{"id":4645,"date":"2019-11-23T18:24:00","date_gmt":"2019-11-23T18:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/?p=4645"},"modified":"2019-11-23T18:55:10","modified_gmt":"2019-11-23T18:55:10","slug":"word-of-the-day-dupe","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/2019\/11\/23\/word-of-the-day-dupe\/","title":{"rendered":"Word of the Day: Dupe"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

From www.grammar.com<\/a>,\nwe get today\u2019s word of the day, dupe<\/em>.\nDupe<\/em> can be either a noun or a verb.\nAs a noun, it means \u201ca person who is easily fooled\u201d or \u201ca person who\nunquestioningly or unwittingly serves a cause or another person\u201d (unwittingly<\/em> means \u201cunknowingly\u201d or \u201cunintentionally\u201d),\naccording to www.dictionary.com<\/a>. As a\nverb, dupe means \u201cto make someone a dupe, to deceive, to trick, to delude.\u201d\nGrammar.com lists a number of synonyms: gull,\nbefool, cod, fool, put on, take in, put one over, put one across<\/em>, and I\u2019m\nsure we could think of many more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to www.etymonline.com<\/a>,\nthe word enters the English language from French: \u201c\u2019one easily deceived or led\nastray by false representations,\u2019 1680s, from French dupe<\/em> \u2018deceived\nperson,\u2019 from duppe<\/em> (early 15c.), thieves’ jargon, perhaps\nfrom phrase de huppe<\/em> \u2018of the hoopoe,\u2019 an extravagantly crested\nand reputedly stupid bird.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ukraine has been in the news a lot lately, for anyone\nwho pays attention to such things, so we\u2019ll look at something related to that\ncountry. Since 2006, the Ukraine has, on the fourth Saturday of November, the\nHolodomor. Holodomor<\/em> is a Ukrainian\ncompound word that means \u201chunger plague\u201d or \u201ckilling by starvation.\u201d  Holodomor refers to a terrible year in the\nhistory of the Ukraine, 1932-33.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you look up Holodomor on Wikipedia, you\u2019ll find it\ndescribed as a famine, but that might be a little bit misleading because we\ngenerally think of a famine as a natural disaster, caused by lack of rain,\nresulting in too little food to feed all the people. But that\u2019s not what\nhappened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In the late 20s, Josef Stalin and his Soviet government\ndecided to enforce collectivization on the peasants of the Ukraine. The\npeasants, who had owned their farms until then, were expected to work as day\nlaborers on these government-owned farms. For some reason, the peasants objected,\nbut the Soviet government insisted. There were actually a number of peasant\nrevolts in the early 1930s. And that led to Holodomor.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

According to Anna Reid, in \u201cRule by Starvation\u201d in The Wall Street Journal<\/em> (06 Oct 2017),\nthe takeover happened in 3 stages. \u201cTeams of activists were dispatched to the\ncountryside to persuade peasants to hand over land and livestock to\nstate-controlled farms, where they would work as day laborers for payment in\nkind. Villagers remembered how out of place the visitors looked, tiptoeing\nthrough the mud in polished shoes. One even mistook a calf for a colt, brushing\naside correction with the declaration that \u2018the world proletarian revolution\nwon’t suffer because of that.\u2019”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, \u201cA few months later, the Kremlin launched a parallel\ndrive to evict and deport \u2018kulaks\u2019–a term that in theory referred to wealthy\npeasants but in practice meant community leaders and anyone, rich or poor, who\nresisted collectivization. Targeted were teachers, clerks, store keepers, millers\nand tanners, as well peasants who owned two cows rather than one or whose huts\nwere roofed with tin rather than thatch.\u201d Many people were taken to gulags, and\nsome were even executed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Then, \u201cIn August 1932, food theft was made punishable by\ndeath or 10 years’ imprisonment, sweeping thousands more into the Gulag.\nRequisitioning brigades snatched fruit from trees, seedlings from gardens, soup\nfrom cooking pots. They killed dogs and smashed millstones. Children were shot\nat by mounted guards as they crept into the fields to glean fallen grain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBy New Year’s 1933 there was no food left, and full-scale\nfamine took hold. Firsthand accounts are not as rich as those in Ms.\nApplebaum’s superb Gulag: A History<\/em>\n(2003)–peasants were less likely to record their experiences than the\nmiddle-class professionals who filled the prison camps. But they are vivid\nenough: the eating of bark and weeds; children’s bird-like necks and wizened\nfaces; ubiquitous, unremarked corpses; cannibalism. By the time Stalin finally\ncalled a halt in 1934, millions lay dead and thousands of villages stood empty.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Estimates of the dead just in Ukraine run from 4 to 12\nmillion. Millions more died in other countries. More, in case you\u2019re wondering,\nthan died in the Holocaust.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The news of this man-made famine was reported to the West in\n1933, when a British journalist, Gareth Jones, snuck into the Ukraine and kept\na journal of what he saw there: \u201cI walked along through villages and twelve\ncollective farms. Everywhere was the cry, ‘There is no bread. We are dying’.\nThis cry came from every part of Russia, from the Volga, Siberia, White Russia,\nthe North Caucasus, and Central Asia. I tramped through the black earth region\nbecause that was once the richest farmland in Russia and because the\ncorrespondents have been forbidden to go there to see for themselves what is\nhappening.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cIn the train a Communist denied to me that there was a\nfamine. I flung a crust of bread which I had been eating from my own supply\ninto a spittoon. A peasant fellow-passenger fished it out and ravenously ate\nit. I threw an orange peel into the spittoon and the peasant again grabbed it\nand devoured it. The Communist subsided.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But the West did not believe Jones, in large part because of\nthe efforts of Western journalists like \u201c<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Walter Duranty, a NY Times journalist (and Soviet\nsympathizer) who deliberately misled the world and denied the famine to\ncollaborate with the Communist regime. He stated that the hunger was due to\nnatural circumstances of malnutrition and disease and not human action,\u201d\naccording to FEE. And progressives in the West believed Duranty. He even won a\nPulitzer Prize for his reporting from the Soviet Union. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The truth about Walter Duranty is that he was a dupe. Or\nperhaps a shill. He died in Orlando, FL, in 1957, in the peace of quiet of a\nfree-market nation. Gareth Jones, on the other hand, was murdered by bandits in\nChina just before his 30th<\/sup> birthday, and many believe that the\nmurder was arranged by the KGB. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

It is sad when the world we live in punishes those who tell\nthe truth and reward dupes and those who destroy the lives of others.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The image is of passers-by and the corpse of a starved man on a street in Kharkiv, 1932 (https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Holodomor#\/media\/File:HolodomorUcrania9.jpg<\/a>). <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From www.grammar.com, we get today\u2019s word of the day, dupe. Dupe can be either a noun or a verb. As a noun, it means \u201ca person who is easily fooled\u201d […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":4654,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4645","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-word-of-the-day","clearfix"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4645","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4645"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4645\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4655,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4645\/revisions\/4655"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4654"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4645"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4645"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.freedomshillprimer.com\/institute\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4645"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}