Communazis, Islamofascists, who can tell these scary foreigners apart?

The original Hitler really was a "Hitler"

I've discovered that public libraries sometimes make available online their digital subscriptions to various journals. Which is how I came across this article that I've been meaning to look up for a long time, "Red Fascism: The Merger of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia in the American Image of Totalitarianism, 1930s-1950s" by Les Adler and Thomas Paterson American Historical Review Apr. 1970.

I had seen this particular quote referenced several times:

Americans after the Second World War also blended their images of the German Führer. and the Soviet Premier. Stalin was a new Hitler, demagogic, dictatorial, demanding personal loyalty, conniving to rule other peoples. The tough but friendly "Uncle Joe" of wartime propaganda became the paranoid tyrant of the cold war, aping Hitler. The president of the University of Notre Dame articulated the widely held assumption that Stalin mas continuing Hitler's viciousness. Iron Age concluded that "Stalin has succeeded to the mantle of Hitler as a menace to world peace.' George Meany of the American Federation of Labor called Stalin "the Russian Hitler," and General Donovan believed that Stalin was in fact more ruthless and thorough than the Führer. (my emphasis)

I have always been curious to see how they described this happening.

The short answer would be, the Munich analogy, fear, lack of knowledge about European affairs, a vague idea of "totalitarian" dictatorships.

I've blogged a number of times about the "lessons of Munich", in The Munich Agreement 10/02/03, Bad historical analogies 10/10/04, Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/06, Historical analogies and the people who analogize them 05/01/07, and my reviews of Jeffrey Record's books Making War, Thinking History 11/18/06 and The Specter of Munich 01/02/07. Record argues that the analogy has been so overused and used normally in such a shallow way that we'd probably be better off to just stop using it. But old habits die hard. And that habit was firmly established in the early days of the Cold War, as Adler and Paterson explain.

They point out that a number of prominent voices even during the Second World War, when the US, Britain and the Soviet Union were allies, were making an analogy to prewar Germany and the USSR:

Perhaps the most significant, and the most misleading, part of the Nazi-Communist analogy was that drawn between the prewar and wartime military actions of Germany and those of Russia in the postwar period. As Soviet armies marched into Eastern Europe on the heels of the defeated Wehrmacht, many Americans perceived it as immediate aggression rather than as wartime liberation. A clear example of this process was the early transposition of the American vocabulary applied to the Nazi domination of Europe. It was assumed, without understanding the Soviet security concerns or its national interest, that Russia was simply replacing Germany as the disrupter of peace in Europe. The term "satellite," first applied to German domination of Rumania and Hungary, was easily transferred to Russian hegemony in postwar Eastern Europe. (my emphasis)

Since this article apparently isn't available online without subscription, it's worth quoting more from this particular part of the Adler/Paterson article. First came the over-simplistic identification of the Soviets in eastern Europe with prewar Hitler Germany:

It was thus the view of many leading Americans that Russia, like Germany - before, was going to sweep over Europe in a massive military attack. Lewis H. Brown argued that Russia "is the dread of every family in Western Europe every night when they go to bed." Such sentiment encouraged the formation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and other regional alliances. J. Howard McGrath anticipated the arguments in 1947 when he told the Senate: "Today it is Trieste, Korea, and Manchuria, tomorrow it is the British Empire. The next day it is South America. And then - who is so blind as to fail to see the next step?" In 1948 Secretary of State George C. Marshall recalled his prewar experience of watching "the Nazi government take control of one country after another until finally Poland was invaded in a direct military operation." His words clearly suggested the parallel with postwar Russia.

George F. Kennan, the State Department expert on the Soviet Union in Moscow and Washington considered by most observers as the architect of the containment policy, attempted in 1956 to dispel a myth that he himself had helped create years earlier. "The image of a Stalinist Russia," he argued. "poised and yearning to attack the West, and deterred only by our possession of atomic weapons, was largely a creation of the Western imagination." (my emphasis)

First the parallel, then ... the "lessons of Munich":

"Munich" and "appeasement" returned as terms of humiliation and shame to haunt postwar negotiations with the Soviet Union. Responding to Roosevelt's agreement at Yalta to allow the Soviet Union three votes in the United Nations General Assembly, Senator Arthur Vandenberg indicated that among the members of the American delegation to the San Francisco United Nations meeting "there is a general disposition to stop this Stalin appeasement. It has to stop sometime. Every surrender makes it more difficult . In defending the Truman Doctrine in 1947, Vandenberg remarked that "I think the adventure is worth trying as an alternative to another 'Munich' and perhaps to another war. ..." To the suggestion made at a cabinet meeting in September 1945 that the United States eliminate its monopoly of atomic bombs and nuclear information in the interests of peace, [Defense] Secretary Forrestal replied that "it seems doubtful that we should endeavor to buy their understanding and sympathy. We tried that once with Hitler. There are no returns on appeasement." Barron's chastised [Secretary of Commerce and former Vice President] Henry Wallace in 1946 for his advocacy of disarmament in atomic weapons through an agreement with Russia and wrote that he had an "appeaser's dream." In 1950 General Douglas MacArthur considered the policy of containing rather than unleashing Chiang Kai-shek to be "appeasement," and he chastised those in the administration who would not escalate the Korean War, for they were adhering to "the concept of appeasement, the concept that when you use force, you can limit the force." Adlai Stevenson, in the 1952 presidential campaign, argued that a withdrawal of American troops to allow "Asians to fight Asians ... would risk a Munich in the Far East, with the possibility of a third world war not far behind." Since the cry of appeasement was pervasive in the American mind, diplomats may have been less willing to bargain and more willing to adopt uncompromising positions vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. Indeed, for some, diplomacy and appeasement were probably nearly identical in meaning, and diplomacy with totalitarian states meant concession to principle. This national stance was suggested by President Truman in his Navy Day speech of October 1945 when he stated that "we shall firmly adhere to what we believe to be right; and we shall not give our approval to any compromise with evil." Such an attitude had a paralyzing effect on international give and take and certainly impeded the accommodation of international differences. (my emphasis in bold)

Those phrases have become so familiar now. So is their misuse, and their simplification to meaning "international relations is a testosterone contest. We've gotta show the other guy that our God is bigger than his God." It's become downright traditional by now.

From "Uncle Joe" to the New Hitler in practically no time

We've also collected a number of more examples of what threat inflation and misreading an opponent on the basis of superficial analogies and poor understanding of the specific conditions involved can lead to.

The Truman statement highlighted near the end of that last quote is also a reminder that good-vs.-evil language in foreign policy certainly didn't originate with the Cheney-Bush administration, although they have taken it to cartoonish lengths.

I'm not planning to review the whole origin of the Cold War here. Up to a point, this was understandable and even sensible. George Kennan once wrote that in the decade or so prior to 1939, both Germany and the USSR had been practicing a brand of international politics that made the gangland wars in Chicago during Al Capone's day look like a kid's game. The 1939 pact between Germany and the Soviet Union also encouraged the idea in many Americans' minds that there was something fundamentally similar in the two "totalitarian" systems.

The problem was that it led to simplistic and misleading assumptions. Adler and Paterson illustrate this by a quote from atomic physicist Leo Szilard:

In 1949 Professor Leo Szilard of the University of Chicago wrote in the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists: "Soviet Russia is a dictatorship no less ruthless perhaps than was Hitler's dictatorship in Germany. Does it follow that Russia will act as Hitler's Germany acted?"" Szilard did not think so, and his question emphasizes at once the major assumption and the major weakness of the Nazi-Communist analogy: that conflict with totalitarianism was inevitable after World War 11; that there was no room for accommodation with the Soviet Union because the Communist nation was inexorably driven by its ideology and its totalitarianism. It followed from such reasoning that the United States could have done nothing to alleviate postwar tension. Such a notion, however, ignores the important years 1945-1936 when the possibilities for accommodation were far greater than later in the decade. (my emphasis)

In other words, it was an assumption that often obscured important particulars instead of illuminating them.

For instance:

What is more important for this discussion, however, is not that they [Hitler's Germany and Stalin's USSR] were different, but that many Americans took the unhistorical and illogical view that Russia in the 1940's would behave as Germany had in the previous decade. ...

Americans drew little distinction between the German drive for European domination and the Soviet interest in revolution-between military attack and internal revolution. The Marxian philosophy looked for social and economic improvement among disadvantaged people, whereas, as Hans Buchheim has suggested, fascism was designed not to improve mankind, but rather to destroy that part it disliked. Wolfgang Sauer recently wrote that "Neither V. I. Lenin nor Joseph Stalin wished to turn the clock back; they not merely wished to move ahead, but they wished to jump ahead. The Bolshevik revolution had many elements of a development revolution not unlike those now under way in the underdeveloped countries." The American failure to note distinctions between military fascism and revolutionary Marxism has contributed to a simplistic view of revolutionary and anticolonial movements in the post-World War I1 era and has led to the establishment of world-wide alliances and permanent military containment policies in Europe and Asia. As Professor Robert F. Smith has written, "This distorted use of historical analogy vastly oversimplifies not only the policies of Russia and China, but also the nationalistic reform movements around the world."

The Hitler-Stalin comparison has also been superficial and misleading. Sauer has written that "The social and political order of Bolshevism is relatively independent from the leadership. ... Fascist regimes, by contrast, are almost identical with their leaders; no fascist regime has so far survived its leader." Kennan himself attempted to convince his readers in 1956 that Stalin's intentions, though menacing in Western eyes, were "not to be confused with the reckless plans and military timetable of a Hitler."" Brutal and idiosyncratic as Stalin was, there is little evidence, as Kennan has indicated, to suggest that he was a madman bent on world conquest and subjugation. (my emphasis)

False analogies can be very misleading. Threat inflation can be just as disastrous a mistake as underestimating threats.

For those who dream up wars, it's far more entertaining to pose as Churchill standing up to the barbarians, which seems to the neocons' favorite image. But realistic assessment of national security threats and reality-based analysis of the intentions and capabilities of potential opponents are likely to produce far better foreign policy. And get fewer people killed unnecessarily.

Tags: cold war, hitler, stalin