Something Thoughtful

Nicholas Reid reflects in essay form on general matters and ideas related to literature, history, popular culture and the arts, or just life in general. You are free to agree or disagree with him.       

                                        EVEN LIARS CAN TELL THE TRUTH 

 

[Above is a photograph of Gareth Jones, a man who told the truth.]

 

Would you trust a sensational story if you saw it only on America’s Fox News? Would you trust a sensational story if you read it only in the English Sun? In both cases, the answer is likely to be that you would trust neither source. After all, both platforms have a reputation for bias, exaggeration and crude populist sensationalism. Not to mention promulgating conspiracy theories.

Once part of the media is seen to be delinquent or not maintaining high standards of journalism, it can easily be either ignored or denounced by those who regard themselves as well-informed. But there’s a big problem here. When a journalistic outlet is condemned in this way, even the truthful stories it tells will be denied or denigrated, especially by those who have an interest in suppressing the truth. Call it a mixture of “crying wolf” and “giving a dog a bad name”. For historians, it can be a cause of great embarrassment when, years after the event, it turns out that a despised and tainted source was actually telling the truth.

Here are two extreme, but relevant, examples.

In 1933, the freelance Welsh journalist Gareth Jones decided to take another trip to the Soviet Union, which he had already inspected with an observant eye in earlier visits. In Moscow he heard rumours of a great famine going on in the Ukraine and other parts of the USSR. These rumours were vigorously denied by official Soviet sources. They were also denied by such ace Moscow-based American journalists as the New York Times’ Walter Duranty and Eugene Lyons. At that time, in the depths of the Depression, there were, in the West, still many on the left who took a rosy view of Stalin’s state and thought it was a plausible alternative to capitalism. Despite the denials, Gareth Jones went to the Ukraine and there was indeed a massive famine in process – a deliberately man-made famine, the result of Stalin’s policy of forcing peasants into collective farms, forcibly withdrawing grain from rural areas, taking it all to feed the urban proletariat, and forbidding peasants to have private plots where they could at least subsist on home-grown crops. This engineered famine is known to the Ukrainians as the “Holodomir” and nobody now denies that it carried away millions of lives.

Gareth Jones went back to Britain and was able to get his reportage published in both the Times and even the left-leaning Manchester Guardian (now called just the Guardian).

But the New York Times said that the famine wasn’t happening because Walter Duranty, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his “reportage”, said so. (To his credit, Eugene Lyons much later admitted he was wrong, supported Gareth Jones’ version of events, and moved politically away from the left.) Gareth Jones was able to have a rebuttal of Duranty’s articles printed in the New York Times, but the newspaper still clung to Duranty’s dishonest version.

So where could Jones go to get his factual story known in the USA? He turned to the newspapers of William Randolph Hearst. By the early 1930s, the Hearst newspapers were beginning to be known as America’s crank press. Not only were they populist, but Hearst himself showed admiration for extreme right-wing movements. He allowed Mussolini to have a regular column in one of his newspapers and sometimes expressed admiration for the achievements of Hitler (remember, this was in the very early days of Nazi government).

So here’s Hearst’s “crank” press supporting Gareth Jones’ story, and here’s the New York Times denying it. Which are you going to believe – the much-touted “newspaper of record” or the millionaire’s sensationalist populist press?

I hope you get my point. In this case, it was the less-reliable news outlet that was telling the truth… but those with a vested interest (the NYT’s staff; Soviet diplomats) could deny the truth by saying it appeared in an unreliable source. Who’s going to believe Hearst? Who’s going to believe Fox News or the Sun?

I’ll be brisker about the second example because it is better known. In 1943, by which time Nazi Germany was at war with its erstwhile ally the Soviet Union, Nazi Minister of Propaganda Josef Goebbels made it known to the world that German troops had uncovered mass graves at Katyn Wood, in the region that had previously been controlled by the Communists. There lay tens of thousands of bodies of Polish army officers and intellectuals, doctors, engineers, scientists and academics, essentially the intellectual elite of Poland. Goebbels said they had been massacred by the Russians. Of course the Soviet Union denied this and of course the western Allies didn’t want to hear about it. Goebbels was clearly trying to drive a wedge between Russia and its allies in the west. Besides, when did Goebbels and the Nazis ever care about the fate of Poles or other Slavic peoples? They massacred many Poles themselves in the war years. A hastily concocted counter-narrative claimed that the huge massacre had been executed by the Nazis. Indeed (though it is now often forgotten) the Katyn Wood massacre was included in the original indictments against the Nazis presented at the Nuremberg Trials, though the case itself was never discussed. For years after the war, the evidence against the Soviet regime grew and grew. But in those years many subterfuges were invented by Poland’s Communist government to distract attention from this major crime. It was only in 1989, and after Soviet responsibility for the massacre was known in the West that, with the Soviet Union was falling apart, Mikhail Gorbachev at last declared that the Katyn Wood massacre had been carried out by the Soviet Union in 1940. The aim had been to destroy any credible Polish leadership that could hinder the building of a Communist state.

I think I am one of the few New Zealanders who – in a period of research some years ago – has read through every issue of the People’s Voice, the now defunct newspaper of New Zealand’s sad little Communist Party. It was grimly funny to see, through the 1950s and 1960s, the desperation with which the People’s Voice clung to the false version of the Katyn Wood massacre which the USSR was still promulgating, even as evidence of the true story was becoming more irrefutable.

So here we have the same story. Which person in his or her right mind would believe a story trumpeted to the world by the Nazi Minister of Propaganda? Goebbels was a skilled master at promoting lies, and in the situation of a major war it was clear that he was attempting to alienate the Soviet Union from its allies. The story he gave of Katyn Wood couldn’t possibly be true. Except that it was. Once again, an unreliable source had, in this one instance, been telling the truth.

All this is naturally a great problem for historians. In the real study of history, sources are of prime importance. Of course Gareth Jones’ reportage on its own shouldn’t be taken as the truth until it is verified by other reliable sources. Of course the broadcasts of a totalitarian dictator’s minister should not be taken at face value. They have to be scrutinised closely against other evidence. But the hard fact is that, just occasionally, what is thought of as a tainted source turns out to be right.

You never know. It may be that in 50 or so years, historians will have to explain that the most important story of the age was ignored because it was reported only on Fox News. Or in the Sun.

Footnote: A fictionalised film about Gareth Jones and his expose of the Stalinist-engineered famine, called Mr Jones, was made by Agnieska Holland in 2019. Though not entirely sticking to the facts (what dramatised historical film does?) it still gives a sound overall reading of the case. I saw it recently on Netflix, but I am not sure that it is still posted there.