American diplomatic strategy in the late '30s and early '40s

In another thread, a discussion which included Red Harvest and myself drifted off topic, and began touching on questions relating to the course American diplomacy should have taken in the years leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack. To allow that thread to return to its original topic, I have decided to create a new thread for the purpose of responding to Red Harvest.

@Red:

No, it pretty much reads that way unfortunately.  So I will repeat:  Fascism is no more the answer and no less dangerous than communism.

I strongly disagree with the above. Literally nothing is as dangerous or as evil as communism. To give a specific example of this, consider the following quote:

I handled hundreds of signals to all parts of the Soviet Union which were couched in the following form:

“To N.K.V.D., Frunze. You are charged with the task of exterminating 10,000 enemies of the people. Report results by signal.–Yezhov.”

And in due course the reply would come back:

“In reply to yours of such-and-such date, the following enemies of the Soviet people have been shot.”

----Former Soviet Spy-Chief Vladimir Petrov

The above-described extermination quotas refer to a reign of terror Stalin had unleashed against his own nation’s population. His theory was that if local NKVD officials were given extermination quotas, many of the people rounded up to meet those quotas would be chosen more or less at random. But a number of others would be selected because they seemed different than the norm; and people such as this were (in Stalin’s eyes) more likely to be threats to his regime. This effort alone resulted in millions of deaths of innocent people. Additional millions of mass murders were committed  during the Ukrainian forced famine; and still more millions occurred during purges, anti-Christian religious persecution, exterminations of the kulaks, exterminations of nationalists, exterminations of disfavored ethnic minorities, and other extermination efforts.

In contrast, pre-war Nazi Germany was responsible for perhaps a few hundred non-lawful executions. To attempt to establish moral equivalence between that and the Soviet regime is absurd. Is is true that, during the war, the Nazi government starved or otherwise killed millions of innocent people. These efforts were in large part a response to the British food blockade, a blockade which cut Germany off from desperately needed food supplies.

As 1940 drew to a close, the situation for many of Europe’s 525 million people was dire. With the food supply reduced by 15% by the blockade and another 15% by poor harvests, starvation and diseases such as influenza, pneumonia, tuberculosis, typhus and cholera were a threat. . . . Former president Herbert Hoover, who had done much to alleviate the hunger of European children during WW1, wrote

| The food situation in the present war is already more desperate than at the same
| stage in the [First] World War. … If this war is long continued, there is but one
| implacable end… the greatest famine in history.

The Nazis’ logic was that if they couldn’t feed everyone within their borders, they would starve or otherwise exterminate the people they liked the least, or who were least necessary for the war effort. There is no doubt that both the Nazi and Soviet regimes were brutal. Nevertheless, there is a strong difference between a decision to exterminate millions of people during famine conditions, as the Nazis did, and a decision to exterminate tens of millions of people during a time of peace, when the government is perfectly able to feed everyone–which is what the Soviets were guilty of.

@Red:

There moral compass and behaviour are both so far outside the realm of normal that insane seems the appropriate descriptor.

Unfortunately, it is not an unheard-of thing for political leaders to lack any moral compass whatsoever. When Western democracies elect such men to positions of power, people will sometimes (but not always) call them despicable. But they are almost never called insane. As examples of Western politicians who lacked this moral compass, I would point to those responsible for Operation Keelhaul.

On March 31, 1945, Soviet General Secretary Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt concluded the final form of their plans in a secret codicil to the agreement. Outlining the plan to forcibly return the refugees to the Soviet Union, this codicil was kept secret from the US and British people for over fifty years.[2]

The name of the operation comes from the naval practice of corporal punishment, keelhauling. In his book Operation Keelhaul, Epstein states: “That our Armed Forces should have adopted this term as its code name for deporting by brutal force to concentration camp, firing squad, or hangman’s noose millions who were already in the lands of freedom, shows how little the high brass thought of their longing to be free.” . . .

Tolstoy described the scene of Americans returning to the internment camp after having delivered a shipment of people to the Russians. “The Americans returned to Plattling visibly shamefaced. Before their departure from the rendezvous in the forest, many had seen rows of bodies already hanging from the branches of nearby trees.”[10]

Neither FDR, Truman, nor Churchill–the three Western democratic leaders most responsible for handing millions of refugees over to the Soviets for mass murder–are typically described as insane.

@Red:

That is crossing over into the extreme right wing revisionist form of history with the “pro-communist” assertion.  It’s a rehash of the same bunk that McCarthy was spewing.

The above was in response to me using the phrase “pro-communist” to describe FDR. To describe FDR as “pro-communist” is neither right wing, left wing, or middle of the political road. It is simply correct. Anyone who argues otherwise is making an incorrect (and non-credible) argument.

The best place to start by looking at the following pro-Soviet propaganda poster. Yes, FDR’s administration really did say that! FDR did not limit himself to pro-Soviet propaganda posters: he directly involved himself in the creation of the pro-Soviet propaganda film Mission to Moscow.

FDR’s pro-Soviet diplomatic stance is also the subject of a CIA article.

Certain that he had the correct line on Stalin, FDR desired to meet him, turn his famous charisma on him, and decide world affairs with him on a personal basis. As early as March 1942, he wrote British Prime Minister Winston Churchill:

| I think I can personally handle Stalin better than either your Foreign Office
| or my State Department. Stalin hates the guts of all your top people. He
| thinks he likes me better, and I hope he will continue to do so.9

Guided by this conviction, FDR steered a straight-line policy on “Russia,” as he unfailingly and mistakenly called the Soviet Union: unswerving conciliation of Stalin, capped off with a face-to-face meeting. . . .

Soon afterward, the President entrusted former envoy Davies with a new mission: flying to Moscow and telling Stalin in private how much the American President respected him and how much he wanted to build their special relationship. To prove it, Davies was to tell the tyrant that FDR wanted to meet him face-to-face.

Prior to his departure in May 1943, Davies brought a fresh print of Mission to Moscow to the White House for a sneak preview. After its viewing, he secured FDR’s permission to take a copy with him to Moscow, along with a sealed envelope that the President had prepared for Stalin.

. . . Davies met Stalin in the Kremlin and read him the letter. He emphasized the US government’s disapproval of British imperialism and broadly hinted that the USA and the USSR, without the British, could rule the world together. . . . Davies then retired with Stalin to the Kremlin screening room to watch Mission to Moscow, where his cinematic glorification of the dictator, to his disappointment, did not win a rave review, but only a grunt or two. However, Davies got what he came for: Stalin agreed to meet FDR in Alaska. Davies’ biographer, Elizabeth Kimball MacLean, calls it “the coup of his diplomatic career.”10

The coup proved ephemeral, as did all of the other coups in Davies’ career. Stalin had no intention of roving far from home. He kept putting off the meeting, frustrating and reducing FDR to pleading. Where once he had made a concession to FDR’s physical handicap, Stalin now began to insist on the capital of Iran as a venue, despite its extra hardship for the President. On 25 October 1943, Roosevelt pointed out that “I would have to travel 6,000 miles and you would have to travel 600 miles from Russian [sic] territory.” He implored Stalin not to fail him “in this crisis,” and stooped to the words: “I am begging you.”11

This desire for a long-term alliance was also echoed by FDR’s Office of War Information (OWI). According to a public statement from the OWI, “The possibility for the friendly alliance of the Capitalist United States and the Socialist Russia is shown to be firmly rooted in the mutual desire for peace of the two great countries.”

Given that FDR fought a war to save the Soviet Union, turned over millions of refugees to the machinery of Soviet mass murder, distributed pro-Soviet propaganda, allowed his administration to become overrun by Soviet spies, routinely referred to Joseph Stalin as “Uncle Joe,” and spoke of his desire for a long-term alliance between the USSR and the United States, it’s hard to see what more he could possibly have done to convince a reasonable-minded person that he was pro-Soviet.

@Red:

The overarching problem over the past 11+ years is that supply siders (who can’t operate a calculator or read a graph from what I’ve seen), supported by Greenspan’s testimony cut our govt. revenue during good times driving us into deficit then, and resulting in deficits that are enormous now.  (The result of all this supply siding excess that was supposed to be so stimulative has been the lowest economic growth rate of the modern era–a complete refutation of the whole premise.)

You seem to be confusing Keynesian economics with neoclassical economics. According to classical economists–such as Adam Smith, as well as a number of very talented people who came after him–a nation’s economic output was driven by its aggregate supply curve. Economic downturns sometimes occurred. This was generally seen as the result of the pricing mechanism being out of whack. The best medicine was to allow prices to move freely, so that a new, full employment equilibrium could be reached as quickly as possible.

John Maynard Keynes disagreed with this perspective. He felt that both the cause of, and cure for, economic downturns could be found in what he called an aggregate demand curve. This idea of an aggregate demand curve is a complex construct–too complex to exist in simple economies. The Keynesian aggregate demand curve represents the amalgamation of the Keynesian IS and LM curves. Keynes believed that, during economic downturns, the government should attempt to deliver stimulative shocks to the economy–for example by printing more money than the private sector had been expecting it to print, and by borrowing and spending more than the private sector had anticipated. These actions would shift the LM and IS curves respectively, thereby causing an increase in aggregate demand. The idea was to give the economy a short-term “stimulus” or a “shot in the arm.” To those who complained about this short-term thinking, Keynes replied, “in the long run we are all dead.”

As happy as they were at having “discovered” what they claimed was an aggregate demand curve, even Keynesians admitted that in the long run, economic output is determined by the aggregate supply curve. Starting with Hoover, most presidents have been Keynesian in nature; in large part because the Keynesian focus on the short-term appeals to politicians who have to run for office every four years. Supply side economics represented a departure from that way of thinking; and an effort to focus on the long-run goal of improving the supply curve. Improving the supply curve involves making companies more productive, for example by reducing paperwork and regulatory burdens, and by taking other measures conducive to high economic output. Lower taxes can be a legitimate part of supply side economics, at least under certain circumstances. If someone wanted to lower taxes because he believed that lower taxes and lower spending would be best for the economy over the long-term, his view would be supply side. If he wanted to lower taxes as a way of creating a short-term “stimulus” and economic boost, his perspective could be more accurately described as Keynesian.

@Red:

If fewer workers can produces more widgets, then the employer uses fewer workers to supply the market…and pockets the additional profit from reduced labor cost.

Workers today can produce far more than had been the case in the Elizabethan era. Workers in the Elizabethan era could produce far more per-person than had been the case in the Stone Age. Much of of human progress consists of enabling workers to produce progressively more. While new inventions can sometimes cause short-term disruptions, the increases in productivity such inventions create are the only reason we’re not still living in caves.

@Clyde85:

This thread is not going to get very far, if it get’s too political (which it can do very easily) its going to get locked.

Stalin and Hitler are two lions of the early 20th century who did horrid horrid things, and no matter what you say neither was “less” evil then the other. You have some personal grudge that Germany was beaten while Stalins empire remained, we get that, but no one wants to hear a fawning apologetic for Hitler and his cronies. From my studying of WW2 history the German army was greeted with a welcome and as liberators when they marched into alot of countires. What runied that was after they left came the Nazi party flunikes and SS s***heads came to manage behind them, who’s brutal, stupid and racist ideology runied everything and lost Germany what could have been some of their best friends.

There is no moral victory to be had here, Hitler and his Nazi’s were just as bad and evil as Stalin and his cronies, and just leave it at that before you get banned and this forum loses a person with great wealth of knowladge and source meterial to back it, please� :oops:

I agree that the German treatment of conquered Eastern lands was harsher in WWII than it had been in WWI. I also agree that the racism of Nazi ideology was a contributing factor to this change. Another contributing factor was that the Nazis had seen how the British food blockade of WWI had caused starvation in Germany itself–starvation which greatly contributed to Germany’s decision to surrender in 1918. The Nazis were determined to avoid a repeat of 1918; and so took however much food was required from the Eastern lands to adequately feed the German people.

To address your larger point, I strongly feel that Stalin and communism were far worse than Nazism. I have outlined my reasons for that perspective elsewhere, and there is no reason to repeat them in this post. (Especially as you have not addressed those reasons.)

You expressed concern that I might get banned for expressing the view that the communists were worse than the Nazis. I appreciate your concern for me, as well as the compliment you paid to my knowledge of history.

There are differing schools of thought on how to best arrive at the truth. Some believe in academic freedom: in allowing each side to make its case as best it can, so that whichever side is most accurate will (it is hoped) emerge victorious in the debate. Others believe that the best way to the truth is to censor ideas with which they disagree.

I have a limited amount of time to spend on WWII forums. I would prefer spending that time in a forum which adheres to the former philosophy rather than the latter. If I am banned for expressing the view that the communists were significantly worse than the Nazis, it would indicate to me that one or more list moderators subscribe to the latter philosophy. I would then go about finding another WWII forum run by people who adhere to the former perspective.

@Red:

Pretty much says it for me.� Kurt’s posts are creepy, not unlike something Goebbels would have cooked up.�

I’m no fan of communism (which is a massive failure and extremely bad idea…and its economic market control side is nearly extinct), but Stalin was more of fascist dictator than a communist.� It was all about the boss, not the party or the people.� We can’t even tell for certain if Hitler or Stalin killed more people–and they both have the top two spots of all time!

As I’ve pointed out in the other thread, there is little reason to justify supporting the Nazi’s over the USSR.� It has nothing to do with left/right ideology, and everything to do with strategic positions.� Put Germany where Russia is (and vice versa), swap ideologies/leaders, and put Joe Stalin in league with Mussolini and Imperial Japan instead of Hitler.� There wouldn’t be much alternative to supporting Hitler’s Germany (relocated as Russia) against the others.�

Kurt’s basis for supporting the Nazi’s is political ideology.� Anything that is anti-communist works for him.

You feel my posts are “creepy.” I can’t control what you feel. I can only control whether I tell the truth, even in cases in which the general public has been taught to passionately believe something other than the truth.

You brought up the question of which mass murderers were the worst of all time. The top two were clearly Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. Also Genghis Khan should be included in this discussion; though the 40 million deaths for which the Mongol horde was to blame occurred partly under his rule, and partly under his son’s rule.

Calculating the numbers of mass murders for which Hitler is responsible involves questions of assigning blame. One method to go about doing that is to perform the following calculation:

1. Take the number of people within German-controlled territory
2. Subtract away the number of people Germany could actually feed
3. The resulting number would be the number of deaths to be blamed on the British food blockade.
4. Any civilian deaths in excess of the number from step 3) would be blamed on the Nazi regime.

The problem with the above method is that things were not always as black and white as the above methodology would suggest. For example, the Nazis took horses off of farms so they could be used by the military. Chemicals which could have been used to produce either explosives or fertilizer were often used for explosives. One could argue that these measures were necessary to win the war; and that defeat would subject Germany to mass murder both in Soviet-occupied territory, and in the territory occupied by the Western democracies.

Deaths within German-held territories can be broken down into five categories:

1. Deaths which occurred due to the British food blockade and the Soviets’ scorched earth policies. (The latter involved the removal or destruction of food and farming equipment.)

2. Deaths which occurred as a result of Germany’s efforts to maximize its military’s success. (For example, taking horses off of farms so they could be used by the military.)

3. Deaths which resulted from the general destruction associated with war. For example, the temporary destruction of transportation networks interrupted deliveries of food and medical supplies.

4. Deaths which occurred due to Allied efforts. British and American bombers repeatedly inflicted massive attacks against German cities. The Soviet military routinely attacked columns of German refugees.

5. Deaths which occurred primarily as a result of the Nazis’ wish to exterminate other groups of people.

Unfortunately, I have not seen much research devoted to breaking things down in this way. Most historians tend to act as though the deaths from categories 1, 2, and sometimes 3, should be treated as though they belonged in category 5. Histories written from that perspective are no better, and no more reliable, than Allied propaganda leaflets.

@Clyde85:

@KurtGodel7:

If I am banned for expressing the view that the communists were significantly worse than the Nazis, it would indicate to me that one or more list moderators subscribe to the latter philosophy. I would then go about finding another WWII forum run by people who adhere to the former perspective.

Which would be too great a loss for this site and greatly diminish the level of intelegent discourse on this site in the WW2 forums.

I can see and understand what you mean, I too often sympathize with the German solider and the German army, but I have no sympathy for Hitler and is Nazi party. What they did was far worse then any of that “Stabbed in the Back” nonsense from WW1. Hitler and his party did more to stab the German army and solider in the back with their idiodic occupation policies (one of the biggest factors to Germay’s defeat IMO) and their equally stupid racial superiority theories. I know Stalin and his “communist” cornies were just as bad as Hitler and his Nazi party, most people here know this, no one is disputing this, but like Gamerman said it’s like arguing if you’d rather be shot and hung, either way you end up dead! Hitler and his Nazi’s were defeated by the Soviets in the end because the reaped what the had sowen in their occupation of Russian lands. Had a more moderate policy been used maybe things would have been different. Hitler and his Nazi party are forever stained by the horros they unleashed during WW2 and no matter how terrible Stalin was people are not going to believe the “lesser of two evil” argument.

If thats what were doing here, then I say screw Hitler and Stalin and say go Cthulhu, why choose the lesser of two evils� :wink:

Thanks Clyde. I appreciate the compliments you and gamerman have given me. I also appreciate Gargantua’s recent post on my behalf.

To address your point about German occupation policy within the Soviet Union: there was division within the Nazi Party about whether the German occupation of Soviet territory should be benign or harsh. Ultimately those advocating a benign occupation lost the power struggle, leading to a harsh occupation policy. In contrast, Germany’s leaders from WWI had chosen a benign occupation policy for the eastern lands they occupied. That policy was part of the events which convinced the people of the Ukraine that “Bad things come from Russia, good things come from Germany.”

One of the Nazis’ main reasons for invading the Soviet Union in the first place was to obtain the food necessary to avert starvation in Germany and German-occupied Western Europe. It’s possible that the Nazi leaders concluded that, if they permitted widespread starvation to occur in German-held Soviet lands, they would be seen as dire enemies no matter what else they did. Ruling by fear may have seemed like their only practical option. I acknowledge that their racial ideology almost certainly contributed to this decision. They probably saw Slavs as cowardly and easily intimidated. (Such views would have been reinforced by the Red Army’s abysmal performance in its 1940 Winter War against Finland.)

Also, if Germany’s food situation was such that millions of people would starve to death no matter what course Hitler chose, he certainly would have preferred those millions to be Slavic rather than German.

More generally, I would break the Nazi ideology down into three components:

1. Love for Germans and other Nordic peoples
2. Indifference or even contempt for most non-Germanic/non-Nordic people (such as Slavs)
3. Hatred towards the Jews

The Nazis were at their worst when acting upon the third of these components; and at their best when motivated by the first component. As an example of the latter, Hitler instituted improved workplace safety standards, improved clean air and clean water standards, reduced the unemployment rate to close to zero, significantly increased wages for German workers, greatly increased their vacation time, reduced the workweek to 40 hours, and arranged for government-subsidized cruises so that those workers could see the world. He also led an anti-smoking campaign which significantly reduced the rate of tobacco use within Germany. The Nazis encouraged physical exercise; and arranged for groups of adults to exercise together. German children who grew up in the '30s were consistently well-fed and in good physical condition. This contrasted with the poorer classes of English society–so strong a contrast that even someone as strongly biased as William Shirer noted it.

Another point worth mentioning is genetics. In nature, animals tend to have large numbers of offspring, only some of which survive to have offspring of their own. The fittest animals are most likely to be among the survivors, leading to upward genetic pressure. That source of upward genetic pressure has largely vanished for humans. Instead, the human gene pool is changing based primarily on the number of children individual people decide to have.

I have seen a Nazi propaganda poster which lamented the fact that intelligent, law-abiding people were having far fewer children than their less intelligent law-abiding counterparts, who in turn were having fewer children than unintelligent criminals. Communists have taken the opposite view of this situation. Karl Marx thought that individual differences were determined almost entirely through environmental factors. The communist movement would move even further in that direction.

Lysenko [caused] the expulsion, imprisonment, and death of hundreds of scientists and eliminating all study and research involving Mendelian genetics throughout the Soviet Union.

Mendelian genetics is the only scientifically credible form of genetics. The Stalin/Lysenko persecution of geneticists represented an attack on science–a far more severe attack, at least in terms of body count, than anything the Catholic Church had done to Galileo.

While communists have since backed away from Lamarckist quackery, they have continued to promote an anti-scientific, “yes, but” approach to genetic science. “Yes, Mendelian genetics theory is true, but it doesn’t do much to explain differences between humans.” “Yes, Mendelian genetic theory may apply to humans, but it does little to explain differences in human intelligence.” That sort of thing. Communists have violently opposed efforts to improve–or even arrest the decline of–the human gene pool, on the theory that such efforts are Nazi-like. Despite vast amounts of scientific evidence to the contrary, communists continue to claim that intellectual differences between individuals are caused almost entirely by environmental factors.

Upward genetic pressure, applied over time, caused apes to evolve into humans. Downward genetic pressure, such as we are now witnessing, will cause humans to . . . ?

I would argue that, to deal with current and future challenges and threats, the human race requires two things. 1) Ability. 2) Willingness to work together, and to sacrifice for a larger cause. Communists’ anti-scientific notions about genetics, in combination with the current decline in the gene pool, represent a direct, immediate threat to the first of these two things. Communists’ racial theories and racial objectives are a serious threat to the second.

Ants are willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of the colony because they are genetically similar to the colony’s other ants. What is true for ants is also true for humans: people are willing to sacrifice more for their own children than they are for other people’s children. Adopted children are four times more likely to be abused, despite the fact that adoptive parents are screened, whereas people who want to have and raise their own biological children are not.

During the rise of the Roman Republic, individual soldiers were willing to sacrifice themselves for Rome. Government officials often placed law and honor above their own self-interest. During the decline of the Roman Empire, these things had ceased to be the case. Bribery was the norm rather than the exception. The phrase “Roman soldiers” had become almost an oxymoron: few if any real Romans were willing to fight for Rome. The definition of what a “Roman” was had become blurred. By this point, Rome had become what may (for its time) have been the most multicultural city in human history. “All roads lead to Rome.” Large numbers of people from widely disparate places had congregated in Rome.

Scientific studies have shown that people are happier and more altruistic when in homogenous workplaces than they are in racially diverse workplaces. Rome’s loss of its homogeneity and its loss of altruism were almost certainly not coincidental factors. Other places which have become racially mixed–such as Latin America–are also, like the dying Roman Empire, associated with high levels of government corruption, and a low level of military effectiveness.

Based on this scientific evidence and on this track record, it would make far more sense to preserve the existence of race, than it would to support communists in their goal of globalizing and destroying race. There may come a time when it is critical for humanity’s future that large groups of people work together to achieve a greater purpose. If or when that time comes, we will need to have better institutions than existed in the declining Roman Empire or in Latin America to deal with such challenges.