"Describing the Communist plan to “liquidate” the five million kulaks, relatively well-off farmers opposed to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, Duranty wrote in 1931, for example: “Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not – they must be ‘liquidated’ or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass.”
Taking Soviet propaganda at face value this way was completely misleading, as talking with ordinary Russians might have revealed even at the time. Duranty’s prize-winning articles quoted not a single one – only Stalin, who forced farmers all over the Soviet Union into collective farms and sent those who resisted to concentration camps. Collectivization was the main cause of a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine, the Soviet breadbasket, in 1932 and 1933 – two years after Duranty won his prize.
Even then, Duranty dismissed more diligent writers’ reports that people were starving. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the “mess” of collectivization. “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”"
And the important point is that collectivism always fails. Xi is about to rediscover that point. While the west has created certain "socialist" items in the main we have preferred self-reliance. Sadly we are eroding that preference in our teaching giving up some of that freedom for a dependence on government. To my mind that trend leads to fewer innovations necessary to social improvement. Those innovations via creativity have reduced poverty and improved living standards over the globe. Tragic to think that era might be ending.
Mao's China...Hitler's Germany...Stalin's Soviet Union. Same stuff. Different decades. "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," you know.
New York Times Statement About 1932 Pulitzer Prize Awarded to Walter Duranty
https://www.nytco.com/company/prizes-awards/new-york-times-statement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/
"Describing the Communist plan to “liquidate” the five million kulaks, relatively well-off farmers opposed to the Soviet collectivization of agriculture, Duranty wrote in 1931, for example: “Must all of them and their families be physically abolished? Of course not – they must be ‘liquidated’ or melted in the hot fire of exile and labor into the proletarian mass.”
Taking Soviet propaganda at face value this way was completely misleading, as talking with ordinary Russians might have revealed even at the time. Duranty’s prize-winning articles quoted not a single one – only Stalin, who forced farmers all over the Soviet Union into collective farms and sent those who resisted to concentration camps. Collectivization was the main cause of a famine that killed millions of people in Ukraine, the Soviet breadbasket, in 1932 and 1933 – two years after Duranty won his prize.
Even then, Duranty dismissed more diligent writers’ reports that people were starving. “Conditions are bad, but there is no famine,” he wrote in a dispatch from Moscow in March of 1933 describing the “mess” of collectivization. “But – to put it brutally – you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”"
And the important point is that collectivism always fails. Xi is about to rediscover that point. While the west has created certain "socialist" items in the main we have preferred self-reliance. Sadly we are eroding that preference in our teaching giving up some of that freedom for a dependence on government. To my mind that trend leads to fewer innovations necessary to social improvement. Those innovations via creativity have reduced poverty and improved living standards over the globe. Tragic to think that era might be ending.