[Peace-discuss] Another betrayal myth

[David Green]

(as discussed at the last meeting)

Bush denounces the Yalta Treaty of 1945
By David North
12 May 2005

The twentieth century refuses to die a quiet death.
The shadows of its unresolved controversies lie
heavily upon contemporary politics. There can be no
such thing as a “simple” commemoration of the past.
Invariably, invocations of history serve present-day
political interests.

The celebration of the 60th anniversary of the end of
the Second World War in Europe is a case in point.
With his speech in Latvia, denouncing the Yalta
agreements of 1945, President George Bush sought to
provide an ideological justification for present-day
American militarism and Washington’s self-proclaimed
right to attack and invade any country, in any part of
the world, that it perceives to be a threat to its
interests.

“As we mark the victory of six decades ago, we are
mindful of a paradox,” declared the president. “For
much of Germany, defeat led to freedom. For much of
Eastern and Central Europe, victory brought the iron
rule of another empire. V-E Day marked the end of
fascism, but it did not end oppression. The agreement
at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich
and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. 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”
(emphasis added).

As it was the US president who made this statement, it
represents an unprecedented repudiation and
denunciation by the government of the United States of
a foreign policy decision made by a previous
administration. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt
now stands publicly condemned by President Bush as a
criminal—for how else can one describe an individual
who authored one of history’s “greatest wrongs”? One
might ask, to what other “historical wrongs” might the
president have been comparing the Yalta agreements?
The Holocaust?

Denunciations of the Yalta agreements have long been
part of right-wing political rhetoric in the United
States. For the extreme right and elements within the
American state who advocated the “roll-back” of Soviet
influence in Eastern Europe, and even the total
destruction of the USSR, Yalta was the symbol of
capitulation to communism. The claims that the Yalta
agreements were the product of communist subversion of
the US State Department provided fuel for the
post-World War II witch-hunts spearheaded by Senator
Joseph McCarthy.

But despite these denunciations of Yalta, there
existed a consensus within the most influential
sections of the American ruling class that Roosevelt
had played his cards at Yalta as well as could be
expected given the circumstances that he confronted.
His acceptance of a dominant Soviet role in Poland and
much of Eastern Europe was little more than an
acknowledgment of military and political realities.
The Soviet army was the most powerful force on the
European continent. The destruction of the Nazi war
machine had been achieved principally by the Soviet
army. The bulk of German forces had been deployed on
the eastern front. Without the victories won by the
Soviet forces in 1943 and 1944, an Anglo-American
invasion of France would have been unthinkable.

In the course of liberating Eastern Europe from German
occupation, the Soviet Union had suffered staggering
human and material losses. Roosevelt recognized that
the Soviet Union, having been nearly destroyed by Nazi
Germany, was not going to withdraw its troops from
Eastern Europe and accept passively the reinstallation
of hostile governments that might become part of a new
invading coalition. As historian Eric Alterman has
recently noted, the USSR was no more prepared to
accept installation of a pro-American government in
Poland than the United States was prepared to accept
the establishment of a pro-Soviet government in Mexico
(When Presidents Lie, New York: 2004, pp. 37-38).

The only political conclusion that can be drawn from
Bush’s Latvian statement is that he believes the
United States should have taken military action to
achieve the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Eastern
Europe. For this to have been done in 1945 would have
required Washington to conclude a separate peace with
Nazi Germany and redeploy what remained of the
latter’s military forces in a joint German-American
campaign against the USSR.

This was a political scenario which key Nazi leaders,
such as SS-leader Heinrich Himmler, and even elements
within the American military command, such as General
George Patton, hoped to realize. However, this course
was never considered a viable option within the most
influential sections of the American political
establishment. Aside from being militarily impossible,
a separate peace with the Nazis and an attack on the
Soviet Union would have provoked mutiny within the
American army—whose GIs viewed the Soviet troops as
comrades-in-arms—and massive political protests among
the American people at home.

The political mood within the United States was very
different in 1945 than it was in 1948. It would
require three years of incessant anti-Soviet
propaganda and virulent red-baiting within the United
States before substantial sections of the American
public were prepared to accept the prospect of war
with the Soviet Union. A critical element of this
propaganda was the claim that Roosevelt had “sold out”
Eastern Europe at Yalta.

As always, the Bush administration counts on the
refusal of the media to subject the president’s
statements to any serious political and historical
analysis. Once again, he has not been disappointed.
Bush’s reference to “the captivity of millions in
Central and Eastern Europe” has gone unchallenged. The
American people are left with the impression that
Soviet occupation of Eastern European countries
cruelly trampled on flowering democracies.

The truth is very different. The regimes of Eastern
Europe were cesspools of political reaction. Prior to
the outbreak of World War II, Poland was ruled by a
quasi-military dictatorship run by the successors of
the late Marshal Pilsudski. Fanatically anti-Soviet,
the Pilsudski regime was the first European government
to conclude a treaty with Hitler, signing a
non-aggression pact with the Nazi government in 1934
that was directed against the USSR. The regimes of
Hungary, Bulgaria and Romania had all been part of the
Nazi-directed Axis of World War II. In Hungary, the
dictatorship of Admiral Miklós Horthy had aligned his
government with the Third Reich even before the war,
and participated with Bulgaria in the Nazi invasion of
Yugoslavia in May 1941. Just one month later, Hungary
joined Hitler in the invasion of the Soviet Union.

Romania was ruled by a dictator, Marshal Ion
Antonescu. His government joined the Axis in November
1940, and established the closest links between the
German and Romanian economies. Antonescu encouraged
murderous pogroms against Romania’s Jews, and sent
troops into the Soviet Union when Hitler launched his
invasion. In the areas of the Soviet Union occupied by
Romanian troops, Bessarabia and Bucovina, the Jewish
population was exterminated. Romanian troops also
played a major role in a horrifying massacre in
Odessa, which resulted in the deaths of 280,000
people, most of whom were Jews.

In Latvia, where Bush gave his speech, 75,000 Jews
were murdered along with an estimated 15,000
“politically undesirable elements.” This mass killing
was spearheaded by right-wing Latvian nationalists
organized in such units as the Arajs Kommando, which
carried out pogroms and helped the Nazis herd tens of
thousands into pits in the Rumbula forest, where they
were massacred.

After the defeat of the Nazis, it was inconceivable
that the USSR would permit the reestablishment of
anti-Soviet governments in these countries.

In countering the grotesque historical fabrications of
the Bush administration, it is not our intention to
prettify the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe, let
alone glorify the Stalinist regimes that were
established in the aftermath of the war. But the
Marxist and socialist critique of Soviet policy has
nothing in common with the democracy versus
dictatorship mythology promoted by Cold War
imperialist ideologists.

The Marxist critique of Soviet postwar policy explains
the essentially conservative and counterrevolutionary
character of Soviet policy in Eastern and Central
Europe. Soviet policy was dictated by conventional
considerations of national defense, not international
revolutionary strategy.

While seeking to establish a defensive buffer of
client states on the periphery of the USSR, the ruling
Soviet bureaucracy provided guarantees for the defense
of capitalism throughout Western Europe. The Stalinist
suppression of revolutionary movements of the working
class in the immediate aftermath of the war proved, in
the long run, to be of decisive significance in the
ultimate demise of the USSR.

Bush’s demagogy in Latvia serves to underscore the
doctrine of preventive war: that the United States
will not shrink from war whenever and wherever
“democracy” is threatened, or to put it more
precisely, whenever and wherever key American
interests are at stake.

See Also:
May Day 2005: Sixty years since the end of World War
II
[2 May 2005]




		
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