Saturday, June 21, 2014

Obama: The Projectionist and Chief



We're gonna punish our enemies, and we're gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.
                                                                                     Barack Obama, 2010

We can teach our children the hazards of tribalism. We can teach our children to speak out against the casual slur. We can teach them there is no ‘them,’ there’s only ‘us.’”
                                                                                     Barack Obama, 2014



Psychological Projection:  the act or technique of defending oneself against unpleasant impulses by denying their existence in oneself, while attributing them to others

One of the formidable challenges in attempting to fathom just what kind of person the 44th President of the United States is and what he actually believes is to reconcile the many stunning displays of self-contraction that emanate from his ubiquitous oratory such as the one cited above. This particular example is richly ironic with Mr. Obama’s tenderly expressed concern for the “hazards of tribalism” for our children, coming from a man who conducts his politics as tribal warfare (Chicago style), holds his opposition  in open contempt as benighted and corrupt, and routinely slurs them, sometimes casually, sometimes with great calculation. Consider our “post-partisan” President in 2011 drawing clear invidious boundaries of “us” and “them”.  In stark contrast to his aspirations for Americans to be healthy and employed, the Republican plan in his words was let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance. So far at least, I feel better about my plan” – sarcasm in the service of moral superiority.   

Mr. Obama with his immense self-regard seems to have a strong affinity for first person pronouns – I, me, we, us. I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions” Obama confessed to House Democrats back in 2008. These pronouns are not just his vehicles of self-infatuation they are also particularly useful to him as instruments of misdirection and obfuscation. Obama typically launches his insults, defamations or slurs with the “I”s, to set his starting point, the absolute, pristine clarity of his vision and purpose then to move to enlarge the moral universe of which he is the center and to complete the population of the community of the virtuous with his “we’s and “us’s”. Consider his comments after the Newtown school shooting, April of 2013.

 “When Newtown happened, I met with these families and I spoke to the community, and I said, something must be different right now.  We’re going to have to change.  That’s what the whole country said.”  

I metI spokeI said…” – which evokes in pathetic comparison another triptych from a much earlier time and from a leader of many fewer words:  “I came. I saw. I conquered.” (veni, vidi, vici).  Caesar came, saw and announced that he had conquered: Obama met, spoke and announced that he had “said something.”  In this case, that “something” whatever it might be, must be different”, however that might be.  And lest we doubt the urgency, “right now.”  As with many of the President’s pronouncements, we know at the end of them what we knew at the beginning, that he is a very important person who says things, many things.

The key point, however, is the misdirection. “We’re going to have to change.”  Who exactly is the “we” that must change? There is no “we”.  He (Obama) doesn’t have to change nor do his camp followers.  The “we” in this clumsy, egotistical verbal bramble suddenly, however, turns into the voice of the “whole country” an absurdity given the fact presumably obvious to the President that the whole country is and has long been bitterly divided about guns. Obama clearly has change in mind, no mention of hope, and it is for “them”, the rural Pennsylvanians and the like he singled out during his 2008 campaign who did not vote for him, those “white folks”, as he calls them, who “get bitter [and] cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Here then is one of Obama’s more memorable and condescending slurs that gives full register to the deep grievances that fester within and occasionally slip out when he talks unguarded to his own “folks”.  Worth mentioning in this regard is that candidate Obama’s vicious stereotype was delivered in San Francisco in front of his glitzy Hollywood adulators and sycophants, the genuine “we” and “us” who stand apart and far above the back woods, fundamentalist, shotgun toting bigots who cannot rise above their antipathy.  This time when he spoke in California there was definitely an “us” and a “them”.

Mr. Obama disapproves not only of gun owners, except the ones that guard him and his family, but drivers of SUV’s, and people who deviate from his norms of diet and home heating temperatures. And so, “We can’t drive our SUVs and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 72 degrees at all times … and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.”

Again, the phony “we,” along with one of his signature non-sequiturs, the misdirection to conceal his staggering sense of moral omniscience and his megalomaniacal drive to order everyone else’s life.  “WE can’t drive…” etc. really means “YOUwill drive, eat and adjust your thermostat according to my high standards and requirements in these matters.”  Behind these deceptive words one senses the channeling of Erich Honecker with an East-German-like mentality of someone who lives in a fundamentally bifurcated world of I-we, the enlightened who give the orders versus you-them, the unwashed and benighted who do what you are told.    

Barack Obama, however, is never more duplicitous and deceitful than when it comes to the topic of race.

 “I don’t believe it is possible to transcend race in this country. Race is a factor in this society. The legacy of Jim Crow and slavery has not gone away. It is not an accident that African-Americans experience high crime rates, are poor, and have less wealth. It is a direct result of our racial history.”  

This, of course, is Obama speaking his real mind, albeit in his typical inelegant, sophomore-ish style.  No misdirection or obfuscation in this. By itself and out of context there is nothing remarkable about this comment.  It reflects a perspective on race relations in this country that is widely held in certain circles, particularly on the part of the Left, the “diversity” industry and the grievance-mongering, race-careerist friends of Obama like Al Sharpton.

But then contrast this peevish and pessimistic plaint with the soaring rhetoric that put much of the nation in a swoon back in 2004.

There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America

True today; false tomorrow: welcome to the post-modern world and the post-modern Presidency. That was then and this is now.  So much for the The One, who besides healing the planet was going to escort America into an era that would transcend race and partisanship.  What we know now is that the President is the opposite of what the candidate appeared to be, and that much of what he says with the constant self-referencing is a continuation of the spectacular deception he worked in 2008. His second term ended with impotence and recrimination. We he departed, finally, showing himsel as he has always been, a vain and mean-spirited man, caught up in his own mendacity, incapable of viewing his critics and opposition as anyone but “enemies” whom he seeks to “punish”.  The lofty side of his rhetoric, such as the example above, with its invocation of toleration and sympathetic sense of being able to see ourselves in others is belied by what seems to be a deep ideological conviction premised on grievance and resentment –  “America is just a downright mean country” as echoed by the First Lady in 2008. The grievance and resentment that he harbors and sometimes fails to dissimulate make a vision of “us” versus “them” inevitable, and a politics of tribalism the normal order. One then perhaps would do well to understand the President’s gestures and language as classic “projection,” attributing to others those shortcomings and untoward impulses that he feels within himself.

Saturday, May 10, 2014

The Spanish Civil War and the Quest for Victimhood



The Spanish Civil War formally ended in 1939 with the unconditional surrender of the Republican forces to the Nationalist Rebels led by General Francisco Franco. The war lasted thirty-three months. The shooting stopped but the fighting continues because the antipodal ideological fissures that initially motivated the combatants have never been closed.  They persist into the present day existing as “moral trenches” over which the mutual assaults continue without cessation. They fuel a perpetual civil war that began in the 1930s in Spain but is now a venue and an opportunity for contemporary ideologues anywhere in the world to engage in self-exoneration and moral condemnation and to connive at political and social retribution.
One strategy for gaining advantage in the post-shooting, ideological war that is now the Spanish Civil War of the 21st century is for the ideologue-combatants to seek the status of – “The Victim”.  Insofar as it can be established that the representatives of one’s cause are victims, one can then shape and own the moral vocabulary that articulates the motivations and character of the participants and thus exert enormous control over the interpretation of historical events.
There are two distinct ways in the modern world to become a victim. The first is to be an individual who suffers from an act of evil, moral or physical, deliberately inflicted by another individual or individuals.  Any outside observer will immediately experience vicariously what it must feel like to be an individual who succumbs to the violence, depredation or fraud committed by another individual. A woman raped, a man robbed and beaten, a child sexually molested by an adult, an elderly person defrauded of his life savings by a confidence man – with any of these predations one reflexively empathizes with the victim and feels loathing  and contempt for the perpetrator. Both the innocence of the victim and the culpability of the aggressor are unassailable. The moral polarity is inescapable and primal.
 The second way to be a victim is a more complicated story and requires the mediation of theoretical constructs.  In fact, this kind of victim is a theoretical construct of a particular sort that is at once compelling, broadly encompassing and far reaching.
The theoretically-constructed victim sprung from the brain of a German theorizer of mythic stature, Karl Marx, in the form of a Manifesto, the intention of which was not only to announce the existence of a historically determined class of victims, but to stir them to action against the aggressors as well. 

The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles…. Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild-master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, a fight that each time ended, either in a revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.…   Workers of the world arise and unite.  You have nothing to lose but your chains. (The Communist Manifesto, 1848)

Herein lies the theoretical foundation from which emerged the prototype “victim” of the modern age, one identified as member of an oppressed collective class, a production of the operation of laws of historical necessity.  These laws (asserted to be both explanatory and predictive) Marx himself claimed were a momentous discovery and one cannot but be deeply impressed by the arrogance of his radical reductionism.  For all of the richness and complexity in how it might seem to unfold, history, peeled down to its essential core, is for Marx a story of unrelenting oppression, one that features a world of human beings who fall into two conflicting camps, victims and victimizers.  All social intercourse, however benign or innocent its appearances may present themselves, is about someone using and dominating someone else.
The identity of Marx’s victims is not as immediately and strikingly apparent as it is with the first kind of victim. It must be filtered by a properly accoutered intellectual class through the hermeneutical lens of dialectical materialism. Thus emerges the “theorist”, a privileged “knower”, as we see with Marx himself. But the knower is also a “doer”, a revolutionary destined to take power and complete the destruction of the bourgeois oppressors.
Marx’s formation and family origins were completely bourgeois, not a trivial detail to note as it points to an insidious element of self-hatred deeply embedded in the radical dynamics of Marxist theorizing. Theorists dedicated to revolution from Marx and Engels in the 1840s to Bill Ayres and many of the U.S. radicals in the 1960s have tended to come from the families of the well off and socially advantaged. Their judgment of the bourgeois “ruling class” as an instrument of exploitation was not just the conclusion of a detached, theoretical act of judgment; it erupted from a deep personal animus as well and as such is suggestive of pathological motivations and implacable hatred.  Successful communist revolutions did not merely overthrow the ruling class, they savagely annihilated it. Those theorists, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, who during the twentieth century successfully took power and presided over the masses in large portions of the globe on behalf of the exploited class turned out to be mass murderers and destroyers of epic proportions.
The role of the theorist is critical because the victims may not know that they are victims and be unable to even recognize their oppressors for what they are and what they do. Their consciousness needs to be “raised”, a moral and psychological awakening expertly guided by the theorists.  Also, the exploitation of the victims is imposed largely through a rationalization of the oppressive status-quo. Thus, another piece of the theorist’s labor is to expose the rationalization as an elaborate disguise of the identity of the oppressor and to illuminate the façade of his legitimacy.  The victim insofar as he believes the substance of the oppressor’s rationalized version of reality gives assent to the terms of his own bondage. The theorist is a “de-legitimizer”. His intended wreckage of the status-quo opens the path to the victim’s “liberation.”      
Unlike the first kind of victim, Marx’s victim plays a starring and triumphal role in a grand historical morality play.  By virtue of the part his victim plays and the suffering he endures as a member of an exploited class he becomes endowed with a transcendent moral superiority because he functions at a huge disadvantage within a system that is from the beginning completely rigged against him by powerful forces that not only exploit him but conceal the exploitative relationship from him.  Bertrand Russell has called this ‘the doctrine of the superior virtue of the oppressed”.
Because the system itself and those who run it are thoroughly corrupt, those who are its victims are innocent and even heroic insofar as they struggle against the system. Whatever resistance then the victim makes against the exploiters and oppressors, his methods are justified. Marx envisioned his oppressed and down trodden proletariat as a force of fury and rectification whose violence in service to a revolution would put a righteous end to the exploitative system that was the cause of their suffering, their victimhood.  A letter Stalin wrote to Maxim Gorky in 1930 captures not only the sense of moral superiority of the forces of liberation, but a seeming eager anticipation of an ensuing season of violence and destruction resembling the fascist affinity for “therapeutic violence”.  We are for a liberating, anti-imperialist, revolutionary war despite the fact that such a war, as is known, not only is not free from the ‘horrors of bloodshed’ but abounds in them.” (Stanley Payne, The Spanish Civil War, the Soviet Union and Communism, 25)  
Marx’s concept of “class struggle”, the imbedded premise in all genuine historical understanding and the engine of human progress, has deeply insinuated itself into our thinking and interpretation of social conflict reaching far beyond his failed prediction of a titanic clash of the proletariat and the capitalists exploiters that would culminate in a world of material plenty, free of domination and exploitation.  The most attractive, compelling and enduring feature of Marx’s morality play is the notion of the morally privileged victim. To achieve the status of a victim within the kind of framework set down by Marx entitles one to immunity from the norms of the existing order because these norms are invented and enforced by the oppressor. They serve only his interest and advantage.
Two key things emerge from this immunity. First, the absence of moral limitations on what the victim can do in engagement with the oppressor class is greatly empowering, “liberating” to employ a morally charged term from the Marxist Wörterbuch.  Whatever he does to bring the system down, to defeat it, is permissible because the system is inherently unjust and oppressive. For the Marxist, law is a capitalist tool of domination; morality is a bourgeois fraud, and thus the legal and moral norms of the existing order can have no claim on the proletariat, the victim class.  Lying, theft and murder are permissible if they advance the cause and ultimate victory of the victim class. (See, Charles Mills “The Moral Epistemology of Stalinism,” Politics & Society, V. 22, No. 1, March 1994, 37-51)
Second, the oppressor class for all of its iniquities remains bound to its own bourgeois norms and legal system, and if in its defense its members lie, break promises, suborn and corrupt officials, steal and murder they betray their own professed principles and provide the victim class with further evidence of their utter corruption, hypocrisy and loss of legitimacy. 
With this kind of “differential” in the moral boundaries, whatever the outcome of the struggle between the victim and the oppressor, the victim prevails. If he wins, he has heroically participated in the righteous overturning of an unjust order and succeeded in liberating himself and his fellows from the jaws of exploitation.  The world thereafter is a more decent, just and happy place.  If he loses in the struggle to the lords of reaction, he becomes a tragic hero resisting the oppressor, overwhelmed by brute superior material force. Even his defeat, however, becomes further historical testimony to the raw power, the amoral character, and voracious malevolence of the rigged system he failed to bring down.  He then forever wears the martyr’s crown. 
The Spanish Civil War is the Left’s finest hour of tragic-heroism, the perfect Marxist morality play – the progressive, democratically elected Republican government, struggling valiantly against great odds, abandoned by the Nazi-appeasing British and French, crushed by Spanish fascism in collusion with and abetted by Hitler and Mussolini.
The history of the Spanish Civil War interpreted from this perspective is an invitation to celebrate the tragic heroism and martyrdom of the Republicans, to exonerate the losers in the conflict as innocent victims of fascist aggression and to accentuate the mindless brutality and the innate atavism of twentieth-century fascism.
There are enough elements of truth in this interpretation to make it extremely attractive and compelling, as it has been for the last seventy-five years.  But the “sale” has never been completely made, as evidenced by the persistent polemical battle waged by the historians and politicians, due in part because the specter of Soviet communism in the 1930s, communist machinations in Spain and Stalin’s ultimate collusion and partnership with Hitler in 1939 have always provided a competing narrative with a different set of victims and a more complicated picture. In the crudest, simplest terms, the Spanish Civil War, like the French and Bolshevik revolutions, was a violent clash between the defenders of the old order (religious, past-referencing and hierarchical) and the hopefuls of a new order (secular, anti-clerical and egalitarian). Whoever wins or loses with these sorts of cataclysmic struggles, there are victims.  The lives of large numbers of people are destroyed, their world shattered.  
While the Republicans invoked the rise of fascism in central and southern Europe and the specter of Hitler, the Nationalists launched their rebellion fearing an eventual communist takeover of Spain. They loathed and feared the communists. In light of what the world’s most powerful communist, Joseph Stalin, had done to his own people by 1936, a fear of communism might not be an unreasonable one.  Early into the conflict Stalin was contributing weapons and military expert advisers, as well as the formation and recruitment of the International Brigades that saved Madrid from falling to Franco’s army in the autumn of 1936.  Unlike Franco whose intentions and rhetoric were clear and obvious, the communists under Stalin’s tutelage were master dissimulators playing a double game pretending to be democrats while plotting revolution. The war as their rhetoric announced was a battle of not of communism against the forces of reaction but of “democracy” against fascism.  Nevertheless, the Spanish Civil War in many fundamental respects was a proxy war, a war of the raging ideologies of Europe with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin backing their respective clients.
Hitler, however, was never much impressed with Franco whom he regarded as a provincial rube, a chatterbox with the “manners of a sergeant major” and whom he later demeaned as the “Latin charlatan”. (Stanley Payne, Franco and Hitler: Spain, Germany and World War II, 99).  Nor was Hitler able to entice Franco to enter WWII on the Axis side even after helping him defeat the Republicans. At their meeting at the Hendaye train station near the French-Spanish border in October 1940 to Hitler’s great irritation and frustration the Spanish caudillo rejected Hitler’s entreaties and bored him with a three hour rambling monologue.  Hitler was reported to have said that he would “rather have three or four teeth pulled than sit through another conversation with Franco.” (Payne, Franco and Hitler, 91)       
Stalin eventually abandoned the Republicans and to the disillusionment of many communists world-wide pursued rapprochement with Hitler, concluding the infamous, WWII-initiating “Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact” just four months after the end of the Spanish Civil War. During the 1939-1941 Nazi-Soviet-pact Stalin’s NKVD was handing over Jewish Communists to Hitler. Stalin too had waged his own separate war in Spain, not against the fascist rebels, but against any Republicans or supporters of the Spanish regime whom he regarded as enemies of the USSR. His NKVD agents purged the ranks of the Spanish Left of Trotskyists and other “crypto-fascists” with their own show trials, torture and summary executions.
Looking at the Spanish Civil War as a proxy war with Hitler and Stalin as the principals, not as a clash of abstractions – democracy against fascism – but of a struggle between an increasingly Stalin- and communist-dominated Spanish Left and a reactionary Caudillo backed by Hitler and Mussolini, then the rendering of the conflict as a Marxist morality play does not seem quite so compelling. 
Consider and compare, also, where Stalin and Hitler both were in their respective career-trajectories of mass-murder at that critical point in time, 1936, the year the Spanish Civil War began. By 1936 Stalin had completed a five-year plan in the USSR with a hard turn to the left beginning in 1928 and a propaganda assault by his personally manipulated Communist International (Comintern) on “social fascists”, the Social Democrats and Socialist parties in Europe whom Stalin classified as enemies on the Left since they played by the parliamentary rules in the constitutional democracies he desired to overthrow. German socialists in the early 1930s found themselves under assault both from Hitler’s Brown Shirts and the KDP, the German communists, following Comintern directives. “Fascist” was the most flexible label in Stalin’s political lexicon, shorthand for his enemy du jour.  The boundaries of fascism shifted with the vagaries of the Soviet Union’s own geo-political positioning and strategic priorities.  Many of Stalin’s “Old Bolshevik” colleagues from October Revolution days, Trotsky being the most notable, were by the mid-1930s “unmasked” as “fascist hirelings and collaborators”. The “social fascists” during the 1930s after 1936 suddenly became Stalin’s allies as he then concluded that their support was more valuable to him than their ideological heterodoxy. As many of the Republicans in Spain to their sorrow learned, being Stalin’s friend could be worse than being his enemy.
During the early 1930s Stalin had also planned and executed a brutal, coerced collectivization of his own peasantry. His cadres were sent en masse to forcibly extract grain from the farmers in Ukraine and destroy the “Kulaks”, farmers who were “rich”.  Stalin was desperate for hard currency in order to capitalize Soviet industries through grain sales on the international markets. The result was mass-starvation, a terror-famine, as Robert Conquest called it, which killed between three to five million Ukrainians including women and children. Country roadsides were littered with wasted corpses while the communist-guarded granaries were filled to capacity and readied for export. The Ukrainians remember this holocaust as Holodomor. By 1936 Stalin had also commenced his purge of the CPSU, replete with elaborate Moscow show trials and launched a three year reign of terror that killed hundreds of thousands of Soviet citizens including many lifelong, loyal communists. 
By 1936 Hitler had consolidated his dictatorship, purged Ernst Röhm and the SA in the Night of the Long Knives and was readying his dark and menacing forces for the conquest of Europe. Unlike Stalin, at his point Hitler’s devastation and mass murder was ahead of him.      
With this kind of comparison of the principals the Spanish Civil War, just how to judge the culpability and innocence of their respective clients, who were competing against each other to expand the world in the images held by their patrons and mentors becomes a daunting and complicated task.  In attempting to understand why this war continues it might be better to proceed by stating what would be mutually agreed upon historical judgments rather than seeking to establish an ideologically-based interpretation of exoneration and condemnation. Thus:

1.     Both sides in the war committed atrocities;
2.   Franco was an ungenerous victor, exacted a brutal retribution and presided over long and repressive dictatorship;
3.  Franco’s dictatorship transitioned legally and peacefully to a constitutional democracy in marked contrast to the absence of any communist dictatorship anywhere making a peaceful, legal transition, with the sole exception of Gorbachev’s;
4.   The bulwark of military and political resistance to the Nationalist rebels came from Spanish communists with the advice and support of Stalin’s Soviet advisors;
5. Given the strength and domination of communists in the republican government during the civil war, the victory of the Republican government forces over Franco would not have produced a constitutional democracy but rather a communist dictatorship;
6.     Given the 20th-century history of communist revolution and rule – the Soviet Union and its post-WWII vassal states, the People’s Republic of China, the Republic of North Korea, Castro’s Cuba, Pol Pot’s Cambodia – one can reasonable conjecture that the people of a communist Spain would have endured the persecution, purges, forced collectivization and economic privation similar to what the peoples of these countries did.      

   Points one and two, I believe, would not be contested by anyone. Elements of points three and four might be resisted but the points can be persuasively argued.  Point number five is, of course, counter-factual. Given, however, the fractious history of Spain that followed the abdication of Alfonso XIII and the commencement of the 2nd Republic in 1931 with the country’s archaic social structure, attendant political extremism, violence and regional hostilities and inability to reform, it is difficult to envision any outcome to the civil war that would not have culminated in some kind dictatorship and awful retribution. Moreover, Spain in need of support and outside assistance from strong and stable democratic governments was attempting the modernizing of its social and political institutions within a Europe whose countries were increasingly falling under the domination of authoritarian and totalitarian governments.
Point number six is conjectural and of course it is impossible to know what a victorious Republican government, large elements of which were made up of anarchists, communists, and socialists, would have done to the opposition and what wreckage in lives and property would have come from the “dismantlement” they were planning for the old order they so much loathed. What would have been the fate of Spanish Catholics?  There were still a lot of them. The spring and summer months of 1936 were not a good omen. Also, the history of revolutions in the twentieth century, the three most notable being the Russian, Chinese and Cuban, strongly suggests that a Socialist Republic of Spain would have come to resemble these three with their cult-of-personality dictatorships that murdered, enslaved, repressed and impoverished large numbers of their own citizens.  
Perhaps the initial path to an armistice for the Spanish Civil War would be to relinquish the deeply moralized narrative of the conflict as “good versus evil” and attempt to contemplate it as a piece of the larger picture of mid-Twentieth Century Europe’s tragic immersion in cauldron of totalitarian ideologies. The war unleashed the fanatics, the ideologues and the haters and the Spanish people were their victims, caught in a vice the jaws of which were savage reaction one the one side and communist treachery and tyranny on the other.    

Sunday, January 26, 2014

STALIN & FDR's TRIUMVIRATE OF STOOGES



We are determined that nothing shall stop us from sharing with you all that we have … Generations unborn will owe a great measure of freedom to the unconquerable power of the Soviet people. Harry Hopkins, Madison Square Garden Speech (Quoted from, Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, Penguin, 2008, 284)

Stalin gives the impression of a strong mind which is composed and wise.  His grown eyes are exceedingly kind and gentle.  A child would like to sit on his lap and a dog would sidle up to him. …  A wonderful and stimulating experiment is taking place in the Soviet Union…  The Soviet Union is doing wonderful things… Joseph Davies (Quoted from The Forsaken, 120, 142)

Henry Wallace is a pacifist, a dreamer who wants to disband our armed forces, give Russia our atomic secrets, and trust a bunch of adventurers in the Kremlin Politburo.
Harry Truman on Henry Wallace (Quoted from The Forsaken, 279) 

Franklin Delano Roosevelt died seventy-two years ago two months after returning from his grueling journey to Yalta. With considerable unease one contemplates the famous photographs of a grey and gaunt FDR sitting between Churchill and Stalin, staring back at the camera with ghostly eyes sunken and lost, a dark cloak wrapped around his frail body.  Captured on film is a spent man leaning on death’s door doing exactly what? – negotiating the fate of millions of people with one of the 20th century’s most cunning, deceitful and brutal personalities. Off to the side and out of camera range, providing counsel and support was ... Alger Hiss.

FDR is the closest thing Americans have to a modern, secular saint, the man who guided America through the Great Depression and saved the world from Adolf Hitler. His reputation is guarded by an impenetrable protective halo, the greatness and heroism of his Presidency forever guaranteed. To speak disparagingly of FDR puts one on the fringe. 

FDR’s halo shines particularly bright for Democrats for whom there is no higher praise in the political arena than to be likened in any way to the 32nd President of the United States. Shortly after the 2008 election, Time magazine’s cover featured an eye-popping photo-shopped picture of President-elect Barack Obama accoutered in a signature FDR pose, teeth clenching the cigarette holder at a jaunty angle punctuating a broad, confident grin, head topped with the well-recognized fedora, perched casually behind the wheel of an open 1930s convertible ready, so to speak, to steer America out of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. Under the picture was the caption, “The New New Deal.”     

Image result for obama as fdrEight years later with the vapors of Obama-mania long dissipated, a stagnant economy unemployment rate the new norm, and “Hope & Change” a forgotten campaign inanity, no one should confuse the  President with the 32nd, at least as secular saint. Obama’s descent from the state of his 2008 divinity (“He is sort of a God….” Evan Thomas, Newsweek) to fallible flesh is easily explained and sadly understood. But the continued awe and reverence for Franklin Roosevelt, entrenched and undeniable as it is, is somewhat harder to comprehend.
   
Whether FDR’s policies prolonged the Great Depression remains an extremely involved and complicated historical-political debate and his legacy and reputation in some relative sense rise and fall with the movement of that controversy. However, with the availability of primary source material in the form of declassified official U.S. documents and material from the former Soviet Union archives, FDR’s formulation and conduct of American foreign policy up to and including World War II must be judged as nothing less than a monumental disaster.  His terrible judgment and decisions with in dealing with Stalin and the Soviet Union condemned tens of millions of people to decades of servitude and tyranny.        

The premises for making this case can be stated in two simple sentences, their truth, well documented and indisputable.

Joseph Stalin is one of history’s most brutal, lethal dictators.
FDR trusted Stalin as a decent, honorable man.

Once the God of the Communist world was finally and safely dead in March 1953 even his own protégés after a respectable time denounced him and evicted him from the mausoleum on Red Square.  Thanks to the great pioneering work of historians like Robert Conquest, later confirmed by opening of Soviet archives, we all know that Stalin was one of the most prolific mass-murderers in history, surpassing in sheer numbers his partner in the rape of Poland from 1939-1941, Adolf Hitler.  Moreover, while Hitler’s homicidal designs were focused primarily on Jews, Stalin’s terror-command state cut a much wider swath, was of a longer duration and spawned prolifically lethal emulators like Mao, Kim Il Sung and Pol Pot.    

It was FDR’s government, considerably influenced by the scurrilous, lying New York Times journalist Walter Duranty, which gave diplomatic recognition to the Soviet Union in 1933. This was just the time when Stalin’s cadres were en masse forcibly extracting grain from the farmers in Ukraine. Stalin needed hard currency in order to capitalize Soviet industries through grain sales on the international markets. The result was mass-starvation, a terror-famine, as Conquest called it, which killed millions of Ukrainians including women and children. Driven to insanity by their savage hunger the Ukrainians began eating grass, bark, dirt and finally each other.  Country roadsides were littered with wasted corpses while the communist-guarded granaries were filled and readied for export.**  At that time there were from the outside a few witnesses to Holodomor, the Ukrainian word for the Stalin-made holocaust. Truth-tellers like Gareth Jones and Malcolm Muggeridge observed the starvation first hand and tried to tell the world, but the “blind-eye” was FDR’s preferred modus vivendi for the Soviet Union with the assist of organs like the New York Times and, even worse, with close personal advisors who assiduously enabled FDR’s view of Stalin as a tough but trustworthy sort of guy who only wanted the best for his own people.

In 1943 William Bullitt, the first U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union (1933-1936), a man who had had extensive first-hand experience with Soviet diplomacy and all of its duplicity and treachery tried to disabuse FDR of his benign view of Stalin. According to Bullitt’s memoirs FDR’s response was:

Bill, I don’t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man.  Harry says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything in the world but security for his country, and I think if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.***

One could not imagine a more stunning and jaw-dropping revelation of an utterly willful, delusional mind. A “hunch” no less that trumped more than a decade of evidence of systematic tyranny and perfidy on an unprecedented scale. The “Harry” in this retort was, of course, Harry Hopkins, who was FDR’s “White House live-in” chief foreign policy advisor during WWII.  It is difficult to know with complete certainty if Hopkins was a Soviet agent or merely a dupe. In her book, American Betrayal, Diana West makes a strong and compelling case for the former.  In any case, Hopkins’s approach to Stalin, which also became FDR’s, was open-ended, obliging, obsequious, admiring even. Hopkins encouraged FDR to open wide the spigots of Lend Lease, and … to ask in return?  Not much. At least this is what the President seemed to think.  In return, so the “reasoning” went, Stalin would like him. Whether or not Stalin liked anyone, we know for a fact that close proximity to him was frequently lethal, as his second wife, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Nikolai Bukharin, and many of his old Bolshevik colleagues discovered. The Studebaker trucks, heavy machinery and materials that FDR was sending to the Soviets to help them fight the Germans were also deployed in the Stalin’s Gulag to transport and maintain the slaves.       

The ambassador who replaced William Bullitt in Moscow was none other than Joseph Davies who, shortly after his arrival observed the first of three major Stalin-choreographed show trials and to the amazement of his own staff, including George Kennan, put his imprimatur on the farce.*  Much was made in the international press coverage of the high U.S. diplomatic presence at the trial, a legitimizing touch greatly appreciated by Stalin.* Davies spent the three years of his ambassadorial assignment fawning over and patronizing Stalin who was at the very time conducting a reign of terror that decimated the leadership of his own party and killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people.  His own wife, Marjorie Merriweather Post, years after her return to the U.S., reported hearing from the windows of her Moscow apartment the screams of the victims being carried off late at night by the NKVD.*    

At this same time a heartbeat away from the Presidency was another Stalin-o-phile, Vice President Henry Wallace. Wallace’s contribution to U.S. Soviet foreign policy and to FDR’s fantasy view of Stalin was to treck through the Gulag and render high praise for healthy, hardy “pioneers’ mining the gold and cutting the timber in Siberia.  There are no more similar countries in the world than the Soviet Union and the United States of America,” enthused Wallace.  Free people, born on free expanses, can never live in slavery.”* After his NKVD-managed 25 day tour of the vast Gulag slave colony, Wallace sent an open letter addressed to Comrade J.V. Stalin to convey his “deep gratitude for the splendid cordial hospitality shown to me.”* Stalin was nothing if not cordial and hospitable, especially to gullible, hear-no-evil, see-no-evil, American politicians who would wildly rave about their Potemkin excursions and tell everyone back home how just how swell things were for the lunch pail gang in the Socialist Workers' Paradise.     

We now remember Stalin for his masterminding and executing of three monumental works of mass murder and slavery: the terror-famine, a holocaust claiming millions of victims; the terror-purge of 1936-38 that killed hundreds of thousands of innocent people; and the Gulag, Stalin’s slave-empire, a hellish, murderous prison system, purposely designed and operated so as to subject his own people by the millions to maximum suffering and degradation and to forcibly extract as much labor from them as possible while simultaneously turning them into corpses.

But we should also remember that in these efforts, Stalin had the support and assistance of a triumvirate of stooges, Hopkins, Davies and Wallace, men who looked the other way, men who worked to provide American aide and assistance to  Stalin far beyond what he needed to fight off his former partner in depredation, Hitler. Wallace journeyed though the Gulag and managed to remain tenaciously oblivious to its reality. Davies sat in a front row seat in the Hall of Mirrors observing the Show Trials, yet somehow, like Wallace trooping through Kolyma missed its obvious features and purpose. Hopkins shuttled back and forth between Stalin and FDR, working tirelessly to give Stalin everything he wanted, eyes tightly closed to the many scenes and ample evidence of some of the worst atrocities in modern times.      

For FDR it is time to take him down from the pedestal and drop the reverence, time to look long and hard at the fools and Quislings he installed in high places and trusted. It is also time to write history that speaks forthrightly to his determined, invincible ignorance with regard to all things Russian. In the face of overwhelming evidence of Soviet finger prints on the 1940 Katyn massacre of 22,000 Polish officers in Smolensk, FDR preferred to echo Stalin’s version. “[T]his is entirely German propaganda and a German plot.  I am absolutely convinced that the Russians did not do this.” *** He seemed to be “absolutely convinced” of many things that turned out to be the opposite of the way they actually were which means that his judgment was deeply flawed and that his decisions were tragic.  One does wonder if FDR had lived to see the fate of the Poles, the Baltic people, and the rest of the European countries that fell into the Soviet maw: would his ignorance and arrogance turned to regret?
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*See, Tim Tzouliadis, The Forsaken: an American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia, Penguin, 2008
**See, Robert Conquest, Harvest of Sorrow: Soviet Collectivization and the Terror-Famine, Oxford, 1986.
***Quoted from Diana West, American Betrayal, the Secret Assault on our Nation’s Character, St. Martins, 2013, 199, 212
Kudos to Tim Tzouliadis and Diana West for their significant work on FDR's stooges.