The Editor:

Re: The debate in the Globe and Mail's Letters page over its editorial stand on Walter Duranty's New York Times 1932 Pulitzer Prize.

Scholars of the Nazi Holocaust often group the actors into three categories: perpetrators, bystanders and victims. Of late, a fourth category has been added to the mix: the enabler, the extra who served as a cog in the Nazi murder-machine. [1] That is what Walter Duranty did to The New York Times with his cover-up the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine: implicated it in the Soviet murder-machine.

When American Congressman Herman Kopelmann inquired into the matter, for example, the Soviet Commissar of Foreign affairs, Maxim Litvinov, was able to then refer to Duranty's "authoritative" reports in The Times to continue the cover-up; this even as a [September 30, 1933] British Embassy dispatch quoted Duranty suggesting a death toll resulting from the man-made famine could be as high as 10 million.

Had a Times reporter been awarded the Pulitzer Prize for articles that whitewashed the Nazis and hid the Nazi Holocaust, would the issue have been left to fester for 70 years? Of course not! The Globe and Mail, for one, would have long ago editorialized that the prize should be revoked, and insisted The Times show every sign of contrition to bring closure to the process.

Why does a lesser standard now apply because the millions of victims were Ukrainians?

Sincerely yours,

Orest Slepokura
Strathmore AB
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1. "Cogs in the murder-machine," Bernie Farber, The Calgary Sun, April 29, 2001, p. 8.

Farber: "There were no unimportant cogs within the murder machine that the Nazis constructed to liquidate European Jewry."