Posted on 05/15/2005 10:35:41 AM PDT by lizol
White House Letter: In row over Yalta, Bush pokes at Baltic politics.
WASHINGTON When President George W. Bush declared on May 7 in Latvia that the 1945 Yalta agreement had led to "one of the greatest wrongs of history," he reignited an ideological debate from the era of Joseph McCarthy. For more than a week now, the left and the right have been arguing over the president's words and re-arguing the deal made by Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill in an old czarist resort near the Crimean city of Yalta in the closing days of World War II.
Bush has criticized Yalta at least six other times publicly, usually in Eastern Europe, but never so harshly. In the dust kicked up by all the quarreling, the central question for White House watchers is this: How did the unexpected attack on Yalta get in the president's speech? What drove his thinking? Did the White House expect the fallout?
First, the history and the debate.
Yalta effectively recognized Soviet hegemony in Eastern Europe and set the stage for what later became known as the cold war.
In the view of many conservatives, the dying Roosevelt did nothing less at Yalta than sell out Eastern Europe to Soviet control for the next 50 years. In the view of liberals, including major historians, Roosevelt ceded Poland and parts of Eastern Europe to Stalin because the Red Army controlled the territory anyway, and Yalta changed no realities on the ground. Yalta also called for free elections in Poland, a call that Stalin later ignored.
Not only did Bush side with the conservatives in his speech in the Latvian capital, Riga, he also took a harder-line view against Yalta than any other American president, including Ronald Reagan.
(Excerpt) Read more at iht.com ...
Shouldn't your name be commielarry?
Another 2 strikes against him. He shouldn't have run knowing that his health was so awful. Instead of Wallace who was a socialist, he should have been grooming a good capitalist as Vice-President to get into the White House after him; then we may not have had a weak man negotiating at Yalta. And his super-ego caused him to run more than the 2 terms initiated by Washington which every President had previously adhered to to avoid any appearance of grabbing more power than was seemly for a leader of a Republic.
His socialistic policies prolonged the depression in many economists' view. The Big Brother programs put increased pressure on the money suppliers, which kept the little man down for too long.
There were many reasons for our policy towards Japanese-Americans - some of them good, many of them bad. This was just one of the many tough choices Roosevelt had to make.
Shouldn't yours be A-hole?
I don't know what to say to someone who thinks like you.
super-ego
Reduced to Freudian criticism? Well, perhaps you'd appreciate Leni Brenner. In the '30s Jabotinsky was warning the Jews to leave Europe but all Brenner noticed was that he (Jabotinsky) had Prussian mannerisms.
His socialistic policies prolonged the depression in many economists' view
Maybe they did (economists are like lawyers and psychologists - you can always find one who'll support your views no matter how absurd they are).
If he were around now he'd have to put Pied, Dean , Pelosi and Kerry in camps. Hey !! thats not a bad idea!
He is. Look closely at some of this posts on this thread.
for setting in motion the ascendancy of world international communism in Eastern Europe and the Far East
This is wrong. He couldn't have done more to promote democracy than he did...or rather it's wrong to second-guess him in this way.
Dictatorships were Roosevelt's legacy which I believe Bush was rightly pointing out.
This is completely wrong. Dictatorships are the legacy of WWI. The leaders of that time failed utterly to grasp the enormity and consequences of modern warfare.
:)
You skirt the issue on all my points.
My alter-ego is in control.
It has been the business of Roosevelt democrats to rewrite history for the past 60 years.
The role of Hiss is central to understanding Roosevelt's attitude toward Stalin. He, Roosevelt, never acknowledged Stalin's reign of terror and believed that he was able to influence Stalin. He was completely deluded.
The Baltics were open to an immediate tour following the fall of Berlin. Russia was not about to engage in open warfare with her allies, particularly since that would have meant a civil war in each of those countries. The Baltics were waiting for a liberation that never came. Instead of membership in a European alliance they felt the heel of Russian opression. It took another 50 years and a man of profound courage to right this wrong.
It was, after all, the Roosevelt democrats in the 80's who vigorously opposed Reagan's hard line toward Russia. Once this position was made firm and clear, that despotic government fell. It could have been done at any time prior to then. There was never the moral courage or the clarity of understanding to make it happen.
Play it any way you like. the facts stand on their own. Entrance into the war in the 30's was not an unpopular cause in the US. Roosevelt was too busy trying to create a socialist state here to pay any heed to the clouds of war looming over the world. We entered the war when it became impossible to avoid, not when it was the moral and right thing to do to save tens of millions of lives.
Cowardice prolonged our entry into the war and cowardice withdrew us before the war was won. All in the name of governmental domination of society. The same pathological commitment to socialism continues unabated today.
The strength of our nation lies in the freedom of its people not the power of its government. A free people seek freedom around the world and will bleed and die for that freedom. Freedom was the cause on the lips of every American soldier who fought in WWII. It is the same battle cry today that resonates in the Baltics and the Mid East and wherever people are opressed by their government, even here in our homeland.
At the end of WWII ... They weren't going to give an inch to anyone...and certainly not to Westerners who they suspected - with good reason - stood by while they suffered and jumped in at the end and grabbed as much as they could.
Oh, please, pull your head from your rectum for a moment.
The first issue of note was that the Baltics didn't belong to the USSR before WW2, and in fact Stalin's claim to the Baltics was first based on a secret 1939 pact between Stalin and Hitler, then based on a fabrication that the Baltics invited the Communists in.
Only a brain-dead asshat could characterize ending such an occupation of the Baltics "giving an inch" to opportunistic Westerners who fought their way from Northern Africa, then through much of Europe until they were occupying half of Germany.
Funny, I can't think of any lands that those Westerners gobbled up and incorporated into their own nations, can you?
Regardless of whether Roosevelt's decision to abandon the Baltics to soviet tyranny was the better decision at the time, there is no question as Bush asserted that Roosevelt was in on the decision, and certainly a strong argument that the decision was a great injustice to the people to the Baltics.
By the way, as Stalin and his buddies killed more of his own people than the Germans did, I'm not sure Russia's blood sacrifice of WW2 had as much to do with Soviet dogmatism as a simple lust for power and control.
I don't see any posters observing just what Bush was doing by bringing this up before he went to Russia.
He was thoroughly rubbing Putin's nose in the evils of communism to force him to prove just how serious Russia was taking democracy. Sort of a "are you serious, or not?" type of stance.
It certainly didn't hurt to bring up the issue while in the presence of the countries that were brutalized the most by the horrors of communism.
You and I live on different planets.
Wow...you're full of these skirting-issue statements. Better get your "alter-ego" educated a little better.
"I remember my German and British grandparents were depressed for years over America's failure to liberate these nations so sorely opressed by Hitler. There was a great sense of betrayal here in the US over the failure of the Allies to liberate those nations for whom we went to war."
And if you knew any Russians they were ecstatic over the stupidity of FDR and the triumph of Joe over Franklin. Showed how superior their race was!
I didn't hear this history I lived it and the skewing of the truth done by commies past and present is emphatic. I have opposed on this board those who blame the gift of the Baltic nations to Communism on Churchill!
You remind me of the Muslims who criticize the Israelis for wars or conquest while forgetting their own. From the Russian point of view they were only reasserting control over territories they lost at the end of WWI. The Baltic states, or parts of them, had belonged to Russia for centuries prior to 1914. Poland hadn't existed for more than a century. The Balkans had been part of the Ottoman empire for what - 300 years? As a general rule independence has to be fought for and defended. Otherwise it's lost.
Besides, Stalin's claim to the Baltics at the conclusion of WWII was based on facts on the ground, on occupation and army strengths and positions, not on historical legalisms.
Funny, I can't think of any lands that those Westerners gobbled up and incorporated into their own nations, can you?
Once again you are only interested in a time frame favorable to your position. But looking only at the aftermath of WWII there were border adjustments which favored the French over the Germans. And, of course, the European powers all attempted to reassert colonial control in Africa and Asia.
So who's the asshat, rectum-breath?
However, the big winner in the West was us. We didn't need any more land and our domination was so overwhelming that we were more worried about keeping what we had, about making sure Western Europe stayed with us, than about getting more.
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