Date: Monday, 20 May 2024
https://ericzuesse.substack.com/p/what-made-the-world-were-living-in
https://theduran.com/what-made-the-world-were-living-in/
What Made the World We’re Living In
Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)
The Cold War started on 25 July 1945, when U.S. President Harry Truman made the fateful decision to reverse his immediate predecessor’s, FDR’s, foreign-policy plans, and, instead, Truman commenced to produce the Cold War and the Military-Industrial Complex (MIC), with the aim being that the U.S. Government would come to control ultimately the entire world. This set the U.S. Government onto its path of permanent war for permanent ‘peace’, an increasingly militarized economy, and almost nonstop coups and outright foreign invasions, which have since produced the bulk of America’s $35 trillion foreign debt to finance these mega-imperialistic operations. It still hasn’t ended, and it’s been (and is) a curse to the entire world except for U.S.-and-allied billionaires.
Anyone who doesn’t know the date when the Cold War started can’t even possibly understand the political and cultural world that one is living in, since this world was actually created on that date, and since not to know that date is not to know the event at which it was created, and since not to know that event is also not to know who created it and what caused that person to do this terrible thing on that day, the event that still curses our world — especially that curses it by causing the growth, the cancerous out-of-control tumor, of America’s MIC, that profits from it and feeds upon it, and that has come to control the entire U.S. Government and so to make peons of the American electorate, and to produce our permanent-warfare world, and the tens of trillions of dollars of losses, and the hundreds of millions of deaths and injuries, that result from it.
So: here is the documentation to answer this question, and to explain how and why it was Harry Truman, and NOT Joseph Stalin (such as mythologists claim), who made the decision that started the Cold War, on this precise date.
What follows is not merely a different history of the Cold War’s start — it is the history of the Cold War’s start, which is drastically different from the myths that have been (and are) propagated about it. And it will here be told almost completely by the historical documents themselves, so that the reader will be able to see it for oneself — from the documents. These documents will show that America’s foreign policy after FDR died has been the exact opposite of what he had so carefully been planning for it to be, and that the reason it was the opposite is Truman and not Stalin, who merely responded to Truman’s craving for the U.S. to come to control the entire planet:
——
“Roosevelt and Churchill Discuss Colonial Questions”, August 10, 1941, excerpt from FDR’s son and key private advisor at international conferences, Elliott Roosevelt, his book, As He Saw It (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1946).
https://archive.org/details/ashesawit00roos/page/176/mode/2up
Elliott Roosevelt, As He Saw It,
FOR MORE CONTEXT, SEE: https://archive.is/0BBG2 and https://archive.is/Cd3sP
Then, more highlights from this book will likewise be presented here:
pp. 35-8:
Father [FDR] started it [the after-dinner discussion on 9 August 1941 that revealed the sharp disagreement between FDR and Winston Churchill about imperialism, which FDR believed had caused both World Wars but Churchill believed must continue permanently].
"Of course," he remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, "of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade."
He paused. The P.M.'s [Churchill's] head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.
"No artificial barriers," Father pursued. "As few favored economic agreements as possible. Opportunities for expansion. Markets open for healthy competition." His eye wandered innocently around the room.
Churchill shifted in his armchair. "The British Empire trade agreements," he began heavily, "are--"
Father broke in. "Yes. Those Empire trade agreements are a case in point. It's because of them that the people of India and Africa, of all the colonial Near East and Far East, are still as backward as they are."
Churchill's neck reddened and he crouched forward. "Mr. President, England does not propose for a moment to lose its favored position among the British Do-minions. The trade that has made England great shall continue, and under conditions prescribed by England's ministers."
"You see," said Father slowly, "it is along in here somewhere that there is likely to be some disagreement between you, Winston, and me.
"I am firmly of the belief that if we are to arrive at a stable peace it must involve the development of backward countries. Backward peoples. How can this be done? It can't be done, obviously, by eighteenth-century methods. Now-"
"Who's talking eighteenth-century methods?"
"Whichever of your ministers recommends a policy which takes wealth in raw materials out of a colonial country, but which returns nothing to the people of that country in consideration. Twentieth-century methods involve bringing industry to these colonies. Twentieth-century methods include increasing the wealth of a people by increasing their standard of living, by educating them, by bringing them sanitation — by making sure that they get a return for the raw wealth of their community."
Around the room, all of us were leaning forward attentively. [Harry] Hopkins [a major FDR adviser] was grinning. Commander [C. R.] Thompson, Churchill's aide, was looking glum and alarmed. The P.M. himself was beginning to look apoplectic.
"You mentioned India," he growled.
"Yes. I can't believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy"
"What about the Philippines?"
"I'm glad you mentioned them. They get their independence, you know, in 1946. And they've gotten modern sanitation, modern education; their rate of illiteracy has gone steadily down
"There can be no tampering with the Empire's economic agreements."
"They're artificial ..."
"They're the foundation of our greatness."
"The peace," said Father firmly, "cannot include any continued despotism. The structure of the peace demands and will get equality of peoples. Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade. . ."
It was after two in the morning when finally the British party said their good nights. I helped Father into his cabin, and sat down to smoke a last cigarette with him.
Father grunted. "A real old Tory, isn't he? A real old Tory, of the old school."
"I thought for a minute he was going to bust, Pop."
"Oh," he smiled, "I'll be able to work with him. Don't worry about that. We'll get along famously."
"So long as you keep off the subject of India."
"Mmm, I don't know. I think we'll even talk some more about India, before we're through. And Burma. And Java. And Indo-China. And Indonesia. And all the African colonies. And Egypt and Palestine. We'll talk about 'em all.”
p. 39:
It ought to be set down that Sumner Welles was the man who worked hardest on the Charter [the Atlantic Charter, which Churchill was hoping to establish what since has become NATO, but FDR was intending to establish instead the foundation of the U.N.], and who contributed most. It was his baby, from the time it was first considered, back in Washington; he’s flown from Washington with a working draft of the final agreement in his briefcase; and all the world knows how important a statement it was and is. It certainly isn’t his fault, nor Father’s either, that it hasn’t been better lived up to.
p. 71:
“‘The English mean to continue their hold on their colonies. They mean to help the French maintain their hold on their colonies. Winnie is a great man for the status quo. … Burma — that affects India, and French Indo-China, and Indonesia — they’re all interrelated. If one gets its freedom, the others will get ideas. That’s why Winston is so anxious to keep De Gaulle in his [Winston’s] corner. De Gaulle isn’t any more interested in seeing a colonial empire disappear than Churchill is.’ ...
‘Elliott,’ he said, ‘de Gaulle is out to achieve one-man government in France. I can’t imagine a man I would distrust more. His whole Free French movement is honeycombed with police spies — he has agents spying on his own people. To him, freedom of speech means freedom from criticism — of him. Why, if this is the case, should anybody trust completely the forces who back de Gaulle?’ ...
His thoughts turned to the problem of the colonies and the colonial markets, the problem which he felt was at the core of all chances for future peace. ’The thing is,’ he remarked thoughtfully, … ‘the colonial system means war. Exploit the resources of an India, a Burma, a Java; take all the wealth out of those countries, but never put anything back into them, things like education, decent standards of living, minimum health requirements — all you’re doing is storing up the kind of trouble that leads to war. All you’re doing is negating the value of any kind of organizational structure for peace [his U.N.] before it begins.’ …
‘I must tell Churchill what I found out about his Gambia today. … The prevailing wages for these men [is] … fifty cents a day. … Dirt, disease, very high mortality rate. … Life expectancy … twenty six years.’…
‘Churchill may have thought I wasn’t serious, last time. He’ll find out this time.’”
He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. 'How is it, where you are? How is it in Algeria?' he asked.
I told him it was the same story. Rich country, rich resources, natives desperately poor, a few white colonials that lived very well, a few native princes that lived very well, otherwise poverty, disease, ignorance. He nodded.
And then he went on to tell of what he thought should be done: France to be restored as a world power, then to be entrusted with her former colonies, as a trustee. As trustee, she was to report each year on the progress of her stewardship, how the literacy rate was improving, how the death rate declining, how disease being stamped out, how...
'Wait a minute,' I interrupted. 'Who's she going to report all this to?'
'The organization of the United Nations, when it's been set up,' answered Father. It was the first time I'd ever heard of this plan. 'How else?' I asked Father. 'The Big Four — ourselves, Britain, China, the Soviet Union — we'll be responsible for the peace of the world after....
'...It's already high time for us to be thinking of the future, building for it.... These great powers will have to assume the tasks of bringing education, raising the standards of living, improving the health conditions — of all the backward, depressed colonial areas of the world.
'And when they've had a chance to reach maturity, they must have the opportunity extended them of independence. After the United Nations as a whole have decided that they are prepared for it.
'If this isn't done, we might as well agree that we're in for another war.'
p. 86:
“Father was having the time of his life, his active mind and quick imagination working overtime as we all speculated on what intelligent planning could do.
‘Wealth!’ he cried. ‘Imperialists don’t realize what they can do [but don’t], what they can create! They’ve robbed this continent [Africa] of billions, and all because they were too short-sighted to understand that their billions were pennies compared to the possibilities! Possibilities that must include a better life for the people who inhabit this land.’”
p. 115:
“‘I’m talking about another war, Elliott,’ Father cried, his voice suddenly sharp. ‘I’m talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery!’ …
‘Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again? Your son will be about the right age, fifteen or twenty years from now.’
’The United Nations — when they’re organized — they could take over these colonies, couldn’t they? Under a mandate or as trustee — for a certain number of years.’”
pp. 188-90: [28 November 1943]
Toward the end of the meal Uncle Joe [Stalin] arose to propose his umpteenth toast. … I propose a salute to the swiftest possible justice for all of Germany’s war criminals — justice before a firing squad. I drink to our unity in dispatching them as fast as we capture them, all of them, and there must be at least fifty thousand of them.” [The U.S., under Truman and Eisenhower, instead protected almost all of the ‘former’ Nazis it could and hired them to help America’s Cold War against the Soviet Union.]
Quick as a flash Churchill was on his feet. … His face and neck were red.
“Any such attitude,” he cried, “is totally contrary to our British sense of justice! The British people will never stand for such mass murder.” …
I glanced to Stalin: he seemed hugely tickled, but his face remained serious; only his eyes twinkled as he took up the P.M.’s challenge and drew him on. … At length, Stalin turned to Father and asked his opinion. Father, who had been hiding a smile, … nevertheless felt that the moment was beginning to be too highly charged with bad feeling: it was his notion to inject a witticism.
“As usual,” he said, “it seems to be my function to mediate this dispute. Clearly there must be some sort of compromise between your position, Mr. Stalin, and that of my good friend the Prime Minister. Perhaps we could say that, instead of summarily executing fifty thhousand war criminals, we should settle on a smaller number. Shall we say forty-nine thousand five hundred?”
Americans and Russians laughed. The British, taking their cue from their Prime Minister’s mounting fury, sat quiet and straight-faced. …
“Well,” I said, … “Isn’t the whole thing pretty academic?” … All of a sudden an angry finger was being waved right at my face.
“Are you interested in damaging relations between the Allies? Do you know what you are saying? How can you dare say such a thing?” It was Churchill — and he was furious. …
Fortunately, the dinner broke up soon afterward.
p. 204:
“’That Pat Hurley … he did a good job. If anybody can straighten out the mess of internal Chinese politics, he’s the man. … Men like Pat Hurley are invaluable. … I can give him assignments that I’d never give a man in the State Department, because I can depend on him. … Any number of times, the men in the State Department have tried to conceal messages to me, delay them, hold them up somehow, just because some of those career diplomats aren’t in accord with what they know I think. They should be working for Winston.’”
p. 213:
“’The United Nations …’ he said to me that last night, with great satisfaction. ‘People at home, Congressmen, editorial writers, talk about the United Nations as something which exists only on account of war. The tendency is to snipe at it by saying that only because we are forced into unity by war we are unified. But war isn’t the real force for unity. Peace is the real force. After the war — then is when I’m going to be able to make sure the United Nations are really the United Nations!’”
p. 238:
FDR came to the Yalta Conference “hoping to convince the other partners [Churchill and Stalin] that control of Germany should be integrated, not divided into zones. That control and administration should be joint not only at the top but all the way down the line. But both the British [Churchill] and the Soviets [Stalin] were lukewarm to the idea; they were able to convince Father that the zone idea should be set up; at Yalta, the lines of demarcation were settled and agreed upon.”
“4. A United Nations Conference, the foundations of which were laid at Dumbarton Oaks, having been previously agreed upon in large at Tehran, was called for San Francisco, less than two months in the future. The stumbling block at Dumbarton Oaks had been a question of voting procedure: should the veto by one of the Big Three be permitted to halt action by a Security Council of the United Nations — action against any country accused of aggression, for example?
At Yalta the partners look this problem squarely in the eye — and on the level it required. Both Father and Stalin approved the concept of the veto power for the Big Three, basing their arguments on the simple, crystal-clear fact that if the peace is to be maintained, it can be maintained only if all the word’s greatest powers concur. If two of them fall out with the third, if one falls out with the other two, the peace is in danger,. Only unity and integrity of purpose can save the peace.
The solution of the dilemma posed by this procedural question was Father’s. The Big Three plus China and France, must agree unanimously … before the world organization can take economic or military action against an aggressor. But any seven of the Security Council’s eleven members can cite an aggressor nation and call it to account before the tribunal of world opinion. …
5. The Three answered the questions posed by the liberation of European countries — and in doing so reaffirmed the principles of the Atlantic Charter.
This meant self-government, this meant the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government, this meant free elections.”
p. 250:
“The peace is fast being lost. .. Why? …
When Franklin Roosevelt died, the force for progress in the modern world lost its most influential and most persuasive advocate. With his death, the most articulate voice for integrity among the nations and the peoples of the world was stilled. … In this case, an individual’s death meant a consequent vacuum. … And into the vacuum, … stepped their opposites, the foes of progress, … the advocates of reaction [especially Churchill, Truman, and Eisenhower]. …
The performance? Father’s special envoy, Pat Hurley, did a remarkable job. All the necessary assurances were received from the Soviets, who in fact have lived up to the letter and spirit of their agreement since that time. It then devolved on the United States to fulfill its conditional responsibility. The first warships to enter Chinese ports were British warships. The order excluding them was ‘held up’ somewhere, in all probability in the State Department.
The result? Faced with a broken American promise, Chiang in turn broke his. …
We must reflect soberly on the fact that the military have taken over the task of postwar diplomacy. .. I will argue that such important diplomatic posts should be given over to civilians. ...
——
https://matthewehret.substack.com/p/on-the-anniversary-of-fdrs-death
https://archive.is/cKCx1
“On the Anniversary of FDR's Death: As He Saw It Revisited”
12 April 2022, by Matthew Ehret
Today’s Anniversary of the death of American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt should give the world a chance to revisit the immortal life and courage of the man whom decades of revisionism have turned into a popular aristocratic cartoon character. The decades of intense of effort to distort the life of the true Roosevelt from the minds of todays’ citizens has much to do with the fact that not only did he break from his own class loyalties during his lifetime, but powerfully challenged the structures of the financial oligarchy during a time of global crisis both within the USA and globally.
Even before the earliest days of America’s entry into World War II, Franklin Roosevelt clearly and loudly defined the conditions upon which he chose to bring his nation into collaboration with Britain and other allied powers of Europe in the struggle against fascism: freedom and sovereignty for all nations, an end to want, and especially an end to all systems of empire and exploitation.
Hitler and the fascist axis powers were admittedly the greatest immediate threat to world peace and as such FDR agreed must be put down. However, very few today realize what stark contrast occurred between Roosevelt and Britain’s Prime Minister Winston Churchill over what exactly the post-WWII order would look like. Even if the threat of fascism could be put down, FDR always knew that the evils of colonialism were just as great, if not greater, than the worst expression of fascism and this was the real enemy which he targeted as soon as America entered the war.
One of the greatest living testimonies to FDR’s anti-colonial vision is contained in a little known 1946 book authored by his son Elliot Roosevelt who, as his father’s confidante and aide, was privy to some of the most sensitive meetings his father participated in throughout the war. Seeing the collapse of the post-war vision upon FDR’s April 12, 1945 death and the emergence of a pro-Churchill presidency under Harry Truman, who lost no time in dropping nuclear bombs on a defeated Japan, ushering in a Soviet witch hunt at home and launching a Cold War abroad, Elliot authored ‘As He Saw It’ (1946) in order to create a living testimony to the potential that was lost upon his father’s passing.
As Elliot said of his motive to write his book:
“The decision to write this book was taken more recently and impelled by urgent events. Winston Churchill’s speech at Fulton, Missouri, had a hand in this decision,… the growing stockpile of American atom bombs is a compelling factor; all the signs of growing disunity among the leading nations of the world, all the broken promises, all the renascent power politics of greedy and desperate imperialism were my spurs in this undertaking…
And I have seen the promises violated, and the conditions summarily and cynically disregarded, and the structure of peace disavowed… I am writing this, then, to you who agree with me that… the path he charted has been most grievously—and deliberately—forsaken.”
The Four Freedoms
Even before America had entered the war, the principles of international harmony which FDR enunciated in his January 6, 1941 Four Freedoms speech to the U.S. Congress served as the guiding light through every battle for the next 4.5 years. In this speech FDR said:
“In future days, which we seek to secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.
“The first is the freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.
“The second is the freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.
“The third is the freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.
“The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a worldwide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.
“That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.
“To that new order, we oppose the greater conception–the moral order. A good society is able to face schemes of world domination and foreign revolutions alike without fear.
“Since the beginning of American history, we have been engaged in change–in a perpetual peaceful revolution–a revolution which goes on steadily, quietly, adjusting itself to changing conditions–without the concentration camp or the quicklime in the ditch. The world order which we seek is the cooperation of free countries, working together in a friendly, civilized society.
“This nation has placed its destiny in the hands and heads and hearts of millions of free men and women; and its faith in freedom under the guidance of God. Freedom means the supremacy of human rights everywhere. Our support goes to those who struggle to gain those rights or to keep them. Our strength is our unity of purpose.”
Upon hearing these Freedoms outlined, American painter Norman Rockwell was inspired to paint four masterpieces that were displayed across America and conveyed the beauty of FDR’s spirit to all citizens.
…
Churchill vs FDR: The Clash of Two Paradigms
Elliot’s account of the 1941-1945 clash of paradigms between his father and Churchill are invaluable both for their ability to shed light into the true noble constitutional character of America personified in the person of Roosevelt but also in demonstrating the beautiful potential of a world that SHOULD HAVE BEEN had certain unnatural events not intervened to derail the evolution of our species into an age of win-win cooperation, creative reason and harmony.
In As He Saw It, Elliot documents a conversation he had with his father at the beginning of America’s entry into WWII, who made his anti-colonial intentions clear as day saying:
“I’m talking about another war, Elliott. I’m talking about what will happen to our world, if after this war we allow millions of people to slide back into the same semi-slavery!
“Don’t think for a moment, Elliott, that Americans would be dying in the Pacific tonight, if it hadn’t been for the shortsighted greed of the French and the British and the Dutch. Shall we allow them to do it all, all over again? Your son will be about the right age, fifteen or twenty years from now.
“One sentence, Elliott. Then I’m going to kick you out of here. I’m tired. This is the sentence: When we’ve won the war, I will work with all my might and main to see to it that the United States is not wheedled into the position of accepting any plan that will further France’s imperialistic ambitions, or that will aid or abet the British Empire in its imperial ambitions.”
This clash came to a head during a major confrontation between FDR and Churchill during the January 24, 1943 Casablanca Conference in Morocco. At this event, Elliot documents how his father first confronted Churchill’s belief in the maintenance of the British Empire’s preferential trade agreements upon which it’s looting system was founded:
“Of course,” he [FDR] remarked, with a sly sort of assurance, “of course, after the war, one of the preconditions of any lasting peace will have to be the greatest possible freedom of trade.”
He paused. The P.M.’s head was lowered; he was watching Father steadily, from under one eyebrow.
… etc.
——
FDR’s foreign-policy principles:
Postwar Foreign Policy Preparation, 1939-1945
p. 470 [FDR Administration’s 9 March 1943 draft, for the U.N.’s Charter]
&
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1943v01/d683
March 17, 1943: Memorandum For The President
Herewith is attached amended draft relating to dependent peoples, dated March 9,1943.
C[ORDELL ] H[ULL]
[Attachment]
March 9, 1943
DECLARATION BY THE UNITED NATIONS ON NATIONAL INDEPENDENCE
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hull_note
Content[edit]
The Hull Note consists of two sections. The first section is a "Draft mutual declaration of policy" by stating these principles:[7]
1. inviolability of territorial integrity and sovereignty of each and all nations.
2. non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries.
3. equality, including equality of commercial opportunity and treatment.
4. reliance upon international cooperation and conciliation for the prevention and pacific settlement of controversies
5. non-discrimination in international commercial relations.
6. international economic cooperation and abolition of extreme nationalism as expressed in excessive trade restrictions.
7. non-discriminatory access by all nations to raw material supplies.
8. full protection of the interests of consuming countries and populations as regards the operation of international commodity agreements.
9. establishment of such institutions and arrangements of international finances
The second section consists of 10 points and is titled "Steps to be taken by the Government of the United States and by the Government of Japan"[7]
1. multilateral non-aggression pact among the British Empire, China, Japan, the Netherlands, the Soviet Union, Thailand and the United States
2. pledge itself to respect the territorial integrity of French Indochina
3. withdraw of all military, naval, air and police forces from China and from Indo-China
4. no support (militarily, politically, economically) of any Government or regime in China other than the national Government of the Republic of China
5. Both Governments to give up all extraterritorial rights in China
6. enter into negotiations for the conclusion between the United States and Japan of a trade agreement, based upon reciprocal most favored-nation treatment
7. remove the freezing restrictions on Japanese funds in the United States and on American funds in Japan
8. agree upon a plan for the stabilization of the dollar-yen rate
9. no agreement with any third powers to conflict with the fundamental purpose of this agreement
10. influence other Governments to adhere to the basic political and economic principles in this agreement
——
https://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-churchill
“Documents Related to FDR and Churchill”
Background
A close friendship and the excellent working relations that developed between U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill were crucial in the establishment of a unified effort to deal with the Axis powers. This working relationship was highlighted by many joint appearances and agreements that not only addressed the immediate needs of the Allies but also the planning for a successful peace following victory.
In late December 1941, shortly after entry of the United States into World War II, Churchill met in Washington, D.C., with Roosevelt in what became known as the First Washington Conference, code name "Arcadia." The conference placed first priority on the Atlantic theater and the defeat of Germany and Italy. On December 24, 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill delivered Christmas greetings to the nation and the world from the South Portico of the White House during the lighting of the National Community Christmas Tree. FDR closed his short message with the following passage, "And so I am asking my associate, [and] my old and good friend, to say a word to the people of America, old and young, tonight, -- Winston Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain." These words clearly describe the relationship that these two leaders of the "Free World" had struck.
FDR had begun the long-term correspondence that developed into a close working friendship with Winston Churchill in early 1940 while Churchill was still first lord of the admiralty. The initial interaction was to encourage a neutral America to take a more active anti-Axis role.
In July 1940 newly appointed Prime Minister Churchill requested help from FDR, after Britain had sustained the loss of 11 destroyers to the German Navy over a 10-day period. Roosevelt responded by exchanging 50 destroyers for 99-year leases on British bases in the Caribbean and Newfoundland. A major foreign policy debate erupted over whether the United States should aid Great Britain or maintain strict neutrality.
In the 1940 presidental election campaign Roosevelt promised to keep America out of the war. He stated, "I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again; your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars." Nevertheless, FDR wanted to support Britain and believed the United States should serve as a "great arsenal of democracy." Churchill pleaded "Give us the tools and we'll finish the job." In January 1941, following up on his campaign pledge and the prime minister's appeal for arms, Roosevelt proposed to Congress a new military aid bill.
The plan was to "lend-lease or otherwise dispose of arms" and other supplies needed by any country whose security was vital to the defense of the United States. This Lend-Lease Act, proposed by FDR in January 1941 and passed by Congress in March, went a long way toward solving the concerns of both Great Britain's desperate need for supplies and America's desire to appear neutral. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during the debate over lend-lease, "We are buying . . . not lending. We are buying our own security while we prepare. By our delay during the past six years, while Germany was preparing, we find ourselves unprepared and unarmed, facing a thoroughly prepared and armed potential enemy."
In August 1941, Roosevelt and Churchill met for the first of nine face-to-face conferences ( http://www.fdrlibrary.marist.edu/ww2con95.html) during the war. The four-day meeting aboard a ship anchored off the coast of Newfoundland at Argentia Bay was devoted to an agreement on war aims and a vision for the future. The document created at this meeting was the The Atlantic Charter, an agreement on war aims between besieged Great Britain and the neutral United States. The charter set forth the concepts of self-determination, end to colonialism, freedom of the seas, and the improvement of living and working conditions for all people. Many of the ideas were similar to those proposed by Wilson's Fourteen Points , but not accepted by our allies at the Versailles Conference at the close of World War I.
From 1941 when they first met until FDR's death in 1945, Roosevelt and Churchill sustained a close personal and professional relationship. Playwright Robert Sherwood later wrote, "It would be an exaggeration to say that Roosevelt and Churchill became chums at this conference. . . . They established an easy intimacy, a joking informality and moratorium on pomposity and cant, -- and also a degree of frankness in intercourse which, if not quite complete, was remarkably close to it." Roosevelt cabled Churchill after the meeting, "It is fun to be in the same decade with you." Churchill later wrote, "I felt I was in contact with a very great man who was also a warm-hearted friend and the foremost champion of the high causes which we served."
Two of the documents featured in this lesson, the typewritten drafts of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill's Christmas Eve greeting from the White House in Washington, D.C., on December 24, 1941, and the remarks of the president and Queen Wilhelmina of the Netherlands are housed at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, NY.
Resources
Kimball, Warren. Forged in War: Roosevelt, Churchill and the Second World War. New York: William Morrow & Co., 1997.
——
https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1944v03/d708
FOREIGN RELATIONS OF THE UNITED STATES: DIPLOMATIC PAPERS, 1944, THE BRITISH COMMONWEALTH AND EUROPE, VOLUME III
Memorandum by President Roosevelt to the Secretary of State 37
[Washington,] January 24, 1944.
I saw Halifax last week and told him quite frankly that it was perfectly true that I had, for over a year, expressed the opinion that Indo-China should not go back to France but that it should be administered by an international trusteeship. France has had the country—thirty million inhabitants for nearly one hundred years, and the people are worse off than they were at the beginning.
As a matter of interest, I am wholeheartedly supported in this view by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek38 and by Marshal Stalin.39 I see no reason to play in with the British Foreign Office in this matter. The only reason they seem to oppose it is that they fear the effect it would have on their own possessions and those of the Dutch. They have never liked the idea of trusteeship because it is, in some instances, aimed at future independence. This is true in the case of Indo-China.
Each case must, of course, stand on its own feet, but the case of Indo-China is perfectly clear. France has milked it for one hundred years. The people of Indo-China are entitled to something better than that.
F[ranklin] D. R[oosevelt]
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https://web.archive.org/web/20210823184434/https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-congress-the-yalta-conference
https://archive.ph/wwrNc
“Address to Congress on the Yalta Conference”
1 March 1945
I hope that you will pardon me for this unusual posture of sitting down during the presentation of what I want to say, but I know that you will realize that it makes it a lot easier for me not to have to carry about ten pounds of steel around on the bottom of my legs; and also because of the fact that I have just completed a fourteen-thousand-mile trip.
First of all, I want to say, it is good to be home.
It has been a long journey. I hope you will also agree that it has been, so far, a fruitful one.
Speaking in all frankness, the question of whether it is entirely fruitful or not lies to a great extent in your hands. For unless you here in the halls of the American Congress—with the support of the American people — concur in the general conclusions reached at Yalta, and give them your active support, the meeting will not have produced lasting results.
That is why I have come before you at the earliest hour I could after my return. I want to make a personal report to you—and, at the same time, to the people of the country. Many months of earnest work are ahead of us all, and I should like to feel that when the last stone is laid on the structure of international peace, it will be an achievement for which all of us in America have worked steadfastly and unselfishly — together.
I am returning from this trip — that took me so fa r— refreshed and inspired. I was well the entire time. I was not ill for a second, until I arrived back in Washington, and there I heard all of the rumors which had occurred in my absence. I returned from the trip refreshed and inspired. The Roosevelts are not, as you may suspect, averse to travel. We seem to thrive on it!
Far away as I was, I was kept constantly informed of affairs in the United States. The modern miracles of rapid communication have made this world very small. We must always bear in mind that fact, when we speak or think of international relations. I received a steady stream of messages from Washington — I might say from not only the executive branch with all its departments, but also from the legislative branch—and except where radio silence was necessary for security purposes, I could continuously send messages any place in the world. And of course, in a grave emergency, we could have even risked the breaking of the security rule.
I come from the Crimea Conference with a firm belief that we have made a good start on the road to a world of peace.
There were two main purposes in this Crimea Conference. The first was to bring defeat to Germany with the greatest possible speed, and the smallest possible loss of Allied men. That purpose is now being carried out in great force. The German Army, and the German people, are feeling the ever-increasing might of our fighting men and of the Allied armies. Every hour gives us added pride in the heroic advance of our troops in Germany — on German soil — toward a meeting with the gallant Red Army.
The second purpose was to continue to build the foundation for an international accord that would bring order and security after the chaos of the war, that would give some assurance of lasting peace among the Nations of the world.
Toward that goal also, a tremendous stride was made.
At Teheran, a little over a year ago, there were long-range military plans laid by the Chiefs of Staff of the three most powerful Nations. Among the civilian leaders at Teheran, however, at that time, there were only exchanges of views and expressions of opinion. No political arrangements were made- and none was attempted.
At the Crimea Conference, however, the time had come for getting down to specific cases in the political field.
There was on all sides at this Conference an enthusiastic effort to reach an agreement. Since the time of Teheran, a year ago, there had developed among all of us a — what shall I call it? — a greater facility in negotiating with each other, that augurs well for the peace of the world. We know each other better.
I have never for an instant wavered in my belief that an agreement to insure world peace and security can be reached.
There were a number of things that we did that were concrete — that were definite. For instance, the lapse of time between Teheran and Yalta without conferences of civilian representatives of the three major powers has proved to be too long—fourteen months. During that long period, local problems were permitted to become acute in places like Poland and Greece and Italy and Yugoslavia.
Therefore, we decided at Yalta that, even if circumstances made it impossible for the heads of the three Governments to meet more often in the future, we would make sure that there would be more frequent personal contacts for the exchange of views, between the Secretaries of State and the Foreign Ministers of these three powers.
We arranged for periodic meetings at intervals of three or four months. I feel very confident that under this arrangement there will be no recurrences of the incidents which this winter disturbed the friends of world-wide cooperation and collaboration.
When we met at Yalta, in addition to laying our strategic and tactical plans for the complete and final military victory over Germany, there were other problems of vital political consequence.
For instance, first, there were the problems of the occupation and control of Germany—after victory—the complete destruction of her military power, and the assurance that neither the Nazis nor Prussian militarism could again be revived to threaten the peace and the civilization of the world.
Second — again for example — there was the settlement of the few differences that remained among us with respect to the International Security Organization after the Dumbarton Oaks Conference. As you remember, at that time, I said that we had agreed ninety percent. Well, that's a pretty good percentage. I think the other ten percent was ironed out at Yalta.
Third, there were the general political and economic problems common to all of the areas which had been or would be liberated from the Nazi yoke. This is a very special problem. We over here find it difficult to understand the ramifications of many of these problems in foreign lands, but we are trying to.
Fourth, there were the special problems created by a few instances such as Poland and Yugoslavia.
Days were spent in discussing these momentous matters and we argued freely and frankly across the table. But at the end, on every point, unanimous agreement was reached. And more important even than the agreement of words, I may say we achieved a unity of thought and a way of getting along together.
Of course, we know that it was Hitler's hope — and the German war lords’ — that we would not agree — that some slight crack might appear in the solid wall of Allied unity, a crack that would give him and his fellow gangsters one last hope of escaping their just doom. That is the objective for which his propaganda ma- chine has been working for many months.
But Hitler has failed.
Never before have the major Allies been more closely united — not only in their war aims but also in their peace aims. And they are determined to continue to be united with each other-and with all peace-loving Nations- so that the ideal of lasting peace will become a reality.
The Soviet, British, and United States Chiefs of Staff held daily meetings with each other. They conferred frequently with Marshal Stalin, and with Prime Minister Churchill and with me, on the problem of coordinating the strategic and tactical efforts of the Allied powers. They completed their plans for the final knock-out blows to Germany.
At the time of the Teheran Conference, the Russian front was removed so far from the American and British fronts that, while certain long-range strategic cooperation was possible, there could be no tactical, day-by-day coordination. They were too far apart. But Russian troops have now crossed Poland. They are fighting on the Eastern soil of Germany herself; British and American troops are now on German soil close to the Rhine River in the West. It is a different situation today from what it was fourteen months ago; a closer tactical liaison has become possible for the first time in Europe — and, in the Crimea Conference, that was something else that was accomplished.
Provision was made for daily exchange of information between the armies under the command of General Eisenhower on the western front, and those armies under the command of the Soviet marshals on that long eastern front, and also with our armies in Italy — without the necessity of going through the Chiefs of Staff in Washington or London as in the past.
You have seen one result of this exchange of information in the recent bombings by American and English aircraft of points which are directly related to the Russian advance on Berlin.
From now on, American and British heavy bombers will be used — in the day-by-day tactics of the war — and we have begun to realize, I think, that there is all the difference in the world between tactics on the one side, and strategy on the other — day-by-day tactics of the war in direct support of the Soviet armies, as well as in the support of our own on the western front.
They are now engaged in bombing and strafing in order to hamper the movement of German reserves and materials to the eastern and western fronts from other parts of Germany or from Italy.
Arrangements have been made for the most effective distribution of all available material and transportation to the places where they can best be used in the combined war effort- American, British, and Russian.
Details of these plans and arrangements are military secrets, of course; but this tying of things in together is going to hasten the day of the final collapse of Germany. The Nazis are learning about some of them already, to their sorrow. And I think all three of us at the Conference felt that they will learn more about them tomorrow and the next day—and the day after that!
There will be no respite for them. We will not desist for one moment until unconditional surrender.
You know, I've always felt that common sense prevails in the long run — quiet, overnight thinking. I think that is true in Germany, just as much as it is here.
The German people, as well as the German soldiers must realize that the sooner they give up and surrender by groups or as individuals, the sooner their present agony will be over. They must realize that only with complete surrender can they begin to reestablish themselves as people whom the world might accept as decent neighbors.
We made it clear again at Yalta, and I now repeat that unconditional surrender does not mean the destruction or enslavement of the German people. The Nazi leaders have deliberately withheld that part of the Yalta declaration from the German press and radio. They seek to convince the people of Germany that the Yalta declaration does mean slavery and destruction for them — they are working at it day and night for that is how the Nazis hope to save their own skins, and deceive their people into continued and useless resistance.
We did, however, make it clear at the Conference just what unconditional surrender does mean for Germany.
It means the temporary control of Germany by Great Britain, Russia, France, and the United States. Each of these Nations will occupy and control a separate zone of Germany—and the administration of the four zones will be coordinated in Berlin by a Control Council composed of representatives of the four Nations.
Unconditional surrender means something else. It means the end of Nazism. It means the end of the Nazi Party—and of all its barbaric laws and institutions.
It means the termination of all militaristic influence in the public, private, and cultural life of Germany.
It means for the Nazi war criminals a punishment that is speedy and just — and severe.
It means the complete disarmament of Germany; the destruction of its militarism and its military equipment; the end of its production of armament; the dispersal of all its armed forces; the permanent dismemberment of the German General Staff which has so often shattered the peace of the world.
It means that Germany will have to make reparations in kind for the damage which has been done to the innocent victims of its aggression.
By compelling reparations in kind — in plants, in machinery, in rolling stock, and in raw materials- we shall avoid the mistake that we and other Nations made after the last war, the demanding of reparations in the form of money which Germany could never pay.
We do not want the German people to starve, or to become a burden on the rest of the world.
Our objective in handling Germany is simple — it is to secure the peace of the rest of the world now and in the future. Too much experience has shown that that objective is impossible if Germany is allowed to retain any ability to wage aggressive warfare.
These objectives will not hurt the German people. On the contrary, they will protect them from a repetition of the fate which the General Staff and Kaiserism imposed on them before, and which Hitlerism is now imposing upon them again a hundredfold. It will be removing a cancer from the German body politic which for generations has produced only misery and only pain to the whole world.
During my stay in Yalta, I saw the kind of reckless, senseless fury, the terrible destruction that comes out of German militarism. Yalta, on the Black Sea, had no military significance of any kind. It had no defenses.
Before the last war, it had been a resort for people like the Czars and princes and for the aristocracy of Russia — and the hangers-on. However, after the Red Revolution, and until the attack on the Soviet Union by Hitler, the palaces and the villas of Yalta had been used as a rest and recreation center by the Russian people.
The Nazi officers took these former palaces and villas—took them over for their own use. The only reason that the so-called former palace of the Czar was still habitable, when we got there, was that it had been given—or he thought it had been given — to a German general for his own property and his own use. And when Yalta was so destroyed, he kept soldiers there to protect what he thought would become his own, nice villa. It was a useful rest and recreation center for hundreds of thousands of Russian workers, farmers, and their families, up to the time that it was taken again by the Germans. The Nazi officers took these places for their own use, and when the Red Army forced the Nazis out of the Crimea — almost just a year ago — all of these villas were looted by the Nazis, and then nearly all of them were destroyed by bombs placed on the inside. And even the humblest of the homes of Yalta were not spared.
There was little left of it except blank walls — ruins — destruction and desolation.
Sevastopol—that was a fortified port, about forty or fifty miles away — there again was a scene of utter destruction—a large city with great navy yards and fortifications- I think less than a dozen buildings were left intact in the entire city.
I had read about Warsaw and Lidice and Rotterdam and Coventry — but I saw Sevastopol and Yalta! And I know that there is not room enough on earth for both German militarism and Christian decency.
Of equal importance with the military arrangements at the Crimea Conference were the agreements reached with respect to a general international organization for lasting world peace. The foundations were laid at Dumbarton Oaks. There was one point, however, on which agreement was not reached at Dumbarton Oaks. It involved the procedure of voting in the Security Council. I want to try to make it clear by making it simple. It took me hours and hours to get the thing straight in my own mind — and many conferences.
At the Crimea Conference, the Americans made a proposal on this subject which, after full discussion was, I am glad to say, unanimously adopted by the other two Nations.
It is not yet possible to announce the terms of that agreement publicly, but it will be in a very short time.
When the conclusions reached with respect to voting in the Security Council are made known, I think and I hope that you will find them a fair solution of this complicated and difficult problem. They are founded in justice, and will go far to assure international cooperation in the maintenance of peace.
A conference of all the United Nations of the world will meet in San Francisco on April 25, 1945. There, we all hope, and confidently expect, to execute a definite charter of organization under which the peace of the world will be preserved and the forces of aggression permanently outlawed.
This time we are not making the mistake of waiting until the end of the war to set up the machinery of peace. This time, as we fight together to win the war finally, we work together to keep it from happening again.
I — as you know — have always been a believer in the document called the Constitution of the United States. And I spent a good deal of time in educating two other Nations of the world in regard to the Constitution of the United States. The charter has to be — and should be — approved by the Senate of the United States, under the Constitution. I think the other Nations all know it now. I am aware of that fact, and now all the other Nations are. And we hope that the Senate will approve of what is set forth as the Charter of the United Nations when they all come together in San Francisco next month.
The Senate of the United States, through its appropriate representatives, has been kept continuously advised of the program of this Government in the creation of the International Security Organization.
The Senate and the House of Representatives will both be represented at the San Francisco Conference. The Congressional delegates to the San Francisco Conference will consist of an equal number of Republican and Democratic members. The American Delegation is — in every sense of the word — bipartisan.
World peace is not a party question. I think that Republicans want peace just as much as Democrats. It is not a party question — any more than is military victory — the winning of the war.
When the Republic was threatened, first by the Nazi clutch for world conquest back in 1940 and then by the Japanese treachery in 1941, partisanship and politics were laid aside by nearly every American; and every resource was dedicated to our common safety. The same consecration to the cause of peace will be expected, I think, by every patriotic American, and by every human soul overseas.
The structure of world peace cannot be the work of one man, or one party, or one Nation. It cannot be just an American peace, or a British peace, or a Russian, a French, or a Chinese peace. It cannot be a peace of large Nations- or of small Nations. It must be a peace which rests on the cooperative effort of the whole world.
It cannot be a structure of complete perfection at first. But it can be a peace — and it will be a peace — based on the sound and just principles of the Atlantic Charter — on the concept of the dignity of the human being — and on the guarantees of tolerance and freedom of religious worship.
As the Allied armies have marched to military victory, they have liberated people whose liberties had been crushed by the Nazis for four long years, whose economy has been reduced to ruin by Nazi despoilers.
There have been instances of political confusion and unrest in these liberated areas — that is not unexpected — as in Greece or in Poland or in Yugoslavia, and there may be more. Worse than that, there actually began to grow up in some of these places queer ideas of, for instance, "spheres of influence" that were incompatible with the basic principles of international collaboration. If allowed to go on unchecked, these developments might have had tragic results in time.
It is fruitless to try to place the blame for this situation on one particular Nation or on another. It is the kind of development that is almost inevitable unless the major powers of the world continue without interruption to work together and to assume joint responsibility for the solution of problems that may arise to endanger the peace of the world.
We met in the Crimea, determined to settle this matter of liberated areas. Things that might happen that we cannot foresee at this moment might happen suddenly — unexpectedly — next week or next month. And I am happy to confirm to the Congress that we did arrive at a settlement — and, incidentally, a unanimous settlement.
The three most powerful Nations have agreed that the political and economic problems of any area liberated from Nazi conquest, or of any former Axis satellite, are a joint responsibility of all three Governments. They will join together, during the temporary period of instability — after hostilities — to help the people of any liberated area, or of any former satellite state, to solve their own problems through firmly established democratic processes.
They will endeavor to see to it that the people who carry on the interim government between occupation of Germany and true independence, will be as representative as possible of all democratic elements in the population, and that free elections are held as soon as possible thereafter.
Responsibility for political conditions thousands of miles away can no longer be avoided by this great Nation. Certainly, I do not want to live to see another war. As I have said, the world is smaller — smaller every year. The United States now exerts a tremendous influence in the cause of peace throughout all the world. What we people over here are thinking and talking about is in the interest of peace, because it is known all over the world. The slightest remark in either House of the Congress is known all over the world the following day. We will continue to exert that influence, only if we are willing to continue to share in the responsibility for keeping the peace. It will be our own tragic loss, I think, if we were to shirk that responsibility.
The final decisions in these areas are going to be made jointly; and therefore they will often be a result of give-and-take compromise. The United States will not always have its way a hundred percent — nor will Russia nor Great Britain. We shall not always have ideal answers — solutions to complicated international problems, even though we are determined continuously to strive toward that ideal. But I am sure that under the agreements reached at Yalta, there will be a more stable political Europe than ever before.
Of course, once there has been a free expression of the people's will in any country, our immediate responsibility ends- with the exception only of such action as may be agreed on in the International Security Organization that we hope to set up.
The United Nations must also soon begin to help these liberated areas adequately to reconstruct their economy so that they are ready to resume their places in the world. The Nazi war machine has stripped them of raw materials and machine tools and trucks and locomotives. They have left the industry of these places stagnant and much of the agricultural areas are unproductive. The Nazis have left a ruin in their wake.
To start the wheels running again is not a mere matter of relief. It is to the national interest that all of us see to it that these liberated areas are again made self-supporting and productive so that they do not need continuous relief from us. I should say that was an argument based on plain common sense.
One outstanding example of joint action by the three major Allied powers in the liberated areas was the solution reached on Poland. The whole Polish question was a potential source of trouble in postwar Europe — as it has been sometimes before and we came to the Conference determined to find a common ground for its solution. And we did — even though everybody does not agree with us, obviously.
Our objective was to help to create a strong, independent, and prosperous Nation. That is the thing we must always remember, those words, agreed to by Russia, by Britain, and by the United States: the objective of making Poland a strong, independent, and prosperous Nation, with a government ultimately to be selected by the Polish people themselves.
To achieve that objective, it was necessary to provide for the formation of a new government much more representative than had been possible while Poland was enslaved. There were, as you know, two governments — one in London, one in Lublin — practically in Russia. Accordingly, steps were taken at Yalta to reorganize the existing Provisional Government in Poland on a broader democratic basis, so as to include democratic leaders now in Poland and those abroad. This new, reorganized government will be recognized by all of us as the temporary government of Poland. Poland needs a temporary government in the worst way — an ad interim government, I think is another way of 'putting it.
However, the new Polish Provisional Government of National Unity will be pledged to holding a free election as soon as possible on the basis of universal suffrage and a secret ballot.
Throughout history, Poland has been the corridor through which attacks on Russia have been made. Twice in this generation, Germany has struck at Russia through this corridor. To insure European security and world peace, a strong and independent Poland is necessary to prevent that from happening again.
The decision with respect to the boundaries of Poland was, frankly, a compromise. I did not agree with all of it, by any means, but we did not go as far as Britain wanted, in certain areas; we did not go so far as Russia wanted, in certain areas; and we did not go so far as I wanted, in certain areas. It was a compromise. The decision is one, however, under which the Poles will receive compensation in territory in the North and West in exchange for what they lose by the Curzon Line in the East. The limits of the western border will be permanently fixed in the final Peace Conference. We know, roughly, that it will include — in the new, strong Poland — quite a large slice of what now is called Germany. And it was agreed, also, that the new Poland will have a large and long coast line, and many new harbors. Also, that most of East Prussia will go to Poland. A corner of it will go to Russia. Also, that the anomaly of the Free State of Danzig will come to an end; I think Danzig would be a lot better if it were Polish.
It is well known that the people east of the Curzon Line — just for example, here is why I compromised — are predominantly white Russian and Ukrainian — they are not Polish; and a very great majority of the people west of the line are predominantly Polish, except in that part of East Prussia and eastern Germany, which will go to the new Poland. As far back as 1919, representatives of the Allies agreed that the Curzon Line represented a fair boundary between the two peoples. And you must remember, also, that there had not been any Polish government before 1919 for a great many generations.
I am convinced that the agreement on Poland, under the circumstances, is the most hopeful agreement possible for a free, independent, and prosperous Polish state.
The Crimea Conference was a meeting of the three major military powers on whose shoulders rested chief responsibility and burden of the war. Although, for this reason, France was not a participant in the Conference, no one should detract from the recognition that was accorded there of her role in the future of Europe and the future of the world.
France has been invited to accept a zone of control in Germany, and to participate as a fourth member of the Allied Control Council of Germany.
She has been invited to join as a sponsor of the International Conference at San Francisco next month.
She will be a permanent member of the International Security Council together with the other four major powers.
And, finally, we have asked that France be associated with us in our joint responsibility over all the liberated areas of Europe.
Agreement was reached on Yugoslavia, as announced in the communique; and we hope that it is in process of fulfillment. But, not only there but in some other places, we have to remember that there are a great many prima donnas in the world. All of them wish to be heard before anything becomes final, so we may have a little delay while we listen to more prima donnas.
Quite naturally, this Conference concerned itself only with the European war and with the political problems of Europe and not with the Pacific war.
In Malta, however, our combined British and American staffs made their plans to increase the attack against Japan.
The Japanese war lords know that they are not being over looked. They have felt the force of our B-29's, and our carrier planes; they have felt the naval might of the United States, and do not appear very anxious to come out and try it again.
The Japs now know what it means to hear that "The United States Marines have landed." And I think I can add that, having Iwo Jima in mind, "The situation is well in hand."
They also know what is in store for the homeland of Japan now that General MacArthur has completed his magnificent march back to Manila and now that Admiral Nimitz is establishing air bases right in the back yard of Japan itself — in Iwo Jima.
But, lest somebody else start to stop work in the United States, I repeat what I have so often said — in one short sentence — even in my sleep: "We haven't won the wars yet"—with an s on "wars."
It is still a long, tough road to Tokyo. It is longer to go to Tokyo than it is to Berlin, in every sense of the word. The defeat of Germany will not mean the end of the war against Japan. On the contrary, we must be prepared for a long and costly struggle in the Pacific.
But the unconditional surrender of Japan is as essential as the defeat of Germany. I say that advisedly, with the thought in mind that that is especially true if our plans for world peace are to succeed. For Japanese militarism must be wiped out as thoroughly as German militarism.
On the way back from the Crimea, I made arrangements to meet personally King Farouk of Egypt, Halle Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia, and King Ibn Saud of Saudi Arabia. Our conversations had to do with matters of common interest. They will be of great mutual advantage because they gave me, and a good many of us, an opportunity of meeting and talking face to face, and of exchanging views in personal conversation instead of formal correspondence.
For instance, on the problem of Arabia, I learned more about that whole problem — the Moslem problem, the Jewish problem — by talking with Ibn Saud for five minutes, than I could have learned in the exchange of two or three dozen letters.
On my voyage, I had the benefit of seeing the Army and Navy and the Air Force at work.
All Americans, I think, would feel as proud of our armed forces as I am, if they could see and hear what I saw and heard.
Against the most efficient professional soldiers and sailors and airmen of all history, our men stood and fought — and won.
This is our chance to see to it that the sons and the grandsons of these gallant fighting men do not have to do it all over again in a few years.
The Conference in the Crimea was a turning point- I hope in our history and therefore in the history of the world. There will soon be presented to the Senate of the United States and to the American people a great decision that will determine the fate of the United States — and of the world — for generations to come.
There can be no middle ground here. We shall have to take the responsibility for world collaboration, or we shall have to bear the responsibility for another world conflict.
I know that the word "planning" is not looked upon with favor in some circles. In domestic affairs, tragic mistakes have been made by reason of lack of planning; and, on the other hand, many great improvements in living. and many benefits to the human race, have been accomplished as a result of adequate, intelligent planning — reclamation of desert areas, developments of whole river valleys, and provision for adequate housing.
The same will be true in relations between Nations. For the second time in the lives of most of us this generation is face to face with the objective of preventing wars. To meet that objective, the Nations of the world will either have a plan or they will not. The groundwork of a plan has now been furnished, and has been submitted to humanity for discussion and decision.
No plan is perfect. Whatever is adopted at San Francisco will doubtless have to be amended time and again over the years, just as our own Constitution has been.
No one can say exactly how long any plan will last. Peace can endure only so long as humanity really insists upon it, and is willing to work for it- and sacrifice for it.
Twenty-five years ago, American fighting men looked to the statesmen of the world to finish the work of peace for which they fought and suffered. We failed them then. We cannot fail them again, and expect the world again to survive.
The Crimea Conference was a successful effort by the three leading Nations to find a common ground for peace. It ought to spell the end of the system of unilateral action, the exclusive alliances, the spheres of influence, the balances of power, and all the other expedients that have been tried for centuries—and have always failed.
We propose to substitute for all these, a universal organization in which all peace-loving Nations will finally have a chance to join.
I am confident that the Congress and the American people will accept the results of this Conference as the beginnings of a permanent structure of peace upon which we can begin to build, under God, that better world in which our children and grandchildren — yours and mine, the children and grandchildren of the whole world- must live, and can live.
And that, my friends, is the principal message I can give you. But I feel it very deeply, as I know that all of you are feeling it today, and are going to feel it in the future.
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NOW WILL BE PRESENTED THE STATEMENTS BY FDR-OPPONENTS:
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https://web.archive.org/web/20200723111132/https://www.americanheritage.com/we-cant-do-business-stalin
“We Can’t Do Business With Stalin”
Elie Abel, August 1977, American Heritage magazine
Even at this late date it is far from clear that the Cold War in Europe could have been avoided, once the certainty of Hitler’s defeat had robbed the wartime alliance of its compelling necessity. The revisionist notion that Harry Truman, beguiled by the wrong set of advisers and emboldened by the success of the atomic bomb, started the Cold War by setting out to reverse Franklin Roosevelt’s policies of wartime cooperation with the Soviet Union has been all too widely accepted. No one can say with assurance how Roosevelt would have dealt with the postwar challenge had he lived to serve out his fourth term. But there is persuasive evidence that in the last weeks of his life, after his return from the Yalta Conference, Roosevelt had substantially lost confidence in Stalin’s word. He said as much to Anna Rosenberg (Huffman) on March 23, 1945, less than three weeks before his death at Warm Springs. “We can’t do business with Stalin,” the President exclaimed. “He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” To Anne O’Hare McCormick, another old friend, Roosevelt said that he now realized Stalin was not a man of his word; either that or he was no longer in control of the Soviet government.
The record of Roosevelt’s messages to Stalin and Churchill in the final weeks of his life traces a rising curve of disappointment and frustration, together with the first sign of a new readiness to consider harder policies toward the Soviet Union.
From the perspective of Spaso House, Ambassador Harriman’s residence in Moscow, a definite change of atmosphere could be felt many months before Roosevelt’s death, indeed before Yalta. The war had been going well in the summer of 1944. General Eisenhower’s forces made good their landing in Normandy. The Red Army was driving the German invaders from Soviet soil. There could be no question that final victory would be ours in a matter of months. On June 10 [1944], four days after D-Day in France, Stalin at last acknowledged the tremendous achievement of American and British arms in crossing the English Channel to attack Hitler’s European Fortress from the west. Stalin’s bitter reproaches of 1942 and 1943 (“The British are too cowardly to fight”) were forgotten. “The history of war,” he said to the American ambassador, “has never witnessed such a grandiose operation. Napoleon himself never attempted it. Hitler envisaged it but he was a fool for never having attempted it.”
Six weeks later, as the Red Army rolled westward into Poland, fighting for the first time on foreign territory, Stalin broke a promise to Roosevelt. Acting without consultation or warning to his allies, he assigned “full responsibility in matters of civil government” on Polish territory to a newly formed Polish Committee for National Liberation (soon to be known as the Lublin Committee). The Polish government, which had taken refuge in London after the German invasion in 1939, abruptly found itself confronted with a rival regime, one already installed on Polish soil and enjoying the powerful support of the Soviet Union. The American embassy in Moscow had long since warned Roosevelt and his Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, against just such a fait accompli . As early as March 3,1944, Stalin had shown his hand in a conversation with the American ambassador. “While the Red Army is liberating Poland,” he said, “[Stanislaw] Mikolajczyk [premier of the Polish government in exile] will go on repeating his platitudes. By the time Poland is liberated, Mikolajczyk’s Government will have changed, or another government will have emerged in Poland.”
Poland had become the touchstone of Soviet behavior after the war was won, the first test of Stalin’s attitude toward his weaker neighbors to the west. From Spaso House, all the brave talk about a free, independent Poland emerging from the war came to sound more and more improbable. Cordell Hull was not disposed to listen when the ambassador urged upon him the supreme importance of pressing the London Poles to come to terms with the Kremlin before the Red Army took matters into its hands. Roosevelt preferred to leave the prickly Polish problem to the British. He faced a tough campaign for re-election. The last thing he wanted was to involve himself in the delicate questions of Poland’s postwar boundaries or the reconstruction of the London exile government to make it more palatable to the Russians. He feared the wrath of Polish-American voters in Buffalo, Hamtramck, and Chicago.
But events inside Poland would not wait. On July 23, the Red Army captured Lublin. Brest-Litovsk fell on July 26. Three days later the right flank of Marshal Rokossovsky’s First White Russian Front reached the east bank of the river Vistula, opposite Warsaw. When the reluctant Mikolajczyk at last Hew to Moscow and saw Stalin on August 3, the city had” risen up in arms against the Germans. “Warsaw will be free any day,” Mikolajczyk said. “God grant that it be so,” Stalin responded. But when the Polish leader asked for Soviet help to the embattled city, Stalin sneered at the weakness of the so-called Home Army: “What kind of army is it — without artillery, tanks, air force? They do not even have enough hand weapons. In modern war this is nothing.…” Stalin added that he would supply no arms to the uprising. “For this reason,” he said, tightening the screw on the London Poles, “you have to reach an understanding with the Lublin Committee.…We cannot tolerate two [Polish] governments.”
——
https://web.archive.org/web/20230115181809/https://www.martingilbert.com/blog/6966/
https://archive.ph/wphIf#selection-397.257-406.0
from Martin Gilbert’s 1989 The Second World War:
In London, Churchill looked uneasily at the Soviet advance, and in particular at what was happening in Poland, where it had become clear that the free elections, promised by Stalin at Yalta less than three months earlier, would not take place. As early as March 23 [1945], having read the reports from Averell Harriman in Moscow, Roosevelt had told a close friend: “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” On April 2, Churchill telegraphed direct to General Eisenhower, suggesting that it might even be possible for the Western Allies to advance eastward to Berlin. “I deem it highly important,” he wrote, “that we should shake hands with the Russians as far to the East as possible.”
… the political and ideological clash over Poland cast a dark cloud over the imminence of victory “The changes in the Russian attitude and atmosphere since Yalta are grave,” Churchill wrote to the Chiefs of Staff Committee on April 3. To the Dominion and Indian representatives who attended the War Cabinet in London that day, Churchill warned: “Relations with Russia, which had offered such fair promise at the Crimea Conference [Yalta[], had grown less cordial during the ensuing weeks. There had been grave difficulties over the Polish question; and it now seemed possible that Russia would not be willing to give full co-operation at the San Francisco Conference on the proposed new World Organization. It was by no means clear that we could count on Russia as a beneficent influence in Europe or as a willing partner in maintaining the peace of the world. Yet, at the end of the war, Russia would be left in a position of preponderant power and influence throughout the whole of Europe.”
——
The 2024 “A Tale of Two Conferences”, by Sierra Smith, provides, in its first 11 pages, the most comprehensive, well-documented, and accurate, historical account of FDR’s working relationship with Stalin, but then on its 12th page she makes the undocumented false statement that, “Though Roosevelt had led the United States to the brink of Allied victory, he had not developed any clear policies for the United States' role in the postwar world. He never would.” (That’s the standard line amongst the ‘historians.) And, then, it grossly misinterprets Truman (likewise in accord with the standard line among the ‘historians’) as continuing FDR’s foreign policies but as his being more realistic about Stalin than FDR was. I shall quote here only from her paper’s first 11 pages (not from the rest (which miscomprehends (since that’s what she had been taught)):
Roosevelt maintained this hope that he could work with Stalin despite repeated warnings from several of his advisors. From the beginning, the Eastern European Division of the State Department warned Roosevelt that "the fundamental obstacle in the way of the establishment with Russia of the relations usual between nations ... is the world revolutionary aims and practices of the rulers of that country.18 The division members saw too much contrast between the democratic world the United States envisioned and the communist world the Soviets were planning, and they saw nothing in Russia's conduct, past or present, to suggest it would withdraw those ideals. William Bullitt, the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union, reminded FDR of the Soviet's well known record of aggression and despotism. In 1943 he wrote a long letter to the president, urging him to stiffen his stance, warning him of Russia's probable intentions of annexing Eastern European states after the war.19
Loy Henderson was one of many Foreign Affairs officials who constantly maintained that the Soviets could not be trusted. He consistently fought against making over-commitments to the Soviets and as chief of the lend-lease division, struggled against Roosevelt's eagerness to send Russia everything it asked for.20 The United States diplomat in Moscow before and during World War II, Charles Bohlen, recognized that the philosophies of the Soviet Union were "not only alien but also definitely hostile to everything democratic," yet found it almost impossible to convince others that "admiration for the extraordinary valor of the Russian troops ... was blinding Americans to the dangers of the Bolshevik leaders." 21 Roosevelt paid little attention to the warnings of his cabinet because he felt he could "personally handle Stalin better than either [Churchill's] Foreign Office or [his own] State Department."22 Some historians characterize FDR as more of a "grand European statesman" than a democratic president. He kept his plans to himself and operated under the assumption that he was the "unquestioned leader of the country, its sole representative in the cauldron of wartime international politics."23 Roosevelt boldly forged ahead in his dealings with the Soviet Union despite the consistent warnings he received from his advisors.
In the spring of 1943, Allied forces began their attack on Italy in earnest, first bombing Rome and then invading the island of Sicily. This threw the Italian peninsula into a crisis and, just a few months later on September 3, 1943, the Kingdom of Italy and the Allied powers signed the Armistice of Cassibile which demanded the total capitulation of Italy. Because Italy had been liberated exclusively by Western troops, decisions concerning its surrender and the Allied administration of Italy for the remainder of the war were made exclusively by the United States and Great Britain. After negotiating with the Italian government, Roosevelt and Churchill simply informed the Soviet Union of the proposed terms and then acted before Stalin could reply. Moreover, the terms of the armistice established the principle that military authorities have the right to determine who should be allowed to form local governments and ascertain when normal policies should resume.24
The precedent set in Italy essentially gave the Soviet Union the right to direct negotiations and postwar reorganization in the Eastern European states, which the Soviets would exclusively liberate, and made Western attempts to interfere in this area, especially in Poland, seem unrealistic. Historian William McNeill concluded that by excluding the Soviet Union from negotiations in Italy, Roosevelt and Churchill "prepared the way for their own exclusion from any but a marginal share in the affairs of Eastern Europe." 25 This is exactly what happened. … Roosevelt and Churchill’s previous decisions gave them little negotiating power in determining the postwar future of Eastern Europe. …
——
https://go.gale.com/ps/i.do?id=GALE%7CA118496506&sid=googleScholar&v=2.1&it=r&linkaccess=abs&issn=10667210&p=AONE&sw=w&userGroupName=vol_oweb&isGeoAuthType=true&aty=geo
[https://www.hoover.org/research/roosevelts-failure-yalta]
“Roosevelt's failure at Yalta”
Citation metadata
Author: Arnold Beichman
Date: Spring 2003
From: Humanitas(Vol. 16, Issue 1)
Publisher: National Humanities Institute
Document Type: Article
Length: 2,949 words
For some time now I have been researching a political biography of former Vice President Henry A. Wallace and trying to understand why during his incumbency from 1940 on he adhered so closely to Soviet foreign policy ambitions. In seeking answers to this question, I felt that it would be valuable to make a study of the politico-cultural climate of the Wallace period. I was amazed at the extraordinary pro-Soviet atmosphere in the United States from the White House on down during the years of World War II.
The murderous Moscow trials were overlooked, and Stalin's dictatorship was redefined as a new form of democracy. Life Magazine described the FBI as roughly analogous to the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, and described Lenin as "perhaps the greatest man of modern times." It devoted an entire issue, March 29, 1943, to glorifying Russia including these words: "If the Soviet leaders tell us that the control of information was necessary to get this job done, we can afford to take their word for it." Hollywood produced pro-Soviet films like Mission to Moscow, Song of Russia, North Star, and Counterattack. James Reston of the New York Times asserted that "anti-Russian remarks [were] a shabby un-American game." The New York Times itself gushed that "Marxian thinking in Soviet Russia is out ... the capitalist system, better described as the competitive system, is back." (1)
Collier's Magazine in 1943 suggested that the Soviet Union was moving "toward something resembling our own and Great Britain's democracy." The Saturday Evening Post published 24 articles between 1943 and 1945 by its correspondent Edgar Snow, all of them pro-Soviet. George Kennan summed up the situation well: "Those who criticized the Soviets during the crucial years of 1942-1943 were sometimes accused of near treasonous behavior." (2) As Evelyn Waugh put it: "During the German War it was thought convenient to attribute heroic virtues to any who shared our quarrel and to suppress all mention of their crimes." (3)
Since the end of the Cold War there has been considerable reviewing of President Roosevelt's policies towards the Soviet Union. Most notable has been the essay of Professor Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., who has argued that the 1989 counter-revolution in Central Europe vindicates President Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy which, he says, had been criticized for its "naivete" about Stalin.
However, I argue that, from the time he took office in 1933, FDR ignored informed assessments within the State Department of the nature of Soviet diplomacy and that, consequently, the peoples of Central Europe for some four decades paid the price. As sources for my rebuttal of Schlesinger, I will cite the writings and memoirs of Charles Bohlen, Averell Harriman, Loy Henderson and George Kennan, participant-observers in the development of Soviet-American diplomacy between 1933 and 1945. I begin with a discussion of Professor Schlesinger's article as he is the most authoritative of FDR's defenders.
The eminent Pulitzer prize-winning historian's op-ed essay in the Wall Street Journal was titled, "FDR Vindicated." Professor Schlesinger's theme was that despite longtime disparagement of President Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy, especially the 1945 Yalta agreement, the successful counter-revolutions in Central Europe were really "the fulfillment of Roosevelt's purposes at the Yalta conference." (4)
"Roosevelt was much criticized too for naivete," wrote Professor Schlesinger, "in supposedly thinking that he could charm Stalin into amiable postwar collaboration ... FDR's determination to work on and through Stalin was, it seems in retrospect, founded on shrewd insight. As Walter Lippmann once observed, Roosevelt was too cynical to think he could charm Stalin."
I argue to the contrary that President Roosevelt was naive about Stalin and about communism from 1933 until some days, perhaps, before his death in 1945. I will argue from the published record that Professor Schlesinger's essay is a piece of a historical revisionism aimed at restoring FDR's blemished reputation as a statesman. Those I quote in rebuttal of Professor Schlesinger's thesis, such as Kennan, Bohlen, Henderson, and Harriman, can in no way be described as representing a rightist viewpoint.
I do not intend to argue about President Roosevelt's "purposes" at Yalta. Obviously the co-author of the Atlantic Charter could not have wanted Central Europe to fall prey to Stalin's postwar designs. The question, then, is not the virtuousness of FDR's purposes but the quality and intelligence of his diplomacy in seeking the fulfillment of those purposes.
I begin by examining President Roosevelt's decision to engage in personal diplomacy in 1933 on the question of recognition of the Soviet Union. (5) He had already demonstrated his preference for the lying reportage of Walter Duranty, the New York Times man in Moscow, to the informed opinion of State Department experts. (6)
In the early years after the Bolshevik Revolution some U.S. diplomats, who had begun to specialize in Soviet affairs, believed that we should have as few dealings with the USSR as possible. Loy W. Henderson, a longtime career diplomat and one of the principal architects of twentieth-century U.S. diplomacy, opposed the establishment of diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union until it could give credible guarantees not to interfere in U.S. internal affairs.
In his memoirs Bohlen says that Henderson "led the quiet struggle in the [Roosevelt] administration against the soupy and syrupy attitude toward the Soviet Union. A man of the highest character, absolutely incorruptible, he always spoke his mind, a practice that did not make him popular." (7)
Henderson was concerned that Lenin's revolutionary ambitions had rendered the USSR institutionally incapable of fulfilling the international accords it signed, let alone of abiding by the private assurances it gave. He wrote:
It was my belief that since leaders of the Kremlin eventually were
intending to contribute to the violent overthrow of all the countries
with which the Soviet Union maintained relations, they considered
Soviet relations with every country to be of a temporary or
transitional character, subject to change at any moment. (8)
As the editor-annotator of Henderson's memoirs put it:
Throughout his [37] years of service in the diplomatic corps,
Henderson asked a fundamental question about our relations with the
Soviet government: "Can the Soviets be trusted?" His answer,
consistently, was "no."
The fundamental continuity of Soviet foreign policy vis-a-vis the Western democracies from day one of the Bolshevik Revolution, which is luminously clear to Henderson and his subalterns, was apparently not so clear to President Roosevelt and to those around him like Harry Hopkins, who simply did not, could not, or would not understand the meaning of Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism.
A few months after his March 4, 1933, inauguration, the State Department's Eastern European Division presented FDR with a paper on how he might proceed in the negotiations for recognition of the Soviet Union. The memorandum, dated July 27, 1933, contained this prescient paragraph:
The fundamental obstacle in the way of the establishment with Russia
of the relations usual between nations in diplomatic intercourse is
the world revolutionary aims and practices of the rulers of that
country.... It would seem, therefore, that an essential prerequisite
to the establishment of harmonious and trustful relations with the
Soviet Government is abandonment by the present rulers of Russia of
their world revolutionary aims and the discontinuance of their
activities designed to bring about the realization of such aims. More
specifically and with particular regard to the United States, this
prerequisite involves the abandonment by Moscow of direction,
supervision, control, financing, et cetera, through every agency
utilized for the purpose, of communist and other related activities
in the United States. (9)
Little attention was paid in the White House to this memorandum, which dealt with other bilateral issues as well. President Roosevelt was as determined to recognize the USSR as he was to ignore the openly avowed purposes of the Communist International, the Comintern. Even though the documents leading up to recognition contained a Soviet concession that it would refrain from subversive and propaganda activities in the United States, the document failed to mention the Comintern by name. Within a week after the announcement of the establishment of diplomatic relations, the Daily Worker, the Comintern voice in the U.S., was boasting that any claim that "the Litvinov Pact applies to the Communist International will meet with defeat." (10)
It was an ominous event: the Soviet Union was flouting its agreements before even the ink was dry. In the ensuing decades, Soviet disregard of its agreements would be repeated over and over again, events which American policymakers usually shrugged off with a what-can-you-do-about-it frown, often seeking to conceal the violations from the American public.
The United States Government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed. As late as 1953, George Kennan wrote that the United States "should never have established de jure relations with the Soviet government." (11) Yet FDR, with willful ignorance, embarked on a recognition policy without even seeking an enforceable quid pro quo. American recognition of the USSR, formally announced on November 16, 1933, only strengthened that totalitarian state.
What else but this same willful ignorance would account for the foolish White House statements about Stalin during World War II? What else but a frightening opportunism could account for President Roosevelt's silence on the Katyn Forest massacre when he knew from Winston Churchill that Stalin was responsible for this atrocity? (12) Despite Professor Schlesinger's ex post facto apologia, one observer at Yalta, Charles Bohlen, the President's interpreter, sharply criticized FDR at Yalta:
I did not like the attitude of the President, who not only backed
Stalin but seemed to enjoy the Churchill-Stalin exchanges. Roosevelt
should have come to the defense of a close friend and ally, who was
really being put upon by Stalin.... [Roosevelt's] apparent belief
that ganging up on the Russians was to be avoided at all cost was, in
my mind, a basic error, stemming from Roosevelt's lack of
understanding of the Bolsheviks.... In his rather transparent attempt
to dissociate himself from Churchill, the President was not fooling
anybody and in all probability aroused the secret amusement of
Stalin. (13)
Bohlen, who was at Yalta, said that President Roosevelt didn't understand the great gulf that separated the thinking of a Bolshevik from a non-Bolshevik. President Roosevelt, wrote Bohlen, "felt that Stalin viewed the world somewhat in the same light as he did, and that Stalin's hostility and distrust, which were evident in wartime conferences, were due to the neglect that Soviet Russia had suffered at the hands of other countries for years after the Revolution. What he did not understand was that Stalin's enmity was based on profound ideological convictions. The existence of a gap between the Soviet Union and the United States, a gap that could not be bridged, was never fully perceived by Franklin Roosevelt." (14)
W. Averell Harriman, Roosevelt's ambassador to Stalin, was also critical of the president, describing him as a statesman who had "no conception of the determination of the Russians to settle matters in which they consider that they have a vital interest in their own manner, on their own terms.... The President still feels he can persuade Stalin to alter his point of view on many matters that, I am satisfied, Stalin will never agree to." (15)
Had political leaders like President Roosevelt (who, at war's end, held the world in his hands) and his eminence grise, Harry Hopkins, understood Lenin's revolution, they would have understood Stalin's resolution. Thus they would not have mindlessly and naively misjudged the imperialist treaty diplomacy of the Soviet Union, quondam ally of Nazi Germany. Here for example are the words of Harry Hopkins, after Yalta 1945:
In our hearts we really believed a new day had dawned, the day we had
for so many years longed for and about which we had talked so much.
We were all convinced we had won the first great victory for peace,
and when I say we, I mean all of us, all civilized mankind. The
Russians had proved that they could be reasonable and far-sighted and
neither the President nor any one of us had the slightest doubt that
we could live with them and get on peaceably with them far into the
future. I must, however, make one reservation--I believe that in our
hearts we made the proviso that we couldn't foretell how things would
turn out if something happened to Stalin. (16)
And listen to the words of FDR himself talking about Stalin:
I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask
nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex
anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace. (17)
Noblesse oblige, indeed! (18)
By the time FDR realized he had failed at Yalta, it was too late to do anything about it. On March 23, 1945, nineteen days before he died, President Roosevelt confided to Anna Rosenberg, "Averell is right. We can't do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta." (19) In other words, FDR had really believed that Stalin would keep his promises and treaty engagements. (20)
Watching what was going on during and after the war, Kennan deplored "the inexcusable ignorance about the nature of Russian communism, about the history of its diplomacy." He wrote in 1960:
I mean by that F.D.R.'s well-known conviction that although Stalin
was a rather difficult character, he was at bottom a man like
everyone else; that the only reason why it had been difficult to get
on with him in the past was because there was no one with the right
personality, with enough imagination and trust to deal with him
properly; that the arrogant conservatives in the Western capitals had
always bluntly rejected him, and that his ideological prejudices
would melt away and Russian cooperation with the West could easily be
obtained, if only Stalin was exposed to the charm of a personality of
F.D.R.'s caliber. There were no grounds at all for this assumption;
it was so childish that it was really unworthy of a statesman of F.D.
R.'s standing. (21)
To paraphrase Kennan, there are no grounds at all for Professor Schlesinger's assumption that the Central European revolutions of 1989 vindicate President Roosevelt's wartime diplomacy. On the contrary, had President Roosevelt not been naive as well as closed-minded about Stalin, Central Europe might have escaped Stalin's yoke in 1945, thus obviating vindictive essays about FDR in 1990. (22)
A much later verdict on FDR comes from Professor Simon Schama who has written:
Roosevelt's amiable characterization of "Uncle Joe" had an effect on
American perception, turning a sinister and murderous dictator into a
character from Main Street. (23)
Causality in history is not easy to prove, certainly not with any conclusiveness and not without the risk of oversimplification. Still I think we can say with some justification that Roosevelt's negotiations with Stalin had little to do with the eventual liberation of the Soviet satellite states in the late 1980s. If anything, FDR unwittingly helped Stalin enforce his domination over Central and Eastern Europe.
(1) George Sirgiovanni, An Undercurrent of Suspicion: Anticommunism in America during World War II (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1990), 4-5.
(2) Paul Willen, "Who 'Collaborated' With Russia?" Antioch Review XIV:3 (September 1954), 259-83.
(3) Evelyn Waugh, The Spectator (February 12, 1994), 11.
(4) Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., "FDR Vindicated," Wall Street Journal (June 21, 1990), 12.
(5) For a careful examination of the pitfalls of summitry and personal diplomacy between heads of government, see the admonitory article by Dean Rusk, "The Presidency," Foreign Affairs 38:3 (April 1960), 360ff. It was written, obviously, before his appointment as secretary of state by President Kennedy.
(6) See S. J. Taylor, Stalin's Apologist (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 4, 184.
(7) Charles Bohlen, Witness to History: 1929-1969 (New York: Norton, 1973), 125.
(8) Loy W. Henderson, A Question of Trust: The Origins of U.S.-Soviet Diplomatic Relations, ed. and introduced by George W. Baer (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1987), xx. Also see Chapter 25, 227ff.
(9) The memorandum is entitled, "Problem Pertaining to Russian-American Relations Which, in the Interest of Friendly Relations Between the United States and Russia, Should be Settled Prior to the Recognition of the Soviet Government." Henderson, op. cit., 230.
(10) Ibid., 257.
(11) Alders Stephanson, Kennan and the Art of Foreign Policy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 349 footnote 1, Kennan letter to McGeorge Bundy. February 2, 1953.
(12) Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Corespondence, edited by Warren F. Kimball, volume II, (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), 388-99. Churchill sent FDR a secret report on Katyn to be returned "when you have finished with it as we are not circulating it officially in any way." According to the London Economist, "Proust and Katyn," May 5, 1990, p. 111, "Roosevelt forbade an associate to investigate the [Katyn] matter.”
——
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poland%E2%80%93Russia_relations
https://archive.ph/KwZYK#selection-2513.26-2631.4
Poland was seen by the Soviet Union as an enemy and, along with Germany under both the Weimar Republic and the Third Reich, as a politically illegitimate state created by the Allied Powers during World War I at the expense of Germany and Russia.[11][12] During the interwar period Joseph Stalin feared a coordinated Polish-Japanese two-front invasion. Numerous residents of the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic also fled across the border to Poland in protest of the First Five-Year Plan's collectivization policies and the Holodomor.[12] The Soviet Union supported subversive activities of the Communist Party of Poland, the Communist Party of Western Belarus, and the Communist Party of Western Ukraine. Poland in turn sent secret agents across the border to encourage rebellion against Soviet rule, which caused Stalin to begin to associate Poles in the Soviet Union with nationalist dissident and terrorist groups. The NKVD killed 111,091 Poles during the Polish Operation and deported many families to Kazakhstan. Fears of a Polish invasion and external espionage also gave justification to the general internal repression of the Great Purge in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the USSR and Poland concluded a formal Non-Aggression Pact in 1932.[12]]
(13) Bohlen, op. cit., 146. There may have been a personal reason for FDR's attitude to Winston Churchill. In 1918 the young FDR, then assistant secretary of the Navy, on a visit to England attended a dinner for the war ministers at Gray's Inn. He was introduced to the minister of munitions, Winston Churchill, who seemed to have offended the visitor from Washington. "I have always disliked [Churchill] since the time I went to England in 1918," FDR told Joseph P. Kennedy, his ambassador to the court of St. James, at the White House in 1939. "He acted like a stinker at a dinner I attended, lording it over all of us." In a subsequent conversation with Kennedy, he added that Churchill had been "one of the few men in public life who was rude to me." Geoffrey G. Ward, "FDR's Westem Front Idyll," Military History Quarterly, Vol. 2, No. 1 (Autumn 1989), 119. See his book, A First Class Temperament: The Emergence of Franklin Roosevelt (Harper & Row, 1989), 392-93.
(14) Bohlen, op.cit., 211.
(15) W. Averell Harriman and Elie Abel, Special Envoy to Churchill and Stalin, 1941-46 (New York: Random House, 1975), 369-70.
(16) Robert E. Sherwood, Roosevelt and Hopkins (New York: Harper, 1948), 870.
(17) Fred Ikle, How Nations Negotiate (New York: Harper & Row, 1964), 89.
(18) The full text of FDR's quote comes from William C. Bullitt, the first U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union, who never missed an opportunity to warn FDR of Stalin's treachery. But Roosevelt responded: "Bill, I don't dispute your facts; they are accurate. I don't dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins] says he's not and that he doesn't want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace." William C. Bullitt, "How We Won the War and Lost the Peace," Life (August 30, 1948).
(19) Harriman. op. cit., 344 (italics added).
(20) FDR wasn't the only naif to have occupied the White House. In 1949 President Truman said: "I like Stalin.... He is very fond of classical music.... I got the impression Stalin would stand by his agreements and also that he had a Politburo on his hands like the 80th Congress." Mr. Truman must have forgotten the meaning of the Truman Doctrine ("to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or outside pressure," quoted in William Taubman, Stalin's American Policy [New York: Norton, 1982], 100). In his recently published private journals, however, President Truman wrote: "[Stalin] broke twenty agreements he's made with Roosevelt and he broke thirty-two with me. I don't know how you're going to be able to tell in advance that a man is going to make agreements and then break them: He didn't live up to the agreements but nobody could really have predicted that in advance." Margaret Truman, ed., Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman (New York: Warner Books, 1989), 368-69.
(21) George Kennan, Russia and the West Under Lenin and Stalin (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), quoted in Ernst Topitsch, Stalin's War (New York: St Martin's Press, 1987), 129. Earlier, Kennan said that "FDR and others found charitable and comforting explanations for Soviet behavior." In Realities of American Foreign Policy (New York: Norton pb, 1966), 23. For a comprehensive analysis of the FDR-Stalin relationship, see the two articles by Robert Nisbet, "Roosevelt and Stalin," Modern Age (Spring 1986 and Summer-Fall 1986), 103-12 and 205-17. Also Nisbet's book Roosevelt and Stalin: The Failed Courtship (Washington, DC: Regnery Gateway, 1989).
(22) In 1945, Maxim Litvinov, Stalin's longtime foreign secretary, was quoted by Edgar Snow as saying privately: "Why did you Americans wait until now to begin opposing us in the Balkans and Eastern Europe? ... You should have done this three years ago. Now it's too late." "The Cycles of Western Fantasy," Encounter 402 (February 1959), 11, n. 17. Litvinov once was asked by Richard C. Hottelet, the CBS correspondent: "Suppose the West were suddenly to give in and grant all Moscow's demands ...? Would that lead to good will and easing of the present tension?" Litvinov answered: "It would lead to the West's being faced after a more or less short time, with the next series of demands."
(23) Simon Schama, "The Games of Great Men," New Yorker (May 2, 1994), 96.
Arnold Beichman
Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace
Beichman, Arnold
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2003 National Humanities Institute
——
People such as Beichman confused Stalin with Trotsky. FDR’s relationship was with Stalin — not with Stalin’s mortal enemy Trotsky. Here is a typical Trotskyite statement against Stalin’s foreign policies:
https://www.marxist.com/rise-of-comintern-role-trotsky.htm
“The rise of the Comintern and the role of Leon Trotsky”
Fred Weston, 10 December 2020
We, the genuine Marxists who base ourselves on the ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, recognise the first four congresses of the Communist International as genuine forums of Marxist debate, where most of the questions we still face today were hammered out. The resolutions and theses voted at those congresses are a heritage we claim as ours. The debates and speeches of the key leaders are also of extreme relevance today.
Two leaders stood out above all the others, Lenin and Trotsky. Much rewriting of history, with lies and distortions, has been carried out since then. The Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union falsified the role Trotsky had played in the Russian Revolution. The reason for that was that he continued to defend the genuine ideas of Bolshevism, which were a direct threat to the privileges and power that the bureaucracy had acquired in the course of the 1920s. …
The two outstanding leaders of the Russian revolution, Lenin and Trotsky, also played a key role in the building of the new International. Lenin’s role is unquestionable, but Trotsky’s has been somewhat blurred by subsequent events. Lenin died too early to witness the bureaucratic degeneration of the Soviet Union and the rise of the monstrous Stalinist regime – although he had an inkling of what was beginning to crystallise, as his last letters clearly demonstrate. It, therefore, fell to Trotsky to defend the real heritage of Lenin; his ideas and methods of work.
With the objective development of events: the defeat of one revolution after another that led to the isolation of the Soviet Union, which had inherited the backward economic conditions left by the Tsarist regime, the conditions for the rise of a privileged bureaucratic caste were prepared.
[In other words: Stalin was not for, he was against, the ComIntern, because the Comintern was Trotskyite, favoring the creation of communist revolutions around the world (in other words: Trotsky and the ComIntern favored communist imperialism, the communist version of imperialism, only communist instead of capitalist. That is the reason why Stalin had Trotsky killed. There was this internal war within communism, between Stalin’s “communism in one country” versus Trotsky’s communist imperialism, and writers such as Bohlen and Bleichman ignore this crucial fact. To them, Stalin was an imperialist and aimed to conquer the U.S.; to them, he was a Trotskyite seeking foreign conquest, they ignore that Stalin was afraid that Poland, a hostile neighboring country, might again invade Russia.
They also ignore that both Churchill and FDR recognized that because of the precedent that they had created by what they did in the case of Italy, both men would be wrong to propagandize against Stalin’s doing the same thing — but imposing communism instead of capitalism — in eastern Europe. And, so, such writers likewise are wrong to allege that when Truman on 25 July 1945 told Stalin that the U.S. would never recognize those Governments, Truman was simply continuing on FDR’s policy in that matter. Truman was, in fact, reversing it.
Why, then, did FDR privately express to his advisors, that he had gotten Stalin wrong? The reason was that he was expecting to live, not to die immediately, and that he wanted to keep those advisors with him into and through the upcoming San Francisco Conference creating the U.N. — FDR’s baby. He had it all figured out, and was expecting that in the U.N. which he would create at that Conference, Stalin, seeing the leadership that FDR was providing at that Conference, would be delighted to see that it would abolish and replace by the U.N. ALL imperialisms — including America’s control over Italy, and USSR’s control over Poland etc. I follow here with yet more evidences that FDR’s ideology was dominated by his opposition to imperialism — something that writers such as Beichman and Bohlen failed to understand:]
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The 21 December 1943 report by FDR’s aide at the Tehran Conference, “Patrick J. Hurley, Personal Representative of President Roosevelt in Iran, to the President”, said — and FDR endorsed it to his Secretary of State, and also to Winston Churchill (Hurley’s enemy) himself — said:
It is the purpose of the United States to sustain Iran as a free, independent nation and to afford the Iranian people an opportunity to enjoy the rights of man as set forth in the Constitution of the United States and to participate in the fulfillment of the principles of the Atlantic Charter. … Modern history of this country shows it to have been dominated by a powerful and greedy minority. The people have also been subjected to foreign exploitation and monopoly. … The American people, single-mindedly devoted to independence and liberty, are fighting today not to save the imperialisms of other nations nor to create an imperialism of our own but rather to bestow upon the world the benevolent principles of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms. … I have been told, usually by British [including directly by Churchill himself] and Americans, that the principles of imperialism already have succumbed to the principles of democracy. From my own observations, however, I must say that if imperialism is dead, it seems very reluctant to lie down.
The imperialism of Germany, Japan, Italy, France, Belgium, Portugal and the Netherlands will, we hope, end. … British imperialism seems to have acquired a new life. This appearance, however, is illusory. What appears to be a new life of British imperialism is the result of the infusion, into its emacipated form, of the blood of productivity and liberty from a free nation through lend lease. British imperialism is also being defended today by the blood of the soldiers of the most democratic nation on earth.
The names of the imperialistic nations are sufficient to indicate that a large part of the world’s population is still committed to the principles of imperialism. These names also indicate the opposition that will be encountered by any effort that has for its purpose the establishment of democracy in nations that are now subjected to the rule of imperialistic nations. We are approaching the irrepressible conflict between world-wide imperialism and world-wide democracy. It is depressing to note how many of our real friends in the world seem to be irrevocably committed to the old order of imperialism. ...
We did sustain Britain in the first world war as a first-class power but we did not succeed in making the world “safe for democracy”. Instead, when we backed away from the League of Nations and failed to make the peace terms an instrument of democracy, we made the world safe for imperialism. … Friendship and cooperation between the United States and the U.S.S.R. are essential to peace and harmony in the postwar world. There must, therefore, be a mutual understanding and acceptance of the postwar patterns for freedom which the great powers among the United Nations are to offer to their less powerful associates. Without such agreement there would be jealousy, suspicion and conflict. … Soviet prestige has benefited from their own well ordered conduct and by their direct and positive relations with the Iranians.
That denigration of Churchill can be seen as a complete document at “Churchill and Roosevelt, The Complete Correspondence: Volume 3, Alliance Declining, February 1944 — April 1945”, pages 6 and 7. Though the document was from 1943, it was so important that it was included in that book. FDR insulted Churchill profoundly by recommending to Churchill Hurley’s statement. Then, on page 14 there, FDR cabled to Hurley, 3 March 1944, rejecting in the most tactful way Churchill’s expressed suspicions that FDR was planning, after the War, for America to grab whatever it could get (such as Iran): “Please do accept my assurances that we are not making sheep’s eyes at your oil fields in Iraq or Iran.”
One key result of the Tehran Conference was the Declaration on Iran, dated 1 December 1943, at the Conference’s end, and it was signed by FDR, Churchill, and Stalin, and asserted that “The Governments of the United States, the U.S.S.R., and the United Kingdom are at one with the Government of Iran in their desire for the maintenance of the independence, sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iran.” FDR demanded Churchill sign it, and Churchill signed it very reluctantly (since it would mean giving up Iran), but he promptly ignored it as soon as FDR died and Truman became the U.S. President.
Then, on 14 April 1945, two days after FDR’s death, Hurley, now America’s Ambassador in China, wrote to the U.S. Secretary of State, in order to counter Churchill’s lies about what had been the intentions of FDR and had been agreed to between FDR and Stalin and Churchill:
In the discussions with Churchill and Eden, questions pertaining to the reconquest of colonial and imperial territory with American men and lend-lease supplies and the question pertaining to Hongkong and other problems were interjected by the British [especially by Churchill]. Nearly all questions pertaining to various phases of Asiatic policy were frankly discussed. Churchill definitely branded the American long range policy in regard to China as “the great American illusion”. He also disapproved America’s withdrawal of American resources in Burma and India for the stabilization of America’s military position in China. [Churchill wanted U.S. to become the new imperial master over both Burma and India.] He said that the withdrawal of American resources from Burma and India might have a serious effect on the position of Mountbatten. I countered that America’s position in China was facing disaster and to prevent American failure in China, I considered it justifiable and essential to use as much of American resources as necessary for the purpose of maintaining American position in China which, with the Pacific operations, constitute the real battlefronts against Japan. When the subject was broached, I told Churchill I was not authorized to settle the matter of the use of American resources reconquest of [British] colonial possessions in Southeast Asia. However, I expressed my own opinion that America should use all her resources for the defeat of Japan rather than dissipate them in the reconquest of colonial territory in the rear. Churchill disagreed most emphatically with my expressed stand. I replied that I felt Britain, France and the Netherlands had enough resources of their own to mop up the enemy in their own empires. The President briefed me regarding Hong Kong and authorized me to discuss it if the question were introduced. Churchill flatly stated that he would fight for Hong Kong to a finish. In fact he used the expression “Hong Kong will be eliminated from the British Empire only over my dead body”. He then said that the British Empire would ask for nothing and would give up nothing and I replied by saying that President Roosevelt had given him the British Empire which, in my opinion, was lost up until the time we entered the war. I added we had given freely of the resources and the lives of America and that I felt that his statement that he would accept nothing and give nothing was logically and factually incorrect. I reminded him that he had already accepted much. I then pointed out that if the British decline to observe the principles of the Atlantic Charter and continue to hold Hong Kong, that Russia would possibly make demands in regard to areas in North China that would further complicate the situation and nullify most of the principles for which the leaders of the United Nations, especially Roosevelt, had stated that we were fighting.
I said that such a position would also be a complete nullification of the principles of the Atlantic Charter which was reaffirmed by Britain and the Soviet in the Iran Declaration. At this point Churchill stated that Britain is not bound by the principles of the Atlantic Charter at all.
Furthermore, General Albert C. Wedemeyer, a friend of Hurley’s, cabled to the War Department, on 29 December 1944 (as quoted in the 1996 book by Maochun Yu, OSS in China: Prelude to Cold War, p. 198): “We Americans interpret United States policy as requiring a strong unified China and a China fighting effectively against Japanese. There is considerable evidence that British policy is not in consonance with United States policy. British Ambassador personally suggested to me that a strong unified China would be dangerous to the world and certainly would jeopardize the white man’s position immediately in Far East and ultimately throughout the world.” Wedemeyer was both anti-communist and anti-imperialist, and so was removed by President Truman in 1949. Another of the numerous stunning facts that this brilliant work of investigative history by Maochun Yu discloses is that Hurley was actually (p. 187) “mediating the feud between the [anti-communist] Nationalists and the Communists in the ... hope that the two sides could still somehow sit together and rule the Chinese people jointly.” Plus: both the State Department and the OSS were aiming to “provide complete equipment for up to twenty-five thousand [communist] guerillas” and to “supply at least one hundred thousand Woolworth one shot pistols for [communist] Peoples Militia.” There’s shown “Fig. 14. An OSS agent demonstrating to Communist agents how to use one-shot assassination weapons, Yenan, 1944.” Other books confirm from other nations’ archives. A February 1944 British War Department memo is quoted in Rolf Tanner’s 1994 A Strong Showing: Britain’s Struggle for Power as saying “Our main reason for favoring the restoration of Indochina to France is that we see danger to our own Far Eastern Colonies in President Roosevelt’s ideas that restoration depends upon the UN (or rather the U.S.) satisfying themselves.” It’s clear and indisputable that under FDR, the policy against Rhodesism ran deep. And that Truman quickly reversed it. FDR waged WW II as a war to end imperialism; Truman waged the Cold War to create the U.S. empire. The imputation of continuity in U.S. foreign relations after FDR’s death is a blatant misrepresentation of American history. It’s a lie.
The fascist John Foster Dulles also lied to deceive readers to believe that there was continuity between FDR’s vision for the global future and Truman’s. The opening of Chapter 5, titled “United Nations,” of his 1950 book War or Peace, says under the sub-head “Atlantic Charter” (intending there to confuse the reader to think that the Atlantic Charter had somehow been part of the U.N.’s creation):
When President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill met off Newfoundland in August, 1941, and drew up their Atlantic Charter statement of peace aims, no mention was made of an international organization. Mr. Churchill, as we have since learned, had proposed to include this; but President Roosevelt was unwilling. He told Mr. Sumner Welles that he thought “nothing could be more futile than the reconstitution of a body such as the Assembly of the League of Nations. According to Mr. Welles, the President felt a transition period would be necessary, “during which period Great Britain and the United States would undertake the policing of the world.”
That’s footnoted to the 1946 book by “Sumner Welles, Where Are We Heading?, p. 5.” However, what’s there states that in this conversation, which occurred on 11 August 1941, right after the brief period of the Molotov-Ribbentrop mutual non-aggression Pact which ended when Germany’s Operation Barbarossa against the USSR had started on 22 June 1941, and “our knowledge of the views of the Kremlin about the future establishment of world order … was very slight,” FDR clarified to Welles that the League of Nations would be an inadequate model, and a global governmental organization, much stronger than that, would instead be needed. Welles did not say that Churchill “had proposed to include this” (what became the U.N.). Explicitly, and only, FDR did.
In fact, Welles’s book said on page 6:
President Roosevelt, before he left Washington for the Atlantic meeting, had told me in some detail how he thought the approaching meeting with the British Prime Minister should be utilized to hold out hope to the enslaved peoples of the world. The English-speaking democracies both stood for principles of freedom and of justice. They should jointly bind themselves now to establish at the conclusion of the war a new world order based upon these principles.
When FDR met Churchill on 9 August 1941, the two men hadn’t met in decades and didn’t know each other well. Right at the start, they were at loggerheads on imperialism, and whereas FDR was already planning for what became the U.N., Churchill was already planning for what became NATO.
Dulles simply lied there, to suggest otherwise (that Churchill invented the U.N.). Dulles had actually been one of the people who had been working on Truman to deceive him as to what FDR’s post-WW-II intentions had been.
Furthermore, the basic message of that book by Sumner Welles was actually to the exact contrary of what the lying Dulles was saying and implying: Welles was saying that FDR’s vision for the Post-WW-II world had been hijacked — even that early (1946). This hijacking had started, it seems, on 11 August 1941, when the Atlantic Charter (not the U.N. Charter) was being drafted. The Welles book’s first chapter describes the negotiations between Churchill and FDR, which created the Atlantic Charter — the document that subsequently is sometimes virtually called “the North Atlantic Treaty” or “the NATO Treaty” or otherwise NATO’s precursor. (It was nothing of the sort.) On page 1, Welles stated (already deeply disappointed by the quick replacement of FDR’s plan):
At the moment of writing, the prospect [for world peace] is obscured. There is no freedom from that fear which afflicted all peoples during the uneasy truce between the great wars. Greed and lust for power are still omnipresent. The insane delusion that democracy and Communism cannot simultaneously exist in the world is rampant. Stupidity, reaction and timidity dominate the councils of the nations.
Opportunity after opportunity for understanding between all peoples has been lost.
This is exactly the opposite of the message in Dulles’s book (that U.S. global empire is the way to preserve world peace).
Page 10 from Welles, discussing the drafting of the Atlantic Charter, said that FDR “wrote upon the draft a further, and sixth, article, in these words:”
Sixth, because the future of peace is impossible if armament by land, sea and air continues in the hands of any nation which threatens or may threaten to use force outside its frontiers, we believe that disarmament of such nations is essential. We say this in the hope that the whole world may be guided in spirit to the goal of abandonment of force.
That clause failed to be included in the Atlantic Charter. Apparently, Churchill wouldn’t accept it, and FDR decided not to insist that it be included, but perhaps expected to push for it after the War would already be won and the U.N. would be organizing. Whereas FDR had been expecting that the Atlantic Charter would pertain to something that would evolve into the United Nations, he died and quickly it became transformed into something that would instead be confused with the founding of NATO — the anti-Soviet military alliance. This warping by Dulles is part of how the ‘history’ of the Cold War became the myth that it did. On Welles’s page 17, he wrote (this being, of course, in 1946 — prior even to the existence of NATO itself):
The final text of the Atlantic Charter did not, of course, contain all that either the President or Mr. Churchill would have like to see incorporated in it. But however material the omissions and the defects in the Atlantic Charter may now seem to be [as-of 1946], it must be read in the light of the moment when it was written.
Dulles’s book didn’t only misrepresent that, but he raped Welles’s core intent.
In fact, by the time of 25 August 1943, when FDR again met with Churchill, this time in Ottawa, he was more publicly forthcoming about what his plans were for the post-War world and what the Atlantic Charter should evolve into, which clearly was the United Nations, and NOT anything such as NATO. FDR’s “Address at Ottawa, Canada” stated that “There is a longing in the air. It is not a longing to go back to what they call ‘the good old days.’ I have distinct reservations as to how good ‘the good old days’ were. I would rather believe that we can achieve new and better days. … I am everlastingly angry only at those who assert vociferously that the four freedoms and the Atlantic Charter are nonsense because they are unattainable. If those people had lived a century and a half ago they would have sneered and said that the Declaration of Independence was utter piffle.” But Churchill and other Rhodesists were able to play upon Truman’s pettinesses in order to get Rhodes’s vision and not FDR’s to shape the post-WW-II world. Whereas King George III had lost America’s Revolutionary War, Cecil Rhodes’s ghost ended up winning World War II.
This warping of ‘history’ has been broad-scale and comprehensive. For example: the CIA-edited and written Wikipedia articles on the history of the U.N., such as “Declaration by United Nations”, continue Dulles’s rewrite, in order to convey the false impression that smears together the origins of both NATO and the U.N. The actual “Declaration” included only the WW II goals, of defeating the Axis, none of FDR’s post-WW-II goals, of an armed global federal Government that would outlaw empires and aggressions.
America’s aristocracy has mastered the PR of ‘humanitarian’ aggressions, and ‘standing for democracy’, and thus achieved the highest contemporary embodiment of George Orwell’s “Big Brother” scam against the public everywhere. These corrupt billionaires add, to that, the appeal of ‘anti-corruption’. And they always say also that these invasions, and coups, and sanctions, are necessary for America’s ‘national defense’. Their lies never stop. They give us lies, not history. A myth.
Nicolas J.S. Davies’s 2010 BLOOD ON OUR HANDS: The American Invasion and Destruction of Iraq said (page 7): “The American view that the United States can use these [the U.N. and other international] institutions or ignore them as it sees fit to advance its own interests is an outgrowth of the dominant position that the U.S. has occupied in the world since 1945.” That is true, but it begs the deeper questions, of why this psychopathic attitude came to control in the U.S. Government and media, and of how and why and when the U.S. Government actually became irrevocably committed to be such a psychopathic international operation, as that. Might-makes-right was supposed to have been the attitude of the three fascist powers that America was opposing in World War Two; so, how did that fascist attitude come to be the American attitude after WW II, and how soon after WW II did it happen, that America itself became a fascist nation? It happened on 25 July 1945, and this fit perfectly into the plan of Cecil Rhodes, which had started in 1877. Rhodes created the plan and started the organization. (The movie The Constant Gardener dramatizes how it works, as seen by its mid-level operatives.)
This plan became undeniable after U.S. President George Herbert Walker Bush, on 24 February 1990, started informing America’s vassal-nation heads-of-state, that though the Soviet Union would soon end its side of the Cold War, the U.S.-and-allied side would secretly continue the War until Russia itself becomes conquered. And all of America’s subsequent Presidents did continue it. Not only did Bill Clinton expand NATO right up to Russia’s borders. He infiltrated America’s corruption into Russia, so that U.S.-and-allied billionaires could operate in conjunction with ‘entrepreneurs’ they backed in Russia to suck its blood and cripple its economy. G.W. Bush brought seven more of Russia’s neighboring countries into NATO. Obama was perhaps the worst of all, by directly challenging Russia to war, in both Ukraine and Syria. Trump vaguely talked about withdrawing America from NATO, but continued Obama’s neoconservative policies. Biden likewise pretended to be different from his predecessor, but has continued his predecessors’ neoconservative policies.
Decent people who had served in earlier U.S. Administrations found it difficult to believe, and impossible to explain, how such a thing had happened. Here is the complete statement regarding that, from George Kennan in the New York Times on 2 May 1998, after Bill Clinton expanded NATO to Russia’s border: “I think it is the beginning of a new cold war. I think the Russians will gradually react quite adversely and it will affect their policies. I think it is a tragic mistake. [It was no mistake.] There was no reason for this whatsoever. [There was no justification for it, but there was plenty of reason for it.] No one was threatening anybody else. This expansion would make the Founding Fathers of this country turn over in their graves. We have signed up to protect a whole series of countries, even though we have neither the resources nor the intention to do so in any serious way. [NATO expansion] was simply a light-hearted action by a Senate that has no real interest in foreign affairs. What bothers me is how superficial and ill informed the whole Senate debate was. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. Don’t people understand? Our differences in the cold war were with the Soviet Communist regime. And now we are turning our backs on the very people who mounted the greatest bloodless revolution in history to remove that Soviet regime. I was particularly bothered by the references to Russia as a country dying to attack Western Europe. And Russia’s democracy is as far advanced, if not farther, as any of these countries we've just signed up to defend from Russia. It shows so little understanding of Russian history and Soviet history. Of course there is going to be a bad reaction from Russia, and then [the NATO expanders] will say that we always told you that is how the Russians are — but this is just wrong. This has been my life, and it pains me to see it so screwed up in the end.” It had been “screwed up,” actually, back in 1945, but he knew nothing about it at that time, and still didn’t understand what had happened, nor why.
Even Stalin himself didn’t know about it until later in 1945. Vladimir O. Pechatnov wrote about that in his September 1999 “Foreign Policy Correspondence between Stalin and Molotov and other Politburo Members, September 1945 - December 1946”:
The London session of the Council of Foreign Ministers in September 1945 was the first diplomatic encounter of the Allies after the Potsdam Conference, with an agenda that included preparing draft peace treaties with European satellites of Germany, as well as finding solutions for other issues of the postwar peace settlement. It was the first serious test for the coalition of victors after the complete end of hostilities of the Second World War. …
The first serious conflict at the conference erupted, as expected, on the issue of recognition of pro-Soviet governments in Rumania and Bulgaria. The United States and Great Britain sympathized with the anti-Soviet opposition in those countries and refused to discuss peace treaties for Rumania and Bulgaria until governments of those countries were reorganized on a broader democratic basis. The CC instructions had anticipated a linkage between consideration of peace treaties for Balkan countries and the one for Italy, which was a main priority for the Western Allies.5 In his dispatches to Molotov, Stalin instructed him to stick to the agreed line, particularly on Rumania, whose leader, Petru Groza, and his delegation had just visited Moscow. “The Rumanians feel fine,” Stalin informed on September 12. “They will stand firm and, by any account, the Allies’ machinations will be defeated. You must also stand firm and make no concessions to the Allies on Rumania.” Stalin not only sketched for Molotov a general line of behavior, but also noted that his position in conversations with the Allies was so far too defensive. He supplied him with arguments for going on offensive. “It should be said directly that representatives of America and England in Rumania supported anti-Soviet elements such as [Ilie] Radescu and his friends, and this is incompatible with our Allied relations. … In case the Allies remain implacable with regard to Rumania, Bulgaria, etc., you should, perhaps, let Byrnes and Bevin know that the government of the USSR would find it difficult to give its agreement to the conclusion of a peace treaty with Italy. Here you can use such arguments as their unfair attitude to our proposals on Italy’s colonies and on the unresolved issue of Soviet reparations from Italy.” …
Stalin apparently by then did not share Molotov’s optimism. And he must have been alarmed by the mention of the French and Chinese in the context of peace treaties. He demanded angrily, via Vyshinsky, to “pay attention” to their inadmissible participation in the discussion of peace treaties with Finland and the Balkan countries. Molotov admitted that “the instructions of com. Stalin” were correct [because these had been agreed by Stalin, Churchill, and FDR, in their drawing-up the Berlin Protocol at the end of the Yalta Conference], but attempted to evade them by pointing that “because we did not consider this issue a significant one, we agreed with it, particularly since Bevin and Byrnes insisted on it.” This was a lame excuse, giving the flavor of kow-towing to the Allies. Stalin’s patience snapped. On September 21, again via Vyshinsky, he sent Molotov a harsh “instruction from the Highest Quarters” [“Instantsiia”] in which he demonstratively dropped a comradely way of calling Molotov “ty” [analogous to “tu” in French and “Du” in German] and adopted the dry and formal “Vy” [like “Vous” or “Sie”]. “You must adhere to the decisions of Potsdam about the participation of only involved states. … When only the Anglo-Saxon states, i.e. the United States and England, opposed the Soviet Union, neither of the two raised a question about a majority or minority. Now, when in violation of the decisions of the Berlin conference and with your connivance, the Anglo-Saxons managed to bring in the Chinese and French, Byrnes got a chance to raise the question about majority and minority.”
This Stalin directive became a turning point for the conference. Historians have long argued about the motives behind it, most of them thinking that the procedural issue was just a pretext for squeezing concessions from the Western partners by a threat to abort the conference. This new evidence from Stalin-Molotov correspondence tends to support this interpretation to the extent that it confirms that Stalin early on was ready to sacrifice the London session in case his basic demands were not met. Yet there is no indication in his instructions to Molotov that would reveal this pretext plot; to the contrary — Stalin emphasized the centrality of procedure and Molotov’s subsequent remarks to Bevin on its “trivial importance”13 do not necessarily mean that Stalin thought the same. It is possible that the strategist was hiding his real purpose even from his his chief negotiator in order to make him more single-minded in pursuit of a procedural struggle.
But Stalin’s fury also seemed to be genuine, since he attributed real importance to the principles of the Potsdam formula.
Stalin, by the time of the London Conference, in September and October 1945, recognized what the significance had been of the dispute with Stalin that Truman had written about to Bess, on July 25th of that year, about which Truman had said: “There are some things we can’t agree to. Russia and Poland have gobbled up a big hunk of Germany and want Britain and us to agree. I have flatly refused. We have unalterably opposed the recognition of police governments in the German Axis countries. I told Stalin until we had free access to those countries and our nationals had their property rights restored, so far as we were concerned ther’d never be recognition. He seems to like it when I hit him with a hammer.”
Here is what the British delegation to the London Conference reported about this conflict, to Parliament, on 9 October 1945:
The Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs (Mr. Ernest Bevin): I desire to make a statement on the work of the Council of Foreign Ministers. …
Having studied the terms of reference of the Council which were laid down in the protocol of the Berlin Conference, I thought it right to submit to my colleagues at the opening meeting a suggestion as to procedure. I suggested that it would be inconvenient if some of the Members of the Council had to be excluded from some of the meetings. It would be even more inconvenient, I said, if some Members had to be asked to leave a particular meeting while some of the items on the agenda were discussed. …
Mr. Byrnes, the Secretary of State for the United States, took the same view as I did, and Mr. Molotov said that he agreed with my proposal if, as he understood it, it meant that all five members of the Council should attend all meetings, and, if they desired, participate in the discussions, but that decisions should be taken only by the delegations representing the Governments which were, or by the Council's terms of reference were deemed to be, signatories of the relevant terms of surrender.
All being agreed on this interpretation of the Berlin Protocol, the proposal which I had made was adopted without dissent. I am sure that when we passed this resolution at our opening meeting we believed that we had faithfully interpreted the understanding reached by the signatories of the Protocol. … We had made a start on the draft treaties for Rumania and Bulgaria. There were before the Council proposals by the Soviet, British and United States delegations. We took the Soviet proposals as a basis and several points raised in the British proposals were disposed of. We then proceeded to discuss the United States proposals regarding the draft peace treaty with Rumania. These United States proposals brought up the whole question of the recognition of the Government of 37Rumania, since it has been made clear in them that the United States Government, while ready to discuss a draft, would not negotiate a peace treaty with Rumania until a broadly representative government had been established in that country.
The Truman Administration and the Clement Attlee Administration (which coincidentally took office on 26 July 1945, the day after the Cold War started) had dumped FDR’s plan and were demanding that the Soviet Union must accept U.S. and UK authority over nations that bordered the Soviet Union. Stalin refused, but the Cold War didn’t start when he refused; it started when Truman told Stalin on 25 July 1945 that the U.S. had demands regarding the countries which bordered the Soviet Union.
John Foster Dulles’s 1950 book, War or Peace, titled its fourth chapter “No Appeasement,” and this referred to an alleged right for the U.S. Government to make those demands regarding those countries. He said there of Stalin’s view, “the argument went on, the United States, in the interest of peace, must do whatever the Soviet Union demanded.” Dulles presumed that the Soviet Union shouldn’t object if America would place its missiles and army right on the Soviet border. He might as well have been saying there that the Soviet Union had a right to place nuclear missiles in Cuba — and Mexico, and Canada — but the U.S. and UK regimes thought that only they possessed such rights. Stalin could not accept it — like FDR, he thought that no nation had such a right — and, so, the Cold War was on.
The issue of separating Russia from the rest of Europe was central to the U.S.-UK regime’s plan. And, for the U.S. and UK, this meant that the Rhodesists must control what George Orwell, the author of the prophetic 1948 novel 1984, called “Oceania” — which was an ambiguously fascist or communist empire including the British Empire plus the Western Hemisphere — and that they must ultimately fight for and win control also over Europe right up to the Soviet border, so that “Eurasia” will be only the Soviet Union, and that the only other power would be “Eastasia,” which is China, Korea and Japan. That would have included both the core and the periphery of Rhodes’s plan, but Orwell had a very hostile attitude toward imperialism; and, in any case, the real-world conquests by the real-world version of ‘Oceania’ came much sooner than Orwell ever imagined it could. Almost immediately after 1948 — the very next year, in fact — NATO was born in 1949, and the Rhodesists also ended up controlling not only much of non-Soviet Europe, but also Japan, and part of Korea. So, the Soviet Union was virtually surrounded by Rhodesist forces.
Furthermore, immediately upon such successes, the Rhodesists aimed to control Europe not only militarily (through NATO) but also diplomatically, through, ultimately, a European Union, which became created by the CIA. The details are supplied in an exhaustive 1,000-page biography of Jean Monnet by Éric Roussel, which was published only in France in 1996, and which seems to have been successfully suppressed. It has never been translated, and has no reviews even at America's Amazon, and only 3 reviews at Amazon in France. However, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard of UK’s Telegraph newspaper has provided some of the core information from it. Furthermore, Richard J. Aldrich’s 2003 The Hidden Hand also provides key details, such as by Aldrich’s saying, on page 366, about the American Committee for a United Europe:
ACUE, more than any other American front organization of the Cold War, was a direct creature of the leading lights of the CIA. Indeed, it was so replete with famous CIA figures that its ‘front’ was very thin. Its early years seemed to have formed something of a laboratory for figures such as [Bill] Donovan, [Allen] Dulles, [Walter] Bedell Smith and [Tom] Braden, before they moved on to other projects in the mid-1950s. Over its first three years of operations, 1949-51, ACUE received $384,650, the majority being dispersed to Europe. This was a large sum, but from 1952 ACUE began to spend such sums annually. The total budget for the period 1949-60 amounted to approximately $4 million. As the quantity of money flowing across the Atlantic began to increase, ACUE opened a local Paris office to monitor more closely groups that had received grants. By 1956, the flood of increased funding was prompting fears among the Directors of ACUE that its work would be publicly exposed. …
The emerging European Economic Community (EEC) and the growing Western intelligence community overlapped to a considerable degree. This is underlined by the creation of the Bilderberg Group, an informal and secretive transatlantic council of key decision-makers [representatives of the billionaires who controlled U.S. and U.S.-allied international corporations]. Bilderberg was founded by Joseph Retinger and Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 1952 in response to the rise of anti-Americanism in Europe. … Retinger secured support from Averell Harriman, David Rockefeller and Walter Bedell Smith. The formation of the American wing of Bilderberg was entrusted to Eisenhower’s psychological warfare chief, C.D. Jackson, and the funding for the first meeting, held at the Hotel de Bilderberg in Holland in 1954, was provided by the CIA.
Funds for these CIA operations came not only from the U.S. Treasury but from private sources, America’s super-rich, and, also from organized gangsters, as was revealed in the 1998 classic by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press. This off-the-books funding comes from narcotics kingpins throughout the world, as protection-money, which is essential to keep them in business. So, the EU was financially fueled from all of these sources, and, basically, was a bribing-operation (to end up getting the ‘right’ people into the EU’s Parliament, etc.), in addition to be receiving funds from what might be considered idealistic philanthropic donors (because the dream of a united Europe had long preceded the grubby version of it that the CIA created for Europeans).
The EU was a Cold War operation, from its very start. It remains that to the present day.
Pritchard issued two important articles about this, the first being his 19 September 2000 “Euro-federalists financed by US spy chiefs”:
DECLASSIFIED American government documents show that the US intelligence community ran a campaign in the Fifties and Sixties to build momentum for a united Europe. It funded and directed the European federalist movement. … One memorandum, dated July 26, 1950, gives instructions for a campaign to promote a fully fledged European parliament. It is signed by Gen William J Donovan, head of the American wartime Office of Strategic Services, precursor of the CIA.
The documents were found by Joshua Paul, a researcher at Georgetown University in Washington. They include files released by the US National Archives. Washington's main tool for shaping the European agenda was the American Committee for a United Europe, created in 1948. The chairman was Donovan, ostensibly a private lawyer by then.
The vice-chairman was Allen Dulles, the CIA director in the Fifties. The board included Walter Bedell Smith, the CIA's first director, and a roster of ex-OSS figures and officials who moved in and out of the CIA. The documents show that ACUE financed the European Movement, the most important federalist organisation in the post-war years. In 1958, for example, it provided 53.5 per cent of the movement's funds.
The European Youth Campaign, an arm of the European Movement, was wholly funded and controlled by Washington. The Belgian director, Baron Boel, received monthly payments into a special account. When the head of the European Movement, Polish-born Joseph Retinger, bridled at this degree of American control and tried to raise money in Europe, he was quickly reprimanded.
The leaders of the European Movement — Retinger, the visionary Robert Schuman and the former Belgian prime minister Paul-Henri Spaak — were all treated as hired hands by their American sponsors. The US role was handled as a covert operation. ACUE's funding came from the Ford and Rockefeller foundations as well as business groups with close ties to the US government.
Then, on 27 April 2016, he bannered “The European Union always was a CIA project, as Brexiteers discover” and reported:
It was Washington that drove European integration in the late 1940s, and funded it covertly under the Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon administrations. … The US has relied on the EU ever since as the anchor to American regional interests alongside NATO. … It is odd that this magisterial 1000-page study found only a French-language publisher. [Roussel’s Jean Monnet. The French Wikipedia’s article on Roussel says “En 1995, il écrit une biographie consacrée à Jean Monnet2 qui reçoit le prix de l'Essai de l'Académie française, le prix Guizot, et le prix européen de l’histoire.” Despite all of those awards, the work is little-known, even in France.] Nor are many aware of declassified documents from the State Department archives showing that US intelligence funded the European movement secretly for decades, and worked aggressively behind the scenes to push Britain into the project. …
[The CIA] treated some of the EU’s ‘founding fathers’ as hired hands, and actively prevented them finding alternative funding that would have broken reliance on Washington. … The American ‘deep state’ was in up to its neck. …
Since that newspaper (like all major news-media in the U.S. and in its vassal-nations are) is both neoliberal and neoconservative, the neoconservative Pritchard approved of all this. He did it by saying: “There is nothing particularly wicked about this. The US acted astutely in the context of the Cold War. The political reconstruction of Europe was a roaring success.” However, obviously, no authentic democracy can exist in a nation that’s governed by means of deceiving its public; nor can any democracy be an empire, either the imperialistic nation itself, or one of its vassal-nations, because that’s merely “Deep State” rule, behind the scenes, by its billionaires — an aristocracy, and not a democracy, which reigns there. Though all of the country’s major news-media will support the aristocracy — since they’ll all be owned by the aristocracy — anyone who calls it a ‘democracy’ is transparently a fool or a liar, because it’s an aristocracy, which is the opposite.
Here is how the EU thanks Russia for that: by blaming Russia, right along with Nazi Germany, as having been their enemy during WW II. The U.S.-regime-created EU’s European Parliament voted on 19 September 2019 for a resolution condemning both Hitler and Stalin for having started World War II, which is a lie — and an especially outrageous one, considering that the Soviet Union did more than any other country to defeat Hitler and to enable all of those countries to not now be controlled by a Nazi regime. (Shortly after that article, another article, by Max Parry, independently came to the same conclusion: that the EU is fascist.) This Big-Lie Resolution, which the EU’s Parliament passed on 19 September 2019, said that
whereas it has become commonplace for Russia to deny responsibility and blame hostilities on the West in its official rhetoric, creating a reliable propaganda base upon which it can rely to justify its disregard of international law and continue its aggression against Eastern Partnership countries; [the EU]
1. Stresses that the Second World War, the most devastating war in Europe’s history, was caused by the notorious Nazi-Soviet Treaty of Non-Aggression of 23 August 1939, also called the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, and its secret protocols, which allowed two totalitarian regimes that shared the goal of world conquest to divide Europe into two zones of influence.
The actual history is: Stalin had been begging the UK to ally with the Soviet Union to defeat Hitler; and, after being snubbed each time, joined with Hitler in order to prevent an expected invasion by Hitler against the Soviet Union. It was an act of desperation by Stalin, which was forced upon him by the UK. And, now, the U.S. and its allies rewrite ‘history’ to make the Soviet Union their enemy during WW II, instead of their savior — as they actually were.
On 3 March 2021, the retired former Commander of the U.S. Army in Europe, General Ben Hodges, addressed an online “Zoom” conference of U.S. and Ukrainian nazis and admirers and followers of the pro-Axis WW II Ukrainian leader Stepan Bandera (who was famous for slaughtering Jews). Hodges said: “I was appalled, like many of you, when President [Frank-Walter] Steinmeier, the President of the German Federal Republic, made this comment, like you have to understand, we’re responsible for the deaths of millions of Russians, and there’s a history here, … and of course it was millions of Ukrainians, not many of the Russians, that died during the Second World War, and so the whole narrative that comes from Berlin is unsatisfactory, and this is where the United States has got to put pressure on Berlin” (to stand up for the U.S. and now also Ukrainian assertive anti-Russian position). Hodges was telling today’s Ukrainian nazis — who have become vastly more hostile toward Russians than toward Jews — that Hitler slaughtered “millions of Ukrainians, not many of the Russians.” He was especially outraged against Steinmeier, who had previously expressed himself opposed to NATO’s having taken up some of Hitler’s fallen banner. On 18 June 2016, the BBC had headlined “German minister warns Nato against ‘warmongering’”, and reported that Steinmeir had said, “What we shouldn’t do now is inflame the situation further through sabre-rattling and warmongering. … Whoever believes that a symbolic tank parade on the alliance’s eastern border will bring security is mistaken.” He was an anti-nazi German, whereas General Hodges was a pro-nazi American. Steinmeier continued: “We are well-advised to not create pretexts to renew an old confrontation.” He was actually criticizing NATO for doing some of what Hitler had been doing during the lead-up to Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union. Hodges was now saying that America should ignore people such as Steinmeier and encourage yet more of those NATO military ‘exercises’ on Russia’s borders. And, as usually happens when a nazi cites ‘history,’ he was spouting lies. That conference was held in conjunction with the Atlantic Council, which is NATO’s main PR agency, and its purpose was to encourage U.S. President Biden to take a harder stance against Russia than he yet had done.
The U.S., in a sense, has adopted not only many ‘former’ Nazis, but the mantle of German Nazism — not (of course) as regards Jews, but instead as regards Russia and world-conquest in general: America is the world’s leading aggressive and imperialist nation. The EU is an important part of that operation, and thus now equates Russia with Nazism instead of with having conquered the Nazis. Authentic European democrats would therefore abandon alliances with the imperialistic U.S., and would recognize — and honor the fact — that Russia is an important part of Europe, and was the main source of the victory against Nazism. Only then can the Cold War, which Truman started, and which George Herbert Walker Bush and his successors continue, finally end. And, by abandoning the fascist U.S. empire, Europeans would finally break the back of imperialism itself (the major sin of so many European countries); and, maybe, ultimately establish what had been FDR’s dream, of a truly meaningful U.N.
If this requires a rewriting of ‘history’, then that is a ‘history’ which is built only on lies, and it needs to be “re-written.” Many of these lies concern what have become the most symbolic aspects of the ‘history’ of the Cold War, such as the Berlin Wall and the separation between East and West Germany. It goes back even to before the time when Truman, himself, had made the decision for America to conquer the world.
And so that’s how Truman came to make the decision on 25 July 1945 to create the world we live in today.
The U.S. has exactly 900 foreign military bases. (That’s over ten times as many as do all of the world’s other nearly 200 countries combined.) This is in addition to 749 bases (which can be examined here) that are within the United States, for a grand total of 1,649 U.S. military bases. Whom is this ‘defending’ anyone from? America spends now over $1.5 trillion annually on its military, which is more than do all of the world’s other nearly 200 countries together. The U.S. federal Government deficit (expenses minus income) in 2023 was $1.7T, which is little more than its military expenses that year. Ever since the Soviet Union ended in 1991, the U.S. has engaged in 244 military invasions, which is more than in all of U.S. history prior to that date. Its MIC is in overdrive. Who benefits from this, but the billionaires and centi-millionaires? All of this began on 25 July 1945.
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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.
