De Gaulle and French betrayal of Poland in Semptember 1939

[ljadw]

Considering Churchill's past posts held and his current posting as a long-term MP, calling his opinion "irrelevant" borders upon ignorance. As far as De Gaulle is concerned, he was a forward thinking staff officer in the 30's who was also promoting, much like Guderian, the use of tanks and mechanization for the French Army. Once again, to render his opinions within the defense establishment "irrelevant," borders on ignorance.



Yes it is. What does her political leanings have to do she quoted Rydzs Smygly?? She was INTERVIEWING Rydzs Smygly and quoted what he SAID. Think about this. Did the New York Times retract her story because she misquoted Rydzs Smygly? The only person whose judgement is clouded by their political beliefs and preconceived notions is you.



There you go again Ludo, moving the goal posts again.

You stated "he did not represent HMG and was fired by Eden in 1938 and what he said were only assumptions,without any proof"

For your information, after his dismissal, Vansitarrt was given a newly created position of "Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty's Government" in which he served until 1941. Did you conveniently forget the bolded first part of your statement???

About Vansittart: on 9 October 1937,Chamberlain wrote in his letter to his sister Hilda that Vansittart was a man whose '' instincts were all against my policy ''
The source is John Charmley :Chamberlain and the Lost Peace P 34 and Note 11 on P 216.
The obvious conclusion is that after he was fired, Vansittart did not represent the views of the British Government and that his newly created position represented nothing .Unless you think that the British PM would use as his representant someone whose instincts were all against the policy of the PM.
There is even no proof that when Eden became again Foreign Secretary, he listened to/asked the opinions of Vansittart .

A nice quote, but how does it disprove the fact that Vansitartt and Drax were entrusted not only with negotiating with the Soviets in the summer of 1939, but also that he held the position of "Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty's Government"?

1 Vansittart and Drax were not going to Moscow to negotiate with the Soviets,as HMG knew very well that the Soviets could not and would not help .Not to prevent a war.Not to help Poland if there was a war .They could not do it even if they wanted and they would not want to do it even if they could .There were no negotiations between B+ F and the Soviets .
It was all keeping up appearances .
They went to Moscow ,wasting their time, only for political domestic reasons ,which were that Lloyd George ( who hated Chamberlain ) and Churchill demanded in the Commons that the government should send a mission to Moscow to have Russia (= the Red Army ) on its side when war broke out .If there was a possibility that this could happen, Halifax would go to Moscow . But he knew that it was only a wast of time.
2 The title from Vansittart does not mean that he had any political influence :the title was only hollow words .
Chamberlain knew very well what the opinion was of Vansittart .See his letter to his sister and it was out of the question that the Chief Diplomatic Adviser to his Majesty's Government would play a role .No one took any notion of Vansittart .
Other point : if the opposite had occurred = 1 September attack by the Soviets,17 September intervention by Hitler to prevent the Soviets from taking Danzig and West Prussia,would the situation have been different ?
NO ,of course: Drax, Vansittart and Doumenc would go to Berlin . Poland would refuse any German help and Hitler would ask what would be his reward if he intervened .
And the wokes who blamed Stalin and Chamberlain,would now blame Hitler and Chamberlain .
Already in 1938,Churchill was talking ,bombastly as usual,about the Great Alliance (B+ F and the USSR )
and Chamberlain wrote to his sister: ''the Plan of the Grand Alliance,as Winston calls it,is a very attractive idea,till you examine its practicability.From that moment its attraction vanishes .''
Source : Churchill The Greatest Briton unmasked (Nigel Knight ) P 80 Note 15 .
And, was the situation of Poland better in 1939 ? Of course not .
There was nothing Britain and France could do to prevent Hitler from attacking Poland .And there was nothing they could do to prevent Hitler from defeating Poland .

In re Churchill The Greatest Briton unmasked"

"I think it was Carlyle who wrote that “No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.” That pretty much sums up Nigel Knight’s new book on Churchill. If you want to read a book on Churchill that is unreservedly negative on almost all aspects of his career, pick up Clive Ponting’s biography instead. Or even David Irving’s. Really. You’ll thank me for it.

Two-thirds of Knight’s book is devoted to World War II, which the Allies won despite Churchill’s best efforts to give the game away. Chapter 7’s title, “Dunkirk: Churchill’s Defeat,” lets you know where Knight is coming from. The last paragraph in the book tells you where he ends up:

t was Hitler who made Churchill a historical figure. If it had not been for Hitler, Churchill … would be largely forgotten today. It is because of Churchill’s role in World War II…that we remember Churchill, above all else, for Hitler’s defeat. Hitler, however, is remembered for himself.

No, I’m not making this up. That’s the last sentence in the book. What does it mean? You tell me. I can think of several explanations.

First, maybe Nigel just isn’t that good a writer. I almost didn’t make it past the first page after reading this sentence: “In 1895 Churchill endured the deaths of both his father and his childhood nurse, to whom he had been very attached as his American mother, Jennie, had ignored him.”

Of course, Jennie hadn’t ignored him and Churchill certainly wasn’t “very attached” to his father. Perhaps Knight only meant Churchill was attached to his nurse “Woomany,” and not his father as well? The sentence doesn’t say that but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and read on.

A second explanation is that he just doesn’t know that much about Hitler or the Nazis—a flaw which tends to put a Churchill biographer at a disadvantage. I confess that I didn’t make it past Chapter 3, “Disarmament: Weakening Britain’s Defence in the 1920s” before I started skimming. Hey, what’s good enough for Carlyle is good enough for me.

Knight’s thesis is that when Churchill was at the Exchequer in Baldwin’s first government from 1924 to 1929, “Churchill’s desire for disarmament in the 1920s weakened national defences just at the time when the threat from the active Nazi movement in Germany was becoming apparent.”

Give me a break. Apparent to whom? Hitler was in jail during 1924 when Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Nazi Party was banned in Germany as a result of its failed putsch in Munich the year before. Hitler began to rebuild the party in 1925 and was so miserably unsuccessful at it over the next four years that the party received only 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 Reichstag elections good for a paltry twelve seats. By the spring of 1929, the Conservatives and Churchill were out of power. The “threat from the active Nazi movement in Germany” didn’t become apparent to anyone until 14 September 1930 when, thanks to the worldwide depression, the Nazis went from 2.6% and twelve seats to 18.3% and 107 seats, making them the second largest party in Germany."


Yup, another *ahem* authoritive source from ljadw!

Nice try ! to move the goalposts .
You have nothing to counter what Chamberlain wrote to his sister about Churchill and Vansittart ,thus you are talking about something I never said .
What Knight said about Churchill's activities before the war has nothing to do with what Chamberlain said about Vansittart and what Conservatives, Socialists and Liberals said about Churchill before the war .Do you think that Lord Derby ( a man with an enormous power in the Conservative party ) had forgotten Churchill's personal attacks against him ?When Churchill became PM ,Derby's son resigned as minister,saying that he refused to collaborate with some one who had attacked his father's honor .
And about the Drax Mission ( not the Vansittart mission ) : ''The Soviets did not take the delegation seriously because Drax did not have any power to make decisions without the approval of the government,rendering him next to powerless . ''
Source : Wiki :Reginald Drax .

[Gorque]

According to Drax
The PM did not want to have the Soviets on board in case of war,neither did the Poles .Thus :the mission was only propaganda.
Drax was an admiral ,without any competence of land war .
Vansittart had been fired ,was labelled as unstable by Eden and as hostile to HMG's policy .
If Chamberlain wanted to negotiate with the Soviets, he would send Halifax/Cadogan and Gort/Ironside .
Besides :WHY would Chamberlain want to negotiate with the Soviets ? Poland refused,rightly, to negotiate with the Soviets .
And Chamberlain knew very well what the Soviets would demand in exchange for their intervention .

So basically what you are saying is that you have no evidence to counter the fact that Drax was chosen as a member of a military delegation to seek a deal with the Soviets despite my having provided proof to you. Good to know!

[Gorque]

2 The title from Vansittart does not mean that he had any political influence :the title was only hollow words .
Chamberlain knew very well what the opinion was of Vansittart .See his letter to his sister and it was out of the question that the Chief Diplomatic Adviser to his Majesty's Government would play a role .No one took any notion of Vansittart .

And yet he was still in the employ of the British government, receiving diplomatic reports and giving handing out advice; i.e. political influence.

You have examples of Vansittart giving advice and of the government listening to his advice ? For the periods 1938-1939 and 1939-1941 .
Vansittart was hostile to appeasement ( reason : he hated all what was German, something which made him totally unfit for his post ),but appeasement continued til 3 September 1039.

And you seem to think that everyone within the government was aligned with Chamberlain. What a ridiculous outlook on how government functions.

If that is so then why did Chamberlain cave in to the demands of Parliament to send a military delegation to Moscow?

[Gorque]

About Vansittart: on 9 October 1937,Chamberlain wrote in his letter to his sister Hilda that Vansittart was a man whose '' instincts were all against my policy ''
The source is John Charmley :Chamberlain and the Lost Peace P 34 and Note 11 on P 216.
The obvious conclusion is that after he was fired, Vansittart did not represent the views of the British Government and that his newly created position represented nothing .Unless you think that the British PM would use as his representant someone whose instincts were all against the policy of the PM.
There is even no proof that when Eden became again Foreign Secretary, he listened to/asked the opinions of Vansittart .

A nice quote, but how does it disprove the fact that Vansitartt and Drax were entrusted not only with negotiating with the Soviets in the summer of 1939, but also that he held the position of "Chief Diplomatic Adviser to His Majesty's Government"?

1 Vansittart and Drax were not going to Moscow to negotiate with the Soviets,as HMG knew very well that the Soviets could not and would not help .Not to prevent a war.Not to help Poland if there was a war .They could not do it even if they wanted and they would not want to do it even if they could .There were no negotiations between B+ F and the Soviets .
It was all keeping up appearances .
They went to Moscow ,wasting their time, only for political domestic reasons ,which were that Lloyd George ( who hated Chamberlain ) and Churchill demanded in the Commons that the government should send a mission to Moscow to have Russia (= the Red Army ) on its side when war broke out .If there was a possibility that this could happen, Halifax would go to Moscow . But he knew that it was only a wast of time.
2 The title from Vansittart does not mean that he had any political influence :the title was only hollow words .
Chamberlain knew very well what the opinion was of Vansittart .See his letter to his sister and it was out of the question that the Chief Diplomatic Adviser to his Majesty's Government would play a role .No one took any notion of Vansittart .
Other point : if the opposite had occurred = 1 September attack by the Soviets,17 September intervention by Hitler to prevent the Soviets from taking Danzig and West Prussia,would the situation have been different ?
NO ,of course: Drax, Vansittart and Doumenc would go to Berlin . Poland would refuse any German help and Hitler would ask what would be his reward if he intervened .
And the wokes who blamed Stalin and Chamberlain,would now blame Hitler and Chamberlain .
Already in 1938,Churchill was talking ,bombastly as usual,about the Great Alliance (B+ F and the USSR )
and Chamberlain wrote to his sister: ''the Plan of the Grand Alliance,as Winston calls it,is a very attractive idea,till you examine its practicability.From that moment its attraction vanishes .''
Source : Churchill The Greatest Briton unmasked (Nigel Knight ) P 80 Note 15 .
And, was the situation of Poland better in 1939 ? Of course not .
There was nothing Britain and France could do to prevent Hitler from attacking Poland .And there was nothing they could do to prevent Hitler from defeating Poland .

In re Churchill The Greatest Briton unmasked"

"I think it was Carlyle who wrote that “No book that will not improve by repeated readings deserves to be read at all.” That pretty much sums up Nigel Knight’s new book on Churchill. If you want to read a book on Churchill that is unreservedly negative on almost all aspects of his career, pick up Clive Ponting’s biography instead. Or even David Irving’s. Really. You’ll thank me for it.

Two-thirds of Knight’s book is devoted to World War II, which the Allies won despite Churchill’s best efforts to give the game away. Chapter 7’s title, “Dunkirk: Churchill’s Defeat,” lets you know where Knight is coming from. The last paragraph in the book tells you where he ends up:

t was Hitler who made Churchill a historical figure. If it had not been for Hitler, Churchill … would be largely forgotten today. It is because of Churchill’s role in World War II…that we remember Churchill, above all else, for Hitler’s defeat. Hitler, however, is remembered for himself.

No, I’m not making this up. That’s the last sentence in the book. What does it mean? You tell me. I can think of several explanations.

First, maybe Nigel just isn’t that good a writer. I almost didn’t make it past the first page after reading this sentence: “In 1895 Churchill endured the deaths of both his father and his childhood nurse, to whom he had been very attached as his American mother, Jennie, had ignored him.”

Of course, Jennie hadn’t ignored him and Churchill certainly wasn’t “very attached” to his father. Perhaps Knight only meant Churchill was attached to his nurse “Woomany,” and not his father as well? The sentence doesn’t say that but I gave him the benefit of the doubt and read on.

A second explanation is that he just doesn’t know that much about Hitler or the Nazis—a flaw which tends to put a Churchill biographer at a disadvantage. I confess that I didn’t make it past Chapter 3, “Disarmament: Weakening Britain’s Defence in the 1920s” before I started skimming. Hey, what’s good enough for Carlyle is good enough for me.

Knight’s thesis is that when Churchill was at the Exchequer in Baldwin’s first government from 1924 to 1929, “Churchill’s desire for disarmament in the 1920s weakened national defences just at the time when the threat from the active Nazi movement in Germany was becoming apparent.”

Give me a break. Apparent to whom? Hitler was in jail during 1924 when Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Nazi Party was banned in Germany as a result of its failed putsch in Munich the year before. Hitler began to rebuild the party in 1925 and was so miserably unsuccessful at it over the next four years that the party received only 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 Reichstag elections good for a paltry twelve seats. By the spring of 1929, the Conservatives and Churchill were out of power. The “threat from the active Nazi movement in Germany” didn’t become apparent to anyone until 14 September 1930 when, thanks to the worldwide depression, the Nazis went from 2.6% and twelve seats to 18.3% and 107 seats, making them the second largest party in Germany."


Yup, another *ahem* authoritive source from ljadw!

Nice try ! to move the goalposts .
You have nothing to counter what Chamberlain wrote to his sister about Churchill and Vansittart ,thus you are talking about something I never said .
What Knight said about Churchill's activities before the war has nothing to do with what Chamberlain said about Vansittart and what Conservatives, Socialists and Liberals said about Churchill before the war .Do you think that Lord Derby ( a man with an enormous power in the Conservative party ) had forgotten Churchill's personal attacks against him ?When Churchill became PM ,Derby's son resigned as minister,saying that he refused to collaborate with some one who had attacked his father's honor .
And about the Drax Mission ( not the Vansittart mission ) : ''The Soviets did not take the delegation seriously because Drax did not have any power to make decisions without the approval of the government,rendering him next to powerless . ''
Source : Wiki :Reginald Drax .

What's the matter Ludo, don't you like it when I employ the same tactics of discrediting a source like you do?

I especially love this part from Knight's study and the retort.

Knight’s thesis is that when Churchill was at the Exchequer in Baldwin’s first government from 1924 to 1929, “Churchill’s desire for disarmament in the 1920s weakened national defences just at the time when the threat from the active Nazi movement in Germany was becoming apparent.”

Give me a break. Apparent to whom? Hitler was in jail during 1924 when Churchill became Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Nazi Party was banned in Germany as a result of its failed putsch in Munich the year before. Hitler began to rebuild the party in 1925 and was so miserably unsuccessful at it over the next four years that the party received only 2.6% of the vote in the 1928 Reichstag elections good for a paltry twelve seats. By the spring of 1929, the Conservatives and Churchill were out of power. The “threat from the active Nazi movement in Germany” didn’t become apparent to anyone until 14 September 1930 when, thanks to the worldwide depression, the Nazis went from 2.6% and twelve seats to 18.3% and 107 seats, making them the second largest party in Germany."

And yet you still quoted him.

[gebhk]

Meyer : His articles were some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper .
Sulzberger :His work should have been recognized for what it was by his editors and by the Pulitzer judges .
Muggeridge : Duranty was the greatest liar I knew .
And , why did all those liberals to take away Duranty's Pulitzer price ?
And Duranty was not the only in the NYT to deny and defend the communist atrocities,for ideological reasons .

And more blah instead of evidence. And in this case not even sequitur blah since none of that disagrees with my point that your adversaries have given proof positive that the NYT in general and Duranty in particular did not deny the Hlodomor (at least some of the time) while you have, so far, provided none to support your claim that it and he did.

[wm]

What we have here is basically tabloid history with statements like "The Times was a pro-communist US tabloid", "Duranty was the greatest liar."

Professor Mark von Hagen commissioned by the NYT to examine the coverage of Duranty for the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2003 wrote this:

Duranty was neither unique among reporters nor even many scholars of the time in sharing these unbalanced and, ultimately, condescending, views of Russian history and the Soviet people.
Moreover, several foreign correspondents fell under Stalin's spell to a certain extent, as Duranty clearly did, especially if they had been granted the privilege of an interview with the great man.
And, after all, he certainly did turn out to be one of the most important political leaders of the twentieth century.

So if Duranty wasn't any better than the others why he was the greatest liar?
Why was the NYT a pro-communist US tabloid?
Please explain.

[ljadw]

Meyer : His articles were some of the worst reporting to appear in this newspaper .
Sulzberger :His work should have been recognized for what it was by his editors and by the Pulitzer judges .
Muggeridge : Duranty was the greatest liar I knew .
And , why did all those liberals to take away Duranty's Pulitzer price ?
And Duranty was not the only in the NYT to deny and defend the communist atrocities,for ideological reasons .

And more blah instead of evidence. And in this case not even sequitur blah since none of that disagrees with my point that your adversaries have given proof positive that the NYT in general and Duranty in particular did not deny the Hlodomor (at least some of the time) while you have, so far, provided none to support your claim that it and he did.

I have quoted Meyer and Sulzberger and I have cited Duranty himself .

[ljadw]

2 The title from Vansittart does not mean that he had any political influence :the title was only hollow words .
Chamberlain knew very well what the opinion was of Vansittart .See his letter to his sister and it was out of the question that the Chief Diplomatic Adviser to his Majesty's Government would play a role .No one took any notion of Vansittart .

And yet he was still in the employ of the British government, receiving diplomatic reports and giving handing out advice; i.e. political influence.

You have examples of Vansittart giving advice and of the government listening to his advice ? For the periods 1938-1939 and 1939-1941 .
Vansittart was hostile to appeasement ( reason : he hated all what was German, something which made him totally unfit for his post ),but appeasement continued til 3 September 1039.

And you seem to think that everyone within the government was aligned with Chamberlain. What a ridiculous outlook on how government functions.

If that is so then why did Chamberlain cave in to the demands of Parliament to send a military delegation to Moscow?

This proves that you have no idea of how functions British Government .If you disagree with the PM ,he fires you or you must resign .
And I sea that you don't know the difference between the Government and the Commons .
And, no member of the Cabinet resigned between Munich and 3 September 1939,except Duff Cooper,who was not important . .
And :Chamberlain did not cave in to the demands of Parliament, but to the demands of the woke media and public opinion .The Commons were more than Lloyd George and Churchill .
LG hated Chamberlain,had no followers and his demand for a military mission had as only reason to make things difficult for the PM .
For Churchill,who hoped for war, the intention was to become a cabinet minister again .
Both had lost all support in the Commons : LG would never become PM again and Churchill became PM (against the will of the Tories ) because Halifax refused and because there was no one else .

[henryk]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Du ... 933_famine
excerpts

Walter Duranty (25 May 1884 – 3 October 1957) was an Anglo-American journalist who served as Moscow bureau chief of The New York Times for fourteen years (1922–1936) following the Bolshevik victory in the Russian Civil War (1918–1921). He was a mouthpiece for the Stalinist regime within the US through the influential platform that New York Times provided to him and covered up the atrocities of the Stalin's regime such as the starvation of the Ukraine people which led to the death of 6-7 mil Ukrainians.[citation needed]

In 1932, Duranty received a Pulitzer Prize for a series of reports about the Soviet Union, eleven of which were published in June 1931. He was later criticised for his subsequent denial of the widespread famine (1932–1933) in the USSR,[1] most particularly the famine in Ukraine. Beginning in 1990, there were calls for the Pulitzer board to revoke Duranty's prize. The Pulitzer Board declined to revoke the award and in 2003 said the articles which it examined in making the award did not contain "clear and convincing evidence of deliberate deception".[2]
............................................
Views on the Soviet Union
In the 1931 series of reports for which he received the 1932 Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence, Duranty argued that the Russian people were "Asiatic" in thought, valuing communal effort and requiring autocratic government. He claimed that they viewed individuality and private enterprise as alien concepts that led to social disruption and were just as unacceptable to them as tyranny and Communism were unacceptable to the Western world.

Failed attempts since the time of Peter the Great to apply Western ideals in Russia were a form of European colonialism, he wrote, that had been finally swept away by the 1917 Revolution. Vladimir Lenin and his New Economic Policy were both failures tainted by Western thought. Duranty believed that Stalin scrapped the New Economic Policy because he had no political competition. The famine in Ukraine demonstrated the lack of organized opposition to Stalin, because his position was never truly threatened by the catastrophe. Stalin succeeded where Lenin had failed: he "re-established a dictator of the imperial idea and put himself in charge" by means of intimidation. "Stalin didn't look upon himself as a dictator, but as a 'guardian of a sacred flame' that he called Stalinism for lack of a better name."[7] Stalin's five-year plan was an attempt to effect a new way of life for the Russian people.[citation needed]

Duranty argued that the Soviet Union's mentality in 1931 greatly differed from the perception created by the ideas of Karl Marx;[8][vague] he viewed Stalinism as an integration of Marxism with Leninism. In one of his articles submitted for the Pulitzer Prize, Duranty opines[how?] on the Soviet actions that led to the famine.[9]

Duranty sometimes claimed that individuals being sent to the labor camps in the Russian North, Siberia, or Kazakhstan were given a choice between rejoining Soviet society or becoming underprivileged outsiders. However, he admitted that for those who could not accept the system, "the final fate of such enemies is death". Though describing the system as cruel, he stated that he had "no brief for or against it, nor any purpose save to try to tell the truth". He argued that the brutal collectivization campaign was motivated by the "hope or promise of a subsequent raising up" of Asian-minded masses in the Soviet Union that only history would be able to judge.[citation needed]

Duranty both admitted the brutality of the Stalinist system and defended the necessity of it. He repeated Soviet views as his own opinion, as if his 'observations' from Moscow had given him deeper insights into the country as a whole.

Duranty's motivations have been hotly debated and his reporting is faulted for being too uncritical of the USSR, presenting Soviet propaganda as legitimate reporting.[10]

In his praise of Joseph Stalin as an imperial, national, "authentically Russian" dictator to be compared to Ivan the Terrible, Duranty was expressing views similar to those of some White (Russian) émigrés during the same period,[11] namely the Smenovekhovtsy movement, echoing still earlier hopes by the Eurasianism movement and the Mladorossi group currents in the 1920s. (Of course, Stalin was not Russian, but Georgian, with distant Ossetian ancestry – his paternal great-grandfather was an Ossetian[12]—a fact that he himself downplayed during his lifetime.)

In 1933, Stalin rewarded this praise and appreciation by saying that Duranty tried "to tell the truth about our country".[13]

Reporting the 1932–1933 famine
In The New York Times on 31 March 1933, Walter Duranty denounced reports of a famine and, in particular, he attacked Gareth Jones, a British journalist who had witnessed the starving in Ukraine and issued a widely published press release about their plight two days earlier in Berlin. (Jones' release was itself immediately preceded by three unsigned articles by Malcolm Muggeridge describing the famine in the Manchester Guardian.)[14]

Under the title "Russians Hungry, But Not Starving" Duranty's article described the situation as follows:

In the middle of the diplomatic duel between Great Britain and the Soviet Union over the accused British engineers, there appears from a British source a big scare story in the American press about famine in the Soviet Union, with "thousands already dead and millions menaced by death from starvation".

The "diplomatic duel" was a reference to the arrest of engineers from the Metropolitan-Vickers company who were working in the USSR. Accused with Soviet citizens of "wrecking" (sabotaging) the plant they were building, they were the subjects of one in a series of show trials presided over by Andrey Vyshinsky[15] during the First Five Year Plan.

Five months later (23 August 1933), in another New York Times article, Duranty wrote:

Any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda. The food shortage, however, which has affected the whole population in the last year and particularly in the grain-producing provinces – the Ukraine, North Caucasus [i.e. Kuban Region], and the Lower Volga – has, however, caused heavy loss of life.

Duranty concluded "it is conservative to suppose" that, in certain provinces with a total population of over 40 million, mortality had "at least trebled."[16] The duel in the press over the famine stories did not damage esteem for Duranty. The Nation then described his reporting as "the most enlightened, dispassionate dispatches from a great nation in the making which appeared in any newspaper in the world."[17]

Following sensitive negotiations in November 1933 that resulted in the establishment of relations between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R., a dinner was given for Soviet Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov in New York City's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Each of the attendees' names was read in turn, politely applauded by the guests, until Duranty's. Whereupon, Alexander Woollcott wrote, "the one really prolonged pandemonium was evoked ... Indeed, one quite got the impression that America, in a spasm of discernment, was recognizing both Russia and Walter Duranty."[17]

Sally J. Taylor, author of the critical Duranty biography Stalin's Apologist, argues that his reporting from the USSR was a key factor in U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt's 1933 decision to grant official recognition to the Soviet Union.[6]
.............................................................
Scholarship on Duranty's work
Duranty was reporting at a time when opinions were strongly divided on the Soviet Union and its leadership.

The admission of the USSR to the League of Nations in 1934 was viewed optimistically by some. Others saw an inevitable confrontation between fascism and communism as requiring individuals to take one side or the other. After German invasion of the USSR, Joseph E. Davies, former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1936–1938), wrote positively about "Russia and its people in their gallant struggle to preserve the peace until ruthless aggression made war inevitable". In the same book he referred to Stalin as a "decent and clean-living" man and "a great leader."[19]

Many reporters of Duranty's time slanted their coverage in favour of the Soviet Union. Some drew a contrast with the capitalist world, sinking under the weight of the Great Depression; others wrote out of a true belief in Communism; some acted out of fear of being expelled from Moscow, which would result in a loss of livelihood. At home many of their editors found it hard to believe a state would deliberately starve millions of its own people. reports for The New York Times were a source of much frustration for the paper's readers in 1932, because they directly contradicted the line taken on the paper's own editorial page.[13]

The Ukrainian Famine (1932–1933) and the 1938 Moscow Show Trials
has been criticized for deferring to Stalin and the Soviet Union's official propaganda rather than reporting news, both when he was living in Moscow and later. For example, he later defended Stalin's Moscow Trials of 1938, which were staged to eliminate potential challengers to Stalin's authority.[20]

The major controversy regarding his work remains his reporting on the great famine of 1932–33 that struck certain parts of the USSR after agriculture was forcibly and rapidly "collectivised". He published reports stating "there is no famine or actual starvation nor is there likely to be" and "any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda".[21] In Ukraine, the region most affected, this man-made disaster is today known as the Holodomor.

Since the late 1960s, Duranty's work has come increasingly under fire for failing to report the famine. Robert Conquest was critical of Duranty's reporting in The Great Terror (1968), The Harvest of Sorrow (1986) and, most recently, in Reflections on a Ravaged Century (1990). Joseph Alsop and Andrew Stuttaford spoke out against Duranty during the Pulitzer Prize controversy.[22] "Lying was Duranty's stock in trade," commented Alsop. In his memoirs British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, then The Manchester Guardian's correspondent in Moscow, talked of Duranty's "persistent lying"[23] and elsewhere called him "the greatest liar I ever knew".[24]

What Duranty knew and when
It was clear, meanwhile, from Duranty's comments to others that he was fully aware of the scale of the calamity. In 1934, he privately reported to the British embassy in Moscow that as many as 10 million people might have died, directly or indirectly, from famine in the Soviet Union in the previous year.[25]

Both British intelligence[26] and American engineer Zara Witkin (1900–1940),[27] who worked in the USSR from 1932 to 1934,[28] confirmed that Duranty knowingly misrepresented information about the nature and scale of the famine.

There are some indications that Duranty's deliberate misdirection concerning the famine was the result of duress. Conquest believed Duranty was being blackmailed over his sexual proclivities.[29]

In his 1944 book, Duranty wrote in a chastened tone about his 1932–34 reporting, but he offered only a Stalinist defense of it.[30] He admits that people starved, including not just "class enemies" but also loyal communists,[30] but he says that Stalin was forced to order the requisitions to equip the Red Army enough to deter an imminent Japanese invasion[30] (a reprise of the Siberian Intervention of a decade earlier)—in other words, to save the Soviet Union from impending military doom, not because Stalin wanted to collectivize the population at gunpoint, on pain of death.[30] Although it is likely that Stalin did expect a Japanese invasion (expecting foreign attacks all the time), most historians today do not accept the view that it was his sole motivation.
10. Steinberg, Jacques (October 23, 2003). "Times Should Lose Pulitzer From 30's, Consultant Says". The New York Times. Retrieved September 30, 2016.
16. Assignment in Utopia By Eugene Lyons.
17. Conquest, R. Reflections on a Ravaged Century, Oxford University Press, New York. 1986, p. 320.
20. Robert Conquest, The Great Terror, 1968, p. //.
21. Pulitzer-Winning Lies the Weekly Standard
22. Stuttaford, Andrew (7 May 2003). "Prize Specimen – The campaign to revoke Walter Duranty's Pulitzer". National Review. Archived from the original on 19 May 2003.
23. Malcolm Muggeridge, Chronicles of Wasted Time: Vol 1 The Green Stick, London: Fontana (pbk), 1975, pp. 282–285.
25. "Fellow travelers and useful idiots", The New Statesman, 8 May 2017.
26. The Foreign Office and the famine: British documents on Ukraine and the Great Famine of 1932–1933 (Studies in East European nationalisms).
"Duranty ... manipulated the official palaver so successfully that it was possible to interpret his article in several ways", p. xxx.
27. Ingraham, Joyce (November 23, 2004). "Zara Witkin". Findagrave.com. Retrieved September 1, 2013.

[Gorque]

2 The title from Vansittart does not mean that he had any political influence :the title was only hollow words .
Chamberlain knew very well what the opinion was of Vansittart .See his letter to his sister and it was out of the question that the Chief Diplomatic Adviser to his Majesty's Government would play a role .No one took any notion of Vansittart .

And yet he was still in the employ of the British government, receiving diplomatic reports and giving handing out advice; i.e. political influence.

You have examples of Vansittart giving advice and of the government listening to his advice ? For the periods 1938-1939 and 1939-1941 .
Vansittart was hostile to appeasement ( reason : he hated all what was German, something which made him totally unfit for his post ),but appeasement continued til 3 September 1039.

And you seem to think that everyone within the government was aligned with Chamberlain. What a ridiculous outlook on how government functions.

If that is so then why did Chamberlain cave in to the demands of Parliament to send a military delegation to Moscow?

This proves that you have no idea of how functions British Government .If you disagree with the PM ,he fires you or you must resign .
And I sea that you don't know the difference between the Government and the Commons .
And, no member of the Cabinet resigned between Munich and 3 September 1939,except Duff Cooper,who was not important . .
And :Chamberlain did not cave in to the demands of Parliament, but to the demands of the woke media and public opinion .The Commons were more than Lloyd George and Churchill .
LG hated Chamberlain,had no followers and his demand for a military mission had as only reason to make things difficult for the PM .
For Churchill,who hoped for war, the intention was to become a cabinet minister again .
Both had lost all support in the Commons : LG would never become PM again and Churchill became PM (against the will of the Tories ) because Halifax refused and because there was no one else .

More useless and uninformed information from ljadw, again. The same poster who thinks that in order to be able to run for an MP seat, one needs the approval of the PM.

As I said before, Ludo has 2 opinions: 1.) Ludo is always right and 2 .) The rest of us are idiots.

[ljadw]

Where did I say that in order to be able to run for an MP seat,one needs the approval of the PM ?
I said that the PM can block a sitting MP from being candidate again for his own party in the same constituency .
And this is totally different from what you claim .
Stop with spreading misinformation .

[ljadw]

What we have here is basically tabloid history with statements like "The Times was a pro-communist US tabloid", "Duranty was the greatest liar."

Professor Mark von Hagen commissioned by the NYT to examine the coverage of Duranty for the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2003 wrote this:

Duranty was neither unique among reporters nor even many scholars of the time in sharing these unbalanced and, ultimately, condescending, views of Russian history and the Soviet people.
Moreover, several foreign correspondents fell under Stalin's spell to a certain extent, as Duranty clearly did, especially if they had been granted the privilege of an interview with the great man.
And, after all, he certainly did turn out to be one of the most important political leaders of the twentieth century.

So if Duranty wasn't any better than the others why he was the greatest liar?
Why was the NYT a pro-communist US tabloid?
Please explain.

1 Ask Muggeridge (but he is dead )
2 The editors of the NYT are responsible for everything the journal is presenting : they knew that Duranty lied and did nothing,they hided everything til finally the truth became known .
They are as much responsible as Duranty .
3 The editors of the NYT also hided the Holocaust and Stalin's show trials for their readers .
4 That other journalists ( Lyons, Fischer, Chamberlin )did the same as Duranty does not decrease the responsibility of Duranty

[gebhk]

Hi Ijadw.

With respect, you did not say

that the PM can block a sitting MP from being candidate again for his own party in the same constituency

Which, incidentally, is also untrue as Terry Duncan explained in Post 421. What you did say is:

Downing Street 10 (= the PM ) can prevent sitting MPs from being again candidate ,

Which is completely untrue.

I have quoted Meyer and Sulzberger

Their opinions of Duranty are not evidence - they are just that: opinions. And absolutely zero to do with the subject they were supposed to be in response to, but that is by the by.

I have cited Duranty himself

If so I apologise - can you direct me to the article by Duranty you have quoted which I have obviously missed?

Ijadw and Henryk
If the NYT in general and Duranty in particular were such wholesale deniers of the Hlodomor and the Soviet famine as you say, it should be easy to support your argument with actual evidence in the form of articles from these sources. Yet, so far you seem to have provided reams of other peoples opinion and hearsay (what I am, perhaps overly puckishly, describing as 'blah') instead. To the un-invested bystander like myself, when reams of blah are cited in support of an argument when actual and convincing evidence should be easy to find, suggests a smokescreen is being put up to cover the fact that the argument is either deeply flawed or baseless. Your adversaries have provided a bunch of primary evidence that Duranty and the NYT did the opposite of what you say ie they did in fact report the Soviet famine. Therefore, so far, your adversaries are winning this debate hands down and have managed to prove beyond resonable doubt, that Duranty and the NYT were NOT denying the Soviet famine - at least some of the time.

So have at it - no more blah, let's have the actual articles that support your argument.

[wm]

I suppose many aren't aware that the ideas that Duranty was evil, the NYT was/is even eviler, that they were all commies, are straight from today's right-wing strongholds (including Breitbart, PJ Media, Instapundit) where history is mass politized for the needs of the war on the liberals.
So it's not mere tabloid history but the finest, today's political propaganda too.

But anyway, see this, post-famine article and please try to argue again that Duranty or the NYT denied the Holodomor.

famine.jpg

[wm]

ukraine.png

It's evident that during the first period of the famine, Duranty wasn't aware of it and wrote about severe food shortages but not famine.
But in totalitarian and paranoid Stalinist Russia, reliable news sources didn't exist, weren't possible.
Even Solzhenitsyn writes in his "Gulag Archipelago" that he and his friends didn't even notice the famine.

Duranty was a fanboy of socialism (as so many then and today), and it showed. He wanted socialism to succeed and deliver all its benefits to the people.
That socialism means failure wasn't apparent at that time at all.
But he wasn't a bad as people who literally had the blood of innocent people on their hands like Bernard Show or ambassador William Bullitt (who gave a party to Soviet leaders in circumstances that fitted Caligula or Nero).

But the NYT did its work and published news from other sources and dissenting voices too - and without any delay.