The Slaughtering of Sacred Cows

Nick at the The Frozen North has taken a look at Diana West’s book American Betrayal from a British perspective. Should we call it “British Betrayal”?

Excerpts from his essay are reproduced below:

Brits of my generation were taught that World War II was a moral enterprise and that as a country, we had fought for freedom, self-determination and democracy. Apparently, we declared war on Germany to defend Poland and six years later, after forging a “special relationship” with America, we had defeated Germany and won the war.

We grew up during what became known as the cold war, and we were led to believe that the forces of Communism could lay waste to the entire world. One American President faced them down when they tried to base missiles in Cuba; another called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”. This worldview was reinforced in the public consciousness by fictional works in both TV and print.

And yet, the British and Americans allied themselves with the Soviet Union during World War II. Evidently, it didn’t matter that the Soviets invaded Poland along with the Nazis, or that they refused to return the Polish territory they captured during that military conquest.

How can the British and American wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and the behaviour of our leaders towards the dictator Stalin, be reconciled with the claims that the war was a moral conflict and that Britain and America “won” it?

The American journalist Diana West has recently written a book which examines the extent of Soviet influence on American policy both during and after the war. She has been attacked by the former radical leftist David Horowitz for doing this, but the question being asked here is perfectly legitimate: To what extend did the British and the Americans do Josef Stalin’s bidding during the war?

When I visited the Imperial War Museum in London a couple of years ago, there was a plaque on the wall that said serving in the Merchant Navy was the most dangerous thing anyone could do during the war. Having visited Malta not long before, I was familiar with the story of Operation Pedestal, so it was not difficult for me to accept that sailing in a supply convoy during the war was incredibly dangerous. And the Arctic convoys to the Soviet port of Murmansk were among the most dangerous of all.

The arctic convoys were an attempt to meet the obligations of an agreement that had been made by Lord Beaverbrook on behalf of the British government during a trip to the Soviet Union in September of 1941. Beaverbrook had promised to send the Soviet Union 200 aircraft and 250 tanks each month, which would mean handing over to the Soviets between a quarter and a third of the output of Britain’s military manufacturing output. In the House of Commons, Churchill had warned that ‘sacrifices of the most serious kind and the most extreme efforts will have to be made by the British people’ in order to supply Russia with armaments.

Military aid was therefore sent to the Soviet Union by sea, with convoys sailing up the coast of Norway and around the Barents Sea to the Soviet ports of Murmansk and Archangel. These journeys were so incredibly dangerous, and losses were so high, that the British Chiefs of Staff even proposed cancelling convoy PQ16, which was due to sail from Iceland on 18th May 1942.

Churchill, knowing that Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov was due to visit London a few days later, insisted that the convoy go ahead “whatever the cost” because Britain’s “comradeship” with the Soviet Union was at stake. As the acclaimed historian Laurence Rees has said, this shows clearly that the decision to sacrifice British lives was politically motivated. In other words, Winston Churchill was willing to let British sailors die in order to keep Stalin onside.

Why we would go out of our way to help the reds in the first place remains a mystery to me. I tend to agree with Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, the deputy of General Sir Alan Brooke, who wrote on 29 June 1941: “I avoid the expression “Allies”, for the Russians are a dirty lot of murdering thieves themselves, and double crossers of the deepest dye. It’s good to see the deepest cut-throats in Europe, Hitler and Stalin, going for each other.” Senator Bennett Clark of Missouri expressed similar sentiments at the time: “It’s a case of dog eat dog. Stalin is as bloody handed as Hitler. I don’t think we should help either one.”

This assessment of the situation is borne out by the reality of life in the Soviet Union, which was hell on earth. An American sailor named Jim Risk, whose ship was tied up in Moltovsk for almost nine months during the war, experienced the Soviet regime first hand and drew the obvious conclusion: “We had learned that Stalin was a brute just like Hitler was a brute. They were just brutes in a different language.” Several of his shipmates had been full-blown Communists – “pinkies” – when they set sail, but when they cast off their ropes and sailed away from the Soviet Union, “they were no longer pinkies”. In Risk’s opinion, Josef Stalin was “the dirtiest, filthiest personality in the world”.

We now know that Stalin signed the orders for the Katyn forest massacre, which led to thousands of Polish prisoners being executed by agents of the Soviet secret police, the NKVD. What is not so well known is that both the leaders of the “Grand Alliance” were aware of what had happened. Sir Owen O’Malley, acting as ambassador to the Polish government in exile in London, sent a report on the Katyn massacre to the Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden in May 1943 in which he concluded: “there is now available a good deal of negative evidence, the cumulative effect of which is to throw serious doubt on Russian disclaimers of responsibility for the massacre.’

The official policy of the British government was to ignore O’Malley’s report and to say nothing about the Katyn massacre, lest the truth about Stalin find its way into the public consciousness. After all, the public schoolboys running the British Empire couldn’t have the riff-raff thinking they were consorting with murderers and tyrants, old boy. That wouldn’t do at all.

But they were.

Roosevelt was no better than the silver spooners in the UK – if anything, he was worse…

Visit The Frozen North for the rest, including the end notes.

For links to previous articles about the controversy over American Betrayal, see the Diana West Archives.

45 thoughts on “The Slaughtering of Sacred Cows

  1. The author poses this question here:

    “How can the British and American wartime alliance with the Soviet Union, and the behavior of our leaders towards the dictator Stalin, be reconciled with the claims that the war was a moral conflict and that Britain and America “won” it?

    And then effectively answers most of it here:

    I tend to agree with Lieutenant General Henry Pownall, the deputy of General Sir Alan Brooke, who wrote on 29 June 1941: “I avoid the expression “Allies”, for the Russians are a dirty lot of murdering thieves themselves, and double crossers of the deepest dye. It’s good to see the deepest cut-throats in Europe, Hitler and Stalin, going for each other.”

    As far as the ‘moral conflict’ aspect of the question is concerned I would point out that morality is something that can be exercised in the aftermath by the victors if they so wish. The defeated and the dead do not have this option and one can be certain that this acute reality did not escape those two essential pragmatists, Churchill and Roosevelt.

  2. I haven’t read Diana West’s book and perhaps she has addressed this question. I wonder if there was any legitimacy in the British and American asumption that that the allies needed the Soviet Union to help defeat Hitler.

    • I seem to remember that the possibility of leaving the two tyrants to fight it out was mentioned.

      • When Chamberlain objected to Germany resuming control of Danzig and declared war on Germany that beautiful possibility passed.

    • That’s the very crux of this whole Diana West debacle. Her book is an amassment of data and their analysis copiously implying that whether or not we needed to ally our West with Stalin in order to defeat Hitler, the depth and breadth of that alliance as it developed and the resultant effects of Soviet infiltration in America was too high a price to pay.

      The related question of great moment — whether we could have defeated Hitler without that alliance (and indeed should have, and could have, put Stalin on our plate as our global enemy along with Hitler ) — is also adjudicated by implication in her book charged with the affirmative.

      • Why not keep him dangling on the line till they developed the nuclear bomb then drop one on Moscow – cut the head off the Soviet snake once and for all?

        They may not have wanted to engage in a long drawn out traditional war with the Soviets, but they dropped nukes on japan precisely to avoid that scenario – why not apply the same logic to “Uncle Joe”?

  3. All politicians are of the same metal. All of them are greedy and dishonest. The problem is that ordinary people don’t like meek, honest candidates. Search the human nature. But these deep facts can’t be understood until you are 66 years old, after you have seen so much bitterness in this Life and Earth of Tears. For most people they die and never understand them.
    For example: The Polish appealed for the British before Hitler’s invasion: ” Give us weapons we don’t need rhetoric and empty talk,” which is so common in democracies. No weapons for the Polish.
    Churchill befriended Russia not because he loved Russia, but he was forced by Hitler to do that.
    Today Russia is forced by the West to befriend Iran and Syria. Or any country that would smile to them. Not many countries smile to the Russians and and the Israelis.
    No one in this world can understand the plight of the Israelis. Yesterday they were massacred in Baghdad, Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Summerkund, England, Spain, … etc and the rest were chased out. Because they had killed the Christian deity. So they went ti Israel. Today The Muslims and Europeans are chasing them out of Israel. Today Europe despises the same deity but still hate the Jews and hate themselves.

  4. It should also be called the betrayal of Europe, the very least eastern and Southern Europe too. The British played a deeply disturbing part in the communist takeover of whole chunks of Europe. Take the example of Yugoslavia, a kingdom which was attacked and occupied by the Nazis. There were two resistant movements, one the Partizans, the other, the Chetniks, who were royalists. The allies provided undercover logistic, military support to the royalists from the beginning of the war.

    The exiled Yugoslav government was located in London during the war. The OSS, (US) and the SOE, (UK) backed the royalists. This all changed, when Churchill was persuaded to switch to the Partizans, the communists led by Tito. The repercussions of this switch continue to be felt up the late 90s. How did this all come about? British spies (moles), working secretly for the soviets, to the extent that they successfully misinformed the British and USA leadership. The extent of this was largely revealed in the 1990s, when declassified documents showed the depth of intrigue, betrayal and misinformation, with established links going back to the Cambridge 5 spy ring, soviet moles working at the heart of the British government during the war, ( and afterwards until the 1960s). They had power and used it.

    Effectively, the royalists under general Mihailović, were ultimately sidelined and labelled as traitors. Their war efforts were sabotaged at every step. The image of the Chetniks was tainted, even in recent times, as being pure fascists. At the moment Serbian TV is showing a series about general Mihailovic, called “ravna Gora. This itself may be not much, but it shows that only now, that we can show the participation of the royalists, without the overt communist blinkers.

  5. See links on this

    http://www.truthinmedia.org/Bulletins/tim97-6-9.html
    The article: A 1994 Foreign Affairs Column: “New World Order’s” Greatest Tragedy: MAKING OLD MISTAKES
    Taming of Serbs (Act VI)

    Wonder why you never heard of that in your high school history classes? Because now you know who wrote the American hisotry textbooks – the WW II winners, the Soviet wolves in Western sheep’s clothing.

  6. I’ve often argued this point many times over “The good war”.it was not only poland ,but Finland,Estonia,Lithuania,Latvia and modern day Moldava that were absorbed or attacked during 1939-41 Stalin-Hitler pact.
    I remember watching the documentary “Fire and Ice”about the winter war and the morale outrage expressed by Roosevelt over Soviet actions in Finland.
    Two years later Roosevelt bent over backwards to appease Stalin.

  7. in R. R. Stanford Tuck’s biography “fly for your life” he recounted how, upon hearing of the Nazi invasion of Russia, he imagined hoards of cossacks sweeping over the steppes to route the Nazis.
    if this is the impression of Stalin’s Russia as held by an educated middle class young man, what did the proles think?
    is it no wonder that the “ring of five” spies found it so easy to betray their own country?

  8. addendum: given that the cossacks that were captured by the Nazis were executed on their return to Russia.

    • Along with Chetniks, tartars, Ustashi, Catholics, non communists, all handed over by the British at the end of the war, to appease the likes of Tito and Stalin. How many millions more died in 1944 and 1945 after the hand over to the soviets sphere of influence?
      Simply whitewashed out of history.

      Apparently the only group not to get sent back over the curtains were the Baltic state ss soldiers, instead some of them guarded the nazis at Nuremberg!

      • “Apparently the only group not to get sent back over the curtains were the Baltic state ss soldiers, instead some of them guarded the nazis at Nuremberg!”
        —————————————————————-

        It was called the Balt extradition (baltutlämningen)

        After the WW2 the Soviet Union demanded that Sweden would leave out some 200 Baltic soldiers who had fought on the Axis side against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union demanded it with the strong support of the Allies, even that Balts who had been in German service should go.. Despite strong criticism and internal disagreement the cowardly Socialist Swedish government bent for the Soviet demands. All Baltic and German soldiers having fled to Sweden were extradited to the Soviet Union in January 1946 from the port of Trelleborg.

  9. Much of what we Brits, and the US, did in WW2 is now difficult to defend- with, of course, the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. For example, in July 1940 the Royal Navy destroyed much of the (now Vichy) French Navy in Algeria, with the loss of nearly 1,300 French sailors, after they refused other options offered to them (it impressed the hell out of Hitler, who hadn’t appreciated that Churchill could be so ruthless).

    So supporting the ever-demanding, ungrateful and uncooperative Stalin with arms and helpful air raids (eg Dresden) was a necessity in order to defeat the most immediate threat, Nazi Germany.

    At the risk of making myself out to be far more important than I am, I follow, and post on, GoV for similar motives: I disagree with most of you over many issues, but the main objective is to defeat Islamism, and especially its PCMC apologists and enablers in Western democracies. We can fight over what’s left of civilisation, and how to govern it, later!

    • @MarkH,

      “So supporting the ever-demanding, ungrateful and uncooperative Stalin with arms and helpful air raids (eg Dresden) was a necessity in order to defeat the most immediate threat, Nazi Germany.”

      Your conclusion does not follow from your premises.

    • Yes, the Brits still are not apologetic.

      It is time to abolish about half of British peers who got their titles by killing other white men.

      Hindsight? [redacted: “bovine ordure”.]

  10. And let us not forget the (dead before his time) George Patton:

    I believe that Germany should not be destroyed, but rather should be re-built as a buffer against the real danger, which is Russia and it’s bolshevism.

    The difficulty in understanding the Russian is that we do not take cognizance of the fact that he is not a European, but an Asiatic, and therefore thinks deviously. We can no more understand a Russian than a Chinese or a Japanese, and from what I have seen of them, I have no particular desire to understand them except to ascertain how much lead or iron it takes to kill them. In addition to his other amiable characteristics, the Russian has no regard for human life and they are all out sons-of-bitches, barbarians, and chronic drunks.

    Russia KNOWS what she wants. WORLD DOMINATION. And she is laying her plans accordingly. We, on the other hand, and England and France to a lesser extent, don’t know what we want. We get less than nothing as a result. If we have to fight them, now is the time. From now on, we will get weaker and they will get stronger. Let’s keep out boots polished, bayonets sharpened, and present a picture of force and strength to the Russians. This is the only language that they understand and respect. If we fail to do this, then I would like to say that we have had a victory over the Germans, and have disarmed them, but we have lost the war.

    The one thing that I could not say, and cannot yet say publicly, is that my chief interest in establishing order in Germany was to prevent Germany from going communist. I am afraid that our foolish and utterly stupid policy in regard to Germany will certainly cause them to join the Russians and thereby insure a communistic state throughout Western Europe. We have destroyed what could have been a good race of people and we are about to replace them with Mongolian savages and all of Europe with communism.

    Poland is under Russian domination, so is Hungary, so is Czechoslovakia, and so is Yugoslavia; and we sit happily by and think that everybody loves us. It seems likely to me that Russia has a certain sphere of influence in Korea, Manchuria, and Mongolia.

    We promised the Europeans freedom. It would be worse than dishonorable not to see that they have it. This might mean war with the Russians, but what of it? They have no Air Force, and their gasoline and ammunition supplies are low. I’ve seen their miserable supply trains; mostly wagons drawn by beaten up old horses or oxen. I’ll say this; the Third Army alone and with damned few casualties, could lick what is left of the Russians in six weeks. You mark my words. Don’t ever forget them. Someday we will have to fight them and it will take six years and cost us six million lives.

    The Russians are Mongols. They are Slavs and a lot of them used to be ruled by Ancient Byzantium. From Genghis Kahn to Stalin, they have not changed. They never will, and we will never learn, at least, not until it is too late.

    I am very much afraid that Europe is going Bolshevik. If it does, it may eventually spread to our country.

    The too often repeated remark that “the country owes me a living” is nothing short of treason. The nation owes all of it’s citizens an EQUAL chance, but it is not responsible for the faults and follies of those who fail to avail themselves of these opportunities.

    Do not talk or think of your rights or your fatigues or of what the other fellow has failed to do. War is the struggle of nations; you are in it, but as an individual, and your feelings as such do not exits. In doing your utmost, even unto death, you are conferring no favor. You are privileged to be able to do so much for your country.

    • While I respect Patton’s great accomplishments as a general, he was absolutely wrong to suggest that it was possible to defeat Russia in six weeks. A war against the Russia that had just conquered Berlin would have been so bloody and so brutal that at the conclusion, Europe would be lucky to survive at all. In my view, Russia would have conquered the remainder of Germany and France and essentially created a fortified Europe, with only Britain as an outlier. After that there would be a war of attrition to end all wars of attrition.

      I don’t know what Patton means about the Soviets lacking gasoline and resources, clearly the Soviet Union had enormous scope to acquire these things and would have done so with ease. Their supply trains were good enough to permit them to occupy the entirety of Eastern Europe. The T-34 was the best tank to be used in WW2.

      Perhaps Patton’s comments were made based on the Soviet incompetence at the beginning of the war. The ease with which the Russian veterans steamrolled the Germans by the end should have been enough to dispel the idea that Russians couldn’t make war.

      But let’s be frank, the entire document is a racist rant. I respect Patton’s ability at war, but it looks like he’s under the same delusion as Hitler: the idea that a kind of racial superiority would be the guarantor of victory. WW2 should have been enough to put that theory to sleep.

      • With respect, No1 (and apologies to those who aren’t fascinated by tanks and logistics!), the T-34 (based on the ideas of an American theorist, which were ignored by Britain and the US) was the best tank in 1941, but the Germans learned quickly- the Panther and Tiger were superior, but sometimes unreliable and available in insufficient numbers. Nevertheless, the better trained Panzer crews, in the retreat from Russia to Germany, knocked out eight- repeat, eight- Soviet tanks for every one they lost, but were overwhelmed by sheer numbers.

        The Soviets’ supply trains were severely overstretched in early ’45, which is why Stalin requested his Western allies’ bombardment of the major rail junction of Dresden to prevent the Nazis’ reinforcement of the Eastern front by transferring troops and materiel by rail from the Western and Italian fronts.

        • With respect, the Germans on average lost 1 tank to the Russians 20-25 ratio, that is from Wehrmacht and Waffen SS after action reports.

          • Wow! That’s even worse (for the Soviets) than my figure, which is from a book called “Tank Men” by Robert Kershaw, who was a Brit “tank man” in the First Gulf War. Sadly I loaned it- to another ex- tank man!- and didn’t get it back, so can’t check the author’s source.

            He also recounts that in Normandy, the Panzer crews had a saying: “A Panther is worth five Shermans. Trouble is, the enemy always has six”.

      • The Russians had been badly beaten in ww1.

        Badly badly beaten.

        There is no reason to suppose that they are invincible.

        Had the Germans done a few things different: prioritize Moscow in 1941, for example, they’d have won handily.

        Moscow was quite literally the railway and roadway hub of the entire USSR.
        1000x’s more important than Moscow in Napoleon’s day. Had it been knocked out the entire nervous system of the USSR would have been removed.

        I recently watched Soviet Storm a series about Barbarossa thru Bagration and then Berlin. The editorial is actually Russkie. They saw the invasion as Western Europe come to get them.

        I learned that the van of the German assault was Franco-Scandinavia-Dutch-Walloon…Das Reich Pz. was a sort of Fascist UN elite unit. The Russian version of the battle against the SS around the old site of Borodino is. Dry illuminating. It’s almost a shame that the USSR survived the onslaught.

  11. The BBC’s (yes, I know!) outgoing Moscow correspondent of many years’ standing, a couple of years ago, said he found them outrageously deceitful, too fond of their drink… BUT generously hospitable, and he’d liked them more than any other nationality he’d known. Draw your own conclusions!

  12. If the U.S. hadn’t successfully developed the atomic bomb, the Russians would have taken the whole of Western Europe after the defeat of Germany. In 1944 the Stavka were ordered by Stalin to plan for the invasion of France and Italy.

    • They hardly threatened him with the bomb though …

      Truman finally mentioned to Stalin, after the plenary meeting at Potsdam on 24 July, that the United States had ‘recently tested a new weapon of unusual destructive force’. 52 Stalin asked no questions about the ‘new weapon’ and replied that he hoped the Americans would make good use of it against the Japanese. The explanation for Stalin’s lack of curiosity is simple: he already knew all about the Manhattan Project. The Soviets gained their information from spies who were scientists at Los Alamos, notably Klaus Fuchs and David Greenglass. At his trial in 1951, Greenglass revealed that he had been passing nuclear secrets to the Soviet Union since November 1944. The motive of many of these spies was not just straightforward Communist sympathies, but a desire that the Americans (and British, who shared in the research) should not have a monopoly on the physics behind the atomic weapon. Zoya Zarubina was one of the Soviet officials trusted with the secret task of translating the American information about the nuclear bomb. ‘We got these papers from somebody – well, let’s call it “friends of the Soviet Union” – and from our own intelligence services, and we were very, very rapidly translating them for the Russians to understand.’ Most of the material she worked with was of an extremely technical nature and so ‘little by little we had engineers attached to us. We would do two pages and then the engineers would come and say: “No, no. This is foolish – can it be that?” We thought it a little like a mosaic, a puzzle. . . . Stalin knew more than I did – he knew from A to Z.’

      Rees, Laurence (2012-04-24). World War Two: Behind Closed Doors: Stalin, the Nazis and the West (Kindle Locations 6315-6328). Ebury Publishing. Kindle Edition.

  13. Britain declared war on Germany because it had a treaty with Poland; one must ask if the treaty somehow became invalid sometime in the weeks between the German invasion and the Russian invasion?

    Was there an alternative agenda, was there something else dictating policy I wonder, or was Britain just riddled with agents of influence like the USA?

    • Do you have to ask? One has to assess the reason that the British even had a treaty with Poland in the first place. Why did British generals act as the first governors/commissioners of Danzig? At least with Belgium in ww1 you have potential invasion ports that could be used to send troops to invade the UK.

      Danzig? It looks like a ticking time bomb for British Imperial policy in the same way that WMD scaremongering was used to bludgeon inattentive voters into supporting the invasion of Iraq. I don’t see a single vital national interest for the UK at stake in Poland. The entire security guarantee looks like a deliberate trip wire. A booby trap.

      If Chamberlain had simply told the French, “we will begin to reinforce the Franco-German and the Belgo-German border with the weight of a conscript army and await the inevitable Russo-German conflict” he’d have been acting in the national interest. Instead he sacrificed national interest to some sort of mystical pro Polish interest.

  14. Such moralisation. Say you were there 1940 in London. Would you surrender or get such allies as you could for whatever price they wanted. What would you do?
    Or do you think there would/ could have been peace in our time.

    • The issue is not so much what happened during the war, but rather the way the war has been portrayed since, and whether the idealised “myth” (to use the respected historian Laurence Rees’ term) about how Churchill and Roosevelt conducted themselves, and indeed what we fought the war for in the first place, needs to be discarded.

      This is quite important, in light of the recent attacks launched against Diana West for attempting to examine that wartime “myth”.

    • Perhaps the price is always set too high as might have been case by inviting Muslim Brotherhood sympathizers or operatives into the State Department and elsewhere.

  15. From The Roosevelt Myth by John T. Flynn
    http://www.amazon.com/The-Roosevelt-Myth-Anniversary-Edition/dp/0930073274
    – – – – –
    In 1939 a Communist youth group calling itself the “American Youth Congress” was being investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee, headed by Congressman Martin Dies. A group of Communists from the “Congress,” including their leader Joseph P. Lash, Joe Cadden, and Abbot Simon, staged a series of protests against the investigation, at one point marching into the Committee room and attempting to disrupt the proceedings. They jumped over tables, shouted at the Congressmen, tossed Communist pamphlets about, and at one point Joseph Lash even began singing a foul and insulting song directed at Dies.

    Present at the time, and leading the assembled Communists in their protests, was none other than the wife of the President of the United States, Eleanor Roosevelt. Not only that, but the Communists had been chauffeured to their demonstration in official White House cars, and one of them, Lash, was living full-time at the White House, while Cadden and Simon were often boarders there.

    A member of Congress, who had been an ardent Roosevelt supporter, visited the White House one morning. While there, he was amazed to see Abbot Simon, a board member of a well-known Communist front organization, emerge from one of the bedrooms. He asked the White House usher if he had really seen what he thought he had seen. The usher assured him that he had indeed, and that Simon had been occupying the bedroom for two weeks, sleeping each night in a bed formerly used by Abraham Lincoln.

    In such an atmosphere it is not surprising that the Roosevelt government was anxious to enter the war on the side of the Soviets. Nor is it surprising that Jewish interests, which also figured large in the Roosevelt regime (and in all administrations since), were also zealous in their efforts to involve the United States in the war against Germany, which by that time had removed organized Jewish interests from their former positions of power in that country. Also, it should be noted that in the 1930s and 1940s, the Jewish and Communist power structures were largely congruent, there being large numbers of individuals belonging to both groups simultaneously. Two overlapping interest groups, both very influential in the White House, were pushing for war.

    But the American people were solidly against war — so much so that when campaigning for his third term in November, 1940, while World War II raged in Europe and America was officially neutral, Roosevelt told the American people in a speech in Boston carried by radio and by wire services around the nation:

    “I say to you fathers and mothers and I will say it to you again and again and again. Your boys will not be sent into foreign wars.”
    – – – – –
    Another true American hero – next to Eisenhower.

  16. Exactly. How many divisions did we face at Normandy? How many German divisions did the Soviet army destroy at Kiev alone? We were lucky to divert the 15th Panzer division at Normandy or we would have failed. I think Churchill himself said he would make a pact with the Devil if it would defeat Hitler.

  17. It deserves to be mentioned when criticism is advanced against the great American hero and Supreme Commander Dwight D. Eisenhower that he (together with many aides, among others Billy-Some.like.it.hot-Wilders) also is indebted to the initiation of the concept of the holocaust.
    A retrospective justification of every American’s strenuous war efforts as well as a preparatory popularization of his own role as future presidential candidate was considered to be necessary. Two birds with one stone!

    This video by “Dean Irebodd” reveals details that every historically interested person should know.
    http://youtu.be/3HlPcaP9x5o

    Billy Wilders cruel yet effective denazification & anti-German film is available here.
    https://archive.org/embed/DeathMills

  18. The claim that the Second World War was a moral conflict has been maintained for over 75 years. It was a necessary propaganda tool much like the phrase “war to end all war” was used in the First World War. The fact that Stalin was a greater mass murderer than Hitler made this argument difficult to defend. Informed people knew about the nature of the Soviets even before the butchering of the Czar and his family. The Katyn Forest Massacre, as horrific as it was, was a minor event when compared to the millions who perished. Criticism of Western acts of immorality have remained taboo to a large extent. Many of these immoral acts could be excused because it was imperative to keep Stalin in the fight. But what is the excuse once the danger of Hitler had passed? The Western leaders were not only complicit in Soviet crimes, they were responsible for their own “crimes against humanity.” You can read “respectable” historian after “respectable” historian claim that the Morgenthau Plan was never carried out. This plan was not only a crime but it almost drove all of Europe into the arms of the Soviets. There is an understandable reluctance to recognize these crimes. They are frequently reported by some unacceptable groups. The fear is that recognition somehow makes the crimes of the National Socialists less outrageous. By they same token recognition of these crimes makes the crimes of the Soviets less outrageous. That is unfortunate, however, the truth is the truth.
    In the conflict with Diana West Ronald Radosh recruited Harvey Klehr to make the absurd comment: “In our more than twenty years of … research on Soviet espionage in America, we have uncovered … very little indicating successful policy manipulation.” Klehr, a well respected Soviet expert, has damaged his credibility with this statement. The evidence that the Soviets inspired many the the West’s policies is overwhelming.

  19. Today’s leftleaning liberalism serves as surrogate for both Christianity and other traditional virtues of perhaps earlier times. We proclaim to the world: equality, freedom for ourself and our thinking and interpersonal and general tolerance, but we have no idea on what authority we support our opinions.

    Since our civilization is no longer resting on positive ideals, it can only define itself negatively. This explains the Holocaust’s (see my comment above) increasingly prominent position in the political rhetoric. The veneration of Holocaust monumentalities and all the anniversaries are rites in a new and growing state religion. The holocaust festivity cult is characteristic of our civilization’s negative and stupid character.

    EU Holocaust Remembrance Day was helt tree days ago (did you celebrate?) – and on January 27th every year. It directs the focus not on the defeat of ugly nazism, but on all European’s alleged and collective guilt for the Nazi-orchestrated, more than exagerated, attempts to eradicate jews et alia, regardless if a country fought against nazism or not. This by idiotic politicians inflicted eternal debt on society can be cured only through mass immigration and the establishment of a multicultural and diverse society. Sweden is in this respect a most pious country.

  20. I can join in an discussion about whether it was strategically advisable for the UK to ally itself with Stalin against Hitler, but I do not agree that it was problematic morally. It’s very easy to look back on all this from the comfort of secure societies and forget that Hitler was an existential threat to the UK and Western Civilization. I don’t have a problem with aligning with a bully to help destroy another bully who is about to destroy you. War is not crime management, it is something of another order entirely.

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