More on Remembering Yalta

Eric Alterman has a new piece on the renewed Yalta controversy: Eric Alterman, "Where FDR Went Wrong", The American Prospect Online, May 16, 2005.  He makes the right point about why Bush's criticism of the Yalta agreements was wrong: "the deal with the Soviets was inevitable. Roosevelt was forced to recognize the realities of the postwar map."  But this article lacks his usual level of coherent argument.  It seems to me he gets a little lost in trying to make the point that if Roosevelt had lived, he would have managed the US-Soviet relationship better than Truman did.

The English-language edition of the conservative Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (FAZ) provides another take on Bush's bizarre anti-Roosevelt-and-Churchill ideology on the Second World War, in the form of a criticism of German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder: The chancellor turns a deaf ear by Berthold Kohler 05/13/05.  But this columnist's criticism isn't some blanket embrace of revanchist claims from eastern European rightwingers:

Like his country, the chancellor recognizes the moral and political duties that have been placed in the hands of the new German democracy by the crimes of Hitler's regime. Since Schröder took office in 1998, decisions have been made to pay compensation to former forced laborers and to build the Holocaust memorial that was opened on Tuesday. ...  On the 60th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising, where Schröder also became the first chancellor to attend the ceremonies, he rejected the calls from Germans who were expelled from the East after the war by arguing that you cannot ”turn history on its head.” (my emphasis)

The article gives a decent account of the current politics of historical remembrance for Germany, and is generally complimentary of Schröder's handling of it.  The criticism comes at the end:

In the years ahead, Germany will not be the only country that will discover new layers of its past that reach beyond May 8, 1945, the day on which Germany unconditionally surrendered and ended World War II in Europe. Europe's view of history, up to now a western one, will be touched by the enlargement of the European Union. The new EU members bring their trauma and experience into the alliance. These have to do with something more than Hitler. The Baltics have already heard that the West thinks it is wrong to mention the Nazi dictator in the same breath as Stalin. But now that they are free, they want to be able to say that Stalin came right behind Hitler, and robbed the Baltics of their freedom, killed thousands and shipped hundreds of thousands off to Siberia. A German chancellor, of all people, should have an open ear for such statements, particularly because half of his own country shared this fate. But the chancellor stood on the side of the victors on Monday and did not want to hear a word of it.

This criticism is simply saying that Schröder should have made more friendly political gestures toward the Baltic countries' current grievances against the Russians as a result of their long and often unhappy postwar experiences.  It doesn't suggest what Bush claimed, that Roosevelt and Churchill were responsible for the postwar actions of the Soviet Union in eastern Europe.

The same English-language FAZ has a news article about the events commemorating the end of the war in Europe:  Letting wounds of the war heal: Germany, Russia are reconciling by William Pratt  05/13/05.  This part is important.  And it's the kind of thing that seems to get little notice in the US except in the form of hostile polemics about the allegedly base motives that other countries have for not supporting any war that Bush commands them to:

The meeting was a reflection of the close partnership that the two leaders [Schröder and Putin] have built over the years. It is a partnership based on political and business issues. In 2002 and 2003, they worked with Chirac to prevent Bush from invading Iraq. While that effort failed, the business cooperation between the two leaders has proven to be very profitable. Last month, for instance, Putin came to Hanover to open the world's largest industrial trade fair. During the event, the Germany-based chemical company BASF announced that it was becoming the first foreign company to gain direct access to Russia's huge gas deposits. Under the $1 billion deal, Germany's largest chemical company will join the Russian company Gazprom in developing a gas field in western Siberia.

At the same fair, Russia's rail operator agreed to a deal with Siemens to jointly build 60 high-speed trains based on the German ICE costing an  estimated at €1.5 billion ($1.93 billion).

On the Yalta agreements, Stanford historian David Kennedy wrote in Freedom From Fear (1999):

Controversy over the Yalta Conference reverberated well into the postwar years, when it was alleged that Roosevelt, sick and mentally enfeebled, possibly misguided by scheming pro-Communist advisers, had witlessly kowtowed to Stalin, cut backroom deals, betrayed Poland, delivered eastern Europe into Soviet hands, and sold out Chiang Kai-Shek, opening the door to the eventual Communist takeover in China. All of those charges were vastly overdrawn. If Yalta represented an American diplomatic failure, it was attributable not to the frailties of Franklin Roosevelt's mind and body in February 1945, and surely not to the machinations of supposedly subversive aides, but to the pattern of more than five years of war that left the American president with few options. "I didn't say the result was good," Roosevelt conceded to an associate, "I said it was the best I could do."

The president was unquestionably ill at Yalta, but he did little there that he had not signaled his willingness to do at Teheran, when he was in full possession of his faculties, and did little differently than any American leader could have done at this juncture. ... He perhaps misjudged his ability to speak candidly to the American people about Soviet dominance in eastern Europe but surely judged rightly that the United States could not do much about it. With reference to Germany, his obfuscation managed to head off formal partition and deferred the reparations question for discussion on another and presumably more auspicious day. In China, Chiang's regime was already so rotten as to be beyond salvation. Nothing promised at Yalta appreciably contributed to its eventual collapse. (my emphasis)

I have low expectations of Bush in general.  But even I was surprised at his embracing the crackpot rightwing version of Yalta.  And, as Joe Conason writes (I just quoted this a couple of days ago but it's worth a second one):

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.