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Rereading American Betrayal: How FDR's Soviet Recognition Changed the USA Beyond Recognition
Thanks, KC_Lion. .
Posted on 02/27/2015 11:10:40 AM PST by No One Special
FDR's decision to "normalize" diplomatic relations with Stalin's dictatorship of blood on November 16, 1933 is the seminal event in modern American history, I argue in American Betrayal -- one reason I was very happy to participate in the 80th commemoration of the event presented by CSP, hosted by Frank Gaffney, and also featuring M. Stanton Evans, Chris Farrell, and Stephen Coughlin. The moral, intellectual and strategic repercussions plague us to this minute.
From American Betrayal, starting p. 193:
When Franklin Roosevelt finally extended “normal diplomatic relations” in exchange for a page of Soviet concessions signed by Foreign Minister Maxim Litvinov (who, Prohibition beer on his breath, then returned to the Soviet Embassy “all smiles . . . and said, ‘Well, it’s all in the bag; we have it’), the U.S. government found itself derailed onto a strange, new track through an unfamiliar, soon monotonous, land of endless apologetics.The crux of the U.S.-USSR agreement rested on a series of promises, accepted and signed by Litvinov, that listed very specifically what the Soviet Union would not do “in the United States, its territories or possessions”: namely, it would not attempt to subvert or overthrow the U.S. system. The declaration “scrupulously” stated the USSR would refrain and restrain all persons and all organizations, under its direct or indirect control, from taking any act, overt or covert, aimed at the overthrow or preparation for the overthrow of the United States. It further specifically stipulated that the Soviet government would not form or support groups inside the United States—such as the Soviet-supported CPUSA, myriad “front groups,” the Soviet-directed underground espionage networks Bentley and Chambers later broke with, or the CPUSA-Comintern group on the West Coast that Harry Hopkins found out J. Edgar Hoover was bugging (and knowingly told the Soviets). The agreement, in other words, was a bunch of lies, the first bunch of lies of many. To make it all stick, however, to keep this sorriest of bad bargains, to perpetuate the myth of U.S.-Soviet accord, the United States had to pretend otherwise. The United States had to retire to a new fantasy world of its own creation in which the Soviet Union was keeping its word, in which Soviet-directed and -financed espionage did not exist . . . in which Communists were not under every bed, in which even the act of looking was “Red-baiting” and anti-Communists were paranoid about “bugaboos.” As our most respected and beloved leaders increasingly sought refuge in this world of pretend, they led the nation on a disastrous retreat from reality from which we have never, ever returned. In our retreat, we left morality behind, undefended.
Now, as far as we know, Harry Hopkins had nothing to do with this beginning. Then again, I have found that we don’t know much about who did. “Four presidents and their six Secretaries of State for over a decade and a half held to this resolve” not to recognize the Soviet government, as Herbert Hoover, one of those four presidents, wrote in Freedom Betrayed, his posthumously published (2011) history of World War II and the early Cold War. These American leaders understood that the Bolsheviks’ seizure of the government by force, their reign of blood, their pledge to conspire against other governments, made the “mutual confidence” required for diplomatic relations impossible. However, Hoover doesn’t explain the shift in thinking. Indeed, who or what specifically inspired FDR to undertake this momentous decision is largely glossed over in the historical narrative in general, although we do know Soviet recognition was applauded by businessmen eager to sell their rope to Lenin. The interchanges that followed, the relations that evolved, were marked and warped by paradoxes we would later understand and explain as “Orwellian.” Some of them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn would bring to our attention some forty years later.
In his very first speech on his very first trip to the USA in 1975, the fifty-six-year-old Solzhenitsyn asked the question he had wanted to ask America most of his adult life. He set it up by comparing America’s historic aversion to alliance with czarist Russia to Roosevelt’s rush to recognize a far more repressive and infinitely more violent Bolshevik Russia in 1933. Pre-Revolutionary executions by the czarist government came to about seventeen per year, Solzhenitsyn said, while, as a point of comparison, the Spanish Inquisition at its height destroyed ten persons per month. In the revolutionary years of 1918 and 1919, he continued, the Cheka executed without trial more than a thousand per month. At the height of Stalin’s terror in 1937–38, tens of thousands of people were shot per month. The author of The Gulag Archipelago put it all together like so:
Here are the figures: seventeen a year, ten a month, more than one thousand a month, more than forty thousand a month! Thus, that which had made it difficult for the democratic West to form an alliance with pre-revolutionary Russia had, by 1941, grown to such an extent, yet still did not prevent the entire united democracies of the world—England, France, the United States, Canada, and other small countries—from entering into a military alliance with the Soviet Union. How is this to be explained? How can we understand it?
Presidents Wilson, Harding, Coolidge, and Hoover all rejected relations with the Bolshevik regime. This would seem to mark these men as belonging to the earlier era of Albert Dreyfus, when, as Robert Conquest notes, “the conscience of the civilized world could be aroused by the false condemnation to imprisonment of a single French captain for a crime which had actually been committed, though not by him.” A generation or two later, the conscience of the civilized world couldn’t be aroused, period, not by the false condemnation of one nor the false condemnation of thousands, tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands, as Conquest explains. “The Soviet equivalent of the Dreyfus Case involved the execution of thousands of officers, from Marshals and Admirals down, on charges which were totally imaginary.” What happened to the “conscience of the civilized world”?
The West’s decision to recognize the USSR—and its determination to keep recognizing it, no matter how much lying and acquiescence to betrayal that entailed—did more to transform us than any single act before or since. The profound diplomatic shift—part Faustian bargain, part moral lobotomy—didn’t just invite the Soviet Union into the community of nations. To make room for the monster-regime, the United States had to surrender the terra firma of objective morality and reality-based judgment. No wonder, then, that tens of thousands of Dreyfus Cases in Russia meant nothing to the “conscience of the civilized world.” Implications had already been officially sundered from facts.
To be sure, there was something new in the way recognition ever after reordered the priorities and actions of our republic, something that marked the beginning of a different kind of era. The fact is, the implications of normalizing relations with the thoroughly abnormal USSR didn’t just reward and legitimize a regime of rampantly metasticizing criminality. Because the Communist regime was so openly and ideologically dedicated to our destruction, the act of recognition defied reason and the demands of self-preservation. Recognition and all that came with it, including alliance, would soon become the enemy of reason and self-preservation. In this way, as Dennis J. Dunn points out, we see a double standard in American foreign policy evolve, and, I would add, in American thinking more generally. It was here that we abandoned the lodestars of good and evil, the clarity of black and white. Closing our eyes, we dove head first into a weltering morass of exquisitely enervating and agonizing grays.
This is the journey that forced open our psyches to increasingly expansive experiments in moral relativism. Only a very few refused to go; only a very few saw the sin. There is something poignantly allegorical in Solzhenitsyn’s recollection of being a young Red Army soldier flummoxed by what he and his comrades heard as Roosevelt’s disastrous misreading of Stalin at around the time of the Tehran Conference. As they marched on the Elbe, he said, they hoped to “meet the Americans and tell them.” He added, “Just before that happened I was taken off to prison and my meeting didn’t take place.” Just before that happened, just before he was going to tell his American compatriots the truth about Stalin, about the Soviet Union, the twenty-six-year-old was arrested by the NKVD for the most mildly derogatory statements about Stalin written in a letter. He was sentenced to a labor camp for eight years.
Solzhenitsyn would have been too late anyway. Having abandoned the Western moral tradition and Enlightenment logic as a precondition of the U.S.- USSR relationship, we already inhabited a brave new—and dangerous—realm. Wishful thinking was in. Evidence was out. Ideology was in. Facts were out. With an exchange of rustling paper at the White House, the revolution was here, the epicenter of American betrayal. ...
“FDR’s alliance with Russia was all about WWII.”
I believe she is referring to official diplomatic recognition of the U.S.S.R. in 1933; long before joining forces with them in WWII.
Ironically Hitler was hoping that Stalin would have agreed to lead Hitler’s Russian Puppet State. Despite being bitter enemies, Hitler greatly admired Stalin.
Socialists love other socialists.
Ditto That!
its water under the bridge, its a moot point, there is nothing to be done about it....
I am so tired of people "discovering" past wrongs or even present wrongs and do nothing physical about it....
like our pubs...we can't stop immigration, nor the IRS, nor obamanocare, nor VA scandals, nor the helping of ISIS and other moslem terrorists...just like the white kid never fights back....just sits there and takes it....
One day maybe,mwe’ll learn all of the truth. Maybe too late.
Simple: Democrats LOVE DEATH.
Stunning quote.
Transformation or milepost? It certainly was a marker, but was it a cause?
Very doubtful it would have collapsed the Soviet government. The capitol would have simply shifted eastwards to the safe zone. Napoleon burned Moscow. Russians had that in their institutional memory bank that loss of Moscow does not mean the government has collapsed, or that the invaders have won.
I've long felt that FDR was the worst tyrant the USA has ever had. If more people read about his presidency, they'd be shocked to see how he trampled on people's rights in order to run those failed economic policies. Thank goodness the NRA was ruled unconstitutional by the SCOTUS (of course, that led to King FDR's attempt to enlarge and pack the court).
FDR is the worst, followed by LBJ and Hussein IMO. But actually, our current woes can probably be traced back to FDR's commie-riddled administration which set up an anti-American apparatus that still operates.
One of the most insightful/important analysis to show up on FR in a long time, IMHO. God, I hate what the left has done to this country.
Read America Betrayal and Freedom Betrayed. You will begin to understand how the U.S. was manipulated with help from inside the White House and the State Department to enter a war fought for the benefit of the Soviet Union. Stalin had this figured out by 1938. The Soviet Union entered the war bankrupt and came out in control of Eastern Europe with China soon turning communist. FDR helped him every step of the way. We are taught the war was started to protect the independence of Poland and it ended with Poland owned by the Soviet Union. So what really was in play? Read the books.
Also, I think, what the Israeli Left is trying to do with the murderous Palestinians.
Also, what the American Jewish Left encourages Israel to do.
Rereading American Betrayal: How FDR's Soviet Recognition Changed the USA Beyond Recognition
Thanks, KC_Lion. .
Wow, terrific post.
Thanks for putting this up.
It’s always exciting to discover that someone else has clearly expressed things you have thought about for decades.
Now, I have a question for the many part time World War II historians on this thread who, like me, who are drawn to books like this.
What would have happened in Europe after June 1941 if the USA had not supported the Soviet Union?
Many people do not realize the truly massive scale of military supplies we sent.
I think the USSR would have collapsed, or, at the very least, Stalin would have had to surrender everything west of the Volga.
How would we have fought the war in Europe if Hitler had been comfortably ensconced in western Russia without a serious military threat on that front?
My general feeling is that Hitler would hav been in this position if we had not provided lend-lease military aid to Stalin and once Hitler was so ensconced, he would have been very difficult to remove. So despite my misgivings of having Stalin as an ally and despite all that happened after that, I think it was necessary. But I am no historian in any sense. This is but a seat of the pants judgement. Would love to see some more learned judgements.
youtube links to Diana West speaking oin this book, must watch!
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkoOH05Yvyb2IfDUSxkoYQSrKyH9XORbq
not true, in fact, one of the final points you realize in her book, is that we did not fight to our doctrine, but to soviet doctrine, we waxed the Nazis only AFTER the soviets entered German territory, we didnt invade until Russia was inside German borders
and she makes it clear, it appears to have been why we waited so long to invade Europe in France
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