"Fake news" about Russia - a long and venerable tradition

Edward Herman has an informative survey from a left point of view of the history of dodgy reporting on Russia and the Soviet Union since the Russian Revolution of 1917, Fake News on Russia and Other Official Enemies: The New York Times, 1917–2017 Monthly Review 69:3 (July-August 2017):

Fake news on Russia is a Times tradition that can be traced back at least as far as the 1917 revolution. In a classic study of the paper’s coverage of Russia from February 1917 to March 1920, Walter Lippmann and Charles Merz found that “From the point of view of professional journalism the reporting of the Russian Revolution is nothing short of a disaster. On the essential questions the net effect was almost always misleading, and misleading news is worse than none at all. ... They can fairly be charged with boundless credulity, and an untiring readiness to be gulled, and on many occasions with a downright lack of common sense.” Lippmann and Merz found that strong editorial bias clearly fed into news reporting. The editors’ zealous opposition to the communists led the paper to report atrocities that never happened, and to predict the imminent collapse of the Bolshevik regime no fewer than ninety-one times in three years. Journalists uncritically accepted official statements and relied on reports from unidentified “high authority.” This was standard Times practice.

This fake news performance of 1917–20 was repeated often in the years that followed. The Soviet Union was an enemy target up to the Second World War, and through it all, Times coverage was consistently hostile. With the end of the war and the emergence of the Soviet Union as a military rival, and soon a competing nuclear power, the Cold War was on. In the United States, anti-communism became a national religion, and the Soviet Union was portrayed in official discourse and the news media as a global menace in urgent need of containment. With this ideology in place and with U.S. plans for its own global expansion of power established, the Communist threat would help sustain the steady growth of the military-industrial complex and repeated interventions to counter purported Soviet aggressions. [my emphasis]

Herman also lists several notorious cases in which the Times and other major US media were insufficiently critical or outright complicit with misinformation, much of it in the context of the rivalry with the Soviet Union: the overthrow of the elected Guatemalan government in 1954 (Hernan's article is especially interesting on that incident); the Vietnam War; the 1981 attempted assassination of Pope John Paul II; the nonexistent "missile gap" that played such a large role in the 1960 Presidential election; NATO intervention in the Balkan Wars of the 1990s; and, the nature of US the relationship of the US to the Boris Yeltsin regime.

He raises important points of caution about the controversy over Russian hacking int he 2016 election. On this blog, I've tried to focus on Recognizing the seriousness of the Trump-Russia scandal while being careful about the facts (06/02/2017). My own framing of this set of dilemmas differs from Herman's. My outlook would include the following:

• Russian attempts to interfere with the election results via cyber-meddling are serious, whether they were successful or not.
• It continues to strike me as disingenuous to complain that there is no concrete proof of the hacking claims. The FBI, the CIA and the NSA have all concluded that it occurred, but they can scarcely be expected to make public every piece of information they used to come to that conclusion, despite the many ways in which those same agencies abuse the excessive secrecy which they apply to themselves.
• The Wikileaks revelations on Clinton campaign emails played to both the Republicans obsession with her emails and the national press' seemingly endless temptation. But they were mostly routine campaign gossip. And it's hard to imagine they influenced the outcome in as significant a way as, say, James Comey's infamous press conference days before the election.
• We need a good, professional, thorough investigation of the whole Russian hacking issue by Congress and/or some kind of genuinely independent commission. If the FBI, the CIA and the NSA are making such serious claims on such a major and sensitive issue, the voters need to know about that!
• We can object to foolish foreign policies and military provocations against Russia without exonerating Russia of all dirty business on the election hacking and on seeking illegitimate influence with Trump and his team.
• The fact that neoconservative and liberal-interventionist hawks are seizing on the Russian interference issues to promote their dubious and dangerous foreign policy goals does not mean that we should ignore the seriousness of the hacking and influence operation claims.

But some of the claims Herman makes in recommending caution about facts not clearly established in the public record strike me as a bit over the top. Like this one:

The political point of the DNI [Director of National Intelligence] report [of January 2017] thus seems to have been, at minimum, to tie the Trump administration’s hands in its dealings with Russia. Some analysts outside the mainstream have argued that we may have been witnessing an incipient spy or palace coup that fell short, but still had the desired effect of weakening the new administration. The Times has not offered a word of criticism of this politicization and intervention in the election process by intelligence agencies, and in fact the editors have been working with them and the Democratic Party as a loose-knit team in a distinctly un- and anti-democratic program designed to undermine or reverse the results of the 2016 election, on the pretext of alleged foreign electoral interference. [my emphasis]

But he's right in talking about the ways that the mainstream press has been careless about the facts and willing to treat insufficiently documented claims as settled fact, e.g., the claim that it was Russia that provide the hacked DNC emails to Wikileaks. He doesn't even mention the "17 intelligence agencies" trope that I've discussed here before.

Hernan's article suffers a bit from a common left temptation, to treat outcomes as the successful result of some carefully executed plan by the powerful, e.g., the way he describes Trump's bombing of Syria near the end. The role of blundering and just plain incompetence is often underestimated in important matters of state. This current Administration is especially well-endowed with the latter. And the Democrats haven't exactly been brilliant in their political combat against the Republicans in recent years.

Analogy to the "end of history" peirod

Interesting thought piece from Paul Mason, The Soviet Union collapsed overnight. Don’t assume western democracy will last forever Guardian 12/05/2016:

Since Putin stole the 2011 election, and the subsequent protest movement was suppressed, the young people who took part in it have retreated into an angry silence. It’s not exactly a new situation for Russian intellectuals. Lenin was arrested here in 1887 for leading a student protest and spent most of the next 30 years in exile or underground. Then the Bolsheviks suppressed free speech and political opposition for another 70 years and Russia’s capitalist oligarchs are doing their best to suppress it now.

In the face of this, why do Russian artists, philosophers and journalists persist in their belief in change? In short, because they have seen the moral and physical collapse of something that once seemed permanent: the Soviet Union.

He ties it to the present moment by saying, "Since Trump’s victory in November 2016, it has become possible to believe a similar collapse will happen in the west, to globalisation and liberal values."

He uses the example of Putin's emergence after the strong medicine of neoliberalism and austerity economics applied to Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union:

Compared with the chaos of the 1990s, Putinism has felt like a redemption. Putin has, at the cost of diplomatic isolation and the suppression of democratic rights, restored growth, order and national pride. Now all over the world there are mini-Putins: the Hungarian PM, Viktor Orbán; the Turkish president, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan; the would-be French fascist president, Marine Le Pen. If – as they desire – the west descends into economic nationalism, everybody under the age of 50 will go through the same kind of ideological shock the Russians went through in the late 80s.

There are historical trends. The problem is, they're tricky to discern as they are happening. Which brings me to one of my favorite Hegel quotes: "The Owl of Minerva takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."

Meaning that we can't tell what a historical period really was about until it's ending. On the pessimistic side, I know, but a useful caution. Because people do make history and aren't completely at the mercy of broad trends.

Realism needed: including about the history of the Soviet Union

For a lot of Americans the Cold War is more-or-less still going on and knee-jerk reactionary thinking seems to get more common every year.

But here in the real world, scholars do actual research on the entity once known as the Soviet Union. And their results don't always fit neatly into Cold War boxes.

Like this one from economist Elizabeth Brainerd of Brandeis University, "Reassessing the Standard of Living in the Soviet Union: An Analysis Using Archival and Anthropometric Data" The Journal of Economic History 70/1 (Mar 2010). Her conclusion:

Did the standard of living rise or fall in the Soviet Union over the twentieth century? The conventional measures of GNP growth and household consumption indicate a long, uninterrupted upward climb in the Soviet standard of living from 1928 to 1985; even Western estimates of these measures support this view, albeit at a slower rate of growth than the Soviet measures. The alternative measures of well-being examined in this article largely support the evidence of improving population welfare throughout much of the twentieth century, despite the many cataclysmic events that marked this period. Three different measures of population health show a consistent and large improvement between approximately 1945 and 1969: child height, adult height, and infant mortality all improved significantly during this period. These three biological measures of the standard of living also corroborate the evidence of some deterioration in living conditions beginning around 1970, when infant and adult mortality were rising and child and adult, height stopped increasing and in some regions began to decline. The gains in height in the postwar period occurred across many regions of the Soviet Union, although growth was most impressive for men in the Russian Republic. The significant improvements in population well-being before 1970 may in part be related to the expansion of the national health care system, public education, and improved caloric and protein supply during this period. While the Soviet experiment of the twentieth century clearly failed and in countless ways harmed the lives of Soviet citizens, the record of Soviet health achievement prior to 1970 remains impressive. [my emphasis]

Tags: soviet union, ussr

Israel's founding and the Soviet Union

Establishment of the state of Israel on 14 May [1948] was internationally an important achievement for the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and its satellites supported the Jews in every way throughout the war in Palestine. The military aid which the Soviet bloc extended to Israel, declared Professor Yaacov Ro'i, was a major factor in enabling the Jews to gain important military victories; it was also a significant factor in promoting Soviet political and strategic ambitions in the Arab world. To quote him, 'The desire that the British be expelled from Palestine and their position in the entire region weakened, justified the unusual step of exceeding the bounds of purely political backing in the international arena as well as the political risks involved in strengthening Israel's fighting potential both with personnel and arms supplies'.

Say what? Establishment of the state of Israel ... was internationally an important achievement for the Soviet Union and its Eastern European allies?

Well, yes. The latest round of fighting in Gaza reminded me that this was something I intended to post on one of these days. The quote above is from Soviet Policy towards the Arab World, 1945-48 by Rami Ginat Middle Eastern Studies Oct 1996 (JSTOR database link).

Raising of the Israeli flag at Eilat (then Umm Rashrash) in 1948, marking the end of the War of Independence

The Inauguration is obviously the biggest political event on most Americans' minds right now. But it's also Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. And Juan Cole reminds us at his Informed Comment blog (King's Anti-Imperialism and the Challenge for Obama 01/19/09) that King placed great value on the anti-colonialist movement of the post-Second World War period. And Israel's War of Independence played a role in that movement that isn't often mentioned in the light of today's priorities and political alignments.

Of course, the Truman administration also endorsed the creation of the State of Israel. But of the two then-superpowers, the USSR was the one that contributed most substantially to that event and to the support of Israel in its war with the surrounding Arab states that same year.

In an historical retrospective, Israel Seeks "Neutrality" Between U.S., Soviet Union by Washington Report on Middle East Affairs Jan/Feb 1995, Donald Neff recalled that at the time of its founding and immediately afterward, Israel had substantial interest both in having support from Washington and in the immigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. However:

But of more immediate importance were weapons. And it was here that the Soviet Union played a paramount role at this time. Moscow had allowed Czechoslovakia to become Israel's major arms supplier in 1948. In that capacity, Czechoslovakia had provided Israel with all the Messerschmitts and Spitfires that formed its new air force, as well as other weapons and the training of 5,000 of its military personnel by the fall of 1948. And it remained Israel's major arms supplier in 1949.

The significance of the Czech connection to Israel rested on the fact that the U.S. had imposed an arms embargo on the area in 1947. Despite unrelenting pressure from Israel's supporters, the Truman administration continued to observe the embargo in 1949, as did subsequent administrations for more than a decade.

The steadfastness of the Truman administration on the arms issue had less to do with the Arab-Israeli conflict than with the Soviet Union. Keeping Russia out of the Middle East was one of Washington's major goals. Before the Palestine problem grew acute after the end of World War II, the Middle East had been "virtually clean" of Soviet influence, in the words of one British general. But since then it had made some modest gains in Israel because of Moscow's support of partition, its quick recognition of the Jewish state, its decision to allow Jews to emigrate to Israel and its secret supply to Israel of weapons via Czechoslovakia during the fighting.

Harry Truman (l) and Chaim Weizmann, 1948

A mid-1948 report to Secretary of State George C. Marshall from Ambassador to the United Nations Philip C. Jessup observed: "...it is not apparent that communism has any substantial following among the [Arab] masses. On the other hand, there are apparently a substantial number of Communists in the Irgun, the Stern Gang and other dissident [Jewish terrorist] groups. Beyond that, the Soviet Union, through its support of partition and prompt recognition of Israel, must be considered as having a substantial influence with the PGI [Provisional Government of Israel]. The communist influence is, of course, capable of substantial expansion through whatever diplomatic and other missions the Soviet Government may establish in Israel."

This is a major reason that the legitimacy of the State of Israel itself was never a serious point of contention in the Cold War, despite the later alignment of the Soviets with some of the more anti-Israel states like Syria, Iraq and Egypt, and the strong alignment of the US with Israel. The Soviet Union not only recognized Israel at its founding. The founding of Israel was considered to be an significant diplomatic and political achievement for the Soviets and countries like Czechoslovakia that would later be part of the Warsaw Pact.

There were a number of reasons for this particular alignment. Palestine was under British authority until 1947, when under the pressure of Jewish guerrillas fighters (the British called them terrorists), Britain decided to dump the whole mess into the lap of the United Nations. A great many problems in the Middle East and Asia, too, have the fingerprints of the British Empire all over them: Israel-Palestine, Iraq, Kashmir, to name a few. In November of 1947, the UN declared the partition of Palestine into separate Jewish and Arab areas. Civil war began immediately with Israel declaring independence in May 1948.

But Britain and France weren't ready to recognize Israel at that time. Both nations were trying hard to hang on to their worldwide empires and didn't want to give the Jewish-Zionist national liberation movement in Palestine that much of a victory.

The Soviet Union did. And the Truman administration decided to support the creation of Israel, not because it was particularly popular, on the contrary. Truman was persuaded it was the right thing to do for a number of reasons.

But it's important to note here that aligning diplomatically with the USSR on this issue, when Britain and France were taking a different position, showed that Truman wasn't simply dogmatically committed to opposing the Soviet Union above all other considerations. Although, as Neff points out in the quotation above, Truman's administration put trying to limit Soviet influence in the Middle East as a higher priority than arming Israel in the face of the Arab War with Gamal Abdel Nasser's infamous threat to drive the Jews into the sea. The Soviet Union, not the US, was their most important international ally at the time. Czechoslovakia was their most important arms supplier.

Rami Ginat writes:

At the very beginning of the war, the Soviet Union justified its support of Israel by claiming that the state of Israel had been proclaimed in accordance with the resolution passed by the UN and they therefore recognized its establishment. As for the Arabs, the Soviets mentioned frequently that they had defended and would continue to defend the independence of the Arab states and peoples. The Arab war against Israel [according to the Soviet position] was not intended to protect Arab national interests or their independence, but was against the rights of the Jews to create their own independent state.

Stalin's USSR didn't make a practice of letting ideology overrule practical considerations of power politics in international affairs. But ideology is also a part of any state's power-political position, and that was perhaps more so with the Soviet Union than most other states. It laid claim to be the leader of a revolution of worldwide scope. And the Soviets framed their support of Israeli independence in the context of Communist ideology which stressed the importance of national liberation movements against imperialism, even when the leaders of those movements weren't communists or close allies to communists.

Joseph Stalin: Israeli independence was perceived as a victory of Soviet foreign policy

Martin Ebon of the New School wrote in "Communist Tactics in Palestine" The Middle East Journal July 1948 that from 1920 until just a few months prior to his writing, the primary focus of Soviet Middle Eastern policy had been "to reduce the influence of the Western powers, primarily Great Britain."

This negative objective could be detected with particular clarity in Soviet policy regarding Palestine; as long as a solution of the problem was the concern of Great Britain, or of joint Anglo-American efforts, the Soviet Union's attitude was largely one of deterring action. But as soon as the Soviet Government could exercise its influence through the United Nations, Russia's policy became positive and sought a wider objective: to bring Soviet influence into play, even if this required modification of the traditional communist attitude of opposition to Zionism, as well as withdrawal from the goal of a unitary Jewish-Arab state which the communists had previously described as the only possible solution.

Ebon quotes the position of the Soviet-line Communist Party of Israel in 1948 on independence of Israel as follows:

This is a great day for us. The British mandate, covered with blood, is dead. The Jewish state arises. The British mandate has been annulled by the struggle of the Yishuv [Jewish national community in Palestine] and with the help of the Soviet Union and the progressive forces of the world. But the fight for independence is not yet finished. There are still British armies on our soil. The British sent Abdul-lah's Arab Legion into action, which is now attacking savagely.

Just as we achieved liquidation of the mandate by a struggle for liberation of the Yishuv, so we will achieve full independence by the mobilization of all the forces of the Yishuv for the fight for our freedom. On our side stands the whole Jewish people. On our side stand all progressive forces. We will fight and we will win.

The proclamation by the government of the Jewish State means a change in the tradition of getting instructions from Washington and London. On this great day, we state that we will never accept foreign domination and we will fight for the roll evacuation of the British army. As we succeeded in destroying die British mandate, we will oppose every new attempt at Anglo-American suppression. On this great day we declare that we win fight for the freedom of the Arab population and co-operation with them in our state. We stretch out our hands for agreement to the neighboring Arab countries, for their independence means our independence, and we want to stand with them against the common imperialist enemy.

May the Jewish State be the free homeland for all its inhabitants. May the Jewish State be the homeland for working people. Let us build a fighting democratic unity for full independence of our state. In these fateful days and amid dangers which threaten us, may the Yishuv be ready for die defense of our state. Our enemies won't conquer us. The whole Yishuv must be united to fight for freedom. Every attack will meet the opposition of the whole people.

Long live the Jewish State! Long live our independent, democratic state! Glory to the defenders and fighters for independence! Justice is with us! Victory will be ours! [my emphasis]

That position cast Israel's independence war as a battle against Anglo-American imperialism, the "American" part of which wasn't entirely plausible given Truman's support of Israeli independence. The opposing Arab armies were cast as the agents of the British Empire, also quite a stretch, since Britain decided in 1947 to wash its hands of the Palestine mess and allow Israeli independence to move forward.

Soviet hopes to keep good relations with Israel soured fairly quickly. For one thing, the USSR was playing both sides of the fence to some degree in the 1948 war. As Ginat explains:

Nevertheless, Soviet support of partition, the establishment of the state of Israel as well as their solid aid to the Jewish effort throughout the war in Palestine, did not mean that the Soviet Union was willing to put all its eggs in the Israeli basket. In fact, there was much evidence to indicate that arms shipments from the Soviet bloc had been made to Egypt and other Arab states.

But it was mainly the larger political situation in the world that moved Israel fairly quickly firmly toward the Western side in the Cold War:

The Soviet plan to establish a stronghold in Palestine failed mainly because soon after the war in Palestine Israel demonstrated its neutral and independent policy in the inter-bloc struggle - a policy which did not fall in line with Soviet interest. Consequently, the Soviets concluded that the way to achieve domination in the Middle East would not be through Israel but rather through Arab countries, mainly Egypt, Syria and Lebanon. Thereafter, a significant change in their policy concerning the Arab-Israeli conflict took place. With the end of the war in Palestine, the Soviet pendulum of support swung again towards the Arab side. Throughout 1949, the Soviets extended their policy of promoting instability and insecurity in the Middle East. They rejected the possibility of lifting the arms embargo imposed by the UN Security Council. They benefited from the existing state of tension in the Middle East by, indirectly, supplying arms to both sides. They continued to attack the Western powers' defence plans in the Middle East and the Arab leaders' attitude towards these plans, which the Soviets considered to be directed against their vital interests. From this stage on, the Soviets launched a massive campaign against these plans, a campaign which later on proved fruitful. [my emphasis]

The Zionist Labor movement (Mapai, the Labor Party), which played a leading role in the years leading up to independence and just after, practiced a form of militant social democracy. The kibbutz movement was an idealist effort to establish a fundamental basis for a socialist society in Israel. But the orientation of the Israeli labor movement and left was largely social-democratic, not communist. As Martin Ebon wrote in 1948 at the time Soviet-Israeli relations were at their best:

... most Zionist statesmen, from Dr. [Chaim] Weizmann [Israel's first president], favor the Western democracy. Their own community government is run along parliamentary lines. Israel's financial, moral, and military support has in the past largely come from the United States. The young state will continue to require substantial aid, most of it from its friends and well-wishers in America.

Tags: israel, soviet union, ussr

More daffy history from Bush

Does this man look like a Muslim terrorist to you?

Dear Leader Bush addressed his grateful subjects at the Heritage Foundation on Thursday. There was a lot of the usual: terror, evil people, the "war on terror", the value of torture, the need for indiscriminate domestic spying, etc. You can find the full text with audio and video at the White House Web site. A highlights version is available from TPM.

I was struck by the fact that Our Leader mentioned a couple of antiwar groups by name, MoveOn.org and Code Pink. He positioned them as allies of the Democrats against American national security, soldiers and veterans, starting at about 19:30 in the White House video:

I ask Congress to send me a clean veterans funding bill by Veterans Day; and to pass a clean defense spending bill. Congress needs to put the needs of those who put on the uniform ahead of their desire to spend more money. When it comes to funding our troops, some in Washington should spend more time responding to the warnings of terrorists like Osama bin Laden and the requests of our commanders on the ground, and less time responding to the demands of MoveOn.org bloggers and Code Pink protesters.

This is sleazy as all hell, though the Republicans generally have been slinging such charges for basically the last six years, and they're getting more and more hysterical about it.

But the Heritage Foundation crowd responded with warm enthusiasm.

I'm a little surprised by his singling those two groups out, though. It's obvious that when the President considers them significant enough to mention in a speech, that's likely to raise their profile. So why are they doing that? One reason is obviously that the Republicans have been focusing hard lately on discrediting antiwar activists and critics. But this is Dick Cheney's government, after all. So I can't help but wonder just how much they are intending to escalate against those named groups.

At about 4:50 in the White House video, Bush starts his grand history lesson. I found myself thinking about it a lot after I first heard that passage. For the first half hour or so, I was pretty much in a state of wonderment at the strangeness of it. And I don't pretend to understand it. But the jist of it is that Bin Laden is kind of like Hitler and Lenin and therefore we should pay attention to what they say, which would then make everyone go along with Bush and Cheney's plans for whatever they want to do.

Here are Dear Leader's own words on the topic starting at around 4:40 on the White House video:

We must take the words of the enemy seriously. The terrorists have stated their objectives. They intend to build a totalitarian Islamic empire - encompassing all current and former Muslim lands, stretching from Europe to North Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia. In pursuit of their imperial aims, these extremists say there can be no compromise or dialog with those they call infidels - a category that includes America, the world's free nation [sic], Jews, and all Muslims who reject their extreme vision of Islam. They reject the possibility of peaceful coexistence with the free world. Again, hear the words of Osama bin Laden last year: "Death is better than living on this Earth with the unbelievers among us."

History teaches that underestimating the words of evil, ambitious men is a terrible mistake. In the early 1900s, the world ignored the words of Lenin, as he laid out his plans to launch a Communist revolution in Russia - and the world paid a terrible price. The Soviet Empire he established killed tens of millions, and brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear war.

In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews - and the world paid a terrible price. His Nazi regime killed millions in the gas chambers, and set the world aflame in war, before it was finally defeated at a terrible cost in lives and treasure.

Bin Laden and his terrorist allies have made their intentions as clear as Lenin and Hitler before them. And the question is: Will we listen? (my emphasis)

This is more of the usual threat inflation. But I still marvel at the notion of history here.

Karl Kautsky: forerunner of the Taliban?

Let's pretend for a minute that when Woodrow Wilson entered the Oval Office in 1913, he was less worried about rising European tensions and German Imperial aggressiveness under Kaiser Bill than about the threat of communist revolution. And that he set up a crack team of assassins to go after the leader most likely to lead such a movement. He would most likely have gone after Karl Liebknecht or maybe even Lenin's ideological nemesis Karl Kautsky. They were both high-profile leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). And the SPD was generally considered the strongest of the Social Democratic parties and the most likely to come to power first. (The split into Social Democratic and Communist Parties came in the wake of the First World War and the Russian Revolution of 1917.) It's unlikely that he would have gone after Lenin in his exile in Cracow, Poland, hanging out at the Jama Michalikowa Café. Because despite the Russian Revolution of 1905, which saw the first appearance of the workers' committees known as "soviets", Russian Social Democrats appeared even to most Marxists and Social Democrats elsewhere as unlikely leadership for a world revolution. Preventive assassination, like preventive war, is an inherently uncertain business.

John Kenneth Galbraith writes about Lenin in The Age of Uncertainty (1977):

With his high forehead greatly accented by the bald dome above, his neat mustache, dark, quiet suit and something very near a Van Dyck beard, he looked like the head of a firm of chartered accountants. Leon Trosksy, with his fierce and glittering eye and much less disciplined beard, was a man of far more satisfactory aspect [to fit the popular image of a revolutionary]. ...

Previously in London he had been astonished that the library at the British Museum was run for the public and that the librarians actually regarded themselves as the servants of the readers. (Years later, according to legend, it occurred to someone to ask one of the library attendants if he remembered Lenin. He did, a most diligent little man. The librarian wondered whatever had become of him.)

Though he didn't look like The Greatest Threat to Civilization in 1912 or thereabouts, it's not as though Lenin was completely ignored, though. Anyone who had reason or inclination to know about Russian politics or the European socialist movement had probably heard of him and knew something about the Bolshevik political stance. Kaiser Bill in 1917 decided to allow Lenin to travel through Germany from Switzerland on the way back to Russia, where the Kaiser thought Lenin could cause trouble for Germany's Russian enemy in the First World War then still under way.

Karl Liebknecht: Did he want to create a worldwide caliphate?

And after Lenin came to power, Wilson hardly ignored him. In fact, Wilson had a Protestant moralistic streak not completely unlike that associated with Bush. He regarded Lenin as something like the incarnation of evil, to the point of declining to pursue a proposal from Lenin that would have given the Communist government a much smaller area of control than what they wound up with. Wilson even joined with the British in landing troops in Russia. The small clashes that ensued were actually the only time in the existence of the Soviet Union that American and Soviet troops entered directly into hostilities with each other.

So I'm not really sure what the [Cheney] Bush means when he says, "the world ignored the words of Lenin".

Then there's Hitler. The original one, I mean, not Osama Hitler or Ahmadinejad Hitler or Code Pink Hitler. Bush says, "In the 1920s, the world ignored the words of Hitler, as he explained his intention to build an Aryan super-state in Germany, take revenge on Europe, and eradicate the Jews". That's actually a bit vague.

There seems to be a fascination among authoritarian types with the notion that Hitler mapped out his later strategy in Mein Kampf, which he published in 1925. Not really. Written during his brief stint in prison after making a failed coup attempt in Munich in 1923, now known as the Beer Hall Putsch, it is mostly a propagandistic rant derived largely from the extremist pamphlets he had read voraciously in Vienna prior to the First World War.

Here again, anyone paying attention in internal German politics in the 1920s would have had some knowledge of Hitler as the leader of the NSDAP (Nazi Party). Henry Ford even sent money to the NSDAP, so he knew about them. Ford was the only American singled out for praise in Mein Kampf.

But the NSDAP was one of several splinter parties in the German Parliament in the 1920s. According to my trusty multi-color chart from Fragen an die deutsche Geschichte (1991), the NSDAP in 1928 had 12 seats in Parliament, versus 73 for two other overtly anti-Semitic parties, the Christlichsoziale Partei and the Deutsche Reformpartei. Of the two "Weimar parties", as they are sometimes called, the SPD had 153 seats and the Catholic Center Party 62. The Communists had 54 and the liberal Deutsche Staatspartei 25. The two other most significant rightwing parties were the Duetsche Volkspartei with 45 seats and the Deutschnationale Partei with 73 seats.

So, if you were an American looking at German politics in 1928, how worried would you have been about the NSDAP? Even if the Internet had been around then, how much time would you have spent searching out their Web sites? In fact, the NSDAP at that point looked to be a party in decline, its Parliamentary representation having fallen from 32 in 1924 to 14 and then to the 12 of 1928. It was the onset of the Great Depression in Europe in 1929 that gave the NSDAP its fateful boost. In the 1930 elections, the increased their representation to 107 seats. Prior to Hitler becoming Chancellor in January, 1933, the NSDAP's electoral strength peaked at 230 seats in early 1932, which made it then the largest party in Parliament for the first time, and then fell in the elections of late 1932 to 196.

From 1929 onward, anyone who was paying attention to German politics was paying attention to Hitler and the NSDAP. But the real failure of judgment wasn't a failure to listen to Hitler's words. They didn't get votes in those parliamentary elections without practicing the usual political arts of targeting pleasing messages to various segments of the public. Not all of their public positions in 1928-32 turned out to be blueprints for their policies.

The most significant failure on the part of Western nations was failing to recognize the inherently threatening nature of his military buildup, which was at the center of Hitler's domestic economic program from the day he became Chancellor. And a failure to develop foreign policies and military policies consistent with them to be able to contain Germany once they began to revise the Versailles Treaty limits by force with the remilitarization of the Rhineland in March, 1936.

So, the bottom line here is that Bush's little history lesson was as ditsy as most Republican pop history is. The main thing he seems to be trying to do is to inflate the menace of Osama bin Laden running a terrorist network from a cave or village hunt in some godforsaken corner of Wazirstan or wherever he is to the military threats represented by Nazi German and by the Soviet Union at the height of their power.

For that amount of threat inflation, I guess you need to come up with some pretty creative alternative history.

Tags: authoritarianism, bolshevik revolution, bush, germany, german politics, lenin, republican party, soviet union, third reich