Earlier today, I wrote:
I am so tired of this Yalta debate and the veiled attacks on FDR.
And I still am, because I did not understand why the President would even mention it, and I did not understand the need for people on the left to flay Bush amd people on the right to prove Roosevelt was a treasonous bastard. Matt Welch provides the info I needed:
Italics mine, to drive home a point: It has been official American policy to bury Yalta in symbol and by name for at least a decade now. U.S. diplomats and leaders, many from Central European stock, have become fluent in the language of Munich and Yalta, which also comes dancing freely from the lips of the likes of such moral persuaders as Walesa and Vaclav Havel. I was shocked and appalled, living in Central Europe at the time, that respected American commentators so routinely misunderstood the easy-to-find stated motivations for our European policy. There were more than enough Capitol Hill hearings on the issue; it’s not hard at all to find stuff like “the Clinton Administration adheres to the idea of a NATO club of European democracies, repeatedly emphasizing the compelling importance of ‘righting the wrongs of Yalta.'”
Since I’ve wasted this much space I’ll drive the rest of you away with four last quick points. 1) Bush never mentioned Roosevelt. 2) Note the sentence directly after his placing Yalta “in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.” — “Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable.” This does not require a decoder ring, does it? 3) The comment was made in the specific and politically charged context of Vladimir Putin refusing to apologize to the Latvians for the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. 4) In making the above points, I am not laying out my 12-point program for What Roosevelt Should Have Done Differently. For that matter, neither was Bush. (His November 2002 speech in Prague, which also name-checked Yalta, followed its invocation with these two lines: “We have no power to rewrite history. We do have the power to write a different story for our time.”) I’m just suggesting that those looking for a Stab in the Back or at least a John Birch slap within the remarks of the president may have stumbled onto a plot even more sinister, because the Clintonites are in on it, too…
Thanks, Matt.
Filed this under General Stupidity- Mine, for not reading Bush’s speech in its entirety, and for paying any attention to either the Bush-haters or the John Birch society members.
I still think that there was no chance in hell we would have gone to war with the Soviets in 1945 to save the territories, though. The political will was not there, the population would have revolted, and we had our hands full with the Japanese. I fully suspect thatin a few months the last point about the Japanese will be completely forgotten as the usual suspects roll out the annual ‘Was Truman wrong to drop the bomb on Japan?’ debate that must commence every year on the anniversaries of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At any rate, there are a lot of things to dislike about FDR (for the record, a now deceased relative, whose name shall not be mentioned out of respect, referred to FDR as ‘that hop-legged son-of-a-bitch’ until the day he died), but I just don;t see this as one of them. Would I have liked things to have turned out differently? You bet. But as Bush stated, “”We have no power to rewrite history.”
Stormy70
I thought Bush’s speech was outstanding, and a poke in the eye to Putin, which is always good. I have a relative who would have bought your relative a drink.
Gary Farber
“I still think that there was no chance in hell we would have gone to war with the Soviets in 1945 to save the territories, though. The political will was not there, the population would have revolted, and we had our hands full with the Japanese.”
Just in case you’d like agreement: quite right, of course.
“…the annual ‘Was Truman wrong to drop the bomb on Japan?’ debate….”
My opinion, since you didn’t ask, can be made relatively simple (or complex, but I digress): with the benefit of hindsight and knowledge not possible for the decision-makers of the time, including Truman, sure, a reasonable case can be made for having gone other ways, such as dropping the demonstration bomb elsewhere, etc.
But it’s not remotely fair, of course, to judge Truman and co. as if they had the benefit of our hindsight. They had utterly legitimate fears about the alternatives, which I won’t enumerate here, and in the context of what they knew, an utterly legitimate, and fairly compelling, case can be made that their decision was reasonable and justifiable. So while it’s possible that another alternative might have brought desirable results without the added deaths, I don’t agree with those who put any stronger case, or who fault Truman and his advisors for dropping the bombs as they did (but neither would I say that people should shut up about what is, after all, a reasonable debate about one of the most, if not the most, important moral decisions of the last century).
Steve Malynn
Vodkapundit fisks Buchanan, who really deserved your ire – as PB actually means what you thought W did.
http://vodkapundit.com/archives/007819.php
Here’s a neat current (parts 1-3 completed, waiting for 4 and 5) look at Truman’s decision:
http://plungepontificates.blogspot.com/
Christie S.
I did a short research paper years ago on dropping the bomb instead of further direct military action.
One of my main sources was former Sec’y of War Henry L. Stimson’s article “The Decision to Use the Bomb” found in the collection of wartime articles entitled “Causes and Consequences of World War II”.ed Robert A. Divine. Chicago, Quadrangle Books, 1969.
In that article, Stimpson outlined the final considerations:
“My chief purpose was to end the war in victory with the least possible cost in the lives of the men…In light of the alternatives…open to us, I believe that no man…holding in his hands such a weapon of such possibilities for accomplishing this purpose…could have failed to use it and afterwards looked his countrymen in the face.”
Kimmitt
Is it okay that every time Bush notices that the Putinese leopard has not changed his spots, I’m gloriously amused by the “looked into his soul” comment once more? I mean, how more thorough a denunciation of the President’s judgement can we get?
TJ Jackson
The idea that the US would not have gone to war with the USSR over the occupied territories is correct. After all the Amnerican people couldn’t have cared less when the Russian-Nazis invaded Poland. Nor did the American people do anything when the Russians invaded the Baltic states, Finland, Rumania.
It appears that today we have many people who still will not recognize a threat till the bomb drops.
Lurking Observer
Kimmitt:
About as thorough as suggesting that FDR had Josef Stalin’s measure.
You DO realize that this thread is at least partly a discussion of FDR’s failings, which were in turn grounded at least as much in his belief that he could charm Stalin?
TM Lutas
Kimmit – There’s nothing wrong with Putin’s soul. Bush’s started reeling in a very big fish, Russia, into a single Core community of civilized and interconnected nations. The one time he explicitly commented on the enormity task, he opined it’s likely to take about 300 years. That’s about right (maybe optimistic) since they’ve been drifting away from the West for about 1000.
TJ Jackson – The US didn’t have to go to war. They could have honorably gone slow on post WW II power negotiations, calibrated lend-lease to the USSR so that they would have been well east of Berlin at the end of the war, applied lend-lease to the resisting governments and movements of E. Europe, and let Poland, Romania, et al liberate themselves.
At the start, slow negotiations would have saved the West’s honor. Slowing down lend-lease to the USSR would probably have saved the outer tier of satellites, funding liberation movements would have saved some of the inner satellites. An exhausted USSR might have broken with Russia re-emerging while it still had a great many people who remembered normality.
All this would have come to a crashing halt with the emergence of Soviet nuclear arms but the Iron Curtain didn’t have to land where it did and we had an outside shot of unravelling the USSR in the ’40s. We didn’t take it.
Ben Lange
Seems to me Bush is sending a message to Putin. Putin, a week ago, called the breakup of the USSR “the greatest tragedy of the century” or something similar.
It seems the Russians may be no closer to confronting the hideous evil of their communist past. Bush’s remarks are a subtle reminder of a past both nations would rather forget.
Ben Lange
Seems to me Bush is sending a message to Putin. Putin, a week ago, called the breakup of the USSR “the greatest tragedy of the century” or something similar.
It seems the Russians may be no closer to confronting the hideous evil of their communist past. Bush’s remarks are a subtle reminder of a past both nations would rather forget.
Bob
You gotta admit that that Putin guy’s got nice eyes. Nice trustworthy eyes.
One historic issue frequently left out of the debate here:
A lot of Eastern Europe was allied with the Axis Powers against the USSR during WWII. Let’s see, the Rumanians, the Lithuanians, the Latvians, the Croatians, for starters. In their own ways they were working for the Nazis, killing the local Jews and Gypsies and sending divisions of their boys to the Eastern and Western fronts, killing both Soviets and Allies (like Americans) in the West. The first president of that litte post-Yugoslavian Muslim state had been a member of the Hanjar Division, which fought with the Nazis and committed war atrocities against American troops in Italy in 1944. Those folks in the Arrow Cross (Hungarian fascists), for example, killed a lot of Russians during the war. For good reason, the Soviets did not want all these evil bastards back fucking with them after the war with the Germans was settled. They had good reason, beyond economic theory, to want to occupy Eastern Europe. To compare, think of how many divisions Castro has landed in Florida and our obsession with that country.
It had been Western Policy during the Thirties to look at Nazi Germany as a “cordon sanitaire” to separate despicable the socialism of the USSR from France and Britain. The Soviet Union in turn saw Eastern Europe as little sores of fascism on the body of Europe.
When the Western powers sat down with Stalin in Yalta, the Soviets had a fucking lot of troops and momentum. If you look at the immediate post-war voting in places like France and Italy, America’s greatest fear was the widespread popularity of the Communists. After all, much of the anti-fascist underground in occupied Europe had been Communist. If the U.S. and Great Britain had decided to attack Soviet forces there was a good possibility that they would have lost, and would not have much support from the locals in a fight against the Russians. At the very least Europe would have been pockmarked and glowing with a lot of unhappy people.
America’s post-war strategy embraced a lot of the fascist flotsam from Eastern Europe in its (eventually successful) effort to roll back Communism. In short, better the nice and easy (as Frank Sinatra crooned) rather than the very good chance of losing to the Soviet Army, which in 1944 had a lot of fans in occupied Europe.
An aside: As far as slowing down the lend-lease to the USSR, tell that to the folks in London getting blitzed every night. From this spot it’s easy to project a slow, thoughtful path to whipping the Nazis and rolling back Communism, but at the time it looked like the Nazi corporate state was about to roll over the British corporate state. The U.S. corporate state did not want to face the amalgamated Anglo-Germanic corporate state twenty years down the road.
So maybe Roosevelt and Churchill weren’t stupid or sickly or dumb or traitorous. It’s easier to rewrite history than to live through it. Or remember it.
TJ Jackson
He3y Bob did it take you a long time to memorize that from Pravda?
The Western allies outgunned the Russians big time. The USSR depended on the West for its uniforms, food, and transportation. Yeah like it had a hope of beating the West in 1945. As for popularity who the hell believes anyone in Eastern Europe was cheering the Russians on. The Russians fought guerrilla movements in the Baltics and Ukraine into the mid 50s. And all those starry eyed Hungarians, Poles and East Germans.
Please Bon peddle the revisionism to high school kids who have no idea about history, that is unless your high school buddies haven’t all ready sent you back to the sandbox.
Kimmitt
The Western allies outgunned the Russians big time.
That’s not consistent with what I’ve read; my understanding is that the Soviets had more or less the most powerful army in the world, with the best tank in the world at that point. Yeah, supply would have been an issue, but they had much shorter supply lines than ours and more or less the definition of internal lines.
That’s a lot of dead American soldiers you’re spending on a gamble against a country that just helped us beat the Nazis. I don’t think we’re that kind of a country, to be honest.
Bob
Jackson, go back and read what I wrote. The Communist movements in FRANCE and ITALY were strong in the wake of the collapse of the Vichy and Fascist states. Those were what the U.S. and Britain worried about.
And, yes, there were anti-Soviet movements in Eastern Europe, including the Nazi-created and then U.S.-backed Vlassov’s Army in the Ukraine. Which is why the Soviets were so fixated on destroying the Nazi lovers in Eastern Europe. Understanding the USSR’s motives will help you to understand their actions, Jackson.
Which leads us back to Yalta. The USSR lost 20 million to the Nazis. They were, shall we say, motivated to destroy Fascism.
By the way, most of the reporting on the Soviet military power in the decade after WWII, often exaggerated, was from the Gehlen Org, the Nazi Eastern front intelligence organization.
Never read Pravda. Read plenty of books, though.
Hey, Jackson, how’s the war going? And how about that MI6 memo about Bush fixing the intelligence to convince everyone to go into Iraq? Are they running that story in Pravda because it took 12 days for it to reach the SF Chronicle.
The war. The war. The war. You should always understand your enemy’s motivation.