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PERPETUAL WAR for PERPETUAL PEACE & How Our Political Leaders Do It

Saturday, December 20, 2014 19:27

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An ethical person – like a politician, banker or lawyer – may know right from wrong, but unlike a politician, a moral person lives it. “Marx and Engels never tried to refute their opponents with argument. They insulted, ridiculed, derided, slandered, and traduced them, and in the use of these methods their followers are not less expert. Their polemic is directed never against the argument of the opponent, but always against his person.” – Socialism http://chasvoice.blogspot.com/

[SNIPPET FROM PERPETUAL WAR for PERPETUAL PEACE, 1952 by Harry Barnes]

CHAPTER 8

I. Lying Us into War

According to his own official statements, repeated on many occasions, and with special emphasis when the presidential election of 1940 was at stake, Franklin D. Roosevelt‘s policy after the outbreak of the war in Europe in 1939 was dominated by one overriding thought: how to keep the United States at peace. One of the President’s first actions after the beginning of hostilities was to call Congress into special session and ask for the repeal of the embargo on the sales of arms to belligerent powers, which was part of the existing neutrality legislation. He based his appeal on the argument that this move would help to keep the United States at peace. His words on the subject were:

“Let no group assume the exclusive label of the “peace bloc.” We all belong to it. … I give you my deep and unalterable conviction, based on years of experience as a worker in the field of international peace, that by the repeal of the embargo the United States will more probably remain at peace than if the law remains as it stands today. . . . Our acts must be guided by one single, hardheaded thought of ”keeping America out of the war.”

This statement was made after the President had opened up a secret correspondence with Winston Churchill, First Lord of the Admiralty and later Prime Minister in the British government. What has been revealed of this correspondence, even in Churchill’s own memoirs, inspires considerable doubt as to whether its main purpose was keeping America out of the war.

Roosevelt kept up his pose as the devoted champion of peace even after the fall of France, when Great Britain was committed to a war which, given the balance of power in manpower and industrial resources, it could not hope to win without the involvement of other great powers, such as the United States and the Soviet Union. The President’s pledges of pursuing a policy designed to keep the United States at peace reached a shrill crescendo during the last days of the 1940 campaign.

Mr. Roosevelt said at Boston on October 30: “I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars.”

The same thought was expressed in a speech at Brooklyn on November 1: “I am

fighting to keep our people out of foreign wars. And I will keep on fighting.”

The President told his audience at Rochester, New York, on November 2: “Your

national government … is equally a government of peace-a government that intends to

retain peace for the American people.”

On the same day the voters of Buffalo were assured: “Your President says this country

is not going to war.”

And he declared at Cleveland on November 3: “The first purpose of our foreign policy

is to keep our country out of war.”

So much for presidential words. What about presidential actions? American

involvement in war with Germany was preceded by a long series of steps, not one of

which could reasonably be represented as conducive to the achievement of the

President’s professed ideal of keeping the United States out of foreign wars. The

more important of these steps may be briefly stated as follows:

1. The exchange of American destroyers for British bases in the Caribbean and in

Newfoundland in September, 1940.

This was a clear departure from the requirements of neutrality and was also a violation

of some specific American laws. Indeed, a conference of top government lawyers at the time decided that the destroyer deal put this-country into the war, legally and morally.

2. The enactment of the Lend-Lease Act in March, 1941.

In complete contradiction of the wording and intent of the Neutrality Act, which

remained on the statute books, this made the United States an unlimited partner in the

economic war against the Axis Powers all over the world.

3. The secret American-British staff talks in Washington in January-March, 1941.

Extraordinary care was taken to conceal not only the contents of these talks but the

very fact that they were taking place from the knowledge of Congress. At the time when administration spokesmen were offering assurances that there were no warlike

implications in the Lend-Lease Act, this staff conference used the revealing phrase,

“when the United States becomes involved in war with Germany.”

4. The inauguration of so-called naval patrols, the purpose of which was to report the

presence of German submarines to British warships, in the Atlantic in April, 1941

5. The dispatch of American laborers to Northern Ireland to build a naval base.

obviously with the needs of an American expeditionary force in mind.

6. The occupation of Iceland by American troops in July, 1941.

This was going rather far afield for a government which professed as its main concern

the keeping of the United States out of foreign wars.

7. The Atlantic Conference of Roosevelt and Churchill, August 9-12,1941

Besides committing America as a partner in a virtual declaration of war aims, this

conference considered the presentation of an ultimatum to Japan and the occupation of

the Cape Verde Islands, a Portuguese possession, by United States troops.

8. The orders to American warships to shoot at sight at German submarines, formally

announced on September 1 1 .

The beginning of actual hostilities may be dated from this time rather than from the

German declaration of war, which followed Pearl Harbor.

9. The authorization for the arming of merchant ships and the sending of these ships

into war zones in November, 1941.

10. The freezing of Japanese assets in the United States on July 25,1941.

This step, which was followed by similar action on the part of Great Britain and the

Netherlands East Indies, amounted to a commercial blockade of Japan. The war-making potentialities of this decision had been recognized by Roosevelt himself shortly before it was taken. Addressing a delegation and explaining why oil exports to Japan had not been stopped previously, he said:

“It was very essential, from our own selfish point of view of defense, to prevent a war

from starting in the South Pacific. So our foreign policy was trying to stop a war from

breaking out down there. . . . Now, if we cut the oil off, they [the Japanese] probably

would have gone down to the Netherlands East Indies a year ago, and we would have had war.”(l)

11. When the Japanese Prime Minister, Prince Fumimaro Konoye, appealed for a

personal meeting with Roosevelt to discuss an amicable settlement in the Pacific, this

appeal was rejected, despite the strong favorable recommendations of the American

ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew.

12. Final step on the road to war in the Pacific was Secretary of State Hull’s note to the

Japanese government of November 26. Before sending this communication Hull had

considered proposing a compromise formula which would have relaxed the blockade of Japan in return for Japanese withdrawal from southern Indochina and a limitation of

Japanese forces in northern Indochina.

However, Hull dropped this idea under pressure from British and Chinese sources. He

dispatched a veritable ultimatum on November 26, which demanded unconditional

Japanese withdrawal from China and from Indochina and insisted that there should be

“no support of any government in China other than the National Government [Chiang

Kai-shek].” Hull admitted that this note took Japanese- American relations out of the

realm of diplomacy and placed them in the hands of the military authorities. The negative Japanese reply to this note was delivered almost simultaneously with the attack on Pearl Harbor. There was a strange and as yet unexplained failure to prepare for this attack by giving General Short and Admiral Kimmel, commanders on the spot, a clear picture of the imminent danger. As Secretary of War Stimson explained the American policy, it was to maneuver the Japanese into firing the first shot, and it may have been feared that openly precautionary and defensive moves on the part of Kimmel and Short would scare off the impending attack by the Japanese task force which was known to be on its way to some American outpost.

Here is the factual record of the presidential words and the presidential deeds. No

convinced believer in American nonintervention in wars outside this hemisphere could

have given the American people more specific promises than Roosevelt gave during the campaign of 1940. And it is hard to see how any President, given the constitutional

limitations of the office, could have done more to precipitate the United States into war

with Germany and Japan than Roosevelt accomplished during the fifteen months

between, the destroyer-for-bases deal and the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Former Congresswoman Clare Boothe Luce found the right expression when she

charged Roosevelt with having lied us into war. Even a sympathizer with Roosevelt’s

policies, Professor Thomas A. Bailey, in his book The Man in the Street, admits the

charge of deception, but tries to justify it on the following grounds:

“Franklin Roosevelt repeatedly deceived the American people during the period

before Pearl Harbor. … He was like the physician who must tell the patient lies for the

patient’s own good. . . . The country was overwhelmingly ‘ non-interventionist to the very day of Pearl Harbor, and an overt attempt to lead the people into war would have resulted in certain failure and an almost certain ousting of Roosevelt in 1940, with a complete defeat of his ultimate aims. “(2)

Professor Bailey continues his apologetics with the following argument, which leaves

very little indeed of the historical American conception of a government responsible to

the people and morally obligated to abide by the popular will:

“A president who cannot entrust the people with the truth betrays a certain lack of

faith in the basic tenets of democracy. But because the masses are notoriously

shortsighted and generally cannot see danger until it is at their throats, our statesmen are forced to deceive them into an awareness of their own long-run interests. This is clearly what Roosevelt had to do, and who shall say that posterity will not thank him for it? (3)

Presidential pledges to “keep our country out of war,” with which Roosevelt was so

profuse in the summer and autumn of 1940, could reasonably be regarded as canceled by some new development in the international situation involving a real and urgent threat to the security of the United States and the Western Hemisphere.

But there was no such new development to justify Roosevelt’s moves along the road to

war in 1941. The British Isles were not invaded in 1940, at the height of Hitler’s military success on the Continent. They were much more secure against invasion in 1941.

Contrast the scare predictions of Secretary Stimson, Secretary Knox, and General

Marshall, about the impending invasion of Britain in the first months of 1941, with the

testimony of Winston Churchill, as set down in his memoirs: “I did not regard invasion as a serious danger in April, 1941, since proper preparations had been made against it.”

Moreover, both the American and British governments knew at this time that Hitler

was contemplating an early attack upon the Soviet Union. Such an attack was bound to

swallow up much the greater part of Germany’s military resources.

It is with this background that one must judge the sincerity and realism of Roosevelt’s

alarmist speech of May 27, 1941, with its assertion: “The war is approaching the brink of the western hemisphere itself. It is coming very close to home.” The President spoke of the Nazi “book of world conquest” and declared there was a Nazi plan to treat the Latin American countries as they had treated the Balkans. Then Canada and the United States would be strangled.

Not a single serious bit of evidence in proof of these sensational allegations has ever

been found, not even when the archives of the Nazi government were at the disposal of

the victorious powers. The threat to the security of Great Britain was less serious in 1941 than it was in 1940. There is no concrete evidence of Nazi intention to invade the

American hemisphere in either year, or at any predictable period.

One is left, therefore, with the inescapable conclusion that the promises to “keep

America out of foreign wars” was a deliberate hoax on the American people, perpetrated for the purpose of insuring Roosevelt’s re-election and thereby enabling him to proceed with his plan of gradually edging the United States into war. What aim was this involvement in global war supposed to achieve?

II. The War Aims Proclaimed by Roosevelt

1 . Atlantic Charter and Four Freedoms. The most detailed statement of United States

war aims, the equivalent of the Fourteen Points pronounced by Woodrow Wilson during the first World War, may be found in the. Atlantic Charter. This is a joint statement by Roosevelt and Churchill, issued after their meeting off the coast of Newfoundland in August, 1941- It was described as a “common program of purposes and principles” in the United Nations Declaration, issued in Washington on January 1, 1942. The Atlantic Charter is composed of the following eight points:

“First, their countries seek no aggrandizement, territorial or other;

“Second, they desire to see no territorial changes that do not accord with the freely

expressed wishes of the peoples concerned;

“Third, they respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under

which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them;

“Fourth, they will endeavor, with due respect for their existing obligations, to further

the enjoyment by all States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal

terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their

economic prosperity;

“Fifth, they desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the

economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic

advancement, and social security;

“Sixth, after the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny they hope to see established a

peace which will afford to all nations the means of dwelling in safety within their own

boundaries, and which will afford assurance that all men in all the lands may live out

their lives in freedom from fear and want;

“Seventh, such a peace should enable all men to traverse the high seas and oceans

without hindrance;

“Eighth, they believe that all of the nations of the world, for realistic as well as

spiritual reasons, must come to the abandonment of the use of force. Since no future

peace can be maintained if land, sea or air armaments continue to be employed by nations which threaten, or may threaten, aggression outside of their frontiers, they believe, pending the establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security, that the disarmament of such nations is essential. They will likewise aid and encourage all other practicable measures which will lighten for peace-loving peoples the crushing burden of armaments.

So, under the terms of the Atlantic Charter, the victors of World War 1 1 were pledged

to respect the right of every people to self-determination and to observe, as between

nations, the principle of economic equality of opportunity. The argument, subsequently

advanced by Churchill, that the Atlantic Charter did not apply to Germany, is in

contradiction to two expressions used in that document. These are the references to “all

states, great or small, victor or vanquished” and to “all men in all the lands.”

One can find in the Atlantic Charter the germ of the United Nations idea, “pending the

establishment of a wider and permanent system of general security” and also of the belief that nations could be divided into peace-loving sheep and aggressor goats.

There is also an implied gesture of compliment to President Roosevelt in the happy

vision of “all men in all the lands [living] out their lives in freedom from fear and want.”

The President, in his inaugural address of January, 1941, after his election to a third term, had dramatically emphasized the universal realization of the Four Freedoms as essential to world peace. These were freedom of speech and religion and freedom from want and fear. This became the outstanding “glittering generality” in Roosevelt’s war aims.

A fair test of the success and effectiveness of America’s participation in the war would

be the degree to which the postwar world has been characterized by freedom from want and freedom from fear, freedom of speech and religion, the right of peoples to choose their own forms of government and their own national allegiances, and of the

advancement toward world-wide conditions of free commercial intercourse and reduction and limitation of armaments.

2. Unconditional Surrender. This became an official American and British war aim

after Roosevelt tossed off the phrase at the Casablanca conference in January, 1943. It

was apparently inspired by a confusion, in Roosevelt’s mind, between two episodes in the American Civil War.

The demand for immediate and unconditional surrender was put forward by Grant at

the siege of Fort Donelson. Roosevelt seems to have mixed this up with the capitulation of Lee’s Confederate Army at Appomattox, where the expression, “unconditional surrender,” was not used. Despite repeated pleas from specialists in psychological warfare and commanders in the field, Roosevelt refused to modify or even to clarify this demand as long as he lived.

3. Co-operation with the Soviet Union. To charm and appease Stalin into becoming a

co-operative do-gooder on the international scene was one of Roosevelt’s primary war

objectives. According to William C. Bullitt, a former ambassador to the Soviet Union and to France, who was at one time a favored counselor of Roosevelt and who enjoyed

opportunities to discuss Russian policy with the President during the war, Roosevelt’s

Russian policy was based on four principles:

(a) To give Stalin without stint or limit everything he asked for the prosecution of the

war and to refrain from asking Stalin for anything in return.

(b) To persuade Stalin to adhere to statements of general aims, like the Atlantic

Charter.

encourage American public opinion to take a favorable view of the Soviet Union.

(d) To meet Stalin face to face and persuade him into an acceptance of Christian ways

and democratic principles.

Bullitt, whose own impressions of the Soviet regime had changed very much in a

negative direction as a result of his experience as ambassador, presented a memorandum outlining the reasons why such a policy would fail. Roosevelt’s reaction, according to Bullitt’s testimony, was as follows:

“Bill, I don’t dispute your facts; they are accurate. I don’t dispute the logic of your

reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of a man. Harry [Hopkins] says he’s not, and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country. And I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask for 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.”

A similar interpretation of Roosevelt’s policy, written by Forrest Davis and published,

with the President’s knowledge and approval, in The Saturday Evening Post in May,

1944, contains the following statements:

“The core of his [Roosevelt's] policy has been the reassurance of Stalin. That was so,

as we have seen, at Teheran. It has been so throughout the difficult diplomacy since

Stalingrad. . . .

“Suppose that Stalin, in spite of all concessions, should prove unappeasable. . . .

“Roosevelt, gambling for stakes as enormous as any statesman ever played for, has

been betting that the Soviet Union needs peace and is willing to pay for it by

collaborating with the West.

This eagerness to appease the Soviet dictator, at whatever cost to the professed war

aims embodied in the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms, is a thread to the

understanding of the two main wartime conferences of the “Big Three” (Roosevelt,

Stalin, and Churchill) at Teheran and Yalta.

Indeed, the destruction of Germany and Japan as great powers, implicit in the

“unconditional surrender” slogan, and the appeasement of the Soviet dictatorship, were

opposite sides of the same coin. In setting as a goal the political destruction, economic

crippling and total disarmament of Germany and Japan (and, as the first phase of

occupation in Germany and Japan showed, these were the fruits of unconditional

surrender), the balance of power in Europe and Asia was completely upset.

Tremendous power vacuums were created on the frontiers of the Soviet Union. What

this portended was pointed out toward the end of 1943 in words of singularly prophetic

quality by the late Jan Christiaan Smuts, Prime Minister of South Africa and one of the

most experienced and thoughtful senior statesmen of the British Empire:

“Russia is the new colossus on the European continent. What the after-effects of that

will be, nobody can say. We can but recognize that this is a new fact to reckon with, and we must reckon with it coldly and objectively. With the others [the reference was to Germany, France, and Italy] down and out and herself the mistress of the continent, her power will not only be great on that account, but will be still greater because the Japanese Empire will also have gone the way of all flesh. Therefore, any check or balance that might have arisen in the East will have disappeared. You will have Russia in a position which no country has ever occupied in the history of Europe.”

4. Far Eastern War Aims. Two war aims in the Orient were spelled out in Hull’s note

of November 26, 1941. These were the withdrawal of Japan from China and support only for the Nationalist government of Chiang Kai-shek. Others, as set forth by the Cairo Declaration, issued by Roosevelt, Churchill, and Chiang Kaishek on December 1, 1943, were as follows:

“That Japan shall be stripped of all the islands in the Pacific which she has seized or

occupied since the beginning of the First World War in 1914, and that all the territories

Japan has stolen from the Chinese, such as Manchuria, Formosa and the Pescadores, shall be restored to the Republic of China. Japan will also be expelled from all other territories which she has taken by violence and greed. The aforesaid three great powers, mindful of the enslavement of the people of Korea, are determined that in due course Korea shall become free and independent.”

5 . Platitudes and Beatitudes. We here reproduce characteristic excerpts from a long

statement of American war aims, covering seventeen points, issued by Secretary Hull on March 21, 1944:

“In determining our foreign policy we must first see clearly what our true national

interests are. . . .

“Co-operation between nations in the spirit of good neighbors, founded on the

principles of liberty, equality, justice, morality and law, is the most effective method of

safeguarding and promoting the political, the economic, the social, and the cultural well-being of our nation and of all nations.

“International co-operative action must include eventual adjustment of national

armaments in such a manner that the rule of law cannot be successfully challenged and

that the burden of armaments may be reduced to a minimum.

“As the provisions of the four-nation declaration (of Moscow) are carried into effect,

there will no longer be need for spheres of influence, for alliances, for balance of power, or any other of the special arrangements through which, in the unhappy past, the nations strove to safeguard their security or to promote their interests. . . .

“The Pledge of the Atlantic Charter is of a system which will give every nation, large

or small, a greater assurance of stable peace, greater opportunity for the realization of its aspirations to freedom, and greater facilities for material advancement. But that pledge implies an obligation for each nation to demonstrate its capacity for stable and

progressive government, to fulfill scrupulously its established duties to other nations, to settle its international differences and disputes by none but peaceful methods, and to

make its full contribution to the maintenance of enduring peace.

“Each sovereign nation, large or small, is in law and under law the equal of every

other nation.

“The principle of the sovereign equality of all peace-loving states, irrespective of size

and strength, as partners in a future system of general security will be the foundation

stone upon which the future international organization will be created.

“Each nation should be free to decide for itself the forms and details of its

governmental organization and so long as it conducts its affairs in such a way as not to

menace the peace and security of other nations.

“All nations, large and small, which respect the rights of others are entitled to freedom

from outside interference in their internal affairs.”

This is, perhaps, the most conspicuous official example of the vapid, unrealistic

moralizing which enveloped America’s war aims in a haze of Utopian crusading fervor.

Hull was not alone in this tendency to phrase American foreign policy in terns of

beatitudes and platitudes, uttered in complete isolation from the hard fact that a war,

fought with most barbarous methods, was leading with relentless logic to one of the most unjust and unworkable peace settlements in history.

Wendell Willkie, whose subsequent declarations showed that in the 1940 campaign he

faithfully imitated Roosevelt’s technique of talking peace to get votes while

contemplating measures which could only lead to involvement in war, rivaled Hull in his ability to turn out meaningless platitudes. What specific recommendations can be read into the following, typically vaporous musings in Willkie’s hastily written book. One World!

“To win the peace three things seem to me necessary. First, we must plan for peace

now on a world basis; second, the world must be free, politically and economically, for

nations and men, that peace may exist in it; third, America must play an active,

constructive part in freeing it and keeping its peace. . . . When I say that peace must be

planned on a World basis, I mean quite literally that it must embrace the earth.

Continents and oceans are plainly only parts of a whole, seen, as I have seen them, from the air.

England and America are parts. Russia and China, Egypt, Syria and Turkey, Iraq and Iran are also parts and it is inescapable that there can be no peace for any part of the world unless the foundations of peace are made secure through all parts of the world.”

Perhaps the most original formulation of war aims came from Vice-President Henry

A. Wallace. The war, according to Wallace, was “a fight between a free world and a slave world.” “The peoples,” he confidently predicted, “are on the march toward even fuller freedom than the most fortunate peoples of the world have hitherto enjoyed.”

“The object of this war,” Wallace declared in an unequaled flight of fancy, “is to make

sure that everybody in the world has the privilege of drinking a quart of milk a day.”

There was a secondary object: to beat Satan. To quote further from the speech which

earned Wallace the reputation of a wartime inspirational prophet:

“Satan is turned loose upon the world. . . . Through the leaders of the Nazi revolution

Satan now is trying to lead the common man of the whole world back into slavery and

darkness. . . . Satan has turned loose upon us the insane. . . . The Gotterdammerung has

come for Odin and his crew.

“. . . We shall cleanse the plague spot of Europe, which is Hitler’s Germany, and with

it the hell-hole of Asia-Japan. No, compromise with Satan is possible.

6. The establishment, in place of the League of Nations, of a new international

organization, to be called the United Nations. The United Nations, as its Charter clearly proves, was based, on the assumption that the wartime alliance of the Western Powers, the Soviet Union, and China would be permanent. Walter Lippmann expounded this theory when he wrote in the year 1944:

“It is easy to say, but it is not true, that the Allies of today maybe the enemies of

tomorrow…. Our present alliance against Germany is no temporary contraption. It is an

alignment of nations which, despite many disputes, much suspicion, and even short and local wars, like the Crimean, have for more than a century been natural allies.

“It is not a coincidence that Britain and Russia have found themselves allied ever

since the rise of German imperial aggression; that the United States and Russia, under the czars and under the-Soviets, have always in vital matters been on the same side. . .”

Anyone with a reasonable knowledge of history could see the flaws in this argument.

There have been a great many occasions during the last century when the nations that

were the principal allies of World War II felt and acted toward each other very differently from “natural allies.”

However, the belief in the permanence of a wartime alliance was the very cornerstone

of the United Nations, as that organization was conceived at Dumbarton Oaks, perfected at San Francisco, and inaugurated at London. The Charter of the United Nations vested executive power in the Security Council, a body with five permanent and six rotating members. The five permanent members were the United States, the Soviet Union, Great Britain, France, and China.

Except on minor matters of procedure, the Security Council, under the Charter, is

empowered to act only with the affirmative votes of the five permanent members. A

single veto can paralyze action under the Charter. This veto can not only block decisions of great moment, like the use of armed force against an aggressor, but it can also prevent much less important decisions, such as the admission of new members to the United Nations.

The Charter makes no effective provision for growth and change. It may be amended

only with the consent of all the permanent members. When the constitution of the United Nations was framed, everything was staked on the assumption that the wartime co-operation of the United States, Great Britain, and the Soviet Union, a co-operation made possible by Roosevelt’s philosophy of giving Stalin everything he wanted, would

continue permanently.

7. American National Security. Participation in the second World War, as in the first,

was advocated on the ground that American security would be vitally endangered if the

Axis Powers were not crushed. There were cruder and more sophisticated versions of this argument.

A cruder version was the scare picture, often repeated in the interventionist literature

of 1939-41, of a Nazi invasion and occupation of the American continent-the notorious

myth of “Hitler’s timetable” to invade Iowa via Dakar and Brazil. Americans were

supposed to shiver at the thought of storm troopers swaggering through the streets of

American cities and manhandling peaceful citizens. One interventionist poster showed

American children being forced to repeat their prayers: “Adolf Hitler, hallowed be thy

name.”

For those who found such suggestions merely ridiculous or, at least, extremely

improbable, there was another line of psychological approach. It was argued that, even if no physical attack on the Western Hemisphere took place, the American way of life

would be profoundly affected for the worse by an Axis victory. The American economy, so ran this argument, would be regimented; the atmosphere of an armed camp would become permanent; Americans would never know real peace and security.

One prominent advocate of intervention inquired, in the years before Pearl Harbor,

whether America could resign itself to spending as much as three billion dollars a year on armaments. This, he calculated, would be the cost of not “stopping” Hitler. Having

stopped Hitler, the military authorities are now proposing that we spend sixty billion

dollars a year to stop Stalin, and their proposals have been accepted and adopted into our Federal budget.

It was widely assumed, explicitly or implicitly, that war was the road to permanent

peace, that defeat of the Axis would be followed by an era of international good will and security.

So, American war aims may be briefly summarized as follows: (1) the realization of

the principles of the Atlantic Charter and the Four Freedoms; (2) the unconditional

surrender of the Axis Powers and the obliteration of these powers from the scheme of

world politics; (3) peaceful co-operation with the Soviet Union on a long-term basis; (4) the dismemberment of the Japanese Empire and the support of the Nationalist

government of China; (5) a miscellaneous list of desirable moral ideals, including the

regulation of international conduct by rules of unimpeachable morality, the procurement for every human being in the world of a quart of milk a day, and the vanquishing of Satan; (6) the establishment of the United Nations on the basis of close co-operation with the Soviet Union; (7) the assurance of American national security and the promotion of an atmosphere of international peace and good will in which Americans and other “peace-loving” peoples could go about their affairs free from the burden of excessive armaments and of want and fear.

These were the aspirations. What about the achievements, eight years after the end of

hostilities? Let us consider the realization of Roosevelt’s war aims, point by point.

III. How Far Were Roosevelt’s Aims Realized?

1. Pledges of the Atlantic Charter. The first three clauses of the Atlantic Charter

assert, in very clear, unambiguous language, the right of every people to choose the form of government under which they desire to live. These clauses repudiate, on behalf of all the signatories, territorial aggrandizement. And territorial changes that do not accord with the freely expressed wishes of the peoples concerned are denounced.

Before he signed the Atlantic Charter Stalin had voluntarily renounced territorial

aggrandizement in a speech which he delivered in the Soviet Union and which was

widely quoted as a definition of Soviet foreign policy. The Soviet leader declared: “We

shall not yield an inch of our own soil. We do not covet a foot of foreign soil.”

By the end of the war, however, the Soviet Union had acquired, not a foot, but

273,947 square miles of foreign soil, inhabited by 24,355,000 people. The Soviet

acquisitions were as follows:

Area in square miles Population

Eastern Poland 68,290 10,150,000

Finnish Karelia 16,173 470,000

Lithuania 24,058 3,029,000

Latvia 20,056 1,950,000

Estonia 18,353 1,120,000

Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina 19,360 3,748,000

Moldavia 13,124 2,200,000

Petsamo 4,087 4,000

Koenigsberg area 3,500 400,000

C arp atho -Ukraine

(Eastern Czechoslovakia) 4,922 800,000

South Sakhalin 14,075 415,000

Kurile Islands 3,949 4,500

Tannu Tuva 64,000 65,000

In no case was there any convincing pretense of consulting “the freely expressed

wishes of the peoples concerned” or of respecting “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” In most cases there is the strongest evidence that these Soviet annexations were intensely distasteful to the peoples affected.

For example, the Finns who live in Karelia were permitted to choose between

remaining in their homes and going penniless into Finland. The option was almost

unanimously for. Finland. A very high proportion of Lithuanians, Letts, and Estonians – preferred the bleak existence of the DP camps to the prospect of being repatriated to

homelands which had fallen under Soviet rule.

The enthusiasm of the people in eastern Poland for Soviet annexation may be

measured by the fact that about a million and a quarter of them were deported to the

Soviet Union under circumstances of such barbarous cruelty that about three

hundred.thousand perished. All Germans who survived the occupation were driven out of the Koenigsberg area. The outrage to the principle of national self-determination involved in the annexation of eastern Poland by the Soviet Union was accompanied by an even greater outrage, the arbitrary transfer to Poland of all German, territory cast of the line represented by the Oder and the Neisse rivers. This meant the dispossession of at least nine million Germans of the homes which they had occupied in territory which had been solidly German for centuries.

The Soviet annexations at the expense of Poland were specifically authorized by the

Yalta Conference of Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill in February, 1945. This same

conference recognized that “Poland must receive substantial accessions of territory in the North and West.” In other words, it sanctioned the brutal uprooting from their homes of many millions of people and extensive transfers of population in complete disregard of the desires of the peoples concerned. No more complete repudiation of the self-determination clause of the Atlantic Charter could be imagined.

Yet, with a rare mixture of cynicism and hypocrisy, the Yalta . Declaration includes

the following passage, affirming the Atlantic Charter in the very document which

specifically authorizes the disregard of the principle of self-determination:

“The establishment of order in Europe and the rebuilding of national economic life

must be achieved by processes which will enable the liberated peoples to destroy the, last vestiges of Nazism and Fascism and to create democratic institutions of their own choice. This is a principle of the Atlantic Charter â€” the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live â€” the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.”

If the self-determination clauses of the Atlantic Charter were soon proved a fraud and

a hoax by the actions and decisions of the victorious -powers, the other promises of that

document fared no better. Points four and five are sweeping pledges of equality of.

economic opportunity for all nations “great or small, victor or vanquished.”

Equality of economic opportunity would mean maximum elimination of trade barriers,

freely convertible currencies, and no discrimination against the economy of any nation.

But, eight years after the end of the war, bureaucratic regulation of international trade,

inconvertible currencies, barter and semi-barter deals between nations are still the rule,

not the exception.

And the promise of these points in the Charter was further nullified by the many

discriminatory restrictions which were imposed on the postwar economic development of Germany and Japan. Under the Morgenthau Plan it was seriously proposed to turn

densely populated, highly industrialized western Germany into a predominantly

agricultural and pastoral country and to seal up and permanently destroy the German coal mines an indispensable source of energy not only for German, but for European

industry.

The full political ferocity and economic idiocy of the Morgenthau Plan, which would

have involved the death by starvation of millions of Germans, was never put into

practice. But under the Potsdam Agreement of the “Big Three,” concluded in August,

1945, and amplified by a subsequent “level of industry” agreement, the German economy was placed in a strait-jacket of innumerable discriminatory restrictions.

Germany was denied the right to manufacture or operate oceangoing vessels. A top

limit of 5,800,000 tons, ridiculously low in view of German industrial capacity and

needs, was set for the German steel industry. Output of machine tools was set at 11.4 per cent of the 1938 figure. German capacity to earn its national livelihood was impaired by these and scores of other arbitrary interferences with normal economic activity. All German property abroad was confiscated, making the revival of German foreign trade extremely difficult. For years after the war a ruthless program of dismantling German plants continued, on the ground that they might be used to rehabilitate German militarism. But many plants were dismantled which had little relation to armament, such as soap factories, optical plants, and the like. The English were especially conscienceless in their dismantling, concentrating on plants that might provide some competition with British industry. That all this was entirely inconsistent with what might be called the wel-fare clauses of the Atlantic Charter was clearly pointed out by the well-known British economist, Sir William Beveridge, who said, after a visit to Germany in 1946:

“In a black moment of anger and confusion at Potsdam in July, 1945, we abandoned

the Atlantic Charter of 1941, which had named our goals: For all nations improved living standards, economic advancement and social security, for all states, victor and

vanquished, access on equal terms to the trade and to the raw materials of the world

which are needed for their economic prosperity. From Potsdam instead we set out on a

program of lowering the standard of life in Germany, of destroying industry, of depriving her of trade. The actions of the Allies for the past-fifteen months in Germany make the Atlantic Charter an hypocrisy.” [END SNIPPET CHAPTER VIII]

Source: http://chasvoice.blogspot.com/2014/09/perpetual-war-for-perpetual-peace.html

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