Trump and Republicans' revolutionary (?) means

A report about vandalizing a statue fits in well with an issue I've been thinking about, which is how Trump and the Republicans are willing to use "revolutionary" means to achieve their ends, while the Democratic Party tends to be phobic about the word "revolution," except when they are pushing for regime change in a foreign country whose government has fallen out of favor with them.

This is the vandalism I mean: Katy Bergen, Historic John Brown statue in KCK vandalized with racial slurs and a swastika Kansas City Star 03/18/2018; updated 03/18/2018. More on this below.

I'm more reserved than ever about easy generalizations on typical ways democracy in other countries is eroded. That's because so much of it is proposed in service of some regime-change agenda. And the international reporting in the mainstream US media is often so spotty or just plain bad, I try to be careful about jumping to conclusions.

Having said that, it's generally understood that some kind of independence of the judiciary and law-enforcement agencies is necessary for the rule of law to function. And at some point, attempts to influence the justice system for political reasons does become an overriding of the rule of law.

You can tell this isn't a straight polemic, because I'm putting so many qualifications out there. But the lines can be confusing. I have serious doubts about lifetime appointment of federal judges, for instance. But electing judges is also a bad idea because that inevitably politicizes the justice system to so extent. But every system of selecting judges depends for its effectiveness on the participants taking their responsibilities seriously. The Dred Scott decision was clearly a political decision with massive consequences. It was an instance where the judicial system tossed its responsibilities and the rule of law overboard for a political cause: slavery, a cause of the worst kind.

Another famous situation where these issues were raised was Franklin Roosevelt's fight against the Nine Old Men of the 1930s Supreme Court. (William Leuchtenburg, When Franklin Roosevelt Clashed with the Supreme Court – and Lost Smithsonian Magazine May 2005) A reactionary Supreme Court was knocking down law after law passed by Congress that were aimed at improving economic conditions after the devastating Great Depression. Leuchtenburg gives a measured judgment on the practical lessons that historians and politicians have drawn from that fight:

The 168-day contest also has bequeathed some salutary lessons. It instructs presidents to think twice before tampering with the Supreme Court. FDR’s scheme, said the Senate Judiciary Committee, was “a measure which should be so emphatically rejected that its parallel will never again be presented to the free representatives of the free people of America.” And it never has been. At the same time, it teaches the justices that if they unreasonably impede the functioning of the democratic branches, they may precipitate a crisis with unpredictable consequences. In his dissent in the AAA case in 1936, Justice Stone reminded his brethren, “Courts are not the only agency of government that must be assumed to have capacity to govern.” These are lessons— for the president and for the court — as salient today as they were in 1937.

The conventional wisdom is that FDR overstepped and tried to improperly interfere with the Court by his proposal to appoint additional Justices, remembered mainly by the pejorative label of Roosevelt's "court-packing scheme." But the CW also holds that FDR's public fight against the Court jolted them into a (genuinely) more judicially reasonable position on New Deal legislation.

Roosevelt's proposals in that situation were a very different thing from what's going on now in Pennsylvania, where the Radical Republicans are trying to impeach the state supreme court justices who struck down an extreme, partisan gerrymandering scheme the Republicans put in place. (Sam Levine, Pennsylvania GOP Moves To Impeach Supreme Court Democrats For Gerrymandering Ruling Huffpost 03/20/2018)

The Republicans are willing to use impeachment for the most crass partisan purposes. But the Democrats never bothered to even hold Congressional hearings on strong indications of what looked an awful lot like improprieties by Supreme Court Justices Clalrence Thomas and Antonin Scalia. The symbolism of this is sadly ironic: "When Justice Scalia died two weeks ago, he was staying, again for free, at a West Texas hunting lodge owned by a businessman whose company had recently had a matter before the Supreme Court." (Eric Lipton, Scalia Took Dozens of Trips Funded by Private Sponsors New York Times 02/26/2016) See also: Ujala Sehgal, A Brief History of Clarence Thomas' Ethical Entanglements The Atlantic 06/19/2011.

Currently, we have a Republican Party that is committed to appointing highly activist judges and is willing to toss normal procedural and normative practices out the window in order to get rightwing ideologues entrenched throughout the federal judiciary. (See Garland, Merrick) In 2016, the Republicans in Congress effectively nullified the Constitutional procedure for selecting Supreme Court Justices. But when Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch to the Court, there was no resistance on the Democratic side remotely comparable. The net result is that the Republicans have dominance of the selection of federal judges entirely out of proportion to the number of American voters who support their party.

As bad as that is, I wouldn't call that a "revolutionary" method. Trump's blatant threatening and bullying of the FBI and the Justice Department over the Mueller investigation is. From his public statements and the firings of James Comey and Andrew McCabe, Trump has made it very clear that he wants the Justice Department to act on his behalf in much the same way his political mentor and longtime attorney, mob lawyer Roy Cohn, did for years (Ron Elving, President Trump Called For Roy Cohn, But Roy Cohn Was Gone NPR 01/08/2018):

This much is clear: Cohn was Trump's model in the handling of public relationships and media warfare.

Cohn's code was built on self-interest and loyalty; his style was all about intensity. If he was your lawyer, he was prepared to do anything for you; if he was your adversary, no holds were barred.

The title of the NPR article refers to a Trump quote reported by Michael Schmidt in the New York Times, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” (Obstruction Inquiry Shows Trump’s Struggle to Keep Grip on Russia Investigation 01/04/2018)

As Schmidt reminds us, Cohn "had been Senator Joseph R. McCarthy’s top aide during the investigations into communist activity in the 1950s and died in 1986." So Joe McCarthy's authoritarian heritage that was willing to ignore democratic and Constitutional rights and norms has now come to the White House is a potent form via Roy Cohn's political protege Donald Trump. (For more on Cohn, see also: Jonathan Mahler and Matt Flegenheimer, What Donald Trump Learned From Joseph McCarthy’s Right-Hand Man New York Times 06/20/2016; Marie Brenner, How Donald Trum and roy Cohn's Ruthless Symbiosis Changed America Vanity Fair Aug 2017; Robert O'Harrow Jr. and Shawn Boburg; The man who showed Donald Trump how to exploit power and instill fear Washington Post 06/17/2016)

Seve Bannon has rotated out of Trumpian favor for the moment. But his declaration that his goal in February 2017 when he was still a White House strategist that his goal is the "deconstruction of the administrative state" echoes the advocates of the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s, from which he draws some of his ideas and perspective. Francis Wilkerson reported last year (Bannon's Requiem for the Administrative State Business Insider 03/27/2017):

It's unclear so far what Bannon's phrase "administrative state" means, or what "deconstructing" it would entail. Deregulation is surely a key element of it. But Obamacare seems about as clear an example of the administrative state as you can get. It's a vast and highly complex regulatory regime that administers intrusive and often restrictive rules while transferring payments and benefits from some Americans to others via federal and state governments.

In effect, Obamacare is the leading edge of what National Review writer David French called a "vast and bloated executive branch -- existing through its alphabet soup of agencies such as the EPA, IRS, DOE, ATF, and the like."

The "administrative state," in other words, is all the structures and functions of government that conservatives dislike, an alien force that, as French said, "intrudes into virtually every aspect of American life." [my emphasis]

This certainly is a goal that has a "revolutionary" edge to it, though in the sense of "conservative revolution," i.e, overthrowing the existing legal order by extralegal means to establish an authoritarian order.

There is a rich and contentious history of debate and polemics over what how revolution should be defined which I'm not addressing here. But the Republicans have invoked revolutionary rhetoric for decades. The Reagan Administration and its policies were referred to by Republicans as the Reagan Revolution, a term the mainstream press didn't find alarmingly inappropriate. The official White House website still contains this: "At the end of his two terms in office, Ronald Reagan viewed with satisfaction the achievements of his innovative program known as the Reagan Revolution, which aimed to reinvigorate the American people and reduce their reliance upon Government." (my emphsis) 40: Ronald Reagan (n/d; accessed 03/20/2018; sourced to “The Presidents of the United States of America,” by Frank Freidel and Hugh Sidey; 2006)

Later there was the "Gingrich Revolution" of 1994, also called the "Republican Revolution," in which the Republicans under Newt Gingrich's leadership won control of the House of Representative. (Andrea Stone, Republican Revolution fades USA Today 01/19/2003; updated 01/22/2003) Steven Gillon in 2016 characterized the Gingrich Revolution by its highly abrasive, transgressive style of politics that failed " to appreciate the distinction between means and ends." (The Gingrich Revolution and the Roots of Republican Dysfunction Huffpost 10/12/2016) He writes:

The person most responsible for injecting [the current] virulent strain of partisanship into the Republican party was another dethroned House Speaker — Newt Gingrich. The firebrand conservative leaders today are Gingrich’s children. Gingrich rose to power in the 1980s as the pied piper of a new assertive conservatism that merged the moralistic rhetoric of the New Right, and the mystical conservative faith in tax cuts, into a powerful ideological message. It was Gingrich who manufactured the hyper-partisanship that defines modern politics.

And when Republican donors like the Koch Brothers decided in 2009 they needed an Astroturf movement to publicly protest Obama, it quickly became branded as the Tea Party, i.e., a familiar patriotic symbol of the American Revoluiton.

The there was the Neoconservative Revolution, which was heavily influenced by Trotskyism, which became the defining outlook of the Cheney-Bush Administration's foreign policy, including the Iraq War. John Judis wrote about this aspect of the neocons' outlook in the very Establishment journal Foreign Policy in 1995 ("Trotskyism to Anachronism - The Neoconservative Revolution" July/Aug 1995). Noting that the hawkish foreign policy adviser Paul Nitze, who drafted the famous 1950 NSC-68 memorandum during the Truman Administration, was a major influence on the neocons, he also writes:

The other important influence on neoconservatives was the legacy of Trotksyism - a point that other historians and journalists have made about neoconservatism .... Many of the founders of neoconservatism, including The Public Interest founder Irving Kristol and coeditor Nathan Glazer, Sidney Hook, and Albert Wohistetter, were either members of or close to the Trotskyist left in the late 193os and early 194os. Younger neoconservatives, including Penn Kemble, Joshua Muravchik, and Carl Gershman, came through the Socialist Party at a time when former Trotskyist Max Schachtman was still a commanding figure.

What both the older and younger neoconservatives absorbed from their socialist past was an idealistic concept of internationalism. Trotskyists believed that Stalin, in trying to build socialism in one country rather than through world revolution, had created a degenerate workers' state instead of a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat. In the framework of international communism, the Trotskyists were rabid internationalists rather than realists and nationalists. ...

The neoconservatives who went through the Trotskyist and socialist movements came to see foreign policy as a
crusade, the goal of which was first global socialism, then social democracy, and finally democratic capitalism. They never saw foreign policy in terms of national interest or balance of power. Neoconservatism was a kind of inverted Trotskyism, which sought to "export democracy," in Muravchik's words, in the same way that Trotsky originally envisaged exporting socialism. It saw its adversaries on the left as members or representatives of a public sector-based new class. [my emphasis]

The distinction between conventional war and revolutionary war was a familiar one in the 19th century. Conventional war involved fighting to defeat an enemy army, possibly taking over the opposing country or part of it, without seeking to change the basic structure of social relationships in the enemy country. Revolutionary war includes the latter. A model case would be the wars immediately after the French Revolution and then the Napoleonic Wars, in which not just conquest but the implanting of republican governments and the dislocation of feudal social relationships were a part of the goal and practice. When Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation during the Civil War, that was understood as a shift from conventional war, aimed at removing the rebel governments, to revolutionary war, that intended to undo the slave system that was the foundation of the Southern plantation economy.

The main official justification for the Iraq War was Saddam Hussein's nonexistent "weapons of mass destruction." And Dick Cheney didn't give a flying flip about democracy or freedom or basic human rights in Iraq. But that Administration's policy in the Middle East was also justified as installing democratic governments on the inverted-Trotskyist model.

So the Republican Party has been comfortable with the rhetoric of "revolution," though overthrowing corporate capitalism is certainly no part of their agenda. And the highly partisan approach of Trump and his party toward justice right now is a (conservative) "revolutionary" approach to policy. Joe Conason describes the recent majority report of the House Intelligence Committee on Russiagate as a "surrender of Congressional authority to the White House" of a kind which bears "a sad resemblance to the behavior of bogus legislatures under authoritarian regimes."

The Democrats on the other hand, have become allergic to the whole idea of "revolution," unless it comes in the form of a "color revolution" against a government friendly to Russia or hostile to the United States (and to Israel, in the Middle East.) We see it in the way the Democrats shrink from any favorable invocation of the party's two main founders, Thomas Jefferson and Andrew Jackson. Both of whom fought in the American Revolution and both of whom were key leaders in establishing and expanding democracy. So they leave behind any patriotic imagery or symbols associated with the American Revolution and shrug when the Republicans appropriate the symbolism of the Tea Party or Andrew Jackson.

Yes, in real history there are elements in every period of American history that deserve critical summary, not the least of them slavery and Indian policy. But it's one more element of partisan imbalance when the Democrats are unwilling to claim any of the patriotic heritage of the country prior to 1860 while the Republicans effectively appropriate all of it they want to for their own purposes. The Democrats don't even contest it, for the most part, which is one of the ways they allow the Republicans to define themselves as the party of Real Americans.

In the 2016 Presidential contest, Bernie Sanders straightforwardly talked about his program as a revolution. Which he defined clearly as getting more people to participate in the political process including voting, reducing the massive corporate corruption in American politics which is plain to everyone,establishing a solid social-democratic infrastructure including single-payer healthcare, and a more peace-oriented foreign policy with a smaller military budget. Whether that qualifies as dramatic a change as kicking Britain out of the US in the American Revolution or overthrowing the Slave Power in the Civil War is open to discussion. But it certainly is more deserving of that name than the Reagan Revolution or the Gingrich Revolution.

But the Clinton campaign tried to use the "revolution" label against Sanders. Politics is politics, so of course they were going to do that. So we heard campaign-promoted comments like: revolutions get people killed; we don't want to have a revolution, we want to elect a President; Sanders talking about "revolution" and "socialism" makes Hillary the Electable One for the general election.

This kind of fearful/contemptuous attitude toward the left has been a chronic problem for Democrats since 1972. The 2016 Hillary campaign version of it just reinforced the conservative tone in which the Democrats all too often frame themselves.

It doesn't have to be that way. It wasn't that long ago that Democrats could speak with approval of the Roosevelt Revolution that brought the New Deal. The Dems still will speak sometimes of the "civil rights revolution," though it's typically framed as a series of events in the 1950s and 1960s rather than anything ongoing. And even as non-revolutionary a Democrat as Lyndon Johnson could invoke the song that for the civil rights movement was a hymn invoking militancy and radical change: "And we shall overcome."

And even now, the Democrats as a group are trapped by a toxic centrism with a conservative cast that recently led them to oppose Trump's militant populist rhetoric, which included actual incitements to violence at his rallies, with a bland slogan like Stronger Together. Which goes well with the obsession with Bipartisanship that the Democrats can seem to shake off.

Which brings us to John Brown's statue. If there was any white man in the United States prior to the Civil War who was devoted to democracy, despised slavery and actively tried to end it, considered blacks equal to white and women equal to men - in other words, characteristics that liberals now condemn pretty much every citizen of the US prior to 1860 - it was John Brown.

But will Democratic Party liberals be jumping up and down in outrage over seeing his statue defaced? This is the Democratic Party we're talking about, so the answer is: not many. The reason is illustrated by the opening paragraph of an article on Brown from 2005 by historian Sean Wilentz, who wrote a good short biography of Andrew Jackson that takes a nuanced view of him without falling into anachronisms ("Homegrown Terrorist" New Republic The New Republic 10/24/2005):

John Brown was a violent charismatic anti-slavery terrorist and traitor, capable of cruelty to his family as well as to his foes. Every one of his murderous ventures failed to achieve its larger goals. His most famous exploit, the attack on Harpers Ferry in October 1859, actually backfired. That backfiring, and not Brown’s assault or his later apotheosis by certain abolitionists and Transcendentalists, contributed something, ironically, to the hastening of southern secession and the Civil War. In a topsy-turvy way, Brown may have advanced the anti-slavery cause. Otherwise, he actually damaged the mainstream campaign against slavery, which by the late 1850s was a serious mass political movement contending for national power, and not, as Brown and some of his radical friends saw it, a fraud even more dangerous to the cause of liberty than the slaveholders.

While it's a serious point, Wilentz' argument here bears an uncomfortable resemblance to the notorious "moderate" argument during the 1960s: if blacks actively protest against segregation, it will make whites more resistant and damage their own cause.

John Brown fought in the guerrilla war between the pro- and anti-slavery forces in Kansas Territory. And the operation during which he was captured at Harper's Ferry was one he designed to set up resistance bases in the Appalachian Mountains to encourage and facilitate the flight of slaves from their masters' plantations. But America's center-left party, the Democrats, don't really want to invoke that heritage, either. It might get in the way of Bipartisan cooperation.

I'm not suggesting that the Democratic Party set up guerrilla bases in the mountains. In fact, I can't really envision such a thing in my imagination.

But the Democrats mostly let the Republican have John Brown, too! Antiabortionists invoke John Brown to justify extralegal violence against abortion providers. The racism and anti-woman attitudes so common in that movement would be completely repugnant to Brown.

And the Democrats should be able to recognize that in the face of a Republican Party in power employing revolutionary means to wreck liberal democratic institutions, something more militant than Stronger Together bipartisan bromides is needed. As long as they are allergic to even talking about "revolution" in the sense of getting more people out to vote, they will have a hard time getting there. And unless they can do more than "bipartisan" surrender to Trump and the Republicans on issue after issue, it will be hard to convince voters than the Resistance talk is serious on their part.

On the other hand, for the Democrats to try to imitate the loose talk from the right about "Second Amendment solutions" sounds kind of bizarre. (Ed Kilgore, Democratic Congressman Hints at Armed Rebellion Against Trump New York 03/19/2018) A party that can't organize its Congressional representation to block an ill-conceived bank deregulation law isn't going to be organizing its own popular militia.

The problem for the Democrats is that so many of its leaders and office-holders are stuck in the we-aren't-lefties attitude that establishment Democrats in the 1968-72 period used, even Democrats who were born well after that time. This way too often leads them to frequently adopt conservative framing and conservative arguments for their more liberal/progressive positions. They really need to stop doing that, as George Lakoff has been urgently recommending for years now.

Also, despite their enthusiasm for "color revolutions" today, Democrats have often blundered and sometimes caused great harm in no small part due to their inability to take a practical, nuanced view of homegrown revolutions in other countries, from Woodrow Wilson and the Russian Revolution, to Lyndon Johnson and Vietnam, to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on Libya and, to some extent, Syria.

Millennial rightwingers - and more to come?

The current primary campaigns have brought lots of commentary on political authoritarianism (Trump, Cruz, really the whole Republican Party) and even some of self-consciously left-progressive ideologies.

The quality of the commentary varies.

Ned Resnikoff makes a contribution to this discussion with How young ‘liberal’ Americans could become racist right-wingers 02/26/2016. Resnikoff quotes someone who actually knows about far-right populism here:

David Neiwert, northwest correspondent for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told me that violent hate crimes tend to increase in areas that undergo “changes in demographics.”

“When there’s an increase in minorities, that’s when we tend to see these kinds of skinhead type crimes,” said Neiwert. “Or when you’re in a rural area and you have an influx of minorities, then you have people acting out what they see as a defense of their communities.”

Resnikoff is making a fairly broad argument, reflected in the title, that younger "Millennial" voters are open to racist, xenophobic, nationalist, authoritarian appeals in politics. And that this phenomenon can be seen in the US and in Europe:

Trump is not likely to spearhead a reactionary millennial front, but his success in the Republican primary—including among young GOP voters—is suggestive. It’s not difficult to imagine a near future in which young politicians adopt Trump’s flamboyant style and ideological leanings, while pitching their message specifically to members of their own generation.

Parties like Germany’s AfD and France’s National Front are already actively cultivating younger leadership. AfD has a youth-centric wing called Young Alternative, and National Front has elevated 26-year-old Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to become one of the youngest parliamentarians in modern French history. Expect Trump to draw in similar young talent through the force of his example.

By "Millennials," he apparently means people between 18 and 30, more or less. I guess I haven't been assuming that bad ideas and attitudes are restricted to particular age groups. Even though old white people in former Confederate states seem to be particularly receptive to them right now.

This statement from a few years ago still makes sense to me (Franklin Roosevelt, Radio Address to the Young Democratic Clubs of America The American Presidency 08/24/1935:

I, for one, am willing to place my trust in the youth of America. If they demand action as well as preachments, I should be ashamed to chill their enthusiasm with the dire prophecy that to change is to destroy. I am unwilling to sneer at the vision of youth merely because vision is sometimes mistaken. But vision does not belong only to the young.

There are millions of older people who have vision, just as there are some younger men and women who are ready to put a weary, selfish or greedy hand upon the clock of progress and turn it back. [my emphasis]

Finally, Bashar al-Assad is officially our new "Hitler"

Secretary of State John Kerry said Sunday that Syrian President Bashar Assad has taken a dubious place in history, noting the regime's alleged use of chemical weapons against civilians outside Damascus on Aug. 21.

"Bashar al-Assad now joins the list of Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein who have used these weapons in time of war," Kerry said on NBC's "Meet the Press."

- from Nick Gass, Kerry: Case against Assad the same Politico 09/01/2013

Of course! The US never goes to war against anybody but "Hitler."

Never mind that the thing that made Hitler "Hitler" was that he was an enemy that couldn't be appeased or deterred in his aims for external aggression, and was in command of the world's most powerful military (after Germany took over the Skoda arms works in Czechoslovakia that were ceded at the Munich Conference).

Syria's government is none of those things. So, other than everything that made Hitler "Hitler", I guess we could say that Bashar al-Assad is "Hitler" too.

One of my most popular posts here has been Jeffrey Record on appeasement 10/16/2013. It discusses a paper by Jeffrey Record in which he warns about the dangers of making every potential opponent into Hitler:

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examples of the danger of overestimating a security threat.

See also my posts, Review of The Specter of Munich by Jeffrey Record:

"Munich", "Munich", go away! 05/15/2008

Review of Making War, Thinking History by Jeffrey Record 11/18/2006:

No more "appeasement" 07/23/2008, which looks at Record's article, Retiring Hitler and "Appeasement" from the National Security Debate Parameters (Summer 2008), in which he says:

It is high time to retire Adolf Hitler and "appeasement" from the national security debate. The repeated analogizing of current threats to the menace of Hitler in the 1930s, and comparing diplomatic efforts to Anglo-French placating of the Nazi dictator, has spoiled the true meaning of appeasement, distorted sound thinking regarding national security challenges and responses, and falsified history. For the past six decades every President except Jimmy Carter has routinely invoked the Munich analogy as a means of inflating national security threats and demonizing dictators. Presidents and their spokespersons have not only believed the analogy but also used it to mobilize public opinion for war. After all, if the enemy really is another Hitler, then force becomes mandatory, and the sooner it is used the better. More recently, neoconservatives and their allies in government have branded as appeasers any and all proponents of using nonviolent conflict resolution to negotiate with hostile dictatorships. For neoconservatives, to appease is to be naïve, cowardly, and soft on the threat du jour, be it terrorism, a rogue state, or a rising great power. To appease is to be a Chamberlain rather than a Churchill, to comprise with evil rather than slay it. ...

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades and post-9/11 years contain examples of the danger of overestimating such threats. [my emphasis]

Tags: appeasement, dollfuss, fdr, franklin roosevelt, germany, hitler, jeffrey record, second world war

Saving the old New Deal and making a new one

The Real News Network has a series of video reports on the general topic of what the New Deal and its lessons and possibilities mean in the context of today, featuring Jamie Galbraith and Leo Panitch.

Gailbraith [sic] and Panitch: Is a New "New Deal' Possible? 03/19/2013:

Gailbraith [sic] and Panitch: Is a New "New Deal' Possible? Pt.2 03/21/2013:

Galbraith [third time's the charm!] and Panitch: What Would Real Economic Reform Look Like? 03/24/2013:

Tags: austerity economics, fdr, franklin roosevelt, james galbraith, new deal

Prediction is hard, especially about the future

Ernst Untermann was a German immigrant to the US who was committed socialist. An article of his appeared in the German Social Democratic Party's (SPD's) Sozialistische Monatshefte of 12/08/1932, after Franklin Roosevelt had defeated Herbert Hoover in the 1932 Presidential election, "Der Regierungswechsel in Amerika" (The Change of Government in America). In retrospect, this doesn't look like a very perceptive election analysis:

Mit einer solchen gewaltigen Macht, wie sie die Demokraten gewonnen hahen, würde man in einem andern Land gewiß einen grundsätzlichen Umschwung der Politik, wenn nicht der Wirtschaft erwarten. In Amerika glaubt kein Unterrichteter ernsthaft, daß der demokratische Sieg irgendetwas Besonderes an der Innen- und Auβenpolitik der amerikanischen Regierung andern wird. Für Europaer sollte wohl die Erinnerung an Wilsons Riesenschwung von der Neuen Freiheit zur Kriegsdiktatur genügen, um Illusionen unmöglich zu machen. Ein Blick auf die heutige Zusammensetzung der demokratischen Führerfchaft und ihrer finanziellen Gönner sollte dazu beitragen auch die leiseste Hoffnung auf wesentliche Änderung der Methoden und des Ausblicks zu vernichten. Weder der Rekord des Gouverneurs Roosevelt in New York noch seine Haltung während der Wahlkampagne berechtigt zu der Annahme, daß seine Verwaltung von der Wilsons oder Hoovers grundsatzlich verschieden sein wird. Obgleich er eine Unterstützung der Wähler erhielt, die zum erstenmal in der amerikanischen Geschichte wirklich national genannt werden kann, und obgleich er also die volle Verantwortung für den Miβbrauch seiner Parteimacht tragen muβ wie noch nie ein amerikanischer Präsident, wird doch nichts geschehcn, um den Eisenschuh der großen Klassenherrschaft vom Nacken der Nation zu entfernen. Freilich hat Roosevelt in der Hitze des Wahlfiebers erklärt: »Ich bin fur Privatbefitz, aber doch nicht so weit, daβ 1/4 aller Bürger dadurch ruiniert wird.>> Aber er hat nach seiner Wahl sofort eingelenkt: »Legitime Geschäfte haben von mir nichts zu fürchten.>> So hat auch Wilson gedroht jeden groβen Finanzfürsten zu hängen, der an der Demokratie rührt, um dann doch auf John Pierpont Morgans Befehl eine der schlimmsten Diktaturen in unserer Geschichte aufzurichten. Wir werden also eine Wiederholung der Wilsonschen Entwicklung erleben, in der Franklin Roosevelts angeblicher Liberalismus vor der offentlichkeit als Deckmantel für die volksfeindlichsten Manöver dienen wird. {Contemporary "s" used in quote instead of original "f"-style German "s".}

[My translation, with additional paragraph breaks: With such great power as the Democrats have won for them selves, in another country one would expect a basic change in politics, if not in the economy. In America, no news reporter seriously believe that the Democratic victory will change anything essential in the internal and external policy of the American government. For Europeans, the memory alone of {Woodrow} Wilson's huge swing from the New Freedom to war dictatorship should be enough to make illusions impossible. A glance at the present collection of the Democratic leadership and their financial backers should also contribute to destroying the slightest hope for essential changes in methods and outlooks. Neither Roosevelt's record as Governor in New York nor his position during the election campaign justifies the assumption that his Administration will be fundamentally different than those of Wilson or Hoover.

Even though he attained the support of the voters, who really could vote nationally for the first time in American history, and even though he must therefore carry the responsibility like no American President ever before for the misuse of his partisan power, nothing will happen to take the iron shoe of the great class rule off the neck of the nation. It's true that Roosevelt declared in the heat of election fever: "I'm in favor of private ownership, but not so far that a quarter of all citizens are thereby ruined." But after his election, he immediately softened his tone: "Legitimate businesses have nothing to fear from me." {Both FDR quotes retranslated from the German} So had Wilson also threatened to hang any great prince of finance who disturbs democracy, only to erect one of the worst dictatorships in our history at the order of John Pierpont Morgan.

We will therefore experience a repetition of the Wilsonian development, in which Franklin Roosevelt's alleged liberalism with serve as a cover for the most hostile maneuvers against the people.]

In one way, Untermann's expectation is dead-on: in the sense that a dogmatic assumption that the Democratic and Republican Parties of 1932 were irretrievably corrupt and reactionary because they didn't endorse an ultimate program of state ownership of the means of production, which makes its own circular definition. It also has the advantage of being retroactively correct from that viewpoint, because FDR neither attempted nor achieved the abolition of capitalism in the United States. The SPD nominally still did support such a program in 1932, although in reality they had long since rejected such a goal as anything but a symbol of some ideal future state not to be taken seriously in practical politics.

However, from any realistic point of view, it certainly reads now as near-delusional. Because Roosevelt wound up making more far-reaching reforms that increased the well-being and enhanced the rights of working people than any other major capitalist country during the early 1930s.

There are also some strange assumptions in that quote. Wilson's Administration did take repressive measures during the war against antiwar activists and resident aliens who were leftwing activists. But to imagine it as a "war dictatorship" is unrealistic, to put it mildly. And a dictatorship erected at the orders of John Pierpont Morgan? That sounds like Ron Paul Bircher territory.

In light of the 2012 fashionability of austerity economics in a depression, it's worth noting that neither Untermann nor Roosevelt nor the SPD understood in 1932 that budget-balancing in such circumstances was as suicidal as we see it being today in Greece and Spain. FDR famously promised in his 1932 campaign to balance the budget, and Untermann sneers at that promise ... because he argued the Roosevelt wasn't serious about it! Untermann protests, he never was able to do it as Governor of New York!

Untermann was also known for his paintings of prehistoric creatures. Here's a video of some of Untermann's dinosaurs YouTube date 0812/2009:



If that article is any measure, his painting is much better than his political analysis was.

Tags: ernst untermann, fdr, franklin roosevelt

Time travel blogging: Congress investigates war profiteering!

Once upon a time, in a very different country called the United States of America, the New York Times was reporting on the speech of a Senator who had just been selected to head a special Senate Committee on war profiteering, "Nye Enumerates War Profit Rises" 09/02/1934:

Speaking over the Columbia Broadcasting System, [Senator Gerald Nye] asserted that annual average profits of the Atlas Powder Company moved from $485,000 in peace time to $2,374,000 in the World War years and gave increases for other concerns as follows:

Hercules Powder Company — by $6,000,000.
General Motors Corporation — from $6,954,000 to $21,700,000.
Anaconda Copper Company — by $24,000,000.
United States Steel Corporation — from $105,331,000 to $238,653,000.
Bethlehem Steel Company - from $6,840,000 to $49,427,000.
Du Pont - from $6,092,000 to $58,076,000.

For some perspective, $24 million per year was really big bucks for a large corporation back during the First World War.

Gerald Nye has not gone down in history as one of our great statesmen. Far from it. In the years when the international threats from Germany and Japan were becoming more painfully obvious by the month, he was a hardline rightwing isolationist. The term "isolationist" is bandied about a lot, usually to condemn someone who opposes one's own interventionist inclinations. But Nye's brand of what we now know as Old Right isolationism has really not had a significant influence on US foreign policy in decades, though it's kissing cousins with Cheney-Bush style unilateralism.

But in 1934, Nye's Committee began its work with the tacit blessings of the Roosevelt Administration. And the administration cooperated with the Committee in providing and even volunteering documents for its work, which focused on the shady lobbying of lenders and armaments makers during the years before and during the First World War. Though the Democrats controlled Congress, Republican Senator Nye was chosen to head the special committee.

Historians tend to see the Nye Committee's work through the prism of the later bitter fights between the Roosevelt administration and the America Firsters as Roosevelt had to fight tooth and nail to bolster US defenses in the face of Axis aggression against the intense opposition of Republicans like Nye.

But it's a healthy reminder that there was a time, before the living memory of most people now but not hopelessly far away either, where Democrats and Republicans in Congress were willing to openly challenge the titans of industry and finance over war profiteering. The inquiry made a big impression on the public as it produced a number of impressive tales of dubious dealings by the wealth and powerful that could well have put the lives of Americans at stake needlessly. Though the First World War improved its reputation in the US considerably after the experiences of the Second, in the 1920s and 1930s, it was widely held in the US as well as Europe that the war had been a gigantic waste, waged in no small part for venal purposes. And there was a considerable amount of truth in that view.

The Times report also said:

The list of over 100 witnesses, those called for next week to be made public tomorrow, would be a "Who's Who" of the industry, he added, and the inquiry would involve every angle of the war implements industry in this country and much of it that functions under other flags. ...

Witnesses will be asked to disclose their past and present profits from manufacture of explosives, poison gas, airplanes, armor plate, heavy and light artillery, anti-aircraft ordnance, rifles, tanks and all implements of modern warfare.

They will also be called on to state what interest, understanding, or other relations exist between themselves, their firms or corporations and the manufacturers of arms and munitions in England, France, Germany or other foreign countries in which the industry is of major proportions.

Finally, the inquiry will take up alleged "lobbying" by agents of the industry in Washington and their role, if any, in disarmament conferences [after the war]. (my emphasis)

Yes, the times they have 'a changed.

If Barack Obama gets elected, he might want to take a look at Roosevelt's strategy in that matter. Exposing the callous dealings of the "economic royalists" (as FDR came to call them) was a good way to further reduce the glow of economic brilliance around them even more than the Great Depression had done. In addition, this was the time when reactionary business interests were organizing the Liberty League to oppose FDR's New Deal measures.

And what our latter-day Churchills take for granted, that the US should have armed itself like mad after the First World War, was by no means self-evident to everyone in 1934. Close observers of Hitler and his Nazi movement could see even at that point that his policies were directed towards war. But the idea that a massive American military program was an answer to that growing but still distant threat was scarcely obvious in 1934, even in retrospect.

David Kennedy includes this story about FDR in his Freedom From Fear: The American People in Depression and War, 1929-1945 (1999):

In keeping with the temper of the times and with his own budget-cutting agenda, Roosevelt also moved swiftly after his inauguration [in 1932 1933] to shrink the already skeletal 140,000-man army. Army Chief of Staff Douglas MacArthur remonstrated vehemently. Meeting with Roosevelt at the White House, MacArthur later recalled, "I spoke recklessly and said something to the effect that when we lost the next war, and an American boy, lying in the mud with an enemy bayonet through his belly and an enemy foot on his dying throat, spat out his last curse, I want the name be be not MacArthur, but Roosevelt." A livid president shouted that MacArthur could not talk that way to the commander-in-chief. MacArthur, choked with emotion, hurried outside and vomited on the White House steps. The army's budget stayed cut.

Obama could take a lesson about Roosevelt's refusal to be intimidated by some military blowhard spouting purple prose, too. MacArthur's vomiting afterwards makes me wonder what caused it. I suppose it could have been food poisoning. But it could also have been MacArthur, arrogant and used to people deferring to him because of his position, was stunned to be put into place by someone who wasn't afraid of him and his bluster. He later underestimated Harry Truman, as well. I can picture Dick Cheney reacting in a similar way if he were arrested and charged with war crimes.

Tags: douglas macarthur, fdr, franklin roosevelt, gerald nye, war profiteering

The 1933 coup plot against Franklin Roosevelt

Robert Kennedy, Jr., in Hillary Haters and the Roosevelts Huffington Post 12/12/07 discusses the coup plot that I mentioned in my 10/07/07 post, The American Liberty League and coup plotting.

The intense hatred of the Roosevelts was a dominant feature in the American political landscape during the decade of the 1930s and prompted efforts to impeach him and even a plot to depose him by a military coup planned by high ranking officers of Wall Street's richest corporations, including Goodyear, Bethlehem Steel, JP Morgan, and DuPont. The "vast right wing conspiracy" had its own Richard Mellon Scaife. Robert Clark, one of Wall Street's richest bankers and stock brokers pledged half of his $60 million fortune to help finance the coup. His deputy, former Commander Gerald Macguire of the American Legion, a Wall Street bond broker, equated Roosevelt's reforms to Communism and explained the purpose of the coup to a co-conspirator, "We need a fascist government in this country to save the nation from the Communists who want to tear it down and wreck everything we have built in America." The 1933 coup attempt was only averted by the courage of General Smedley Butler, the popular World War I warrior who had been tapped by Wall Street to lead the plot and who instead exposed and denounced it.

Tags: authoritarianism, american legion, american liberty league, franklin roosevelt, robert f kennedy jr., smedley butler

Unconditional surrender in the Second World War

The Big Three: it wasn't such an easy alliance, but it won the Second World War

I've written before about how dysfunctional the prevailing Republican notion of "victory" in warfare seems to be. The US initially achieved that kind of Victory in Iraq: the enemy government was completely overthrown and the enemy country made completely subject to American occupation.

Given the aftermath of that Victory, an aftermath for which there is no end in sight, it's certainly worth asking just what we actually win with a Victory like that.

One of the most important influences on that notion was the policy of "unconditional surrender" that the United Nations insisted upon. The "United Nations" side was Our Side, with the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain being the heaviest hitters of the alliance.

John Chase took a lot back at that policy in Unconditional Surrender Reconsidered Political Science Quarterly June 1955 (behind subscription, except for the first page; some public libraries make access available to patrons online).

Diplomacy of unconditional surrender

Chase traces the actual development of the concept. It was US President Franklin Roosevelt who insisted on the formula, which was eventually agreed upon by Britain's Winston Churchill and the USSR's Josef Stalin. American psychological-warfare specialists were concerned that the unconditional-surrender policy might prolong the war by making the main enemies fight more desperately. Chase writes:

Since the President insisted on retention of the policy over so much opposition, it seems clear that in his own mind it must have served some very basic function, or have entailed some very definite advantages. Careful analysis of the available records indicates that the slogan did, in fact, have such a basic function in the over-all development of American policy, and there were very considerable advantages in it from the President's point of view. The main function, briefly stated, was to impose a damper on premature discussion of the post-war settlement, and the advantages related to three areas, the existing German government and the German people, the policy of the Soviet government, and the attitude of the American people toward the winning of the war.

On the one hand, Roosevelt wanted to avoid proposals like Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points in the First World War. Roosevelt's assessment was that such a thing might lead enemies to expect an overly conciliatory attitude on the part of the Allies. He didn't want a policy which offered "any magnanimous gesture in advance of unconditional surrender "that "the Germans would misconstrue as a sign of weakness", writes Chase.

Yet Chase argues that, at the same time, Roosevelt intended for the policy to convey a strong possibility of generous treatment for the defeated populations. He told his Secretary of State Cordell Hull:

In our uncompromising policy we mean no harm to the common people of the Axis nations. But we do mean to impose punishment and retribution in full upon their guilty, barbaric leaders.

Chase sums up Roosevelt's concept of the effect of the unconditional surrender policy on Germany this way:

It seems clear, then, that so far as Germany was concerned the unconditional surrender policy was intended to inform the world - Germans, Americans, and everyone else - that the Allies would accept nothing less than the complete defeat of existing enemy governments, and would not bargain or compromise with them. Both the President and Mr. Churchill agreed on this, and both went out of their way to explain that this did not mean a policy of unnecessary harshness or vindictiveness toward the common people of the Axis nations.

Although I think the policy of unconditional surrender was the right one in that situation, the fact that it was appropriate in that situation does not make it into some general principle that the US should look to apply every time that US forces are engaged in hostile action. The Second World War was an historical experience, from which we can hopefully learn some constructive things. It was not a grand template drawn by a "Greatest Generation" for all American wars for all times and situations.

Chase makes an important point in connection with the effect of the policy on the German public, which is that the massive bombing of German cities (which occurred in Japan, as well) indicated to enemy civilians that they could expect rough treatment indeed from a victorious foe. He quotes Allen Dulles on the point:

Our propaganda consisted of the slogan "unconditional surrender," and was coupled with the bombing of German cities, high civilian casualties and the destruction of thousands of workers' dwellings. That this type of bombing came only from the west made a deep impression on the German masses who ascribed it to a deliberate difference in policy between East and West. They overlooked the fact that Russian aviation was not adapted to that type of bombing. (my emphasis)

Although it's not directly relevant to the unconditional surrender policy, I would note that by destroying not only civilian houses but civilian businesses, the bombing policy freed up large labor resources for use in the armaments industry, heavily offsetting the effects of one of the main aims of the "strategic bombing".

And whatever Churchill's reservations may have been about the unconditional surrender policy, he wound up concluding, "It is false to suggest that it prolonged the war. Negotiation with Hitler was impossible. He was a maniac with supreme power to play his hand out to the end, which he did; and so did we."

But agreeing with Churchill's judgment in that case, which I do, does not mean that every enemy is Hitler with the "supreme power to play his hand out to the end". Or that unconditional surrender is always and everywhere valid for all wars in which the United States participates.

In relation to the Soviet Union, the unconditional surrender policy served to keep the USSR in general and their leader Stalin in particular, reassured about the intentions of his Western allies to see through the war against Germany to a mutually acceptable end. Two matters made this especially necessary: Poland and the Second Front.

Churchill, the idol of the neoconservatives, actually was prepared in 1942 to agree that the Soviet Union could keep the portions of Poland it had divided with Germany in the secret protocols to the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939. Roosevelt, who the neocons regard as a vacillating compromiser in comparison to the Great Winston, blocked the deal.

Roosevelt did commit a blunder in rashly promising the Soviets that Britain and the US would open the Second Front in the West during 1943. Stalin was understandably disappointed to hear in 1943 that the Second Front would have to wait until 1944. Regardless of the nature of the Soviet regime, their country was bearing by far the brunt of the fighting against Germany with the related human costs.

Both issues were potential sources of distrust on the part of the Soviets. The policy of unconditional surrender functioned to reassure them and to keep the US-Britain-Soviet alliance intact, even to the point of the USSR joining the war against Japan. He does mention an interesting twist, which is that the Soviets raised questions about the unconditional surrender policy at the Teheran Conference in December, 1943:

Stalin endorsed the policy in his Order of the Day of May 1, 1943. Soviet objections to it were not voiced until the Teheran Conference. By that time, however, the Western Allies were fully committed to the opening of the western front, so that the Russians may well have figured that the policy had served its main immediate purpose. It is a notable fact that even at Teheran the Russian objections were based upon tactical considerations, and that their situation was in this respect less happy than that of the Western Allies, whose tactical problem was to convince the Germans of their deadly seriousness, not of their humaneness50 On the whole it can be said that at the time it was announced, and until the tactical, propaganda argument could seem more important, the Soviets accepted unconditional surrender as the President apparently hoped and felt they would. In this respect the policy was clearly successful, and achieved what it was designed to do. (my emphasis)

Unconditional surrender and national unity at home

Chase argues that the role Roosevelt saw for unconditional surrender in bolstering the US public's support for the war was intimately bound up with its purpose of cementing the alliance with Russia:

In the President's mind, unquestionably, preservation of American unity of opinion was an indispensable condition both of victory and of success in the peace to follow. The two major threats to this unity, as the President saw it, were: domestic indifference, arising from a failure to grasp the nature of the issues in this total war; and international resentment and hostility arising from a conflict of aims between the United States and, above all other Allies, the Soviet Union. In his address the President tried to deal with both these threats, explicitly and directly. He emphasized "our determination to fight this war through to the finish," and he stressed the preservation of unity between all the Allies as the indispensable condition of victory. Of course the two objectives were intimately related. Any relaxation of effort short of victory, on the home front, would result in disunity between the Allies; and any evidence of disunity - such as might arise from putting forward conflicting post-war aims - might well produce a relaxation of effort short of victory. (my emphasis)

That connection between the two major considerations should not be seen as simply a truism. The United Nations' prospects for victory against Germany and Japan was heavily dependent on an Allied effort. And, however Soviet policy before and after the war is evaluated, the Soviets did carry the heaviest burden among the Allies. The withdrawal or neutralization of the Soviet Union would have changed the military situation in a fundamental way.

It's worth noting that Roosevelt saw the chief danger to domestic support as public indifference, not treason by the opposition party. At the risk of mucking up my narrative on the historical experience, the current approach is so very different that it may require extra effort for Americans today to grasp that aspect of Roosevelt's view.

Joe Conason recently focused on the Karl Rove strategy of using the 9/11 attacks to promote partisan divisiveness, in A Master of Division Truthdig.com 08/16/07:

In the aftermath of 9/11, the worst attack on American soil since Pearl Harbor, Bush quickly abandoned the example of past wartime presidents who struggled to bring the entire nation together against the enemy. With astronomical approval ratings and extraordinary unity, the president could have accomplished almost anything. But following his political guru’s direction, Bush used war as a partisan instrument—which meant dividing, not uniting, America.

Within months after Democrats and Republicans joined arms on the Capitol steps, standing with the president against the jihadists, Rove told the Republican National Committee that the “war on terror” would become, in effect, an assault on the loyal opposition.

To win the midterm election, the White House would turn on the Democrats who had faithfully supported the invasion of Afghanistan and the USA Patriot Act. "We can go to the country on this issue," predicted Rove in January 2002, "because they trust the Republican Party to do a better job of protecting and strengthening America’s military might and thereby protecting America." That bland description scarcely did justice to the campaign that ensued. The viciousness on the Republican side was typified by an ad campaign that led to the defeat of Sen. Max Cleland, a triple-amputee Army veteran and Bronze and Silver Star winner, by painting him as a stooge of terrorism.

The only unity Rove cared about was unity of 51% of the voters behind the Republican Party's policies.

In his fortuitously timed article "The Rove Presidency" in the September 2007 Atlantic Monthly, Joshua Green mainly focuses on the Rove target of long-term partisan "realignment", which to the authoritarian Republicans meant effectively establishing a one-party state. But his report on Rove is also relevant in some respects more specifically to public opinion on current wars. After the 2002 election, writes Green, the one in which the Congressional authorization for the Iraq War became the most important issue with which the Republicans based Democrats for being soft on national security, Rove's popularity in the Party soared due to "his strategy of aggressive divisiveness on the issues of war and terrorism." And he writes:

After 9/11, any pretense of shared sacrifice or of reaching across the aisle was abandoned. The administration could demand - and get - almost anything it wanted, easily flattening Democratic opposition, which it did with increasing frequency on issues like the PATRIOT Act and the right of Department of Homeland Security workers to unionize. The crisis atmosphere allowed the White House to ignore what normally would have been some of its most basic duties -working with Republicans in Congress (let alone Democrats) and laying the groundwork in Congress and with the American public for what it hoped to achieve. At the time, however, this didn't seem to matter.

... "What Bush went out and did in 2002," a former administration official told me, "clearly at Karl's behest, with an eye toward the permanent Republican majority, was very aggressively attack those Democrats who voted with him and were for him. There's no question that the president helped pick up seats. But all of that goodwill was squandered." (my emphasis)

Now, I'm always happy to contrast Republicans unfavorably with Franklin Roosevelt. But my point here is to emphasize the put Roosevelt's desire for national unity during the Second World War into its own context, which was different than today's. Comparisons between Roosevelt's strategy of generating support for that war have to take full account of the very different situations in the parties in those days.

Roosevelt famously said that for the war, Dr. Win-the-War would have to take the place of Dr. New Deal. His New Deal coalition in Congress was also of necessity significantly bipartisan. The now-extinct and nearly-forgotten species called "liberal Republicans" was still thriving in those days. There were liberal Republicans who supported much of the New Deal and conservative Democrats who opposed it. Although the isolationists prior to the war including some pro-New Deal Republicans, it tended to be conservative. Still, Roosevelt judged that the votes he needed to secure his preparedness program and war policies included conservative Southern Democrats. The two parties today are far more consistently aligned on both domestic and foreign policies.

Based on American historical experience, "national unity" is a greatly overrated state, even during wars. National unity is only constructive if people are unifying behind a sound and constructive policy. Unifying behind a bad policy like Bush's 2003 invasion of Iraq or an overt attack on Iran now just enables the bad policy to produce its bad results.

(I don't want to encourage sloppy revisionism, so I should add that I'm referring to the Iraq invasion more as an example of bad policy than of unity behind it. In fac, there was very significant dissent against going to war. And it was not from some isolated minority like the "anti-imperialist" intellectual dissenters in the Spanish-American War; there was great public skepticism about the Iraq War up until the invasion.)

The Roosevelt administration imprisonment in camps of Japanese-American citizens for no good reason was a decision which largely united white Democrats and white Republicans. A vigorous dissent from one party or a bipartisan alliance would have been far healthier for both democracy and the war effort in that situation.

As a factual matter, the very common notion that broad unity behind a war policy is necessary can also be questioned. Support for the Iraq War had plummeted to a restricted minority by 2006. But the current administration has been able to carry out its military policies in Iraq, including a significant escalation in The Surge, in the face of public opposition to the war and even a hostile Congressional majority.

Abraham Lincoln had great difficulty in maintaining sufficient political support among the public for the Union war effort. He faced organized, vocal, active and even sometimes violent opposition from Democratic Copperheads. Within the Republican Party itself, there was substantial support for candidacy in 1864 by John Charles Fremont. And the 1964 Presidential election against a Democratic candidate, George McClellan, who was rightly regarded as a defeatist, was a hard-fought and close one. But the Union won the war.

But whatever role the unconditional surrender policy played in unity over the war effort during the Second World War, that unity was maintained. The war retained major public support until the end.

Chase points to one historical factor that apparently still goes generally unremarked. During the Iraq War, we've sometimes seen a quote from Franklin's cousin Theodore Roosevelt about the necessity for patriotic dissent during war. The earlier Roosevelt agitated publicly for a tougher war policy than Woodrow Wilson seemed to be pursuing. Including insisting on a policy of "unconditional surrender". Chase writes:

In this connection it seems somewhat strange to this writer that no mention has been made ... of the controversial rôle played by "unconditional surrender" in World War I, and especially in the anti-Wilson speeches of Theodore Roosevelt. But the President's own memory was apparently not so short and, as Sherwood observes, the ghost of Woodrow Wilson was often at his shoulder. Indeed, in retrospect it may well be asked, what better device could be imagined to serve the President's purpose than the very slogan popularized by the "bitter-enders" in the previous war? Surely the President's political genius never burned more brightly than when he rescued this phrase from oblivion, and made it serve American purposes.

One part about Chase's description of Roosevelt's presentation of the war to the public that I find puzzling is this:

Wallace Carroll mentions the President's well-known aversion to stating positively any war aims at all, and the fact that the President gave the war the uninspiring name, "The Survival War". According to Carroll the President believed that "if he attemptedto give the war a social purpose, he would arouse the hostility of the same groups which had opposed his domestic policies."

"Survival War" doesn't have a real snappy sound to it, does it?

But it's misleading to say in isolation that Roosevelt didn't "give the war a social purpose". It's true he didn't try to tie any major New Deal type domestic programs to the war effort. But he did enunciate goals like the Four Freedoms in connection with the war that had definite social content; one of the Four Freedoms was "freedom from want". And he also proposed measures like the Economic Bill of Rights, which although it wasn't linked directly to war measures, did hold out the promise of a more fair shake for labor after the war. He also fought unsuccessfully against Republican opposition to allowing soldiers overseas vote absentee.

Chase points out that if we really look closely at the policy pursued with the German "satellite" nations, "unconditional surrender" wasn't always applied in its pure form. But Roosevelt still insisted upon it, even after additional attempts by the Soviets and the British to drop the formula. He calls attention to why this insistence needs to be explained after the Soviets were satisfied that the opening of the Second Front was firmly decided upon:

Had this been his only purpose, however, no reason would have existed for retaining the policy once the United States was fully committed to the Western European invasion. Hence the President's continued opposition, after this point had been reached, must be understood as indicating his belief that there were still advantages to be gained from it, in spite of its tactical disadvantages which, incidentally, the President never denied the existence of. The question then is, what were these continuing advantages?

Here again, the sad postwar experience of Woodrow Wilson provided a major caution to Roosevelt:

The President was well aware ... of the danger that the United States might return to a policy of isolationism after the war. He was also well aware of the vital importance attached by the Soviet government to a solution of the German problem; and of the necessity for ending the threat to the United States of recurring European wars caused by Germany. The danger of a return to isolationism could be averted, and the basis for Allied cooperation in Germany could be laid, only if the United States were fully committed not only to immediate victory but also to whatever measures of intervention in Germany were necessary after the war to keep the peace.

Conclusion

It's easy to see why a war aim of unconditional surrender would be especially appealing to those of an authoritarian turn of mind. The idea of total victory for Our Side and total defeat of The Enemy meshes well with their tendency to see issues in black-or-white, all-or-nothing, good-vs.-evil terms.

But whatever lessons the Second World War provides on the value of an unconditional surrender policy, that policy in that war needs to be understood in a realistic context. The nature of the enemy, the exigencies of the wartime alliance and coalition warfare and a judgment of the state of public opinion after two decades of an "isolationist" international posture all drove the US insistence on unconditional surrender.

Taking it as some kind of general principle or trying to apply it automatically to every war is impractical and potentially very destructive.

It's worth noting that in 1955, at the time of Chase's article, the results of the policy were being subjected to serious questioning. The criticism was largely based on the fact that insisting on unconditional surrender implied major postwar obligations:

It does seem, therefore, that although the President successfully avoided the Wilsonian error (as the President and Mr. Churchill considered it) of giving the Germans a semi-legal basis for asserting their rights, he nevertheless involved the Allies, and particularly the United States, in a moral obligation of a very far-reaching extent. This was, at any rate, the feeling of some, and was to be voiced later by some critics of the policy.

Yes, taking over an entire country does involve postwar responsibilities that may not be entirely easy to fulfill. It's tempting to draw a contemporary lesson or two from that. But I'll refrain for now.

Tags: churchill, fdr, franklin roosevelt, john chase, karl rove, second world war, stalin, unconditional surrender, world war II

Jeffrey Record on appeasement

I've posted here before on the paper Appeasement Reconsidered: Investigating the Mythology of the 1930s (August 2005) by Jeffrey Record of the Air Force's Air War College.

When I started composing a post to summarize it, I found it far more difficult than on most posts of this type. And I think the reason is that I found the whole thing so intriguing and refrishing that I hate to call out parts of it for particular attention. And since I'm familiar with Record's work on the Vietnam War, the Gulf War and the Iraq War, I felt very comfortable with his approach.

It's not often that you come across a genuinely insightful look at a familiar set of historical events. But this is one.

Record's account is not "revisionist" history, especially not in the sense that David Irving and other pro-Nazi or Holocaust-denier types use the term. And he's not making any claim to original research findings in this paper. What he's doing is telling the story of the Anglo-French policy of "appeasement" toward Hitler's policies prior to Germany's invasion of Poland in 1939.

The policy has been universally recognized as a disastrous failure. So much so that the word "appeasement", which in the 1930s and before simply meant a policy of concessions, has come to be a pejorative meaning weak, feckless and cowardly. As one example among thousands, the leading neoconservative Robert Kaplan writes in Use Brinkmanship on Iran Los Angeles Times 09/29/06:

It was the delegitimization of force that provided the bedrock for appeasement in Europe in the 1930s. Europe was still recovering from a continent-wide war that had cost too many lives and caused untold destruction for no demonstrable result, and that was the product of decisions made by a closed political elite. Sound familiar? The idea that European governments could wage another conflict was seen as preposterous. There was no choice but to reach a diplomatic arrangement with the Nazis.

Appeasement was not only the product of cowards but also of eminently reasonable men. Adolf Hitler had not threatened to annihilate the Jews, and Germany's reasons for reoccupying the Sudetenland were based on principles of self-determination related to President Wilson's 14 Points - his vision for a just and lasting peace for Europe after World War I. (my emphasis)

The standard account of appeasement goes something like this. France refused to stop Germany from re-militarizing (moving troops into) the Rhineland in 1936. Germany rearmed at a furious pace after Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, and the leaders of Britain and France failed to realize the meanace it represented. In early 1938, Hitler occupied Austria and annexed it. (Anschluss, as the event is known in English-language accounts as well as German ones, is the German word for "annexation".)

At the infamous Munich Conference later in 1938, Britain and France acceeded to Germany's demand to take over the part of western Czechoslovakia known as the Sudentenland, where German residents had carried on disputes of various levels of intensity with their Czech neighbors for decades. In doing so, Britain and France abrogated their treaty obligations to protect Czechoslovakia. This convinced Hitler of the weakness of the Western democracies, which emboldened him to further conquests, setting off the Second World War in Europe.

For ideologues like Kaplan, it becomes more of a tale of failure of Will than anything else. And let's not even talk about überhack Victor Davis Hanson, who cranks out bad Second World War anologies by the bucketful.

Record doesn't challenge the basic account I summarized in that narrative. And he certainly doesn't dispute the failure of the appeasement policy. His purpose is to analyze those events to understand them in their actual context in order to challenge the ritual "lessons of Munich" and common assumptions about why appeasement failed. As he notes, the failure of the appeasement policy is constantly invoked by strategists bother professional and armchair. Because of the lessons of appeasement, Presidential declarations about how the foreign policy priorty of the moment is a testosterone contest between the US and its oppnenet of the moment have great resonance. George W. Bush is by no means the first to invoke the comparison. Record wrote a book on the use of the Munich analogy, Making War, Thinking History: Munich, Vietnam, and Presidential Uses of Force from Korea to Kosovo (2002).

Record also observes that this is a favorite theme for our neocon unilateralists:

For neo-conservatives who have provided the intellectual foundation of U.S. foreign policy since September 11, 2001 (9/11) (enshrined in President Bush’s September 2002 The National Security Strategy of the United States of America), the failure of the democracies to stop Hitler in the 1930s remains the primary instruction on both international politics and America’s role in the world. ,,, (my emphasis)

Engelbert Dollfuss, Austrian Standestaat dictator

Though presidents can and have, knowingly and unwittingly, misused the Munich analogy to describe security threats and the consequences of failing to act against them, there is no gainsaying the power of that analogy to mobilize public opinion. This is so because of the catastrophic failure of the security policies Britain and France pursued vis-à-vis Germany in the 1930s. In retrospect, Anglo-French appeasement, driven by perceived military weakness and fear of war, did nothing but whet Hitler’s insatiable territorial appetite (and his contempt for British and French political leadership), while simultaneously undermining the democracies’ security. The result was the most destructive war in history and an enduring pejorative image of appeasement whose casting includes Nazi ideology as a self-evident blueprint of Germany’s territorial aims; Neville Chamberlain as a coward and fool bent on peace at any price; Britain and France as betrayers of brave little Czechoslovakia; and Hitler as the great winner at the Munich Conference of September 1938. (my emphasis)

Record reminds us of one event often neglected in discussion of appeasement toward Hitler. That was the German attempt to take over Austria in 1934 by sending a strike force of Austrian Nazis across the border from Bavaria. They failed to overthrow the "clerical-fascist" government, which the autocratic Chancellor Engelbert Dollfuss called a Standestaat, or corporate state. They did manage to murder Dollfuss. But the Nazis failed to rally any kind of popular support for their coup attempt. And Mussolini's Italy sided with Austria and was prepared to intervene militarily to stop the German takeover.

Dollfuss murdered

This was an example of successful deterrance in the short run (though obviously not for Dollfuss). But Hitler didn't give up his goal of annexing his home country to Germany. When he achieved it four years later, Italy was no longer ready to stand with Austria against Germany.

This was in part because of France's refusal to act militarily to prevent the violation of the Versailles Treaty when Hitler moved token forces into the Rhineland section of Germany, which was forbidden under Versailles. But Record is careful to explain that France's failure was not a problem because it was a loss in a testosterone contest. It was a problem because France's inaction was inconsistent with its strategic posture at the time.

German troops marching into the Rhineland 1936

France was relying on a system of political alliances with eastern European countries like Czechoslovakia and Russia and with Belgium. But its military posture was overwhelmingly a defensive one which "completely undercut" their diplomatic strategy. Record writes:

Both deterrence and coercive diplomacy rest on credibly threatened force, and France lacked the political will and military capacity to make credible threats of force. French diplomacy called for a military hammer, but the French military provided only an anvil.

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, 1938

In this regard, Hitler’s military reoccupation of the Rhineland in March 1936 was a much greater strategic disaster for the democracies than the sellout of Czechoslovakia in September 1938, but not because the Rhineland remilitarization blocked a French attack into Germany; France, as we have seen, had no intention of attacking Germany even through an undefended Rhineland. The disaster lay in the irreparable blow to French prestige. French failure to fire a single shot at token German military forces entering territory so vital to France’s security advertised France to the rest of the Continent as a feckless security partner. French inaction reinforced Belgium's decision to drop its alliance with France in favor of neutrality, exposing France to the very German attack that was delivered through Belgium 4 years later; it encouraged Mussolini, who in thwarting a Berlin-sponsored Nazi coup in Austria 2 years earlier had handed Hitler a major foreign policy defeat, to move closer to the German dictator; it left Austria exposed to virtually certain German annexation, thereby compromising Czechoslovakia’s defense; and it undermined the Eastern allies’ confidence in France. The Rhineland debacle even prompted Pope Pius XI to tell the French ambassador that, “Had you ordered the immediate advance of 200,000 men into the zone the Germans had occupied, you would have done everyone a very great favor.” (p. 18; my emphasis)

This, in turn, undercut France's diplomatic strategy. Even Belgium rejected a military alliance and adopted aneutral stance. But again, the problem was not for France to show that their God was bigger than Hitler's God, to borrow a notorious phrase from Bush's "war on terrorism". The problem was that France had adopted a military policy inconsistent with it political strategy and failed to evaluate realistically the risks involved.

In the end, France was not adequate prepared militarily to defend itself against Germany.

But it was not only French leaders who failed to realize it. Britain was severely overstretched with its colonies. A major attraction of the appeasement policy for Britain was the need to limit its military obligations in a potential European war. And, as Record observes, an overly-optimistic view of French capabilities was a major factor in Britain's misjudgment:

Until 1939, British political leaders and such influential strategic thinkers as B. H. Liddell Hart believed, or at least wanted to believe, that Britain could limit its liability in a future European war by restricting its role to the provision of naval and air power. (During the Napoleonic era, noted Liddell Hart, Britain’s main contribution to France’s defeat had been sea power and the extension of financial credits to continental coalitions that provided the ground forces.) Determined to avoid a repetition of the trench warfare horrors of 1914-18, increasingly fearful of the German air threat ..., and persuaded that France and its Eastern allies, which from 1935 on included Czechoslovakia and nominally the Soviet Union, would not require a major British ground force contribution in a war with Germany, British governments in the 1930s focused increasing defense expenditure on the Royal Air Force at the expense of the army. (my emphasis)

France, on the other hand, was very much aware of its own military dependence on Britain. So, even though France was banking heavily on eastern European alliances, French leaders did not believe France could undertake a defense of Czechoslovakia in 1938 without Britain's support. Thus, France regarded itself as obliged to go along with Britain's appeasement policy at this time.

Record states very clearly that it was dishonorable for France to abandon its treaty ally Czechoslovakia. But he also reminds usthat far moreconcrete factors were in play than vague notions of Will and testosterone:

But for both Britain and France, more than French honor was at stake. Czechoslovakia may not have been sustainable as a national state over the long run, but in 1938 it was the only democracy in Central Europe and formed a significant strategic barrier to German expansion into Eastern and Southeastern Europe. Indeed, a major failure of British diplomacy during the run-up to Munich was its almost willful disregard of Czechoslovakia’s formidable military capabilities. During the Czech crisis of September 1938, the German Army fielded 37 divisions (5 of them facing France) to Czechoslovakia’s 35 divisions (plus 5 fortress divisions). Moreover, the Czechs enjoyed three strategic advantages: they were on the defensive, operated along interior lines of communication, and possessed formidable defensive terrain and fortifications along the German-Czech border. Czechoslovakia also had the largest armaments production complex in Central Europe (the Nazi takeover of Czechoslovakia in 1939 boosted Germany’s arms production by 15 percent, and the arms and equipment of the disbanded Czech army were sufficient to fit out 20 new German divisions). ( my emphasis)

Record spells out one aspect of the Czech crisis that rarely appears in poipular accounts of the "lessons of Munich". That is that Hitler wanted war with Czechoslovakia. He was actually angry when Britain and France agreed to his demand to annex the Sudetenland. Rightwing (or badly confused) revisionists make use of this fact to argue that the sellout of Czechoslovakia was a good thing.

Record certainly does not make that argument. He quotes a 1948 history by J.W. Wheeler-Bennett saying that Britain and France "had made so wholesome a surrender of Czechoslovakia that even Adolph Hitler could not find an excuse to go to war".

This aspect of the crisis might not fit neatly into the standard "lessons of Munich" narrative. But it's important in understanding Hitler's goals, methods and intentions.

Record also poses this counterfactual question, also one rearely discussed:

A most intriguing if unanswerable questionabout Munich is: what if Czechoslovakia had decided to fight anyway? Anglo-French abandonment did not dictate Prague’s renunciation of the inherent right of self-defense. The Czech military strongly favored resistance, and Churchill believed that a Czech decision to fight would have shamed France into war. And who knows what might have happened then? At a minimum, Czech resistance would have bloodied Germany militarily and postponed Hitler’s turn on Poland probably into the spring of 1940. Maybe his own generals would have moved against him. Moreover, as the Soviet Union was also a nominal treaty ally of Czechoslovakia though the two states shared no common border, a fighting Czechoslovakia, especially if joined by France, almost certainly would have delayed, if not altogether eliminated, the emergence of any incentive on Stalin’s part to cut the kind of strategic deal he made with Hitler in August 1939. [Czechoslovakian] President Benes’ decision not to order the defense of his own country for fear that a vengeful Hitler would slaughter the Czech nation may have been a more fateful one than the Anglo-French capitulation to Hitler on the Sudetenland issue.

He mentions how the highly punitive provisions of the Versailles Treaty promoted German revanchism that Hitler and his National Socialists (Nazis) exploited. But there was a difference in perspective on the Versailles Treaty between Britain and France that affected their ability to conduct a joint policy of containing Germany. France wanted to continue enforcing the restrictions of Versailles. Britain took the perspective by the 1930s that the treaty was too severe.

The Versailles Treaty had bad results

There are a lot of things to be said about the Versailles Treaty, which is almost universally recognized now as having been a bad peace treaty, particularly in its provisions relating to Germany. The important point for the 1930s appeasement policy is that the difference between Britain and France toward the treaty provisions blocked a common policy of containing Hitler Germany, which gave Hitler opportunities that he sucessfully exploited:

The British opposed risking war to enforce a treaty they believed to have been a mistake in the first place, and they believed it inevitable that Hitler would rearm and cast off other Versailles restrictions on Germany. Indeed, in anticipation of inevitableGerman rearmament, Britain cut a naval deal with Germany in 1935 that violated the Treaty of Versailles and gave Hitler a green light to start building a navy, including submarines. The Anglo-German Naval Treaty, which Hitler repudiated just 4 years later, permitted Germany to construct tonnage up to 35 percent of that the Royal Navy. Since Germany was starting from scratch, the agreement invited the Third Reich to build a navy as a fast as it could. The agreement shocked the French, who had not been consulted in advance, and encouraged Mussolini to believe that the British were too scared of Hitler to oppose the aggression he was about to launch in Abyssinia. Not until March 1939, when Hitler broke the Munich Agreement, did British and French policy toward Germany converge on a willingness to go to war to stop further Nazi expansion.

B-17s in combat during the Second World War

It's also important that not only did the leaders of Britain and France underestimate the German threat in general, part of their hestiation came from an overestimation of the capabilities of the German Air Force (Luftwaffe). This included overestimating the specific air power resources Germany had, a belief in the air power zealots' mistaken views on how devastating and decisive air power would be, and an unrealistic British policy not back up by sufficient air power. These all served to inflate the German air power threat in policymakers' minds.

Britain's air strategy was based on what is known as "strategic bombing", i.e., bombing aimed at reducing the enemy country's infrastructure, as distinct from tactical bombing in support of specific military operations.

The end of appeasement: the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, 1939 - Pictured here: German Foreign Minister Ribbentrop and Joseph Stalin

However, Britain's actual air force was not prepared to undertake such an effort. Record writes:

Indeed, the strength of the RAF’s ideological commitment to strategic bombing stood in stark contrast to its inability to provide convincing answers to such basic questions as what targets to bomb, how to reach them, chances of hitting them, how hard to hit them, how to determine damage inflicted, and what effect on German morale and industry?

Two famous names appear in Record's analysis in this connection. One is Charles Lindberg, darling of the isolationist, pro-German America First movement prior to the Pearl Harbor attack. The other is Winston Churchill, idol of the neocons:

The misreading of the Nazi air threat stemmed from failure to appreciate, especially in Britain, that German air power was being developed primarily for purposes other than strategic bombardment, and from deliberate strategic deception by Berlin and such influential American dupes as Charles A. Lindberg, a pro-Nazi defeatist who trumpeted German air power’s irresistibility to British, French, and American audiences.

I should introject here that the grotesque misuse of labels like "defeatist" by today's Republican supporters of the Iraq War does not mean that the terms have no legitimate usages. Record's description of Lindberg as "a pro-Nazi defeatist" is dead accurate. He continues:

The assumption was that Germany would attempt a knock-out strike against London, and as early as 1934 Winston Churchill, a persistent purveyor of inflated estimates of German air strength, argued that Germany was approaching air parity with Britain and would have three times the RAF’s strength by 1937. On the eve of Munich, Lindberg’s widely reported view was that “Germany now has the means of destroying London, Paris, and Praha [Prague] if she wishes to do so. England and France together do not have enough modern planes for effective defense.” (On the eve of the Munich Conference British intelligence estimated that Germany had a total of 1,963 combat-ready fighters, bombers, and dive bombers, when Germany actually fielded a total of only 1,194.) ...

Germany, in fact, had nothing of the sort of air capacity Lindberg claimed. A fleet of long-range four-engine bombers lay beyond Germany’s technical and industrial reach in the 1930s, and strategic bombardment was, in any event, alien to the kind of war the Germans planned to fight.

Charles Lindberg at America First Rally: "The three most important groups which have been pressing this country toward war are the British, the Jewish and the Roosevelt Administration." - Lindberg 09/11/1941

Overestimating the enemy's capabilities can lead to just as bad decisions and underestimating them. (I'm trying to avoid any direct analogies to the present, so I will resist the temptation to point out how overestimating the weapons capabilities of an enemy country has more recently led to bad decisions with disastrous results.)

Record also discusses the role of public opinion in Britain and France, which had more immediate effect on their governments' policies than did German public opinion on theirs. It's one of the greatest strenths of democracy, perhaps its greatest benefit, is that ordinary voters and citizens and working people are just not as much fascinated by the prospects of war than their leaders and corporate barons and the country-club set often are. That was true in Britain and France in the 1930s, as well - though to the extent that it led to underestimating the threat from Hitler Germany, the healthy instinct in this case may not have produced the healthiest policy. As the Biblical proverb says, there's a time for peace and a time for war.

Record observes:

Not until 1939, after Hitler violently breached the Munich Agreement with his invasion of the remainder of Czechoslovakia, did British and French public opinion harden against Hitler to the point where it was prepared to risk war to prevent further German expansion. ...

The combination of war trauma induced by the experience of 1914-18 and sympathy toward a Versailles-wronged Germany effectively precluded any British government from carrying the country into war with Germany until Hitler clearly revealed his aggressive intentions beyond Germanic Europe. It is improbable that even the eloquent, Nazi-despising Churchill, had he been prime minister in 1938, could have mobilized public opinion for war with Hitler over the fate of Germans in a mistakenly created country that Britain was in no position to save.

Record also recalls that Germany's policy prior to Pearl Harbor was to try to avoid direct provocations of the United States. And the US options were also restricted by British and French policies. His summary of Franklin Roosevelt's position is a good one:

Roosevelt, who from the beginning had reservations about the wisdom of Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement, grasped the nature and severity of the Nazi threat long before he was politically able to do much about it. By the end of 1937, he was persuaded that the Anti-Comintern Pact between Germany, Japan, and Italy constituted a secret offensive-defensive alliance aimed at world conquest, and though he subsequently flirted with appeasement because Chamberlain seemed committed to it, the Munich Agreement and the bloody November 1938 Nazi anti-Jewish pogrom known as Kristallnacht convinced Roosevelt that Hitler’s aims were unlimited and that Nazi Germany could be stopped only by credibly threatened force. ...

It is testimony to the isolationists’ grip on the Congress (as well as Capitol Hill’s determination to reverse what it saw as a growing Executive Branch accretion of power at the expense of the Legislative Branch) that the Senate rejected Roosevelt’s personal pleas to loosen the provisions of the Neutrality Act until after war broke out in Europe in September 1939 and did not repeal the key provisions of the act until the eve of Pearl Harbor. (Congress did not authorize conscription until September 1940 — after the fall of France and the Low Countries, and amazingly, the House of Representatives voted to renew authorization for conscription by only one vote in August 1941 - 2 months after Hitler invaded the Soviet Union and only 4 months before Pearl Harbor.)

Record's account also stresses an important point about the Soviet Union, one that has often been lost in the mists of Cold War polemics. And that is, Britain and France also thought that by the appeasement policy toward Germany in the West, they would encourage Germany to direct any further acts of military aggression eastward toward the Soviet Union. In Cold War Soviet accounts, this came across as a central motivation of the appeasement policy.

For instance, in a Soviet-era biography, Winston Churchill (1978) by V.G. Trukhanovsky, we read the following description of the British perspective leading up to the Munich Conference of 1938:

Neville Chamberlain, a man of very limited intellectual capabilities (and who, like all such people when in high public office, vastly overrated his talents), thought that he had found a way of killing two birds with one stone. He supposed that Germany should be egged on into a war against the Soviet Union and that, as a result of this war, the USSR would be destroyed or on the verge of collapse, and that Germany would so deplete her resources that she would lose the capacity to fight Britain for the hegemony of Europe. In order to arrange such a war, Chamberlain was prepared to make enormous concessions to Germany so as to strengthen her politically, economically and militarily. ...

As early as 1935, when the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, visited Moscow, Soviet leaders told him that it was dangerous to think that Germany would definitely strike against the USSR, while Britain remained on the sidelines: "The guns might start firing in quite a different direction." This piece of intelligent advice, like many other, similar warnings issued by the USSR, was not understood in the West. (my emphasis)

While distortion can be created by stressing one factor at the expense of all the others, as the author just quoted does, in reality Soviet leaders had every reason to be suspicious. As Record points out, if there were going to be an effective anti-Hitler coalition in the mid-1930s, a partnership between Soviet Russia and France would have been a necessary component of that:

Russia and France had been allies against Imperial Germany, and the Soviet Union in the 1930s constituted the only great power east of Germany. It fielded the largest standing army in Europe and possessed war production potential second only to that of the United States. The same logic that underlay the Anglo-French-Russian alliance of World War I against Imperial Germany applied to stopping Hitler from plunging Europe into another world war, and this logic should have been glaringly apparent after Hitler removed any doubt over his trustworthiness and territorial intentions byinvading what remained of Czechoslovakia after Munich.

But, as discussed earlier here, there were other reasons why France and Britain were reluctant to go to war over Czechoslovakia in 1938, not least among them the lack of military preparedness to match their political strategy. Also, while in retrospect an Anglo-French alliance with the USSR against Germany over the Czechoslovakian issue in 1938 seems like a blindingly obvious idea, French and British leaders had reason to wonder whether Stalin's government could be relied upon to remove its armies and associated political influence from the areas it would have to occupy in a war to protect Czechoslovakia's borders. In hindsight, it seems obvious that it was a risk worth taking. But those were real factors at work in their decision-making.

Having said all that, Record's analysis of the results of their unwillingnessto make such and alliance is still justified:

Yet in August 1939, Stalin entered a nonaggression pact with Hitler that essentially freed German forces, once they (in conjunction with Soviet forces) had erased Poland, to attack in the West with no fear of having to wage war on a second front in the East. Stalin’s conversion from a potential ally of the West into a collaborator with Nazi Germany was the product of several factors, but primary among them was Anglo-French appeasement of Hitler and manifest fear of Communism and mistrust of the Soviet Union. Many Britons and Frenchmen believed Communism posed a greater threat to the West than Nazism, and there were in any event reasonable doubts about the Soviet Union’s value as an ally against Hitler, especially after Stalin decimated the Red Army’s officer corps in 1937-38. "It was natural for European states, especially the great imperial powers, Britain and France, to regard Soviet communism as their sworn enemy - for so it was," observes P. M. H. Bell. "From this fact of life some took the short step to the belief that the enemies of communism were your friends, and that fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were useful bulwarks against Soviet influence. Once this notion took root, it was hard to accept that the Nazi regime was itself a threat, nearer and more dangerous than the Soviet Union." (my emphasis)

And this latter point was also the core of Churchill's analysis of the Nazi threat. Churchill had strong anti-Soviet credentials and an arguably unrealistically hostile view of the Soviet Union. But he also recognized that Nazi Germany was a more direct and immediate threat to British and other Western interests than the USSR.

Record sums up his analysis at the end by saying that the appeasement/compromise policy failed to restrain Hitler's expansionism because Hitler was both unappeasable and undeterrable. And that the leaders of France and Britain should have understood that at the time Hitler made his demands for the dismemberment of Czechoslovakia in 1938.

Nazi book burning, 1933

He was unappeasable because his real goals were such than in the end Britain and France could not have accomodated them. Hitler showed a great deal of diplomatic and political flexibility, aa the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact of 1939 illustrated very dramatically. But, as Eberhard Jäckeldemonstrated in Hitlers Weltanschauung (1981), Hitler never lost sight of his two central goals: eliminating the Jews and conquering Russia.

Hitler was undeterrable because he wasn't trying to avoid war, he was seeking the right opportunity to make war for Lebensraum in the east. Nazi ideology also celebrated war as a positive good whereby the Aryan master race achieved its rightful dominance over lesser human beings.

However, saying that Hitler was undeterrable is not the same as saying he could not be contained. The point is that Britain, france and Russia could ultimately not have contained Hitler Germany witout actually going to war. "War," Record writes, "was thus inevitable as long as Hitler remained in power."

Here, Record gives a limited and grudging endorsement to the present-day neocons' use of this historical situation:

To repeat, because Hitler was both unappeasable and undeterrable, war could have been avoided only via Hitler’s forcible removal of from power, an option apparently not considered by London or Paris and only briefly considered by German military leaders in 1938. Beyond Hitler’s departure from power, only a preventive war that crippled German military power, collapsed the Nazi regime, or both, could have averted World War II. Given the horrors of that war, initiation of a preventive war seems retrospectively imperative, and when neo-conservatives such as Richard Perle speak of how Hitler could have been stopped before 1939, they mean forcible regime change of precisely the kind the United States launched against Iraq in 2003. For Britain and France in the 1930s, however, a decisive preventive war against Germany was morally unacceptable, politically impossible, and militarily infeasible. Rewriting history is always easier than writing it.

But he makes a strong point that the endless use of the Hitler analogy in America's wars leads to an unrealistic view of threats:

No post-1945 foreign dictatorship bears genuine comparison to the Nazi dictatorship. The scope of Hitler’s nihilism, ambitions, and military power posed a mortal threat to Western civilization. No other authoritarian or totalitarian regime has managed to employ such a powerful military instrument in such an aggressive manner to fulfill such a horrendous agenda. Stalin had great military power but was cautious and patient; he was a realist and neither lusted for war nor discounted the strength and will of the Soviet Union’s enemies. Mao Zedong was reckless but militarily weak. Ho Chi Minh’s ambitions and fighting power were local. And Saddam Hussein was never in a position to reverse U.S. military domination of the Persian Gulf. Who but Hitler was so powerful and unappeasable and undeterrable? (my emphasis in bold)

The neocons and warmongering nationalists would argue that whatever countries are on their hit list at the moment actually do meet those criteria. Saddam Hussein, to hear the Bush Republicans tell it, was the worstest and evilest and more horibble dictator and military aggressor since Hitler, no, worse than Hitler!

Here's where good judgment comes in. Rational and responsible people need to distinguish between realistic threat evaluation and trumpted-up war propaganda.

And he concludes with dual warnings, that a menace comparable to Hitler is possible, but that there are serious risks in making every war a new war against Hitler, as the US routinely does:

The problem with seeing Hitler in Stalin, Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Saddam Hussein is that it reinforces the presidential tendency since 1945 to overstate threats for the purpose of rallying public and congressional opinion, and overstated threats in turn encourage resort to force in circumstances where deterrence, containment, even negotiation (from strength) might better serve long-term U.S. security interests. Threats that are, in fact, limited tend to be portrayed in Manichaean terms, thus skewing the policy choice toward military action, a policy choice hardly constrained by possession of global conventional military primacy and an inadequate understanding of the limits of that primacy.

If the 1930s reveal the danger of underestimating a security threat, the post-World War II decades contain examplesof the danger of overestimating a security threat.

Tags: appeasement, dollfuss, fdr, franklin roosevelt, germany, hitler, jeffrey record, second world war