Saturday, July 15, 2017
Simple truth
When I first started rethinking the Cold War in 2010 I didn't have many facts. I was going by a 1944 book that looked at Eastern Europe objectively. As always my guesses were insufficiently paranoid... to put it EXTREMELY mildly.
A newly available radio series offers a possible answer. War Telescope, now available at OtrCat.com, was a series of 15-minute programs on NBC, aired weekly through the war years, hosted by Elmer Peterson and Morgan Beatty. All of the segments provide a mix of insight into wartime life and speculation about the coming peace. Many of these insights have been lost in current thinking. "A European View of the War", aired 2/26/44, may contain the answer to the Stalin puzzle. It focuses on the diplomatic community in Europe, who considered America to be an unstable and unreliable ally. [Robert Parker's 1944 book echoes these concerns.] Our military had saved Europe's ass in WW1 and WW2, but before and between the wars our government had failed to form an intelligent and coherent foreign policy. Would we hold steady after this war, helping the other Allies to conclusively and decisively punish Germany? Or would our financiers and industrialists fall back to their natural preference for Germany, carrying Congress with them as they had done in the 1930s? From this angle it's easy to see why Stalin wanted to have a firm hand on American policy, wanted to insure that the United Nations Organization served Russia more than America. From this angle, letting America return to normal meant letting Germany return to power. It wasn't mainly about Communism; it was mainly about Russian and European national interest.Now that I've seen more facts, the explanation is simpler. America and Germany are ALWAYS trying to obliterate Russia. Sometimes we take turns, sometimes we work together. Stalin was simply and fully correct.
Labels: switchover
¶ 12:39 AM
