Walter Duranty used his Pulitzer and his education to lie for Stalin.
If you disliked Uncle Joe Stalin, you were a yahoo, part of the unwashed, and ignored.
That was a lie, built on lies, supported by lies. Credentialed experts lied for tyrants.
If you found this out, you had a right to be enraged. Liars, secure in elite positions, told your neighbors lies about genocidal maniacs so that they could indulge their own passions. If you opposed the Soviet Union, if you brought up the Gulags, then you were “stupid.” I experienced this personally.
That was deeply evil.
You might have become in response, God help us, reactionary, but if so then you sinned in response to sin. You might have been willing to do anything to expose, defeat, and end the lies of Duranty and his elite, a grifter group.
No. God help us: “No.”
Better to die than to tell a lie.
The reactionary pretended the Tsarist regime had been a Golden Age that somehow had been rejected. The truth teller admitted the sins in otherwise saintly folk. in the old regime. The lies of the old regime, led, to the justification of lies in the new regime that led to new evils based on new lies. Horror was the result: horror on horror on horror built on lies.
The truth must out. The Russian Revolution did not come because of the virtue of the ancient regime, but through the vices.
The United States of America saw the Russian Revolution and rightly recoiled from the state sanctioned mass murder that was happy to announce who should dies next. The lies that our elite media told us to justify that evil made many deeply distrustful of the honesty of that media.
And yet.
There was an equal evil, the response to lies, that told lies to support evil causes like “Jim Crow” laws in the South. These laws kept Black Americans in second-class status.
The reaction to Soviet Communism, one of the worst regimes of the age, and the lies that supported the regime were lies in opposition to that regime. When Bolshevism, a great evil, swept Russia, lying liars used that evil to lie:
As a grand climax to the Scare, Attorney General A. Mitchell Palmer launched his famous Red raids, arresting for deportation 450 supposed Communist aliens in twelve cities on November 7, 1919, and then seized 4,000 more suspects in thirty-three cities on January 2. On December 21, 1919, 249 persons were actually deported on the “Soviet Ark,” the Buford, including the well-known anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman.*
An American need not embrace Union Carbide, a company that killed my grandfather with lies about asbestos and masks, in order to oppose Stalin. Carbide had my Papaw cut asbestos without a mask, because they wanted to save money on masks. They were deeply wicked. That does not make Stalin less wicked.
Honest Americans could say: “Union Carbide should not do as they have done. They are wicked and Stalin is wicked, mayhap even more wicked. Lies are bad.”
We all need mercy. All cultures, nations, peoples, would be canceled if we saw all they have done over time. We begin by telling the truth and then saying: Have mercy.
We cannot justify making 1960’s Americans “jump Jim Crow” by drinking out of segregated drinking fountains, by pointing to the greater evils of Soviet Russia. How stupid is that?
Instead, we can oppose “Jim Crow,” keep fighting racism, hate Stalinism, and live in the beautiful truth.
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* Taylor, S.J.. Stalin’s Apologist: Walter Duranty: The New York Times’s Man in Moscow (p. 91). Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
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