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Maoist Internationalist Movement

L.A. Times refuses interview on its December Stalin article

On December 10th, the Los Angeles Times published a news article about the Soviet leader Josef Stalin (1924-1953) with reference to his relatives who remain alive today. That same day, MIM requested that the Los Angeles Times respond to interview questions, at the leisure of the Los Angeles Times, with a guarantee of publication verbatim. We gave the Los Angeles Times a deadline of December 20th to respond, but it refused to be interviewed. Below is the letter we sent to the Los Angeles Times twice:

Dear Robyn Dixon:

We are hoping you are the author of "Even Amid His Family, Debate Persists Over Stalin" at http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la- 121001stalin.story If you are not Robyn Dixon, please forward this to Robyn Dixon and the editor in charge. I am writing for MIM Notes, a newspaper serving over 15,000 computers a month according to web traffic statistics and more people on the street in paper version, including in Los Angeles.

We would like to interview you about the process of putting together your article. We would like to grant you the unusual interview privilege (by journalistic standards) of having the questions in advance and a guarantee that we will publish your answers verbatim, up to 10,000 characters. You say: "According to the Memorial human rights group, Stalin's policies were responsible for the deaths of 9 million to 12 million people, including those who perished in the famines of 1932-33 and 1946-47. It says 25 million passed through the Gulag, Stalin's network of prison camps, or were exiled." "Author and historian Robert Conquest estimates that 20 million died. Others have suggested higher figures."

Question from MIM Notes:

1. Were you aware that Stalin doubled the life expectancy of his people? If so, why did you not mention it?

2. Does it occur to you that a life expectancy figure might be more relevant for a whole country with over 100 million people than a figure for total number of deaths?

3. Have you or the Los Angeles Times ever published an article about the number of deaths from famine, repression and other deprivation in the United States from 1924-1953? May we have the reference to the article?

4. Did you ever think to compare the Soviet Union not with a country several times richer than it per capita but with other countries as poor as it in the 1924-1953 period? Did you or the Los Angeles Times publish any comparison of statistics under Stalin and that other country?

5. Do you believe that any U.S. president has a comparable record of advancing the physical well-being of the U.S. population? If so who and with what evidence?

6. Were you aware that Robert Conquest was a poet before he became an intelligence officer with the literal job of spreading disinformation?

7. Were you aware that his book on the Ukrainian famine literally uses fiction sources, and Nazi and Nazi-sympathizer sources?

8. Did you know that the Village Voice ran a story exposing the creation of photos and similar evidence regarding the Ukraine famine? Feel free to refer to the following in your answers in any way.

http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/lifeexpectus sr2.html http://www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext/faq/stalindeaths .html http://www.tiac.net/users/knut/Stalin/node75.html# SECTION00800700000000000000 http://www.shss.montclair.edu/english/furr/vv.html

Sincerely,

Web Minister Maoist Internationalist Movement
www.prisoncensorship.info/archive/etext