The shameful liars are STILL in business.
When I learned many years ago that the truth about a man-made famine in Stalin's USSR had been suppressed with the help of Western media, I could not understand how such a thing could have happened. Now I do.
An interesting new film, Mr Jones, dramatises this extraordinary event.
The brave and independent Gareth Jones, above, and the equally courageous Malcolm Muggeridge (later to be a major figure in British broadcasting), both ventured into Ukraine and the Russian North Caucasus, and found starving men, women and children
The brave and independent Gareth Jones, and the equally courageous Malcolm Muggeridge (later to be a major figure in British broadcasting), both ventured into Ukraine and the Russian North Caucasus, and found starving men, women and children.
When a Soviet official denied that there was starvation, Jones flung a crust of his own bread into a brimming spittoon, and immediately a haggard figure grabbed it and ate it.
But the British-born Moscow correspondent of the New York Times, a one-legged libertine called Walter Duranty, first wrote a disgusting article under the headline 'Russians hungry but not starving', in which he described the brave and enterprising reports of Muggeridge and Jones as a 'scare story'. He knew that they were, in fact, true.
A few weeks later he lied again, writing 'any report of a famine in Russia is today an exaggeration or malignant propaganda'.
At the time he did so, people in the famine regions were going mad and eating their own children.
It now seems that the truth about the famine was seen as an obstacle to the USA's desire to open diplomatic relations with Stalin.
So the mass-murder had to be ignored and denied. How low we sometimes sink.
I don't in any way compare myself to great men such as Jones (who was later killed in strange circumstances) or Muggeridge, but I have been having a similar experience in the past few weeks.
I have reported on the bravery of two scientists at the poison gas watchdog OPCW who have raised serious concerns about the accuracy of important reports put out by that body, reports which led to major military action.
The two are hugely experienced non-political experts who sought for months to raise their concerns in private, and were ignored and worse.
An interesting new film, Mr Jones, dramatises this extraordinary event. James Norton is pictured as journalist Gareth Jones in the new film Mr Jones
They have nothing to gain by their actions. They serve no cause except scientific truth.
But the response of their employers has been to belittle them, to suggest wrongly that they were minor low-level figures barely involved in the issue.
And many in the media have either ignored their bravery, or – still more shamefully – joined in the chorus of smears.
One of these smears is that Ian Henderson, a chemical engineer who was sent by the OPCW into the Syrian war zone, was never in fact a member of the Fact Finding Mission (FFM) that went there.
Well, I can tell the OPCW, and others, that there exists in the OPCW's own archives a document (of its own) in which Mr Henderson is listed as a member of the FFM.
So it should just stop saying this. There is much more about this on the Peter Hitchens blog.
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