Download or read book Stalin s Apologist written by S. J. Taylor and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short, unattractive, hobbling about Stalin's Moscow on a wooden leg, Walter Duranty was an unlikely candidate for the world's most famous foreign correspondent. Yet for almost twenty years his articles filled the front page of The New York Times with gripping coverage of the aftermath of the Russian Revolution. A witty, engaging, impish character with a flamboyant life-style, he was a Pulitzer Prize winner, the individual most credited with helping to win the U.S. recognition for the Soviet regime, and the reporter who had predicted the success of the Bolshevik state when all others claimed it was doomed. But, as S.J. Taylor reveals in this provocative biography, Walter Duranty played a key role in perpetrating some of the greatest lies history has ever known. Stalin's Apologist deftly unfolds the story of this accomplished but sordid and tragic life. Drawing on sources ranging from newspapers to private letters and journals to interviews with such figures as William Shirer and W. Averell Harriman, Taylor's vivid narrative unveils a figure driven by ambition, whose early success reporting on Bolshevik Russia--he was foremost in predicting Stalin's rise to power--established his international reputation, fed his overconfident contempt for his colleagues, and indeed led him to identify with the Soviet dictator. Thus during the great Ukrainian famine of the early 1930s, which Stalin engineered to crush millions of peasants who resisted his policies, Duranty dismissed other correspondents' reports of mass starvation and, though secretly aware of the full scale of the horror, effectively reinforced the official cover-up of one of history's greatest man-made disasters. Later, he took the rigged show trials of Stalin's Great Purges at face value, blithely accepting the guilt of the victims. He believed himself the leading expert on the Soviet Union, and his faith in his own insight drew him into a downward spiral of distortions and untruths, typified by his memorable excuse for Stalin's crimes, "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs." Taylor brilliantly captures the full range of Duranty's astonishing life, from his participation in the Satanic orgies of Aleister ("the Beast") Crowley, to his dramatic front-line reporting during World War I, to his epic womanizing and heavy drug and alcohol abuse. It is the bitter, ironic story of a man who had the rare opportunity to bring to light the suffering of the millions of Stalin's victims, but remained a prisoner of vanity, self-indulgence, and success.
Download or read book Witnessing Stalin s Justice written by Kelly J. Evans and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2023-08-10 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Witnessing Stalin's Justice brings together contemporary American reactions to the Moscow show trials and analyses them to understand their impact on US-Soviet relations. Held between 1936 and 1938, the show trials made false charges such as espionage, sabotage and counter-revolutionary plotting at the behest of the exiled Leon Trotsky to condemn the veteran Party leaders who had founded the Communist Party and led the Russian Revolution. Using eyewitness accounts by American diplomats and foreign correspondents for the American press as well as official US government sources, this book highlights the wildly different reactions seen from liberals, radicals, intellectuals and mainstream media. Evans and Welch show how fractures of opinion ran through every level of US society and divided political groups, especially between the American Communist party and other left-wing organisations. Covering the closed trials of the Soviet military, the Soviet anti-foreigner campaign and the Dewey Commission as well as the show trials themselves, Witnessing Stalin's Justice uncovers and brings together American reactions to the Soviet Union's Great Purge.
Download or read book The History of Evil in the Early Twentieth Century written by Victoria S. Harrison and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2018-06-14 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The fifth volume of The History of Evil covers the twentieth century from 1900 through 1950. The period saw the maturation of intellectual movements such as Pragmatism and Phenomenology, and the full emergence of several new academic disciplines; all these provided novel intellectual tools that were used to shed light on a human capacity for evil that was becoming increasingly hard to ignore. An underlying theme of this volume is the effort to reconstruct an understanding of human nature after confidence in its intrinsic goodness and moral character had been shaken by world events. The chapters in this volume cover globally relevant topics such as education, propaganda, power, oppression, and genocide, and include perspectives on evil drawn from across the world. Theological and atheistic responses to evil are also examined in the volume. This outstanding treatment of approaches to evil at a determinative period of modernity will appeal to those with interests in the intellectual history of the era, as well as to those with interests in the political, philosophical and theological movements that matured within it.
Download or read book In a Generous Spirit written by Christina Looper Baker and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 1996 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dorothy Markey's family and culture prepared her to be a proper southern lady. Yet Markey broke free of her cultural bonds and became, instead, a feminist, a communist, and, under the pen name Myra Page, a radical journalist and novelist. Her activism on behalf of social justice, racial equality, and women's rights spanned the 1920s through her death in 1993. Page's work carried her far from her Virginia home to Moscow, Mexico, the rural South, and New York. As a journalist she wrote for the Daily Worker, the New Masses, Working Woman, and Southern Worker. Her novels captured workers' struggles in an authentic voice: The Gathering Storm, Daughter of the Hills, and Moscow Yankee. With consummate skill, Christina Baker weaves together historical research, her own and others' conversations with Page, and Page's letters and other writings. The resulting narrative is a vivid recreation of the life of an uncommon woman and her more than seventy years of striving for the things she believed in.
Download or read book Journalism s Roving Eye written by John Maxwell Hamilton and published by LSU Press. This book was released on 2011-08-15 with total page 681 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping and definitive history of American foreign news reporting from its inception to the present day. Chronicles the economic and technological advances that have influenced overseas coverage, as well as the cavalcade of colorful personalities who shaped readers' perceptions of the world across two centuries.--from publisher description.
Download or read book Humanity written by Jonathan Glover and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of history and morality in the twentieth century, this text examines the psychology which made possible Hiroshima, the Nazi genocide, the Gulag, the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Pol Pot's Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia.
Download or read book Coppola s Monster Film written by Steven Travers and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2016-06-23 with total page 238 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1975, after his two Godfather epics, Francis Ford Coppola went to the Philippines to film Apocalypse Now. He scrapped much of the original script, a jingoistic narrative of U.S. Special Forces winning an unwinnable war. Harvey Keitel, originally cast in the lead role, was fired and replaced by Martin Sheen, who had a heart attack. An overweight Marlon Brando, paid a huge salary, did more philosophizing than acting. It rained almost every day and a hurricane wiped out the set. The Philippine government promised the use of helicopters but diverted them at the last minute to fight communist and Muslim separatists. Coppola filmed for four years with no ending in the script. The shoot threatened to be the biggest disaster in movie history. Providing a detailed snapshot of American cinema during the Vietnam War, this book tells the story of how Apocalypse Now became one of the great films of all time.
Download or read book Diplomacy Communication and Peace written by William Maley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-11-15 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is composed of interconnected essays which reflect on challenging new issues related to diplomacy, communication, and peace. This book begins by drawing out some of the challenges for diplomacy that arise from modern theories of semantics and of strategic communication, as well as those posed by the need for secrecy, and by the activities of agents of influence. It then proceeds to examine important issues in contemporary diplomacy, including refugee diplomacy, humanitarian diplomacy, sovereignty, norms, and consular activities. It concludes with an exploration of dilemmas that confront attempts to promote peace through multilateral means, such as the limitations of peacemaking diplomacy, the difficulty of promoting democratic governance, and the problems associated with dealing with morally repugnant actors. The book is grounded in the conception of diplomacy as a social practice with multiple players, and recognises that ‘the state’ has many different elements, and that ‘state actors’ live in worlds shaped not just by their relations with other states, but also by their own complex domestic politics. This book will be of much interest to students of diplomacy, foreign policy, and International Relations.
Download or read book Intellectuals and Society written by Thomas Sowell and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 496 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The influence of intellectuals is not only greater than in previous eras but also takes a very different form from that envisioned by those like Machiavelli and others who have wanted to directly influence rulers. It has not been by shaping the opinions or directing the actions of the holders of power that modern intellectuals have most influenced the course of events, but by shaping public opinion in ways that affect the actions of power holders in democratic societies, whether or not those power holders accept the general vision or the particular policies favored by intellectuals. Even government leaders with disdain or contempt for intellectuals have had to bend to the climate of opinion shaped by those intellectuals. Intellectuals and Society not only examines the track record of intellectuals in the things they have advocated but also analyzes the incentives and constraints under which their views and visions have emerged. One of the most surprising aspects of this study is how often intellectuals have been proved not only wrong, but grossly and disastrously wrong in their prescriptions for the ills of society -- and how little their views have changed in response to empirical evidence of the disasters entailed by those views.
Download or read book The Allies written by Winston Groom and published by National Geographic Books. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 484 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best-selling author Winston Groom tells the complex story of how Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin--the three iconic and vastly different Allied leaders--aligned to win World War II and created a new world order. By the end of World War II, 59 nations were arrayed against the axis powers, but three great Allied leaders--Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin--had emerged to control the war in Europe and the Pacific. Vastly different in upbringing and political beliefs, they were not always in agreement--or even on good terms. But, often led by Churchill's enduring spirit, in the end these three men changed the course of history. Using the remarkable letters between the three world leaders, enriching narrative details of their personal lives, and riveting tales of battles won and lost, best-selling historian Winston Groom returns to share one of the biggest stories of the 20th century: The interwoven and remarkable tale, and a fascinating study of leadership styles, of three world leaders who fought the largest war in history.
Download or read book To Be a Victim written by Diane Sank and published by Springer. This book was released on 2013-11-09 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin written by Dennis J. Dunn and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 541 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: On November 16, 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Soviet Commissar of Foreign Affairs Maxim Litvinov signed an agreement establishing diplomatic ties between the United States and the Soviet Union. Two days later Roosevelt named the first of five ambassadors he would place in Moscow between 1933 and 1945. Caught between Roosevelt and Stalin tells the dramatic and important story of these ambassadors and their often contentious relationships with the two most powerful men in the world. More than fifty years after his death, Roosevelt's foreign policy, especially regarding the Soviet Union, remains a subject of intense debate. Dennis Dunn offers an ambitious new appraisal of the apparent confusion and contradiction in Roosevelt's policy one moment publicizing the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter and the next moment giving tacit approval to Stalin's control of parts of Eastern Europe and northeast Asia. Dunn argues that "Rooseveltism," the president's belief that the Soviet Union and the United States were both developing into modern social democracies, blinded Roosevelt to the true nature of Stalin's brutal dictatorship despite repeated warnings from his ambassadors in Moscow. Focusing on the ambassadors themselves, William C. Bullitt, Joseph E. Davies, Laurence A. Steinhardt, William C. Standley, and W. Averell Harriman, Dunn details their bruising arguments with Roosevelt over the president's repeated concessions to Stalin. Using information uncovered during extensive research in the Soviet archives, Dunn reveals much about Stalin's policy toward the United States and demonstrates that in ignoring his ambassadors' good advice, Roosevelt appeased the Soviet leader unnecessarily. Sure to generate new discussion concerning the origins of the Cold War, this controversial assessment of Roosevelt's failed Soviet policy will be read for years to come.
Download or read book International Communism and the Spanish Civil War written by Lisa A. Kirschenbaum and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015-07-28 with total page 293 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: International Communism and the Spanish Civil War provides an intimate picture of international communism in the Stalin era. Exploring the transnational exchanges that occurred in Soviet-structured spaces - from clandestine schools for training international revolutionaries in Moscow to the International Brigades in Spain - the book uncovers complex webs of interaction, at once personal and political, that linked international communists to one another and the Soviet Union. The Spanish Civil War, which coincided with the great purges in the Soviet Union, stands at the center of this grassroots history. For many international communists, the war came to define both their life histories and political commitments. In telling their individual stories, the book calls attention to a central paradox of Stalinism - the simultaneous celebration and suspicion of transnational interactions - and illuminates the appeal of a cause that promised solidarity even as it practiced terror.
Download or read book Roger Nash Baldwin and the American Civil Liberties Union written by Robert Cottrell and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2001-01-18 with total page 531 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Roger Nash Baldwin's thirty-year tenure as director of the ACLU marked the period when the modern understanding of the Bill of Rights came into being. Spearheaded by Baldwin, volunteer attorneys of the caliber of Clarence Darrow, Arthur Garfield Hays, Osmond Frankel, and Edward Ennis transformed the constitutional landscape. Company police forces were dismantled. Antievolutionists were discredited (thanks to the Scopes Trial). Censorship of such works as James Joyce's Ulysses was halted. The Scottsboro Boys and Sacco and Vanzetti were defended. The right of free speech for communists and Ku Klux Klansmen alike was upheld, and the foundations were laid for an end to school segregation. Robert Cottrell's magnificent book recaptures the accomplishments and contradictions of the complicated man at the center of these events. Driven, vain, frugal, and tempestuous, America's greatest civil libertarian was initially also a staunch defender of Communist Russia, deferred to the U.S. government over the internment of Japanese Americans, and openly admired J. Edgar Hoover and Douglas MacArthur. His personal relationships were equally complex. Spanning a hundred years from the late 1800s through Baldwin's death in 1981, this riveting biography is an eye-opening view of the development of the American left.
Download or read book Comrade Haldane Is Too Busy to Go on Holiday written by Gavan Tredoux and published by Encounter Books. This book was released on 2018-04-24 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Burdon Sanderson Haldane F.R.S. (1892–1964) was one of the leading scientists of the twentieth century, renowned for helping, through statistical wizardry, to reconcile Darwin’s theory of natural selection with Mendel’s discovery of genes. The product of a distinguished family of scientists and public figures, “JBS” trained and influenced a swathe of students and colleagues at Oxford, Cambridge, and University College London, many of whom, such as the evolutionary theorist John Maynard Smith, went on to distinction in their own right. As a widely known left-wing “public intellectual,” Haldane gained fame as a popularizer of science and commentator on public affairs, broadcasting often on the BBC and publishing extensively in newspapers and magazines. His collections of popular scientific essays influenced a generation of upcoming scientists and remain in print today. On his death in 1964, he was accorded the rare tribute of a televised self-obituary on the BBC. Celebrated for his ability to connect seemingly disparate subjects, during the Second World War Haldane was extensively involved in scientific research to aid the British war effort. Using evidence gathered from VENONA Signals Intelligence intercepts, MI5 files, and the Haldane papers, this book reveals that Haldane was also a Soviet spy—a member of the “X Group,” an espionage ring that was run out of the Soviet Embassy in London. His interlocking associations with other spies, such as Ivor Montagu and Hans Kahle; his role as a hardline Stalinist propagandist through the onset of the Cold War; his betrayal of his colleague and friend, the Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov; his long-standing support for the charlatan Soviet “scientist” Trofim D. Lysenko; and his concealed stalemate with the Communist Party of Great Britain once his ability to finesse Lysenko was extinguished, are unraveled here for the first time.
Download or read book Gulag Boss written by Fyodor Vasilevich Mochulsky and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-29 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the memoir of Fyodor Mochulsky, a man who spent several years in the administration of the Soviet Gulag, including six years supervising the construction of a railroad in the Arctic. It is the first memoir in English from an NKVD (KGB) employee, and recounts his experiences inside the Soviet system of terror and how he came to deal with the logistical and ethical challenges he faced. This book provides a unique perspective on the organization of evil and the thinking of all the apparently ordinary people who help run systems of terror.
Download or read book Not Exactly Lying written by Andie Tucher and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-03-29 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner, 2023 Columbia University Press Distinguished Book Award Winner, 2023 Frank Luther Mott / Kappa Tau Alpha Research Award Winner, 2023 Journalism Studies Division Book Award, International Communication Association Winner, 2023 History Book Award, Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Long before the current preoccupation with “fake news,” American newspapers routinely ran stories that were not quite, strictly speaking, true. Today, a firm boundary between fact and fakery is a hallmark of journalistic practice, yet for many readers and publishers across more than three centuries, this distinction has seemed slippery or even irrelevant. From fibs about royal incest in America’s first newspaper to social-media-driven conspiracy theories surrounding Barack Obama’s birthplace, Andie Tucher explores how American audiences have argued over what’s real and what’s not—and why that matters for democracy. Early American journalism was characterized by a hodgepodge of straightforward reporting, partisan broadsides, humbug, tall tales, and embellishment. Around the start of the twentieth century, journalists who were determined to improve the reputation of their craft established professional norms and the goal of objectivity. However, Tucher argues, the creation of outward forms of factuality unleashed new opportunities for falsehood: News doesn’t have to be true as long as it looks true. Propaganda, disinformation, and advocacy—whether in print, on the radio, on television, or online—could be crafted to resemble the real thing. Dressed up in legitimate journalistic conventions, this “fake journalism” became inextricably bound up with right-wing politics, to the point where it has become an essential driver of political polarization. Shedding light on the long history of today’s disputes over disinformation, Not Exactly Lying is a timely consideration of what happens to public life when news is not exactly true.
