More on Bush channeling Ann Coulter on Yalta

Some other folks were obviously as flummoxed as I was to hear Bush's blame-America-first version of the Yalta conference and Soviet domination of eastern Europe.

The ever-provocative Joe Conason weighs in: And you thought World War II was over? WorkingforChange.com 05/12/05

Historical falsification, when spoken by the President of the United States to slander one of his greatest predecessors, should not go unanswered. In a display of the extremist ideology that drives politics and policy in his administration, George W. Bush chose a platform in Latvia to repeat an old right-wing slur against Franklin Delano Roosevelt. ...

For the President to utter such cheap remarks about Roosevelt (and Churchill, whom he ridiculously imagines to be his model) was unfortunate. For him to utter those remarks on foreign soil, during ceremonies commemorating the end of the war fought so bravely by Roosevelt and Churchill, was unforgivable.

Yes, why does Bush want to defame two of histories greatest democratic figures this way?

Conason also remarks on the Ann-Coulterish nature of Bush's remarks. Is Mad Annie now the gold standard for Republican political thought?

He gives a good, brief summary of the main features of the Western position at Yalta. He also observes:

What the democratic leaders did insist upon -- in direct contradiction of the Bush slur -- was the Declaration on Liberated Europe, including a written promise from Stalin to permit free and fair elections in the occupied nations. Poland was to be reconstituted as an independent democratic state, with an interim government that included both communists and democrats. ...

Ronald Reagan was among the opponents of communism who drew on that moral power. "Let me state emphatically, we reject any interpretation of the Yalta agreement that suggests American consent for the division of Europe into spheres of influence," said the late President in August 1984. "On the contrary, we see that agreement as a pledge by the three great powers to restore full independence, and to allow free and democratic elections in all countries liberated from the Nazis after WorldWar II."

Why does Bush despise Ronald Reagan's view of freedom and democracy and the American role in the world?

Conason thinks that Bush's Coulterish/McCarthyist/Birchite view of the Second World War reflects his own outsized ego. "For in voicing his ugly and erroneous criticism of justly venerated men, he only appears to have overestimated himself." And not for the first time.

Historian and eastern-Europe specialist Timothy Garton Ash also gets into the conversation: Forward to VE Day Guardian (UK) 05/12/05.

Garton Ash frames his comments around the fact that there are in a literal sense as many "memories" of the Second World War as there are people to remember it. But the experiences of different nations in the war and the aftermath produces a variety of interpretations of the war and its lessons. As he puts it, "Really, we should talk about second world wars, not the second world war. The plural applies inside as well as between countries."

And he gives some concrete examples of how this plays out. I found his column to be a helpful take on the various meanings that "remembering" the Second World War has in Europe today. Let's hope that most of the European memories - and American ones, too - are based on a more realistic view than that of our esteemed president. Actually, I think Garton Ash is too generous to Bush here. Maybe he's not aware of the particular ideological twist that Bush's interpretation has for the far right in American politics:

A common past? Forget it! The memory wars began the day the second world war ended. They have continued ever since. With the entry of central and east European states into the European Union and Nato, they are being played out in a new way. Central and east Europeans are now articulating their versions of the past through the main organs of what we used to call "the west". In making Putin's Red Square victory parade a mere stopover between Latvia, the Netherlands and Georgia, George Bush has signed up to their reading of history rather than Putin's. Even the usually timid European commission issued a statement saying, among sentiments more comfortable to the Russian leader: "We remember ... the many millions for whom the end of the second world war was not the end of dictatorship, and for whom true freedom was only to come with the fall of the Berlin Wall."

Bush's statement of blaming Roosevelt and Churchill for postwar Soviet policy in eastern Europe went far beyond that European commission quotation he gives.  But this quotation is also a good reminder that the rightwing got lots of ideological ammunition for their version of Yalta from the bitter, revanchist politics of some of the exile groups from eastern Europe, not all of whom had democracy as their goal for their home countries. 

I also like the way he frames the following point:

[W]e must insist that there are historical facts. When any body politic starts denying or suppressing historical facts, that is a warning sign, like the spots indicating measles. The Soviet Union had historiographical measles for all its life. Russia after 1991 got better. Many Russian schoolchildren had access to a history textbook that taught them, as is only right, about the extraordinary sacrifices of Red Army soldiers and the civilians of cities such as Stalingrad, where, 60 years on, they are still digging up the skeletons. But it also mentioned Stalin's occupation of the Baltic states, his wartime deportations of Balts and others and the contribution made by US lend-lease equipment to the Soviet victory. Now that schoolbook has been withdrawn.

That every citizen of Europe should have full access to the facts about our barbarous past is a precondition for the political health of this continent. The interpretation of those facts is then free. Historians such as Richard Overy and Norman Davies have argued persuasively that the Soviet contribution to the defeat of Hitler has been consistently underrated in most Anglo-American treatments of the subject. But Russia does not help its own case by trying to suppress uncomfortable facts.

While I'm on the skeptical side of thinking that people can learn from the historical past - they more often seem to just use history as bad slogans for what they want to do without much regard for real history - I also think the point he makes here is important. Given today's political climate in America, this may sound like a metaphysical statement, but there is something to be said for reality-based history.