Dr. James Mace: message addressing current realities

Leafing through Western periodicals these days, one is reminded of Dr. James Mace’s article entitled “The Tale of Two Journalists” (June 2003) about how the media in the West covered the Holodomor events in Ukraine and highlighted the Kremlin’s Western mouthpiece, Walter Duranty. The man denied the very existence of the Kremlin-engineered famine, let alone other Bolshevik crimes against humanity. Also, Gareth Jones, the journalist who spoke the truth and was then persecuted by Uncle Joe’s Kremlin-paid buddies in the West and by all those useful idiots who sincerely believed that in the Soviet Union all of the most cherished dreams of humankind come true.

Dr. Mace wrote: “By the early spring of 1933, the fact that famine was raging in Ukraine and the Kuban, two-thirds of the population of which happened to be Ukrainian, was common knowledge in Moscow among foreign diplomats, foreign correspondents, and even the man in the street. In response to Lyons’s ‘revelations’ from the regional official Soviet press, a ban had been imposed on foreign journalists [sic] traveling to the areas in question. Upon checking with his colleagues in Moscow what they knew – on the understanding, of course, that their names would never be mentioned – Jones decided it was worth it to defy the prohibition and buy a ticket at the train station to the places affected as a private person, which was not forbidden. Once there, he employed his simple but logical method of getting off the train and walking for several hours until he was certain he was off the beaten track and start talking to the local. He spent a couple of weeks, walked about forty miles, talked to people, slept in their huts, and was appalled at what he saw. Rushing back to Moscow and out of the Soviet Union, Jones stopped off first in Berlin, where he gave a press conference and fired off a score of articles about the tragedy he had seen firsthand. ‘I walked alone through villages and twelve collective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread; we are dying…’”

The British journalist was risking his life, but he knew he had to take the risk. He wasn’t alone, but there was Stalin’s propaganda machine going full blast. Moscow had the screws to tighten on the accredited Western journalists. They were forced to refute the truthful publications about the Holodomor. Dr. Mace sums up: “Poor Gareth Jones must have been the most surprised human being alive when the facts he so painstakingly garnered from our mouths were snowed under by denials…”

Dr. Mace’s article reaches far beyond that tale of two Western journalists. The author describes the Kremlin’s politics and the situation in Ukraine. He names about a dozen media people from the UK and US. He quotes them, demonstrating the whole range of Western media views on the situation, exposing their half-truths and fearful silence – when they kept the truth seen firsthand away from the public eye.

Does this not remind one of what is happening in Ukraine, with the Kremlin waging this proxy war against our nation? What about some Western media people and their approaches? Have they changed much since June 2003? Isn’t Moscow trying to use the same kind of leverage over the accredited media people? Aren’t some of the Western media publishing and broadcasting packs of lies about Ukraine and its people?

Putin knows he won’t be able to implement his lunatic plan of turning Russia into one of the world centers of power without subjugating Ukraine. Back in the 1930s, Joseph Stalin referred to Ukraine as one of the weakest links in the Soviet Union’s chain of command. He used the Holodomor genocidal famine, mass repressions, and banned the Ukrainization policy in Ukraine, all this being part of his “liberation” Drang nach Osten, Westen, und Sueden campaign plan. A resolution issued by the Comintern read that the Red Army was the main weapon of the working class, so it had to be trained to carry out an offensive anywhere on the front, and that the boundary lines of that front were to be shortly determined as those of the Old World mainland.

Photo by Ruslan KANIUKA, The Day

Stalin badly needed Ukraine’s huge natural resources, subservient manpower, cannon food clad in grey trench coats. Without that he would have never shaken hands with Adolf Hitler in 1939 (an appropriate agreement was signed after more than a month since the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, on September 28), destroyed the strong defenses on the Western frontier and ordered the armed forces to concentrate on offensive training. Then came June 22, 1941 [when Nazi Germany invaded Soviet Russia]. Historians and analysts are still divided on the assumption that the Nazis would not have come to power in Germany without the Holodomor in Ukraine. Dr. Goebbels had his field day exposing hard facts that testified to the Bolshevik misanthropic policy in Ukraine, so much so the local communists had nothing to say to the contrary.

As it was, Walter Duranty and other like-minded Western media people, scholars, even politicians acted in a way that both helped the Ukraine genocide and made it easier for the two totalitarian dictators to arrange for the Second World War that would be aimed against the Western democracy. Stalin and Hitler hated democracy and believed it was their number-one enemy. There was the Holocaust. It was part and parcel of the preparations for, and the waging of, the Second World War, from 1939 until 1945. During all that time the Kremlin ruler kept turning a blind eye to the Nazis acting out their genocide against the Jews. Therefore, Duranty, who, in his own words, “bet on Stalin,” should have been stripped of his Pulitzer Prize for this as well...

Duranty, a mouthpiece of totalitarianism, kept his award and his case remains to be solved in the West. Fortunately, this is among the minor political issues these days. There are quite a few journalists who are following in Gareth Jones’s footsteps, speaking and writing the truth about Ukraine and Russia, about Putin’s dictatorship and Russia’s officers and men committing crimes against humanity in Ukraine, saying all this adds up to Putin’s idee fixe: subjugation of Ukraine.