Bush indulged in shameless historical revisionism of a disgusting kind in Latvia this weekend. He condemned the Yalta agreement in a way that was not only ahistorical, but incorporates some of the worst rightwing-isolationist criticisms of that agreement (Bush Faults WWII Legacy In E. Europe by Peter Baker Washington Post 05/08/05).
In a speech to Latvian leaders, Bush cited the U.S. role at the Yalta conference in 1945, which is widely seen as having paved the way for the Soviet Union to dominate not only the Baltic states but also Eastern Europe for nearly half a century. And to make the point that the United States owns up to "the injustices of our history," he reminded his audience -- and by extension Putin -- of the shameful heritage of American slavery and centuries of racial oppression.
"The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact," Bush said, linking it to British appeasement and Soviet deal-cutting with Adolf Hitler in the late 1930s. "Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history."
Tha Yalta Agreement among the Big Three of the wartime alliance - the United States, the Soviet Union and Britain - essentially ratified the authority of the occupying powers in the areas where their armies stood at the end of hostilities. The text of the agreement committed the three powers to the following:
The Premier of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and the President of the United States of America have consulted with each other in the common interests of the people of their countries and those of liberated Europe. They jointly declare their mutual agreement to concert during the temporary period of instability in liberated Europe the policies of their three Governments in assisting the peoples liberated from the domination of Nazi Germany and the peoples of the former Axis satellite states of Europe to solve by democratic means their pressing political and economic problems.
The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the last vestiges of nazism and fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter - the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live - the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived to them by the aggressor nations.
The Yalta agreement also committed the three powers to establishing the United Nations, probably the major reason why rightwingers in America always hated it and probably a big part of the subtext to Bush's condemnation of it. It established the formal agreement for the administration of occupied Germany
And a secret agreement reached at Yalta also committed the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan. The American narrative of the end of the Second World War has the US dropping two atomic bombs on Japan and then they decide to surrender.
But the bombs weren't ready in February 1945, when the Yalta conference took place. Germany wasn't defeated yet, though it was only a matter of months, at most, it was clear to most everyone (except Hitler) at that time. The war in the Pacific was a bloody one. And it was the United States that had been attacked at Pearl Harbor, not the USSR. The Soviets' agreement to enter the war in the east was important, and they carried through on their agreement. The Red Army was driving down the Korean Peninsula in August 1945, which is when the atomic bombs were dropped. That's how North Korea wound up Communist.
The effect of the Red Army attack gets virtually no attention in American accounts of the war. In the Soviet Cold war version of events, Japan was convinced to surrender by the Red Army's victories on the battlefield, and the dropping of the atomic bombs was a sideshow mainly aimed at intimidating the Soviet Union. That was not Truman's purpose in using the bombs. And it was silly to pretend that the atomic bombs were irrelevant to Japan's defeat. But it's also unrealistic to ignore the Soviet role in those events.
But more relevant to the Yalta agreement, if the bombs didn't work, the United States and Britain needed the Soviets' help big-time in the war against Japan. So that was an important benefit of the Yalta agreement for the US.
We know now that the Soviet Union did not allow democratic elections in the eastern European countries under its control. But was there any possibility that the United States could, should or would go to war against the Soviet Union in 1945 to take those areas back from the Red Army? No. Not in the "reality-based" world anyway.
There's a favorite story on the far right that says that Gen. Patton recommended that the American Army continue its eastward push to Moscow and do away with the Soviet regime, as well. Actually, this wasn't a "recommendation," it was Patton shooting off his mouth as he was wont to do, and in a private conversation at that with a German officer with whom he was dealing in his (Patton's) role as military governor in the German state of Bavaria. Not only was it not taken seriously by the US military, it was considered one more piece of bad judgment by Patton that he was talking such nonsense. Patton's friend and admirer, Gen. Omar Bradley, wrote that it was good for Patton's reputation that he died when he did. Otherwise, he would have probably found his military career ended by his careless talk in cases just like that.
Would it have been better for Roosevelt at Yalta and later Truman at Potsdam to refuse to make any agreements and just say, "it's sin and we're agin' it"? Historians can speculate about whether this or that point might have been negotiated differently. But only in the land of Republican pseudohistory could anyone imagine that it was a realistic and/or desirable option in 1945 for the US to go to war with the Soviet Union over eastern Europe.
And neither Yalta nor Potsdam implied any formal recognition by the US and Britain of any right by the Soviet Union to impose governments on eastern European countries and make them satellites. And in the case of the Baltic nations Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, the USSR had absorbed them into the Soviet Union as part of the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact of 1939, aka, the Hitler-Stalin pact, aka, the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact. The United States never recognized the validity of that agreement and continued to recognize those nations as having the right to be free and independent.
For Bush to compare Yalta and Potsdam to Munich and the German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact is just loony.
What's next? He goes to Moscow and declares it was sinful for the United States to ally with Soviet Russia against Nazi Germany in 1941?
Bush is continuing the rewriting of history to justify his preventive war doctrine, which at least rhetorically he expanded in his Second Inaugural Address to the neoconservative dream of wars of liberation being waged against regimes of which the United States disapproves. From the Post article:
Bush connected the struggles against Nazi and Communist despotism in this part of the world to his own campaign to bring democracy to the Middle East. "We will not repeat the mistakes of other generations -- appeasing or excusing tyranny, and sacrificing freedom in the vain pursuit of stability," he said. "We have learned our lesson. No one's liberty is expendable. In the long run, our security, and true stability, depend on the freedom of others."
Bush needs to rewrite the history of the Second World War if he wants people to remember it at all. Because that war began with Hitler's preventive war against Poland. German and Japanese leaders were prosecuted and convicted for planning and waging what was then called in legal terms "aggressive war," which now is called "preventive war" in international law. It means attacking another country when that country is no imminent threat to the attacking nation.
No, Bush and his team don't want to remind people of that aspect of the Second World War.
7 comments:
Bruce,
Excellent post. If the American people weren't so ahistorical none of this would ever fly. But sadly few Americans know Yalta from Yiddish and whatever Bush tells them about it is going to fly. Thanks for reminding us just how looney it is.
dave
You know, it's ok to admit to historical mistakes and "St. Roosevelt" made quite a few of them. Speaking as an registered independant, I can safely say that I, and, I'm sure, others, would take Dems more seriously if you could admit it every now and then.
So, mrz777, what was the alternative to the agreements made? Not expect the USSR to enter the war in the east? Not try to get the Soviets to agree to democractic elections in the occupied countries? Not have an agreement over how to administer Germany? Go to war against the USSR, our own ally in 1945, when Japan wasn't even defeated? - Bruce
What mistakes were made? Enough to require two comments.
Part I:
How about intentionally stopping the US Army advance towards Berlin and instead diverting them south, intentionally allowing the Red Army to take the city as redress for Soviet suffering during the Nazi invasion. If we had taken Berlin, an agreement on administering Germany would be about as moot as Soviet promises to hold free and fair elections in Poland, wouldn't it?
How about pulling US troops out of established positions in Czechoslovakia, all but guarunteeing that the Red Army would be able to occupy the entire country and install a puppet regime.
How about forcibly repatriating political refugees from territories occupied by Stalin, thus guarunteeing at worse they execution and at best a stint of undetermined duration in the Gulag archipelago (this includes not only civilians but Red Army POWs).
Part II
Comparing Yalta to Molotv-Ribbentrop is hardly looney. Molotov-Ribbentrop agreed to divide Eastern Europe between Soviet and Nazi spheres of influence. Yalta agreed to divide Europe between Soviet and Allied influences. How is that different?
Bush isn't rewriting history, he's stating facts that were forgotten by the West when it was decided to align with a genocidal lunatic. When Hitler "preemptively" invaded Poland from the west, Stalin moved in at the same time from the west. In 1940, Churchill came mighty close to declaring war on Stalin in response to his invasion of Finland...allowed under Molotov-Ribbentrop.
I haven't seen one argument this week by anyone anywhere on the political spectrum that the US should have continued the war against the Soviet Union. All I've seen are acknowledgements that elements of the post war were mishandled by Roosevelt. Why is that hard for die hard Democrats to acknowledge? Mistakes were made and they cost people of Central and Eastern Europe 50 years of freedom and democracy. We (US government) can admit it and move forward with those countries. In stark contrast, the current Russian government refuses to admit that it's direct historical predessor acted illegally and immorally. I'll take the current US Government and it's historical honesty and repentance for past wrongs over Putin's bluster and deception any day of the week.
In the meantime, you can continue to oddly pray at the 70 year old altar of FDR. Because, you know, domestic and foreign policies enacted 70 years ago are entirely applicable to the U.S. and the world nearly a century later.
On Berlin: It's a valid criticism to say that the US should have taken Berlin. Gen. James Gavin in his memoirs *On to Berlin* argued that, at the minimum, a clear political decision should have been made on that issue. As it was, Gen. Eisenhower thought it made the most sense militarily to let the Red Army take Berlin. If the American Army had taken it, it would have at least allowed the Western Allies to connect Berlin directly to what became West Germany. That would have avoided the kind of confrontations that occurred in 1948 and then later in the early 1960s. But it wouldn't have meant that the Soviets weren't occupying part of Germany.
On the issues of positioning troops in Czechoslovakia and the repatriations, I'm not familiar enough with those details to comment immediately on them.
But the Soviet Union was the ally of the US and Britain in the Second World War, like it or not. There had to be some arrangements made to coordinate the postwar occupation. We can learn from the results of that agreement. From what I know about the arrangements for the return of German prisioners-of-war, I would say in retrospect that it would have been better not to agree to let Russia hold them after the war.
But that does not make the US and Britain, or Roosevelt and Churchill, somehow responsible for the Soviets' later actions in eastern Europe. And that's what Bush was saying. - Bruce
Part of think realistically about those treaties is looking at the other "what if's", like the ones I included in my earlier note. Initially, the Soviets wanted to draw the boundaries of Poland much to the west of where they wound up, absorbing more of it into Russia and making even more of present-day Germany into Polish territory. That's one of the things the Western Allies won in the negotiations. Given the postwar expulsion of Germans from Polish territory and the possible relocations of Poles that might have taken place had the Soviets been left to draw Poland's boundaries, there are costs both human and strategic that were avoided by the Yalta/Potsdam agreements.
The US was left the most powerful country in the world at the end of the war. But that didn't mean the US could impose its preferred solutions anywhere it chose. - Bruce
The German-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact included an arrangement to invade Poland, a country that was not threatening either the USSR or Germany, as well as allowing the Soviets to take the Baltic states. The postwar agreements were about the occupation of the liberated and conquered countries, not about invading new countries at which the various parties were at peace.
You say you haven't heard the continue-on-to-Moscow argument. That's good, because it wasn't an option. But for the US and Britain to have the power to impose a *substantially* different postwar arrangement in eastern Europe, going to war against the Red Army is what it would have required.
As I said in the earlier comment, we can argue "what if's" about what might have been negotiated differently. In retrospect, the US would have saved itself and western Europe a lot of trouble if they had pushed on to Berlin, even though that was not considered the most advantageous arrangement in the strictly military sense.
But the United States was not to blame for the actions the Soviets took in the countri
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