House of Eratosthenes

Pat Buchanan scored a hole-in-one with his critique over the weekend of President Bush’s visit to Moscow. It should be required reading for anyone who tries to keep up with important historical events as well as current events, since the era & related events receiving Pat’s attention, tend to get covered up or at least tend to get viewed with a blurry lens. It’s hard to learn this stuff with a Google search, with a printed encyclopedia, and even with an old-fashioned trip to the local library:

May 8, 2005
What Exactly Is Bush Celebrating in Moscow?
By Pat Buchanan

To Americans, World War II ended with the Japanese surrender on Aug. 15, 1945, following detonation of atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9.

But for Russians, who did not enter the war on Japan until Aug. 8, 1945, “The Great Patriotic War” ended on May 9, with the surrender of Nazi Germany. Which raises a question:
What exactly is President Bush celebrating in Moscow?

The destruction of Bolshevism was always the great goal of Hitler. And the Red Army eventually bore the brunt of battle, losing 10 times as many soldiers as America and Britain together.

But were we and the Soviets ever fighting for the same things, as FDR believed? Or was Stalin’s war against Hitler but another phase of Bolshevism’s war to eradicate Christianity and the West?

Vladimir Putin, a patriot and nationalist who retains a nostalgia for the empire he served as a KGB agent, refuses to renounce the Hitler-Stalin Pact of Aug. 23, 1939. Under the secret protocols of that pact, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia and the Romanian provinces of Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina were ceded to Stalin, as was eastern Poland.

Hitler’s attack on Poland, the success of which was guaranteed by that pact, came on Sept. 1, 1939. On Sept. 17, Stalin, who had hidden in the weeds to see how Britain and France would react to Hitler’s invasion, stormed into Poland from the east and claimed his share of the martyred nation. Six years of terror for Poles began, ending in 44 years of captivity in the bowels of what Ronald Reagan bravely called an “evil empire.”

As a result of this war, Hitler’s 1,000-Year Reich lasted 12 years and Germany was destroyed as no other nation save Japan. Hamburg, Cologne, Dresden and Berlin were reduced to rubble.

Between 13 million and 15 million Germans were ethnically cleansed from the Baltic region, Poland and Czechoslovakia. Two million, mostly women and children, perished in an orgy of murder, rape and massacre that attended that greatest forced exodus in European history.

As a result of the Great Patriotic War, Finland had its Karelian Peninsula torn away by Stalin and 10 Christian countries — Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary and Yugoslavia — endured Stalinist persecution and tyranny for half a century.

Again, what, exactly, is Bush celebrating in Moscow?

Alexander Solzhenitsyn was a soldier of the Red Army in the Great Patriotic War. Let us hear from him about what a wonderful cause it was. As for Putin, into whose soul Bush has looked, his position is understandable. From the vantage point of Russian vital interests, the Hitler-Stalin pact was a brilliant coup.

Hitler was on the path to war. The war he wanted was one with the Soviet Union: to kill it, carve it up and put every Bolshevik to the sword. His war was also to be a racist war. Hitler wanted to impose Germanic rule over Slavic peoples.

Stalin, with his pact, redirected Hitler’s Panzers to the west and bought the Red Army two more precious years to prepare for Hitler’s onslaught — years Stalin used well.

How did Stalin succeed?

On March 31, 1939, the British and French — in panic after Hitler drove into Prague without resistance — handed Poland an unsolicited war guarantee they could not honor and did not intend to honor. It was a bluff. But believing in that guarantee, the brave Poles defied Hitler over Danzig, stood and fought, and were crushed, as the British and French hid inside the Maginot Line.

But because they had declared war on him, though they had no plan to attack him, Hitler, in April 1940, invaded Denmark and Norway, and in May, the Low Countries and France. In three weeks, he threw the British army off the continent at Dunkirk, and, in six weeks, crushed France.

Meanwhile, Stalin provided Hitler all the food and fuel he had requested and declared Britain and France to be the aggressors against his Nazi partner.

When Stalin’s turn came and Hitler invaded on June 22, 1941, Soviet Foreign Minister Molotov, who had negotiated the Hitler-Stalin — or Molotov-Ribbentrop — pact, said plaintively to the German ambassador, “What have we done to deserve this?”

Churchill and FDR rushed to embrace Stalin, gave him everything he demanded and more, and at Tehran and Yalta, ceded to him custody of all the peoples of Eastern Europe and of Poland, for which Britain had gone to war.

What Putin is celebrating is easy to see. But, tell me again: What exactly is our president celebrating in Moscow?

This is something I don’t understand about the way George W. Bush manages political situations, and I only understand a little tiny bit about the way America manages political situations. Bush, and his family dynasty as well, appears to place a great deal of importance on this concept of “political capital”. Like any successful politician, he believes in a “balance” of capital that must be “checked” frequently and accurately, just like the checking account balance of someone who doesn’t wish to be overdrawn. However, when the time comes to spend the political capital, it must be spent big time. Come the end of the “year”, whenever that is, the account balance will be zero no matter what; so you might as well spend as much as you can, or the difference between what was spent and what could have been spent, will be wasted.

George Bush, his father, and close friends of the family have made several comments that help support these viewpoints.

Apparently, someone in the administration feels there is sufficient political capital available to spend on celebrating V.E. Day in Russia, and if this capital is not spent it will be wasted. As I’ve said before: The lowliest Bush has held higher office, has more in the bank, and comes up in Google search results more often, than the most prestigious Freeberg — so who in the hell am I to argue. But I can certainly question, because there is an abundance of things here I do not understand.

Like: Why not simply celebrate Hitler’s removal from power?

And: What in the hell is it with FDR? Let’s re-examine my favorite pet peeve for a second.

Franklin Roosevelt locked up Japanese-Americans and stole their land, because they had Japanese blood. If Roosevelt were a Republican, we would look back on this and say “Ooh, Franklin Roosevelt did a bad thing.” it would be impossible to get a grade school education without being told about this. Any time the name “Roosevelt” was articulated on the news, there would be an obligatory closing-line about Japanese Internment (just as you can’t say “Reagan” without mentioning “Iran-Contra”, or “Nixon” without “Watergate”).

But when we look back on Japanese Internment, that was a bad thing we did. America is ashamed. This doesn’t make too much sense, because at the time our country seems to have been far from united politically on locking these people up. Roosevelt, and those closest to him, were pretty gung-ho about it, but even in his inner circles there was dissention about this move.

And we come to the infamous Yalta conference, wherein accords were reached that would result in 20 million people being exterminated in Soviet gulags. Thanks to President Bush, America is sorry about this even though Franklin Roosevelt is the guy right in the frigging picture.

America stands behind what its leaders do, doesn’t it?

Of course we do.

But it seems the answer to that question varies with the letter that goes in back of that leader’s last name. To those who think we should somehow apologize for removing Saddam Hussein from power, America didn’t do the job, George W. Bush did it, and it was, as the saying goes, “Not In Our Name”. Yet at the same time, we all seem to agree Yalta was a bad move, as was Japanese Internment — and nobody is ready, willing or able to recall that Roosevelt did these things, pretty much on his own, with lackluster-at-best grassroots support.

Which concerns me a lot. The more I read about what happened then versus what is happening now, it appears there were a lot more people opposed to Roosevelt’s policies back then, than toward Bush’s policies today.

We continue to pressure ourselves to apologize for things Roosevelt did. But an apology to the rest of the world is meaningless if our country is not determined to avoid previous mistakes. And the fact of the matter is, if a young, energetic, Democrat with a head chock full of ideas came along, just like Roosevelt did in 1932, we’d elect him in just as big a landslide, and we’d be just as negligent today in checking the new leader’s more questionable decisions, as we were back then.

I can’t stand Roosevelt. You know that old rule about not going shopping for groceries on an empty stomach? Roosevelt is a lesson that we shouldn’t annoint our heroes on an empty stomach. It’s human nature — if you’re starving and your family is starving, and someone comes along and feeds them, you’ll stand behind that guy no matter what he does. In the days to come he can screw things up royally, and you’ll still support him — after he’s dead, you’ll take the fall for everything, after the apologists have run out of things to say, still not blaming your rescuer directly for any of his various gaffes. That’s the mistake we made.

In the final analysis it all comes down to this: You can’t think straight on an empty stomach.

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Not Our Finest HourTuesday, May 10th, 2005

Not Our Finest Hour
Tuesday, May 10th, 2005