A Blanket of Silence

Andrew B. Wilson September 14, 2018

ll I know,” the British socialist Beatrice Webb confided in her diary in 1932 as she and her husband Sidney were writing a laudatory two-volume history of the Soviet Union, “is that I wish Russian communism to succeed.” The playwright George Bernard Shaw — a close friend of the Webbs, a fellow socialist, and a great admirer of the communist dictator Josef Stalin — claimed after a nine-day visit to Russia, “There was not, and could not be, a food shortage in the USSR.” Walter Duranty, the New York Times Moscow bureau chief from 1922 to 1936, took that falsehood and raised it to a still more preposterous height, assuring American readers that Soviet granaries “were overflowing with grain” and that the cows were “plump and contented.”

Unemployment in the United States reached a peak of 25 percent in the United States in 1933. As terrible as that was, there was human suffering on a far greater scale at this same time inside the Soviet Union: Famine wiped out scores of villages and caused millions of people to starve to death. This was a purely man-made famine — caused by the forced collectivization of agriculture, or the stamping out of an independent peasantry allowed to sell any part of their product in an open market.............Too bad that the hope that this plan inspired in so many intellectuals turned out to be false while the evil turned out to be all too real and long-lasting. Be that as it may, over the last 100 years, socialism has never lacked apologists among the intellectual and media elite.........To Read More......