[emgoldstein]

Thompson, like many (if not most) American journalists of her time, was a Stalin apologist in the Duranty circle:

http://spartacus-educational.com/USAthompsonD.htm

I'm not sure any intellectual who collaborated with Hitler should get points for warning the world about Stalin. Or vice versa.

If Harper's had written an article called "Who Goes Bolshevik" in 1941, it could have been much shorter: "pretty much everyone." Or at least, everyone who mattered. If you wanted the truth about Stalin in 1941, you'd do much better with the Voelkischer Beobachter than the New York Times.

[dang]

I don't know the details but that link doesn't come close to establishing that she was a Stalin apologist.

[pvg]

It doesn't seem like it at all. Things she apparently wrote in 1946:

The West experienced moments of doubt, Thompson wrote, in which the outcome of communist belief and behavior was questioned: "Can communist cultism, organized like a medieval secret order, with a priesthood, a police and an inquisition, reform itself into a modem, liberal, democratic movement?" Why, during the war, did communist propagandists throughout the world demand an immediate "second front", an attack on heavily fortified Western Europe by the United States and Great Britain? "Did these obedient claques care nothing for the lives of American boys? Were they listening to any voices but the voice of Stalin?" "Yet, we said: No", Thompson continued. "We shall prove our confidence, trust and trustworthiness. We shall hold faith that it will not be betrayed. Loyalty, we said, begets loyalty." But as Germany collapsed, the Soviet Union began "reversing every wartime pledge and policy. And not only was the quarter of a century of communist despotism to be fastened again upon the necks of the long suffering, heroically,enduring, eternally,hoping, eternally,serving Russian people -but naked and unashamed it was seeking new people to subject. "

[emgoldstein]

Ah, but that was 1946. The (American) party line had changed -- most American liberals were anti-Stalinist in 1946.

A quick google search turns up this from 1943:

http://trove.nla.gov.au/ndp/del/article/11332745

"Dorothy Thompson, the well-known columnist, writes: 'Russia does not want to make an isolationist policy. Russia wants a friendly Europe in a friendly world, with a system of collective security. There are signs of such hostility in both Europe and America to Russia that it gives Russian leadership some reason for suspicion. As things look at present, it is by no means certain that defeat of Germany will assure a non-Fascist Europe or one prepared to adopt a good-neighbor policy toward Russia."

Her views in 1946 are standard 1946 post-FDR New Dealism (after the Anglo-Soviet split); her views in 1943 are standard 1943 New Dealism. You're just hearing the party line; God only knows what she actually thought, and when.

It would be much easier to fight the memory hole if we didn't have these ridiculous copyright laws, but a lot of original WWII propaganda (not cherry-picked by modern hagiographers) remains on line. It's often pretty appalling reading.

[pvg]

That's extremely thin gruel. You seem to want to paint any whiff of Russia/Soviet sympathy as the equivalent of 'Stalin apologist' and reaching even further, an equivalent to being a Nazi sympathizer. I don't think that's a view that can easily be factually rather than ideologically supported.

[emgoldstein]

I recommend Malcolm Muggeridge's autobiography for a compelling look at the circle of Western journalists in Moscow in the '20s and '30s, of which Muggeridge was a part. Scott Alexander has a good review:

http://slatestarcodex.com/2015/08/11/book-review-chronicles-...

You either stayed in that circle or dropped out; there was no in-between. Of the reporters listed in the link, W.H. Chamberlin is the only other one who defected. Duranty (whose Pulitzer the NYT still refuses to return) was the norm, not the exception.

Also note that Thompson was part of the most bloodthirsty wing of New Dealists (eg, Rex Stout, also seen in the link) who supported prewar and postwar anti-German atrocities. It was certainly Nazi policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Jews as physically possible, but it was also Allied policy from 1941-45 to kill as many Germans as physically possible -- and that policy by no means stopped on a dime in May 1945:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Food_in_occupied_Germany

A real and complete moral reckoning for the period has yet to come, and will be more interested in our crimes than those of our defeated enemies.