Remnant of "Red Scare" repealed.

[Edward]

I should have thought, especially in a society which was still legally segregated, it was much easier to demonise the Japanese than the Germans along racial grounds.

 

[LizzieMaine]

The most interesting aspect of how the US felt about Germany is how quickly the general public was convinced to turn around its viewpoint after V E Day. During the war itself, the official US line was that Germany itself bore collective guilt for the rise of the Nazis and that they, as a nation and a people, had to be made to pay for this. This view was hammered over and over again by the Roosevelt Administration thru the OWI. But as soon as the war was over and FDR was dead, the new group of foreign policy advisors surrounding President Truman made sure that line immediately shifted. The German people were now to be viewed as victims of the Nazis, not their enablers.

It's tempting to view this just as American compassion coming to the surface, but there were deeply political reasons for it. The Cold War had to be sold to the public, and that couldn't happen without first selling the idea that Germany was a now an ally, a people and a nation and a culture with whom we had much more in common than the "Asiatic" now-common-enemy to the east. There was a strong racial component to this -- they didn't actually say "Aryan solidarity" out loud, but it was there between the lines if you could read it, especially in the policies advocated by George Kennan and his circle.

And cultivating such a new line on Germany also made it easier for the US to justify collaborating during the Cold War with various individual Germans who had held significant positions in the Nazi regime. They were just fighting for their country against Bolshevism, you see, not for Hitler per se. Their pasts could be forgiven and their knowledge and experience put to good use. "Welcome to the US payroll, Klaus Barbie. That business in France is all in the past now. Ah there, Otto von Bolschwing. Welcome to sunny California, here's a nice house and a good job for you. That whole 'Final Solution' thing was obviously just a momentary moral lapse. And if you see your friend Eichmann anywhere, let him know we might be able to set him up with something too."

 

[LizzieMaine]

I should have thought, especially in a society which was still legally segregated, it was much easier to demonise the Japanese than the Germans along racial grounds.

The "America First" crowd certainly found it to be so. Colonel Lindbergh, among others, strongly advocated a collaboration among the US, the British, and Nazi Germany against the "Asiatic hordes" to the east, and repeatedly emphasized his belief that fighting against Germany would be against the best interests of the "white race."

 

[BlueTrain]

Part of the reality of the post-war period was that the Soviet Union was occupying half of Europe, not just half of Germany. So the political landscape, as they say, had changed almost overnight. The term "iron curtain" became part of our vocabulary, mainly from its use by Churchill, although the expression was not new. Although it had literally changed overnight, it actually got worse through the 1950s. The Berlin Wall was not built until 1961.

Even if the Soviet Union had not been the enemy it was, what would we have otherwise done with Japan and Germany? The war was over and we were occupying those countries. They were largely pacified, unlike Iraq, for instance, and the occupation forces were at first not that large. The United States took over the police functions in Germany for several years (don't know about Japan) and it became an "accompanied tour" for married soldier. Korea has always been an unaccompanied tour. Even a permanent occupation loses its edge after a while, even with a war still in progress.

None of this was confined to the United States, of course. Australia was very sensitive to Asians moving there and Africans after the colonial wars beginning in the 1950s sometimes forced Asians, mainly from South Asia, to leave. As far as racial questions go, it becomes a question of who gets to say who is white--or white enough.

 

[Edward]

The most interesting aspect of how the US felt about Germany is how quickly the general public was convinced to turn around its viewpoint after V E Day. During the war itself, the official US line was that Germany itself bore collective guilt for the rise of the Nazis and that they, as a nation and a people, had to be made to pay for this. This view was hammered over and over again by the Roosevelt Administration thru the OWI. But as soon as the war was over and FDR was dead, the new group of foreign policy advisors surrounding President Truman made sure that line immediately shifted. The German people were now to be viewed as victims of the Nazis, not their enablers.

"...now the Germans, they too, have God on their side."

Bob Dylan, 1963.

 

[BlueTrain]

Belt buckles during the Nazi period displayed the motto "Gott mit uns." God with us.

 

[Tiki Tom]

It's tempting to view this just as American compassion coming to the surface, but there were deeply political reasons for it. The Cold War had to be sold to the public, and that couldn't happen without first selling the idea that Germany was a now an ally,..."

My dad always thought that the TV show "Hogan's Heroes" was, in reality, a clever CIA-sponsored plot to make the Germans (Schultz, Klink) seem lovable, for exactly this reason. I always thought he was crazy, but maybe he was a more sophisticated thinker than I gave him credit for. (BTW, he was also certain that Kennedy was most certainly NOT killed by a lone gunman and that a deep conspiracy was involved. )

 

[BlueTrain]

The problem with conspiracy theories is that it ignores the possibility that a single person, all by themselves, can do something like that. In other words, the theories are based not on what someone can do but on what someone can't do.

My father spent a year as a prisoner-of-war in Germany, most of that time in a camp near Moosburg, just north of Munich. It was the largest P.O.W. camp in southern Germany and some prisoners had been there since 1939. He never said a bad thing about his treatment or his experiences while there. I don't know if he ever saw Hogan's Heroes or what he might have thought about it. There were as many as 80,000 prisoners in Moosburg.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Don't laugh too hard at the idea -- the CIA did in fact involve itself in film production in the 1950s and 1960s. It's well documented that the popular animated adaptation of Orwell's "Animal Farm" was funded by the Agency and produced by a CIA front company. If you know both the book and the film you'll recall that certain plot points were altered to give the film an even more obvious anti-Soviet point of view, and to eliminate the scene at the end where the pigs who betrayed the revolution are happily mingling with human (capitalist) exploiters. Orwell had intended the book as a commentary on the political betrayal of socialism, not a polemic against socialism itself -- but the CIA version changed the story just enough to alter that perspective.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Part of the reality of the post-war period was that the Soviet Union was occupying half of Europe, not just half of Germany. So the political landscape, as they say, had changed almost overnight. The term "iron curtain" became part of our vocabulary, mainly from its use by Churchill, although the expression was not new. Although it had literally changed overnight, it actually got worse through the 1950s. The Berlin Wall was not built until 1961.

It's very interesting and illuminating to read the popular press of 1945-46 to see just how the people of the period were viewing the unfolding scene -- and how they were being guided to a particular viewpoint. You will find a lot of ink being spilled in 1945 about the importance of the US continuing a policy of postwar negotiation with the USSR in line with the Tehran conference, and you'll find quite a few mainstream commentators continuing to stress the wartime line of peaceful coexistence with the Soviets as being essential to keeping the postwar peace. Very few people outside of hardline Kennanites believed in 1945 and the early part of 1946 that the Soviets in any way wanted or even were capable of war against the US -- they had just lost over twenty million people and their industrial capacity was in ruins. Their desire for a "sphere of influence" in Europe was widely seen as a matter of protecting themselves against any future resurgence of German aggression to their west. But thru the latter part of 1946 and into 1947 the Kennanite line starts to dominate, and the public was now being led to believe that the USSR was ready to attack at any moment unless the US pursued an aggressive, pro-active policy of containment to keep them under control. Because the public had no interest whatever in fighting another war, the Cold War had to be sold to that public like a box of soap chips, and it was, thru every medium possible.

The shift was strongest in the Luce publications -- they had been strongly pro-Soviet during the war years, in keeping with the OWI line, doing a lavish special issue of "Life" in 1943 which presented Stalin as a heroic bastion against Fascism, and the Soviet people themselves as really not all that different from Americans at all. By the end of 1946, though, the Luce magazines were in the forefront of promoting the Kennanite view -- and by 1949 had taken this to such extremes that they published a two page spread denouncing and demanding the blacklisting of such "Red dupes" in the US as Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann, Charles Chaplin, Arthur Miller, Dorothy Parker, Adam Clayton Powell, Mark Van Doren, Norman Mailer, Langston Hughes, and George Seldes. In a vicious bit of irony, the very issue in which that spread appeared also featured a glowingly positive photo essay on Fascist Spain. Franco, of course, that delightful Christian gentleman, was now to be viewed as a valuable ally against the godless Asiatic hordes.

 

[ChiTownScion]

The most interesting aspect of how the US felt about Germany is how quickly the general public was convinced to turn around its viewpoint after V E Day. During the war itself, the official US line was that Germany itself bore collective guilt for the rise of the Nazis and that they, as a nation and a people, had to be made to pay for this. This view was hammered over and over again by the Roosevelt Administration thru the OWI. But as soon as the war was over and FDR was dead, the new group of foreign policy advisors surrounding President Truman made sure that line immediately shifted. The German people were now to be viewed as victims of the Nazis, not their enablers.

It's tempting to view this just as American compassion coming to the surface, but there were deeply political reasons for it. The Cold War had to be sold to the public, and that couldn't happen without first selling the idea that Germany was a now an ally, a people and a nation and a culture with whom we had much more in common than the "Asiatic" now-common-enemy to the east. There was a strong racial component to this -- they didn't actually say "Aryan solidarity" out loud, but it was there between the lines if you could read it, especially in the policies advocated by George Kennan and his circle.

It didn't happen overnight. There was an attitude toward German civilians facing starvation in '45-46 by Eisenhower and others of "Let 'em starve: that many fewer German soldiers we won't have to face in a generation. " And Morgenthau and others advocated an agrarian and de- industrialized Germany where a cuckoo clock would be the pinnacle of technology. What really turned that was occupation US Army commanders expressing concern that a desperate German civilian population would be ripe for Soviet takeover. They spoke out to the Truman administration and members of Congress of both parties. And thus came to be the Marshall Plan of 1948. But those first few post war years were times of extreme hardship for the German people.

 

[BlueTrain]

The post-war period in Germany as well as the rest of Europe is another example of forgotten history. It isn't intentional; it's just a case of it didn't happen here and it didn't happen to us. Your mother might have said to eat your spinach because people are starving in Europe but beyond that, it wasn't really of much concern. The Berlin Airlift was more a battle against the Soviets rather than a simple humanitarian effort to help Berliners.

Many political positions need enemies.

 

[LizzieMaine]

Pretty much everything that happened between the US and the USSR from 1947 to 1950 was a mutual case of "mine's bigger than yours." And the result was the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the arms race, to say nothing of what Russia ended up mutating into after the USSR folded, and various petty despotisms in the Middle East. It will be up to future generations to decide if it was really worth it. In the end, even George Kennan himself wondered that.

 

[BlueTrain]

Whatever future generations decide, they'll keep changing their minds.

 

[Fading Fast]

Pretty much everything that happened between the US and the USSR from 1947 to 1950 was a mutual case of "mine's bigger than yours." And the result was the Korean War, the Vietnam War, and the arms race, to say nothing of what Russia ended up mutating into after the USSR folded, and various petty despotisms in the Middle East. It will be up to future generations to decide if it was really worth it. In the end, even George Kennan himself wondered that.

Unfortunately, there's no Time Machine to tell us if things could have turned out differently.

And while I think what you say here is a fair way of looking at it, it is only one way as well. For example, you could also say the West, despite its many faults, allowed for a massively greater amount of personal freedom for its individuals and standard of living for its people than the East.

In this view (or angle) the US/USSR divide was a war of ideologies and I'm glad the one that allowed for more freedom and better living standards won. For all the horrors of McCarthyism - it went for less than two decades, didn't directly murder anyone (or did it, I know some died indirectly), was defeated internally and now is aggressively denounce - I'll take that over the the NKVD (later KGB) or Stasi and the murder, fear, horror and physical torture it brought to millions of its people for nearly the entire existence of those government.

Just another angle of looking at it.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I think it depends on how you look at murder. Certainly there have been and are many people around the world who view policies pursued under US imperialism over the past sixty-odd years as leading to the murder of millions in the name of capitalist hegemony, but that will lead us down a road that's not Lounge-appropriate, so I won't go down it.

I know that you and I differ sharply on the Rosenberg case, but I firmly believe that Ethel Rosenberg was murdered by the US Government on the basis of a manipulated trial, and that evidence from VENONA supports the conclusion that she in no way contributed to the espionage operation involving her husband and brother. I further firmly believe that Julius Rosenberg was unjustly executed -- he was not charged with, or convicted of, a capital crime under the the Espionage Act of 1918, and given that VENONA supports the conclusion that his espionage activities on behalf of the USSR were terminated by the Soviets in January of 1945, he was not guilty of, and could not legally have been charged with treason, since the Soviets were our ally and not our enemy during the entire period of his espionage activity -- hence his prosecution under the Espionage Act, which was not a treason charge, and did not legally provide for a death penalty. And further, since VENONA supports the conclusion that Rosenberg was suspended from his espionage activity in January 1945, he could not have been involved in David Greenglass's transmission of atomic-bomb lens drawings to the Soviets in September of 1945. He was indeed a spy -- but he was not an atomic spy. But he was murdered by the US Government while David Greenglass, who by his own admission *was* an atomic spy, walked out of prison in 1959 as a free man -- having bought his life by perjuring himself on the witness stand under pressure from the FBI. And Greenglass himself, before he died a few years ago, finally admitted doing exactly that.

I further believe that the evidence demonstrates that the FBI was aware of all of this in 1950, given that all of the physical evidence presented during the trial, including the Greenglass drawings and the famous Jell-O box panel, had to be and was admitted during the trial itself to be "recreated" by the proscecution. But the Rosenbergs were tried and executed in spite of the known facts solely and exclusively to terrorize the American left.

That's just one case we now know most of the details about. There were very definitely political prisoners in the US during the Cold War -- start with the Smith Act defendants of 1949 and work on down, people held behind walls not for anything they did but for no other reason than what they believed. For a nation determined to shine as a beacon of freedom and liberty of thought, the US during that period did a very very unconvincing job. But then again, given that well over a thousand expatriated Nazis were working in US intelligence both foreign and domestic during that period, maybe it shouldn't be a surprise.

 

[Fading Fast]

I will accept any "the state-is-responsible" killing list standards - as long as the standards are equally applied - and am comfortable that the USSR's numbers will be an obscene multiple of the US's. I know and openly acknowledge that the US gov't has done many immoral things, but degree and numbers do matter when we are talking about a gov't run by many different people over many years.

I see the USSR during the Golden Era - and believe the evidence both before and after its break up supports this - as a totalitarian gov't that directly and indirectly killed and tortured tens of millions of its people, impoverished the majority of them and denied basic freedoms to most.

The US, by comparison, during the GE did many bad things to many groups and individuals, but its murdered, tortured, impoverished and made-to-live-in-fear list and number of people is still minuscule compared to the USSR.

And the US did provide freedom to many during the Golden Era - one country had to use force to keep its people in and one to keep people from coming in - and a rising living standard (spin the wheel and I'll take the life of a random US person to that of the random USSR citizen - yup, if an against-the-odds spin comes up, I could lose, but I know which are the dramatically better odds.)

If the argument is that the US has many, many things to be ashamed of - I'm with you. If the argument is that those things puts it anywhere near the level of the USSR's inherent evil - given time to gather my evidence - I'll push all my chips in the center of the table on that bet.

 

[Fading Fast]

The Golden Era experience of my half-German dad and his Italian, Greek, Irish, Polish, Jewish and... list of friends - all immigrants, first or second generation Americans - was that they didn't live in fear of the gov't, they felt prejudices but believe things were so much better here than where (the USSR?), that they put their shoulder to the wheel and lived a pretty good life in this country. And they gave their kids an even better life - even though they weren't the leading class, the WASPS, the white-people-of-privilege (in the GE, their German, Irish, Italian, etc., names, appearances and mannerism marked them as not part of that class). On a cosmically perfect scale, their lives in America weren't fair - but compared to any other country and any other time in history, I doubt so many of different backgrounds and starting with nothing could have had more freedom or opportunity. That is part of the US' Golden Era story too.

 

[LizzieMaine]

I'm not one much interested in swapping death figures, because frankly, unless you have Nazi-style inarguable documentation of them, they're simply estimates put together according to whatever standard the compiler cares to use. I know of people who will offer a death toll for capitalism in excess of a billion people worldwide since the 19th century, but I don't base my views on that number or any kind of number. Likewise, the death toll for the USSR or China or any other power is something you can't throw around like it's the bottom line on a balance sheet. Robert Conquest -- another historian who received support from The Intelligence Community -- tried to do that in the 1960s, and was forced to repeatedly backpedal his estimates after the Soviet archives were opened. The documentation for the 1930s, especially, is so scanty that you can quote any figure you want and find someone with evidence thay say supports it. We know, without much doubt, how many people the Nazis killed because they themselves thoroughly documented it. There is simply no such precise documentation extant in any Soviet archive -- the numbers tossed around are broad estimates based on whatever criteria -- census data, "unexplained death rates," or simple speculation that the estimator cares to use. It's like trying to estimate exactly how many indigenous Americans were slaughtered, starved, or otherwise expunged by the US Government during the 19th Century. You can guess, but you will never *know.*

We don't even know, for sure, how many people were ever actually in the Gulag system let alone how many people died there. Alll the estimates do agree on is that the vast majority of prisoners -- over 90 percent -- came out alive at the end of their sentences. And there is much confusion over how many were genuine poilitical prisoners and how many were simply common criminals, because both types went to the Gulags. We just don't know, and when discussing such things it's important to admit that we don't, rather than just take whatever numbers best harmonize with our point of view. That's all I'm going to say about "death tolls."

 

[Fading Fast]

I stand ardently by my prior posts as I believe the evidence while - like most - is not perfect, is so overwhelmingly supportive of my view - and I've read both sides of the argument extensively - that "we don't really know" just doesn't do it for me. Even throwing total death counts away, the freedom to live life according to your desires, drive and ambition, to have relative freedom to speak your mind, pursue your goals and - including our Great Depression, but also including the decades on both sides of it in both countries (it was no day at the races in the '30s in the USSR) - to have a decent living standard - I'll take the US and I doubt too many would honestly choose otherwise. So take "death tolls" off the table and the argument I think we've been having about the two countries in the Golden Era and really, up to the fall of the USSR - so all history not modern politics - doesn't change for me. Death totals or not, one built walls (physical or by laws enforce by force) to keep their people from escaping and one had to stop people from willing coming in. Not hard to guess which was which.