Quick take on Joe Scarborough and what he idolizes

Joe Scarborough went on a tear today stressing about how people who weren't war heroes shouldn't criticize Robert Mueller's investigation. While he's trashing people who deserve to be trashed, having serving in the armed forces can't be and shouldn't be something that forever exempts public officials from criticism. for that matter, we need a lot more sensible criticism of our military establishment and its leadership. Joe: President Trump Sycophants Owe Robert Mueller, FBI And The US An Apology Morning Joe/MSNBC 04/13/2018:

Also, I've heard Scarborough say repeatedly now, as he does here, that Joseph Stalin was the worst mass murderer ever. Not a competition than anyone should want to be a part of. But Stalin-is-worse-than-Hitler is a hard right meme that always raises my skepticism. And not to wade into the depressing business of the body count, Scarborough says Stalin killed 40 million of his own people. I'm not an expert on the subject. But I'm pretty sure you only get to the 40 million number by counting every death in the Soviet Union from all causes during Stalin's time as head of the country.

(18) Internationalism in the Soviet remembrance of the October Revolution

Today is the actual anniversary of the October Revolution. The Bolsheviks' initial seizure of power took place during the night of October 25-26 (Old Style) which is November 6-7 in the New Style calendar adopted by the new government which took effect on February 1, 1918 (New Style).

Part of the challenge in understanding the Russian Revolution is that the past has been continually reinterpreted. That happens with all historical events, of course. But the interpretations of Soviet history were not only very, very many in number. But some of those interpretations were perceived by the players as very high stakes.

David Brandenberger's Fate of Interwar Soviet Internationalism: A Case Study of the Editing of Stalin's 1938 Short Course on the History of the ACP(b) Revolutionary Russia, 29:1 (2016) is focused on one instance of that process. Nikita Khrushchev in his famous 1956 "secret speech" critiquing Stalin included a passage adressing Stalin's claims about the authorship of the Short Course, the book being a central piece of the official Soviet outlook, in the context of how Stalin had directed the preparation of a later hagiographic biography of himself (Text from The cult of the individual - part 4 Guardian 04/26/2007):

But even this phrase did not satisfy Stalin: The following sentence replaced it in the final version of the Short Biography: "In 1938, the book History of the All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks), Short Course appeared, written by comrade Stalin and approved by a commission of the central committee, All-Union Communist party (Bolsheviks)." Can one add anything more?

(Animation in the hall.)

As you see, a surprising metamorphosis changed the work created by a group into a book written by Stalin. It is not necessary to state how and why this metamorphosis took place.

A pertinent question comes to our mind: if Stalin is the author of this book, why did he need to praise the person of Stalin so much and to transform the whole post-October historical period of our glorious Communist party solely into an action of "the Stalin genius"?

Did this book properly reflect the efforts of the party in the socialist transformation of the country, in the construction of socialist society, in the industrialisation and collectivisation of the country, and also other steps taken by the party which undeviatingly traveled the path outlined by Lenin? This book speaks principally about Stalin, about his speeches, about his reports. Everything without the smallest exception is tied to his name.

And when Stalin himself asserts that he himself wrote the Short Course, this calls at least for amazement. Can a Marxist-Leninist thus write about himself, praising his own person to the heavens?

I'm not especially concerned here with the exact role of Stalin in preparing the Short Course. But in the course of describing it, Brandenberger talks about the internationalist position that was reflected in the drafts prepared by the committee for Stalin's review. Stalin's edits on the Short Course, in Brandenberger's account, removed much of the internationalist focus focus from the text and instead gave more emphasis to the leadership of the Communist Party, a change reflecting Stalin's priorities of the moment.

Brandenberger describes the kind of internationalism that was part of Soviet ideology:

Propaganda and indoctrination played a central role in the Bolshevik movement from its earliest days. The party leadership’s demands in this regard changed after the October 1917 revolution, of course, when it set about transforming itself into a ruling institution. Mass agitation and indoctrination now became major priorities as the party sought new slogans and rallying calls with which to mobilize Soviet society. That said, the process of adapting Marxist-Leninist ideology and the party’s revolutionary experience into an appealing, accessible and evocative propaganda line turned out to be easier said than done. Ultimately, what Henry Steele Commager has referred to as ‘the search for a usable past’ preoccupied the party leadership well into the 1930s. Over the course of this long process, one of the few constants in the official line was its emphasis on the centrality of internationalism to the Soviet experiment. [my emphasis]

Initially, there were high hopes by Lenin and other Communist leaders immediately after the October Revolution that there would be other revolutions in Europe, Germany in particular. It didn't wind up happening. But it wasn't a completely unrealistic expectation. The Marxist theories dominant in the Second International assumed that a socialist revolution in a "backward" country with many more peasants than industrial workers would not be able to maintain itself without assistance from a socialist revolutionary government in a rich country. And until 1917, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) was generally viewed as the world's leading party in the pursuit of socialism.

The writers of the Short Course draft described the initial period of the revolution this way:

Invoking the global dimensions of the Bolshevik experience in the introduction to their manuscript, they then promptly returned to the subject shortly thereafter in order to declare that that at the turn of the twentieth century Russia stood at the epicentre of the worldwide revolutionary moment. Industrialization was more rapid in Russia than elsewhere, conditions were more oppressive and the working class was more aware of how little it had to lose. V. I. Lenin argued in this regard that Russia represented a weak link in the international capitalist system and offered an ideal site for revolution. What was needed was a disciplined revolutionary vanguard of radicals – a position that led Lenin and his Bolsheviks into conflict with more conciliatory, ‘opportunistic’ Menshevik elements within Russian Social Democracy. Lenin clashed with the Second Communist International during these years on account of the unwillingness of Social Democrats such as Karl Kautsky and August Bebel to endorse his revolutionary activism. Even leftists like Rosa Luxemburg did not automatically side with Lenin.

Even this account reflects post-1917 priorities and perceptions. It requires imagination to argue that "at the turn of the twentieth century Russia stood at the epicentre of the worldwide revolutionary moment," although the 1905 revolutionary outbreak in Russia did attract considerable interest and attention in other countries of Europe. Some of it sympathetic, some of it horrified.

Brandenberger continues that account:

The fall of the Russian autocracy in February 1917 gave Russian Social Democrats an opportunity to correct the mistakes of the Second International and resume their commitment to worldwide revolution. According to Iaroslavskii and Pospelov, however, the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries refused to capitalize on the extraordinary disruption that the war was causing, revealing their parochial, bourgeois orientation. Lenin, by contrast, continued to press the case for a new International and socialist revolution, both in exile and upon his return to Russia in April 1917. When the Bolsheviks overthrew the Provisional Government that October, Iaroslavskii and Pospelov quoted Stalin as attributing the victory to three international factors. First, the revolution had taken place at a time when the world’s major imperialist powers were preoccupied by their own internecine conflict. Second, the ongoing war led many in foreign lands to sympathize with the Russian revolution’s call for a cessation to the ongoing hostilities. Third, the war had created a revolutionary crisis throughout the combatant countries that won the Bolsheviks new allies in the struggle against imperialism.

That view of matters does give an idea of how for many people in other countries, the October Revolution was viewed with sympathy and hope. That may be more difficult for people to envision now. But czarism had been dearly hated by European democrats, including socialists, for a century or more. After Russia's defeat of Napoleon's invasion and the establishment of a restorationist peace with the Treaties of Paris of 1814-1815, Russia was widely perceived as a bulwark of royalist and reactionary regimes in continental Europe. And Russia had indeed played that role in the democratic revolutions of 1848.

Iaroslavskii and Pospelov framed the 1918–21 civil war in global terms, tracing it to international imperialism’s attempt to suppress the threat of world revolution. Hardfought Bolshevik victories against both foreign and domestic enemies in 1918 contributed to the collapse of the old order in the German and Austro-Hungarian empires. Soviet power was then at least briefly established in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belorussia, Ukraine and the Caucasus. In Germany, the communist Spartacists under Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht rose in rebellion before being betrayed by local Social Democrats. In Hungary, communists also briefly took power, while other movements emerged in Switzerland, France, Poland, the United States and elsewhere. Although these risings faltered due to right-wing reaction, left-wing weakness and Social Democratic treachery, they proved Lenin to have been right about the revolutionary nature of the international situation. Eager to support such radicalism, Lenin quickly founded the Third Communist International – the Comintern – to serve as the ‘military headquarters’ of the world revolutionary movement.

Again, the authors were writing an official history, not a scholarly treatise. And that during the time of the Great Purges of 1934-1938. But its a good description of how the international role played by the October Revolution was viewed by the Soviet Communists at the time of the revolution and afterward.

(13) October Revolution: the Big Three (Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin)

Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better know to the world by the last name he adopted, Lenin, was by all accounts the most important leader of the Russian Revolution in the 1917-1922 and in the years leading up to it. Albert Resis in his biographical sketch of Lenin for the reliably staid Britannica Online (accessed 09/23/2017) writes:

If the Bolshevik Revolution is — as some people have called it — the most significant political event of the 20th century, then Lenin must for good or ill be regarded as the century’s most significant political leader. Not only in the scholarly circles of the former Soviet Union but even among many non-Communist scholars, he has been regarded as both the greatest revolutionary leader and revolutionary statesman in history, as well as the greatest revolutionary thinker since Marx.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1916)

He fell seriously ill in early 1922, possibly due to the effects of a failed assassination attempt on him in 1918. By the end of that year, he was no longer active in leadership. A stroke in March 1923 left him without speech, and he passed away in January 1924 at the age of 53.

Spiegel TV has a two-minute video of silent clips of Lenin, apparently all from the time of the revolution, although it does not include commentary or captions: Lenin - Führer der Revolution.

Lev Davidovich Bronshtein (1879-1940), better known as Leon Trotsky, was one of the two major contenders for the Communist Party leadership, along with Josef Stalin, after Lenin's death. Trotsky advocated a different development policy and international political strategy than those identified with Stalin's commitment to "socialism in one country." Up until Trosky's death in Mexico at the hands of an assassin wielding a pickax in 1940, Trotskyism was the most important dissenting ideology that identified itself as part of the Communist left.

Leon Trotsky (1918)

In the later ideological disputes, Stalin and Trotsky and their partisans did their utmost to boost the importance of the one during the 1917-1924 period and to denigrate that of the other.

Trotsky had been a visible if erratic figure in the Russian revolutionary movement prior to 1917, sometimes finding himself in agreement with the Bolsheviks, other times not. He was the only one of the three who ever visited the United States, from January to May of 1917, when he returned to Russia and joined the Bolsheviks in August. As Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, he played a decisive role in directing troops loyal to the Bolsheviks in the October 25-26 (Old Style) seizure of power. He later became Foreign Minister responsible for negotiating peace with Germany and the leader of the Red Army during the civil war.

When Lenin fell ill in 1922, the Bolshevik leaders elevated a troika composed of Stalin, Lev Kamenev, and Grigory Zinovyev in preference to giving the central leadership position to Trotsky. Stalin had a established himself as the main leader by 1923, a status he retained until his death. In 1926, Trotsky would join with Kamenev and Zinovyev in what was called the United Opposition to Stalin. He was exiled from the USSR in 1929, and in exile formed the Fourth International, a collection of rival communist parties to those of the Moscow-led Third International.

Trotskyism has been a persistent strain in left thought ever since. Trotskyists are known for presenting themselves as the most uncompromising of revolutionaries while also at times taking positions that echo those of rightwingers and counter-revolutionaries. I once heard a useful definition which said that the Trotskyists are people who support revolution everywhere except where one is actually taking place.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin, aka, Josef Stalin (1879-1953) was named General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party in 1922, soon becoming the main political leader of the Soviet Union and remaining so until his death in 1953. Though he is widely remembered today as a villain, he was also one of the few most consequential political leaders of the 20th century, leading the USSR in the rapid industrialization of the 1920s and 1930s and during what is known in Russia as the Great Patriotic War against Nazi Germany. And his role during the Russian Revolution of 1917-1921 has also been contested in great detail, both by his partisans and his enemies.

Ioseb Dzhugashvili Stalin

Stalin was from Georgia, then a part of the Czarist Empire. He studied at a Greek Orthodox seminary, where he became attracted to Marxist revolutionary ideas. Which were definitely not part of the seminary's preferred outlook! He joined the Russian Social Democratic party in 1898 and left the seminary the following year, devoting himself to revolutionary political activity. Among other things, he pulled off robberies to fund party activities, notably including a spectacular robbery of a shipment of money to the State Bank at Tiflis in 1907.

Stalin's role during the Russian Revolution itself was significant, though not as visible as that of Trotsky.

Uwe Klußman writes in "Der letzte freie Leser" Russland: Vom Zarenreich zur Weltmacht/Spiegel Geschichte 6:2016:

Im März 1917, kurz nach dem Sturz des Zaren, schloss sich der aus der sibirischen Verbannung heimgekehrte Stalin in Petrograd seinen bolschewistischen Genossen an. Im April 1917 wählten sie ihn zum Mitglied des Zentralkomitees. In dieser Funktion bereitete er den Aufstand der Bolschewiki vor. So wurde Stalin Teilhaber der Macht, als Mitglied der von Lenin geführten Regierung, des „Rates der Volkskommissare". Dort war er zuständig für Nationalitätenfragen.

[In March 1917, shortly after the overthrow of the Czar, he [Stalin] joined up with his Bolshevik comrades in Petrograd after returning from Siberian exile. In April 1917, they voted him to be a member of the Central Committee. In this function, he prepared the uprising of the Bolsheviks. Thus Stalin became a holder of power, as a member of the government led by Lenin, of the "Council of People's Commissars." There he was responsible for nationality questions.]

In the Russian Empire, the nationality problems were extremely important ones. Russia ruled various non-Russian nationalities and was known as the "prison house of nations." During a stay in Vienna to acquaint himself with European Social Democracy, Stalin prepared his best-known theoretical work at the time of the Revolution, Marxism and the National Question (1913), in which he advocated for the right on national self-determination on the part of the nations of the Empire. When the Bolsheviks took power in Russia and various nationalist groupings made cause with the Whites in the civil war, they were forced to take a more, shall we say, nuanced view of those nationalist movements.

During Stalin's stay in Vienna for six weeks in 1913, two other men who would become major antagonists of his later in life: Leon Trotsky and Adolf Hitler. There is no evidence that Stalin's paths crossed with the impoverished young rightwing fanatic Hitler, who was then living in a shelter for homeless men who had been surviving on the margins of society. However, Herbert Lackner ("Stalin unser" Der Erste Welkrieg-Profil History April 2013) recounts that that Stalin did meet Trotsky for the first time in Vienna at Trotsky's apartment at Kolschitzkygasse 30 in the Wieden district. In an account written many years later, in 1939, Trotsky described his first impression of Stalin as not very positive. It was also during his stay in Vienna that he started using the name Stalin, first as a pen name on an article of his that appeared in the newspaper, Der Sozialdemokrat.

Klußman writes further about Stalin's role in the Revolution:

Lenin schätzte Stalin als Multitalent der Machtsicherung. Während des Bürgerkriegs sandte die Partei ihn daher an verschiedene Frontabschnitte zwischen Perm am Ural und Petrograd. In Zarizyn an der Wolga, der Stadt, die später als Stalingrad weltbekannt wurde, zeigte er seinen rigorosen Führungsstil: Stalin ließ Getreide requirieren, Gegner hinrichten und Kritiker unter den aus der Zarenarmee übernommenen Militärberatern einsperren. Für seine militärischen Leistungen verlieh die sowjetische Führung ihm 1919 die höchste Auszeichnung, den Rotbannerorden.

[Lenin valued Stalin as a multi-talent for the securing of power. During the civil war, the Party sent him {Stalin} to different portions of the front between Perm on the Urals and Petrograd. In Tsaritsyn {Volgograd} on the Volga, the city that later would become world famous as Stalingrad, he showed his rigorous leadership style: Stalin had grain requisitioned, enemies executed, and critics among the military advisers taken over from the Czarist army imprisoned. For his military services, the Soviet leadership awarded him the highest recognition, the Order of the Red Banner.

Order of the Red Banner

Political pragmatism comes in various flavors

David Dayen has a good piece on Bernie Sanders' very pragmatic and effective role in enacting the ACA/Obamacare law: Sanders, Clinton, and the Big Lie of the “Possible” New Republic 01/26/2016.

And he reminds us of the kind of Democratic pragmatism that the Clinton camp is invoking against Sanders. As I'm writing this, I've just been watching reports on Univision about Obama's latest round of heartless deportations of Latinos. It's producing scenes like the one reported here: Exclusivo: Video muestra el arresto de una indocumentada frente a sus hijos Univision 01/27/2016.

This round is the result of yet another of President Obama's "bipartisan" gestures toward the Republicans. It's in brutal contrast to his nice rhetoric against the Republicans' xenophobic demagoguery.

I'm sick of this kind of "pragmatism."

David makes a straightforward point against the pragmatism argument that the Clinton camp is using against Sanders:

When you saw off every policy to what falls into the immediate range of possibility at the present moment, you give supporters little reason to organize behind your ideas. More important, you neglect the creative ways in which those seemingly unrealizable goals can be realized, no matter the situation in Congress.

He concludes with this expansion of his point:

The key to making progress in a polarized era comes with having more ideas available on the shelf when opportunities arise. It’s how an outrageous handout to big banks that lasted for over a hundred years suddenly got cut, with Mitch McConnell stealing the idea from the Progressive Caucus budget. It’s how the entire student loan system was overhauled as an add-on to the ACA, largely because of outside pressure and one senator taking a stand (in that case, Tom Harkin).

There’s a point at which you can manage the base into oblivion, and jump from dismissing Bernie Sanders to dismissing the largest wing of the Democratic Party. What’s more, telling a new crop of progressive legislators, from Zephyr Teachout to Elizabeth Warren, that they must content themselves with the art of the possible, and back off big ideas, is not only bad politics. It’s bad policy.

Paul Krugman continues to snipe at Bernie's health care plan. But in Potemkin Ideologies 01/26/2016 at his New York Times blog, he emphasizes the asymmetry of the debates in the Democratic and Republican primaries:

On the Democratic side, the argument is about a theory of change: voters really do care about progressive priorities, and are torn between two candidates who broadly have similar ideologies but have different visions of the politically possible.

What we’re seeing on the Republican side, by contrast, is that almost nobody except a handful of pundits and think-tank hired guns cares at all about the official party ideology. ...

What used to happen was that the conservative movement could basically serve the plutocracy, while mobilizing voters with racial/gender anxiety, all the while maintaining a facade of serious-minded libertarian philosophy. But now it’s broken down, and the real motives are out in the open.

He's being a bit generous to the Clinton camp there, though. Dan Roberts reports on what looks like old-fashioned redbaiting, in the days when "red" meant Communist instead of Republican (Sanders smeared as communist sympathiser as Clinton allies sling mud Guardian 01/22/2016):

... the attacks are likely to intensify nonetheless in the days leading up to the Iowa caucus according to a new document that delves into affiliations and statements made by the senator dating back decades.

The dossier, prepared by opponents of Sanders and passed on to the Guardian by a source who would only agree to be identified as “a Democrat”, alleges that Sanders “sympathized with the USSR during the Cold War” because he went on a trip there to visit a twinned city while he was mayor of Burlington.

Similar “associations with communism” in Cuba are catalogued alongside a list of quotes about countries ranging from China to Nicaragua in a way that supporters regard as bordering on the McCarthyite rather than fairly reflecting his views.

Sanders has insisted on many occasions this year that his own philosophy of democratic socialism is very different from that of authoritarian regimes, and much more in keeping with the tradition of American reformers such as Franklin D Roosevelt.

Politics is politics, as Joe Stalin said in a speech just after the Munich Agreement, a few months before signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact. ("Politics is politics, as the old, case-hardened bourgeois diplomats say." Report 03/10/1939)

Remembering Stalin

Pilar Bonet reports on an historical conference about Joseph Stalin that was just held in Moscow (El Kremlin maquilla a Stalin El País 09.12.2008. It's not actually clear from her article, though, who sponsored the conference.

The focus of Bonet's article is this warning from the participants:

Nos inquieta la amplia difusión de recetas para el renacimiento de Rusia por la vía de una modernización autoritaria o incluso la dictadura y la propaganda de una violencia justificada desde el punto de vista histórico con muchos millones de víctimas y purgas sociales.

[We are disturbed by the increased difusion of formulas for the rebirth in Russia of the view of an authoritarian modernization or including dictatorship and the propaganda of violence justified from the historical point of view with many millions of victims and social purges.]

Maybe that loses something from the translation from a Russian (?) original to Spanish to my English translation. But the way it's written, it doesn't quite make sense. I think a more likely if less literal translation would be, "We are disturbed at the increasing frequency with which we see formulas used to describe the Stalin era which justify from an historical point of view the authoritarian modernization of Russia or even the Stalin dictatorship and the propaganda of violence it utilized."


This controversial painting in the Orthodox Church of Saint Princess Olga of Strelnain near St. Petersburg is based on a story that Stalin came secretly to consult St. Olga to ask if the Germans would take Moscow in 1941. El Mundo blogger Daniel Utrilla calls it "the most iconoclastic icon every painted".

The rest of the article does explain that there has been a tendency in official treatments of history to give Stalin a more positive evaluation. Bonet quotes Lev Gudkov, the director of an "analytical center" called Levada, as saying that in the 1990s, only 12% of Russians had a postive view of Stalin but not 50% do.

The article is really pretty vague. In fact, it's more than a bit sloppy. Bonet provides this one-sentence summary of Stalin's career: "Stalin provocó millones de víctimas con la industrialización forzada, pero con él la URSS venció al nazismo y se transformó en una potencia nuclear." (Stalin provoked millions of victims with forced industrialization, but with him the USSR defeated Nazism and transformed itself into a nuclear power.)

Not a very helpful summary to anyone who doesn't know much about the period. It is pretty much unquestioned that Stalin's rule victimized many people unnecessarily with massive political purges, executions and imprisonment in forced labor camps under inhumane conditions. More controversial is the question of whether Stalin deliberately imposed conditions of starvation on sections of the population during the collectivization of agriculture, or whether the resulting famine was a disastrous but unforeseen result of the policy.

It's also a bit strange to say the USSR defeated "Nazism" without any more context. The USSR in the Second World War, or the Great Patriotic War as it was and is known in Russia, defeated a massive invasion by Nazi Germany and its allies. And the end of Nazism in Germany was a result of the United Nations' joint war in Europe. But "defeated Nazism" is a little too much of a shorthand phrase to describe that.

Another recent article reports Stalin planned to destroy Moscow if the Nazis moved in by Adrian Blomfield Daily Telegraph 12/05/08. It sounds like there are some interesting new documents on the subject now available in the public record. But the idea that the Soviets during the "Great Patriotic War" would have destroyed many of the facilities of Moscow if they had been forced to withdraw from it isn't a surprise. The Soviets dismantled factories and moved them deeper into Russia in front of the German advance. And when they didn't have time to do that, they practiced a scorched-earth policy toward facilities that could have been militarily useful to the Germans.

Tags: stalin,

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

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

The original Hitler really was a "Hitler"

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

I had seen this particular quote referenced several times:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For instance:

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

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

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

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

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

Tags: cold war, hitler, stalin