be withdrawn, but for the benefit of others to whom I hope you will circulate this letter, allow me to list some of them. Duranty was awarded the prize for his coverage of the Soviet Union in 1932, the year when the great famine of 1932-33 began in the Ukraine. His biographer, SJ Taylor, calls it the greatest man-made disaster ever recorded, exceeding in scale even the Jewish Holocaust of the next decade. Eugene Lyons said that Duranty privately put the number of dead from the famine as high as 10 million even though he was reporting that there was not and could not be a food shortage in the Soviet Union and that there was no starvation. The chasm between what Duranty was reporting and what he said privately has been confirmed by other journalists who knew him. One of them was the late John Chamberlain, who reported that he heard Duranty casually mention in an elevator at the Times the millions who had died in the famine, something that Duranty had never reported. In communicating the boards decision in November 1992 to reject our request that Durantys prize be revoked, Mr. Christopher pointed out that the award did not constitute an endorsement of Durantys overall career.
The famine was planned by Stalin to destroy the opposition to his collectivization program in the Ukraine. The famine itself was one of Stalins economic plans and Durantys failure to report it truthfully refutes every word in that citation. It would make good sense for the Pulitzer Prize judges take into account the reputation of the nominees for integrity. A Janet Cooke or Steven Glass might be capable of producing a story truly deserving of a prize, but it ought to undergo very careful scrutiny. Would the judges who awarded the prize to Duranty in 1933 have done so had they known that the Soviet government was providing him with both a mistress and a car and giving him special privileges that were designed to influence his reporting. Duranty is reported to have told a United States embassy official in Berlin in 1931 that his dispatches always reflected the Soviet position.
Christopher also said that the Pulitzer board had decided that revoking the prize would be inappropriate and set a bad precedent and would be second-guessing an earlier board. There were a few reporters in the Soviet Union who told the truth about what was going on. When the Duranty prize is revoked, as it must be, it could be given posthumously to Malcolm Muggeridge, one of the few who had the will to investigate the Ukrainian tragedy and the courage to report it. Correcting errors is supposed to be a hallmark of good journalism. Awarding the Pulitzer Prize to Walter Duranty was obviously a monumental error, and it cries out for correction. I dont recall the board refusing to accept the Washington Posts return of the prize awarded to Janet Cooke in 1981. Admitting that her selection was a serious mistake was the honorable thing to do. It is hard to conceive of the board allowing that award to stand had Ms. Revoking an award given 76 years ago would set a precedent, but it would be a very good one. It would signal that honesty and accuracy are indispensable requirements both for stories nominated for Pulitzer Prizes in the future and for those that have won them in the past. It will signal that the standards for integrity and honesty demanded of journalists are lower than those demanded of pop singers by the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences. In 1992, the Academy revoked a 1989 Grammy awarded to a group called Milli Vanilli, when it was ...
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