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Mr. Jones is the rare movie that portrays both the evil perpetrated by Joseph Stalin and the complicity of Western media in upholding and strengthening the malevolent Soviet Communist state.
Gareth Jones was a Welsh journalist who surreptitiously visited Ukraine in 1933 and observed first-hand the devastating famine there. He reported in several newspapers his observations of the Ukrainian holodomor, where an estimated 12 million ethnic Ukrainians perished due to the famine. His report was denounced as “a big scare story” by Walter Duranty of The New York Times. Duranty had won the Pulitzer Prize 1932 for arguing that the Soviet system was autocratic but superior to capitalism in furthering the economic development of the Russian people.
The movie ends without depicting Mr. Jones’ murder in northern China in 1935. There is suspicion that his murder had been engineered by the Soviet NKVD, but no proof was ever found.
Mr. Jones is available for rent or purchase on Amazon Prime. Gareth Jones’ life story is written here. Walter Duranty’s life is described here.
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Re: Zol Cendes’ post 101983 of 8/11/20
The next step is showing how Marxist egalitarianism caused their mass murder. Concretes are merely a start. I have no recall of any commentary, except for Rand, making that link.
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I saw that movie. After watching many similar horrors on YouTube, I’ve become used to the idea that some people want to kill innocent people. The severe flaws in epistemology and ethics in the West allows such things to go on.
A question in my mind when I saw the movie was how much the reporter loved his life. It seemed he was taking a huge risk becoming involved with such bad countries.
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Re: Zol Cendes’ post 101983 of 8/11/20
This movie is well-done as a sort-of docudrama, with a mostly hapless protagonist wandering into trouble, and revealing the utter corruption of Duranty and the NYT.
If there was much question about the documentary aspect of it, we get a line on the screen at the end of the movie informing us of the dire fate of Mr. Jones two years after the events in the movie.
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Re: Joseph Avatar’s post 132029 of 8/16/20
A question in my mind when I saw the movie was how much the reporter loved his life. It seemed he was taking a huge risk becoming involved with such bad countries.
Taking huge risks in the uncompromising pursuit of one’s values — in this case, the truth — is the essence of loving one’s life.
As a factual matter, it appears that the movie portrays Mr. Jones as being in harm’s way to a much greater degree than he actually was. And while the film exaggerates the dangers he faced and claims he witnessed dead bodies and cannibalism (among other things), when he did not, at the same time, it downplays the actual amount of information that he revealed (not just the starvation in Ukraine but throughout the Soviet Union) and the heroic efforts he went through to document and report his findings.
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Re: Zol Cendes’ post 101983 of 8/11/20
This is a commendable movie, not just for revealing (for the umpteenth time) the horrors of the Stalin regime, but for the added importance of showing the immorality of the press and intellectuals who fawned over the great experiment while minimizing and excusing its ugly truth, and for honoring a reporter devoted to the truth.
I place it alongside some other movies that are set in the same era, whose heroes take great risks to defy the Soviet regime such as East/West and Child 44.
But beyond the merits of this movie is the unexplored horror of the Soviet Union from beginning to end, before and after Stalin. Everyone by now knows that Stalin was a monster whose death toll (conservative estimates of around 20 million, others as high as 60) surpassed that of Hitler. But Stalin didn’t kill everyone who died as a result of the Communist revolution, whose mass murderers include Lenin before him. And the death toll, though reduced significantly, did not cease with Stalin’s death. And that’s leaving aside the lives destroyed long-range trying to exist in the totalist regime of the Soviet Union.
There seems to be a trend among those who are either ignorant or who remain nostalgic about the Soviet Union, to use Stalin as a scapegoat essentially acquitting the Soviet Union of its evil. In their view, Stalin was an aberration, a clear paranoid monster who didn’t represent what the Soviet experiment was really trying to do. At college in the 60s and 70s, I had many discussions with my peers who often claimed that Stalin aside, there weren’t any real differences between the United States and the Soviet Union. And among some Russian friends I see the same inclination: yes, Stalin was an evil murderer, but Americans have an exaggerated negative view of the Soviet Union as a whole (I only wish).
I’m not aware of any critically acclaimed movies that explore the non-Stalinist Soviet Union and the horrors it perpetrated (Ayn Rand’s “We the Living” set in the Bolshevik revolutionary period is an exception), but there should be.
These movies, while heaping more and more deserved animosity on Stalin’s head, do not seem to affect the moral pass given to Communism by many.
The mass deaths resulting from the unleashing of Communism into the world are the consequence of a philosophy and its ideology, not of an aberrant individual who is to be set aside as an exception when passing moral judgment. Where is that historical drama?
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Re: Stuart Feldman’s post 132091 of 8/19/20
The mass deaths resulting from the unleashing of Communism into the world are the consequence of a philosophy and its ideology, not of an aberrant individual who is to be set aside as an exception when passing moral judgment
It’s curious, I say sarcastically, that certain philosophies and ideologies attract aberrant individuals. There may be Hitlers in the US but they will probably never rise higher than drug addict.
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Re: Jim Allard’s post 132042 of 8/16/20
Taking huge risks in the uncompromising pursuit of one’s values — in this case, the truth — is the essence of loving one’s life.
I think risk has to do with epistemology. If I have incomplete data, but still think there’s a significant chance based on the data I have to gain or keep a value, then I would consider that a risk with a good reward. Where I can minimize the risks involved, my preference is to do so, and there should always be a positive expected value.
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