Saturday, May 07, 2005
Paying tribute to FDR: From Bush's statement delivered in Latvia: (emp add) 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. We won't go into the details here, but Yalta was a ratification of the realities on the ground. It's long been a hobbyhorse of the right, who demonize FDR for agreeing to the division of Europe.
posted by Quiddity at 5/07/2005 03:36:00 PM
9 comments
Bush is such a brave, thoughtful man, in retrospect. No doubt he's fantasizing about having a Mission Accomplished banner hanging on the Kremlin, and LOTS of staged photo-ops of Commie statues being pulled down.
VKW
If fucking Preznit Wasted Sperm even knew what happened at Yalta without some hired PhD whispering the details in his ear it would shock me.
Show him a picture of the the Allies at the conference and he'd be as likely to name them "Larry, Moe and Curly" as anything else.
He probably confuses Latvia with Lavrenti Beria and figures that the country was responsible for the KGB. Or something.
This is great posturing by Bush. It clearly implies that, had he been president at that time, Allied forces would have accepted Hitler's offer to cease hostilities in the West and operate jointly against the Soviets.
And you know, I do believe Bush would have jumped at such a chance. Hitler being, after all, a good christian and a strong supporter of capitalism and all. The fact that it would have probably doubled the death toll of World War II from 50 million to 100 million--and resulted in the deaths of all 12 million Jews in Europe--would have been of no consequence to the Shrub.
Derelict
"[The] us did have nuclear arms by this time (or near enough) to make a credible and deadly threat to russian expansion."
Credible in what sense? Stalin and his generals were well known for being profligate with the lives of the troops. So it seems that a threat to wipe out millions more Russian soldiers would not have stood up very well.
And then, of course, there's the question of just how happy all those Eastern Europeans would have been to have their countries turned into nuclear wastelands. Something about destroying the village to sace it comes to mind.
You might wish it was revisionism, but the history is there on the page for all to read. I do not doubt that Eastern Europeans suffered greatly under the imposition of Soviet-style dictatorship. But neither do I doubt that the alternative of going straight from WWII into WWIII would have been far more horrific.
Derelict
"as for nuclear devices, derelict, my guess that what was done to hiroshima would be a real deterrent to the ussr. we can agree to disagree about that."
Apparently not that much of a deterent, as events in Korea not five years later proved.
In hindsight, the way events unfolded created tragedy across eastern Europe. At the time, however, military realities dictated the political compromises. It simply wasn't practical or possible for U.S. and British troops to keep rolling east to take on the Russians. As previously noted, Stalin and his generals had no qualms whatever about wasting hundred of thousands of Russian lives (both military and civilian). Given that Russia had several million men under arms at the time (versus American and British forces of well under a million), the most likely outcome an attempt to take on the Russians would have been for the whole of Europe to fall under Soviet domination.
So, even looking back with the 20/20 vision of hindsight, we can see that no good would have come from an attempted liberation of Eastern Europe. The most likely net result would have been tens of millions more dead and all of Europe under Stalin's heel.
Anon 7:30 is right. The reality is the armed forces of the Western Allies were not going to make much headway against the Red Army of May 1945.
But the real problem was political. The British public certainly would not have tolerated a continuation of the war and it's doubtful the American public would have been much more accepting.
The same can be said of the troops on the ground. Talk about smashing moral. After defeating Germany, no GI wanted to press on to fight indefinitely against a new enemy.
It's just childish and profoundly ignorant (politically, militarily and economically) to think a continuation of WWII to take on the SU was remotely possible.
Face it, FDR wussed out. Old Joe gave him one stern look and you could hear his wheel chair rattle from all the shaking. FDR is like most lies the left whould have you believe. He was a womanizing (maybe where Slick got his guidance) closet Commie who didn't have the 'nads to do the right thing - even though Patton and his boys were clearly ready to kick the Red Army all the way back to Stalingrad.
Bush took care of that illusion with his statement and he'll do the same thing to SS as soon as he slaps down the Senate and gets Bolton approved. God, it must suck to be a Democrat right about now.
Yeah, Cap'n--you got it right! 600,000 thousand Americans (including cooks and clerks) and their 10,000 tanks would have been more than a match for 15 million Russians, their 1,000,000 tanks, 5,000,000 artillery pieces, and 10 million reserves. That would have worked out great, don't ya think?
It must be an amazing world for people like you. I mean, all these grand delusions uncluttered by anything approximating actual facts must make it seem like the world is invented anew every day.
casimir wrote, the time to leverage the russians is earlier than 1945, but in any case, in 1945--you stop lend-lease, you make it clear that you are prepared to fight for eastern european freedom.
That's roughly what George Kennan was proposing: stop sending war materiel to the Soviets, etc, if necessary.
I guess "eastern european freedom" doesn't include the freedom of Jews, Gypsies, and the like not to be shovelled into Nazi ovens.
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