They Said It Didn't Happen

In 1932 Josef Stalin, angered at Ukraine's resistance to collectivized agriculture, sent 25,000 militant party members to the region to force collectivization on 10 million Ukrainian peasants. Recalcitrant farmers were selectively executed, but Stalin quickly realized that such a method worked too slowly on such a large number of people.

Mass starvation would be his ultimate choice of genocide, and all seed stocks, grain, and farm animals were confiscated from Ukraine's farms. Stalin had Red Army troops seal off the borders to Ukraine and closed off rail lines. Nothing went in and nothing came out. It was just a matter of time until people starved to death.

Struggling for survival, people eventually ate pets, their boots, tree bark and roots, and in some cases, ate infant children. Stalin also sent Lazar Kaganovitch to shoot 10,000 Ukrainians per week. All tolled, the death count was 10 million people, 3 million of them children, and most of them from starvation instead of bullets.

At the time this was happening there was a young man named Gareth Jones, a recent alumnus from Cambridge University, who travelled extensively in the former Soviet Republic, and spent time in Ukraine. He reported on what he witnessed and was excoriated for it, called a liar by Walter Duranty of The New York Times. Duranty, the 1932 Pulitzer Prize winner, used his considerable credentials to discredit the truth of what Jones reported.

From GarethJones.org:

The following month in early March 1933, after an 'off-limits' walking tour of the Soviet Ukraine, Gareth, a young man of just 27 years, exposed to the world the terrible famine-genocide that had befallen the Soviet Union and gave reasons for this tragic state of events. It was in the same week that Malcolm Muggeridge had three unsigned famine articles in the Manchester Guardian published, though at the time, due to the more reported Jewish problems in Germany , they went almost unnoticed. Gareth's story however, broke world-wide with much credence (by virtue of his position with Lloyd George) from a Berlin press interview on the 29th March 1933, and was published in the USA as 'exclusives' on the same day by Pulitzer prize winners; H. R Knickerbocker (1931) and Edgar Adsel Mowrer (1933)..

Even though Gareth revealed the truth, he was publicly denounced as a liar by several Moscow resident Western journalists, including The New York Times' and incumbent 1932 Pulitzer Prize Winner, Walter Duranty. In 1937, Eugene Lyons, a Moscow based correspondent, who repudiated Gareth four years earlier, was apologetic for his actions in his book Assignment in Utopia.

There were 10 million poor peasants being slowly starved to death - if they were not the "lucky" ones to be shot - and the New York Times deliberately hid the truth, and refuse to this day to even apologize even as they still hail Duranty as some sort of hero figure. And the world is silent. What does that say?

At least Eugene Lyons eventually expressed regret and acknowledged his misdeeds. The New York Times remains defiant and enjoys a reputation as a beacon of truth. If this story were not so maddening, I'd laugh.

Sources:
www.garethjones.org
www.faminegenocide.com
And a wonderful article in American Thinker by the son of a survivor of the Holodomor, Vladimir Steblina:
Crimes of the NY Times

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