NY Times: A History of Vile Propaganda for Mass Murderers & Tyranny

From hiding Stalin’s monstrous genocide of Ukrainians and boosting Chairman Mao as an “agrarian reformer” to praising Adolf Hitler and concealing the depths of his depravity, the Times has a long legacy of shilling for savages and mass murderers.

The New York Times is passionate about the plight of Ukrainians facing the wrath of the Kremlin today, but once upon a time the self-styled “newspaper of record” hid the truth to help Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin exterminate millions of Ukrainian men, women, and children by starvation. Between 7 million and 10 million perished in the engineered famine as the Times’ chief Moscow correspondent Walter Duranty denied it and told Americans what a great man Stalin supposedly was.

That was hardly the only time the Times lied for tyrants. The “Gray Lady” shilled for plenty of other mass murderers including Cuba’s Fidel Castro, China’s Chairman Mao Tse-Tung, and Germany’s National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler. Today, it continues to provide cover for would-be foreign and domestic tyrants while painting those who resist tyranny as “extreme,” “radical,” or even dangerous.

Returning to Ukraine, the Soviet policy toward that nation under Stalin represents one of the most barbarous episodes in the history of humanity. After ruthlessly eliminating dissenters and “kulaks” (supposedly more prosperous farmers) by murder or deportation to slave labor camps in the frozen Russian north, Stalin in the early 1930s turned his eyes toward the peasants who remained in Ukraine.

The Soviet leader, who had taken over from Lenin almost a decade earlier, ordered all food and grain seized — even the meager supplies belonging to destitute families and the seed needed to plant a crop the following year. Bands of communists went from home to home stealing every last speck of food, knowing mass starvation and death would be the result.

For hundreds of years, Ukraine had been known as the “breadbasket of Europe” as its bountiful soil produced enormous quantities of grain for the continent. And yet, under Stalin, as winter arrived in 1932, death from starvation and malnutrition were everywhere. Some Ukrainians even turned to cannibalism in a desperate attempt to survive, according to multiple reports.

The story of the famine is recounted in horrifying detail by survivor Miron Dolot in the 1985 book “Execution by Hunger: The Hidden Holocaust.” In the book, Dolot provides a first-hand account of the unimaginable horror. Stalin sold much of the stolen grain on international markets, painting the supposed “surplus” as evidence of communist success.

Another account of this period was offered by survivor Ivan Kasiianenko, a boy at the time, at a 1987 hearing of the U.S. Commission on the Ukraine Famine. Among other horrors, Kasiianenko explained how Soviet agents murdered his parents and siblings by starving them to death. “Even mothers,” he said, “sometimes lost their sanity and turned into animals who smothered their own children and ate them.”

Ukrainians know this slaughter that killed more people in one winter than the German Holocaust did in five years as the “Holodomor,” defined as “murder by hunger.” It was perhaps the single most vicious slaughter of innocent human beings in year ever perpetrated by man.

Few people outside Ukraine knew what was happening then. To this day, few know much about it. But the Times and Duranty did know, and chose to conceal the truth. In fact, for a decade prior, Duranty had been heaping praises on those responsible for enslaving the peoples of Russia, Ukraine, and beyond, hiding the evil while inventing fabricated stories of success.

During the genocide, Duranty worked hard to mislead Americans. “There is no famine or actual starvation, nor is there likely to be,” he lied in a November, 1932, article as the famine was raging. He also called reports of famine “an exaggeration or malignant propaganda.” Incredibly, as the truth leaked out, Duranty even published a piece blaming the victims, saying “the food shortage must be regarded as a result of peasant resistance to rural socialization.”

Living a life of luxury with his lover in Moscow, Duranty served as a willing mouthpiece for Stalin and his bloodthirsty regime. In fact, he admitted as much. According to Soviet expert Leonard Leshuk in US Intelligence Perceptions of Soviet Power, 1921-1946, Duranty estimated in private conversations with British diplomats that the genocide had starved some 10 million people to death. Leshuk also reported that Duranty “admitted to A.W. Klieforth of the U.S. Embassy in Berlin … that ‘in agreement with The New York Times and the Soviet authorities’ his official dispatches always reflect the official opinion of the Soviet regime and not his own.”

In short, Duranty and the Times willingly parroted the propaganda of one of the most murderous governments in history. For Duranty, who had been a close friend of notorious Satanist Aleister Crowley and even participated in some of his satanic rituals, that may not have been surprising. But for the Times to prostitute itself for communist purposes would have been shocking to Americans of the day.

Even when the facts about the genocide emerged, Duranty fiendishly worked to cover them up. In the spring of 1933, British traveler Gareth Jones, who had served as secretary to Prime Minster Lloyd George, had the chance to witness the horrors for himself. He promptly told the world what he saw: massive starvation of Ukrainians caused by Soviet policies designed to exterminate a nation.

Duranty rushed to denounce the reports as false. Writing in the Times, he claimed, falsely, that “there is no actual starvation, or deaths from starvation.” While he finally conceded that “conditions are bad,” he insisted “there is no famine,” even as millions were perishing from starvation. Perhaps even worse, he downplayed the savagery, writing that “you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.” Those “eggs” were innocent people.

For his lies, Duranty and the Times were richly rewarded. Stalin infamously told Duranty that he had done a “good job” in his reporting on the Soviet Union in late 1933. Even more significantly, Duranty and the Times received a Pulitzer Prize for selling Stalin’s lies to Americans.

“Mr. Duranty’s dispatches show profound and intimate comprehension of conditions in Russia and of the causes of those conditions,” explained the award announcement. “They are marked by scholarship, profundity, impartiality, sound judgement, and exceptional clarity, and are excellent examples of the best type of foreign correspondence.”

In receiving the award, though, Duranty made clear his sympathies for the monsters he was protecting with his fake news. “I learned to respect the Soviet leaders — especially Stalin, whom I consider to have grown into a really great statesman, and their planned system of economy, despite present imperfections,” he said, as if the killing of tens of millions of people and the enslavement of countless more were mere “imperfections.”

The Times’ blatant lies and propaganda paved the way for Franklin D. Roosevelt’s decision to have the U.S. government officially recognize the barbarous Soviet regime and treat it as a legitimate government. Roosevelt knew the truth, of course, long before the U.S. government started promoting Stalin as “Uncle Joe.” But such a move never would have been possible if Americans, too, had known the extent of Stalin’s atrocities in Ukraine and beyond.

Two decades ago, as the voices denouncing the Times for its propaganda became impossible to ignore, the paper issued a sort of “mea culpa” acknowledging some problems and admitting its “discredited” coverage was wrong. “Since the 1980’s, the paper has been publicly acknowledging his failures,” it said of Duranty, adding that pressure was growing to have his Pulitzer revoked for “failure to report the famine.”

The Pulitzer board also condemned Duranty’s lies on the “horrific” famine. But it stopped short of revoking the prize awarded to Duranty and the Times. “By its decision [not to revoke the prize], the board in no way wishes to diminish the gravity of that loss” from the deliberate famine, the board said, extending its “sympathy” to Ukrainians and others who still mourn Stalin’s atrocities.

If it had been a one-time mistake by the Times, perhaps hiding the genocide of millions of Ukrainians from Americans could have been forgiven. But the Times has consistently provided cover for leftwing butchers, over and over again, even as it ignored the plight of victims suffering at the hands of those despots.

Consider the Times’ coverage of Cuban revolutionary Fidel Castro. Prior to taking power, Times correspondent Herbert Matthews described the Communist leader’s agenda as “a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore anti-Communist.” Just a couple years before Castro seized power, Matthews praised him in the Times for his “strong ideas of liberty, democracy, social justice.”

“There is no communism to speak of in Fidel Castro’s 26th of July Movement,” Matthews claimed, even as sensible observers such as Robert Welch and even the U.S. Ambassador to Cuba warned Castro was a communist. Almost incredibly, Matthews continued shilling for Castro and claiming he was not a communist even many months into his reign of terror. Castro “is not only not Communist,” Matthews wrote on July 16, 1959, “but decidedly anti-Communist.”

Even before Matthews paved the way for Castro to massacre thousands of his political opponents and enslave a once-free nation, Matthews was shilling for the communists in the Spanish civil war. Like Duranty, who was still covering Stalin and the USSR until 1940, Matthews ignored the massacres of Spanish priests, nuns, and others by the Stalin-backed communist terrorists rampaging through the Iberian Peninsula.

Before it was helping bring Castro to power, the Times was also boosting National Socialist leader Adolf Hitler, too. In its very first article about Hitler, published on November 21, 1922, the Times claimed, citing “several reliable, well-informed sources,” that “Hitler’s anti-Semitism was not so violent or genuine as it sounded.”

As Hitler was rising to power in Germany, the Times’ bureau chief in Berlin, Guido Enderis, was widely known as a Nazi himself. Even other Times’ writers complained of his “loudmouthed defense of Nazism” while he was out drinking in bars, according to a report in The Tablet by Northeastern University Journalism Professor Laurel Leff. Indeed, analysts say the Times appreciated the Nazi leanings of its writer, as this provided greater access.

“Throughout the 1930s, Enderis helped steer Times coverage to play down Jewish persecution and play up Germany’s peaceful intentions,” explained Leff. “He kowtowed to Nazi officials, wrote stories presenting solely the Nazi point of view, and reined in Times reporters whose criticism he thought went too far, shaping the news in favor of a genocidal regime.” He constantly had kind words for top Nazis in print, too.

A book by Leff exposes the Times’ biases and deliberate decisions to basically cover for Hitler and downplay what was happening in Germany. Titled “Buried by the Times: The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper,” the book points out that the way the newspaper covered the Holocaust and National Socialism in Germany “contributed to the public’s ignorance” about what was going on.

The building where the Times’ office was located flew a Swastika flag, its German employees marched in Nazi parades, and there was a “Nazi cell” in its German subsidiary, Leff reported. As concerns grew around the world about atrocities being committed in Germany by the Nazis, the Times’ reporter wrote that “the government would not tolerate persecution of the Jews and had established no discrimination against them.”

Of course, the Times was hardly alone in regurgitating Nazi propaganda. Time magazine actually named Hitler its “Man of the Year” for 1938, long after he had started imprisoning and terrorizing his detractors and the very same year he began invading Germany’s neighbors.

On China, the Times also long showed a soft spot for the barbaric regime. Even before the communists came to power, the Times and other “mainstream” outlets openly demonized liberty-minded Chinese leader and strong U.S. ally Chiang Kai Shek while gushing over Mao as a “democratic agrarian reformer.” The paper’s book reviews constantly boosted pro-CCP books while ignoring or condemning those that exposed the communist evildoers.

Read the rest of this article with GEORGE Magazine.