It was Stalin who said, a single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is only a statistic. He was interrupting an official lamenting the loss of lives in the Holodomor, the famine he created in the Ukraine, while collectivising agriculture and industrialising the Soviet Union. He devastated the Ukraine, the Soviet Union’s ‘bread bowl’, by confiscating all its crops to feed factory workers. The military shot starving people who tried to escape or deported them to Siberia. The idea was not just to break the back of the resistance to collectivisation but to break the spirit of independence in Ukraine.

Exactly how many people died is unknown since the Soviet Union denied for decades that there had even been a famine and suppressed the statistics. Stalin told Churchill in 1942 that 10 million kulaks were repressed for resisting collectivisation. Soviet posters moralised that ‘To eat your children is a barbaric act’ and thousands of people were convicted of cannibalism.

Despite the barbarism, there was no shortage of Westerners to whitewash this crime against humanity. George Bernard Shaw, an ardent admirer of Stalin, justified mass executions to defend the country from ‘exploiters and speculators’. When Malcolm Muggeridge, then a reporter for the Manchester Guardian and a British communist, smuggled out his eye-witness accounts of starvation in the diplomatic bag his editors watered them down. But the worst journalistic betrayal of the truth was that of Pulitzer Prize-winning Moscow correspondent for the New York Times Walter Duranty. On 31 March, 1933, the Times published a piece by him headlined ‘Russians Hungry but Not Starving’ in which he blamed food shortages on the ‘novelty’ of the collectivisation and reflected approvingly that, ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’.

There is no comparison between the horrors of the Holodomor and the postmodern pandemic we have lived through. But there is a comparison to be made in the ignominious role played, or not played, by the media.

After the release of his emails under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests, Dr Anthony Fauci and his friends must vie for first place as the greatest conspirators of the Covid era. He is equally in the running to be the greatest source of disinformation on just about every aspect of the pandemic, ably assisted by ‘experts’ and public health authorities around the world.

Fauci could be relied on to misinform on any topic from the origin of the virus and the necessity of lockdowns to the demonisation of the unvaccinated and the safety and efficacy of the novel genetically-induced vaccines.

Fauci’s performance was a tour de force that involved overturning decades, even millennia of knowledge about infection. . It required the wholesale abandonment of the scientific method as the empirical means of acquiring knowledge because it relies on careful observation, truthful interpretation, rigorous skepticism and robust debate. It is not possible to engage in science without freedom of thought and speech but free speech was deemed so dangerous that doctors, scientists, academics and anyone who questioned the world according to Fauci was cancelled.

Why didn’t the mainstream media question any of this? Why, as Adam Creighton asks in an excellent article in the Australian this week, was the media so credulous and incurious, so ‘naive to the financial and political forces that pushed governments to eschew the more sensible path of voluntary Covid-19 vaccination’?

It is not necessary to speculate to answer that question. When Elon Musk bought Twitter in October last year he opened up the company’s internal communications to journalists including Bari Weiss, the former opinion editor for the New York Times who resigned after being bullied by woke colleague; Matt Taibbi, a former contributing editor to Rolling Stone and staunch critic of mainstream media; and Dr Michael Shellenberger, a former Democratic candidate for governor of California, environmental activist and strong supporter of nuclear energy. All three would have been seen as sympathetic to the Left at some point but each has been cancelled for their commitment to truth-telling. They are now up to their 19th Twitter file exposé.

Shellenberger explains in an interview with Joe Rogan this week that what they expected to find inside Twitter were ultra-progressive leftists who were biased in their content moderation. What they uncovered were documents and communications exposing a ‘censorship-industrial complex’, a huge operation run by current and former US government officials and contractors from a host of agencies including the FBI, the CIA and the Department of Homeland Security. This complex worked with a network of university think tanks and NGOs called the ‘Election Integrity Partnership’ to outsource the censorship of Americans in the lead up to the 2020 election. They did this to avoid violating the First Amendment which protects freedom of speech from government censorship.

None of this is surprising except the audacity of the whole endeavour. It was clear after the British people voted for Brexit and Americans elected Trump that the Democrats were going to do everything in their power to prevent his re-election. They blamed the Big Tech titans for his election to pressure them in to cooperating. They used ‘the complex’ to cook up the Steele dossier which they fed to mainstream media to propagate the Trump-Russia collusion fabrication. The security agencies framed Hunter Biden’s laptop as Russian disinformation so that social media would censor it in the lead-up to the 2020 election. From that point there was no great leap to branding the Covid lab leak as a conspiracy theory. They censored anyone who contradicted the official narrative.

Even parents grieving the death of their children killed by the vaccine.

Last week, it was the 90th anniversary of Duranty’s defence of Stalin. In Australia, the Bureau of Statistics revealed the death toll for 2022. An extra 25,235 Australians died unexpectedly – 10,000 from Covid and 15,000 from what?  It was the biggest increase in mortality numerically since the Spanish flu of 1919 but more than half of the deaths weren’t caused by the pandemic virus. Did the vaccine play a role? The media didn’t ask. As Stalin would have said, it’s just a statistic.