Eisenhower and the Communists

Saturday, August 13th, 2011

Recent American history is plagued by dishonesty, Foseti says:

One of my guiding principles when thinking about recent American history is to assume that every prominent American from the mid-[19]20s to the mid-[19]50s found a way to make himself acceptable to the communists. If an American during this period was unable to find a way to make himself acceptable to the communists, he wouldn’t have been prominent.

Even the conservative movement spent much of this time period appeasing the communists. Strange, no? (Even stranger, this is considered an achievement by conservatives).

Vladimir sums up this idea nicely in the comments:

The question was whether the leftist dominance in the intellectual circles — and consequently in the federal bureaucracies, academia, foundations, etc. — would be permitted to lead to further radical transformation and re-engineering of the country and the whole society in the leftward direction. The answer, of course, turned out to be yes, and the political forces that mounted any serious opposition were defeated utterly and consigned to infamy by the official history.

Foseti previously provided an obscure yet important example:

To recap, Tom Lamont was the effective head of JP Morgan, during a period in which large US banks de facto controlled foreign policy. Lamont actually negotiated many of the international agreements that followed WWI on behalf of the US government (or himself, or both, or maybe they are the same thing — these relationships get somewhat fuzzy). Lamont’s son was as big a commie as they come and his son thought highly of Lamont’s politics. What is Lamont’s relationship to communism or the Soviets? We have no idea. If you dig deeper though, this Republican banker sure has a lot of friends who are commies and who are directly connected to the Soviets.

The same thing basically happens when you pick anyone prominent in this time period.

For instance, Eisenhower chose Joseph Fels Barnes to ghostwrite his memoirs:

I guess he couldn’t find any non-CPUSA members to write his book. Moldbug also adds, “Eisenhower did not keep Acheson as Secretary of State, but he kept the Acheson-Hiss State Department — and indeed collaborated quite enthusiastically in purging its enemies. This was not an accident or a mistake.” Indeed, what could be more complicit with communism than not purging the State Department post-Hiss?

(Incidentally, I really like that all mainstream still refuse to admit that anybody was actually a member of the CPUSA or worked for the Soviets. I’m reading a mainstream history book now that still always refers to Alger Hiss as an accused spy — I’m pretty sure he was at least convicted. Are these guys afraid of being sued for defamation by Hiss’s heirs?).

The Birchers believe that Ike stopped short while the USA was defeating the Germans so that the Soviets could capture more territory. I have no idea if this is true. It probably doesn’t matter anyway, since the Acheson-Hiss State Department was going to make sure the Soviets got more than their fair share. The Birchers also believe that Ike has a lot of Commie friends during his time as president of Columbia. I suspect that this is probably true, but irrelevant — how could be president of Columbia in the ’40s and not have commie friends?

At some point American Communism broke with the Russian sort, Foseti admits:

However, I think this break was less ideological than bureaucratic. One side was running the other side. At some point in the 50s, this stopped – they actually broke ties. The ideologies didn’t change but the power structure did.

Back to Vladimir for the summation:

However, the real truth was in fact even worse and scarier than these conspiracy theories. The domestic American left actually believed in pretty much all the worst ideas that a Soviet subversion program would have liked to install and promote — and they believed in these ideas, for the most part, honestly and independently. [This may not be an accident. The Soviets may have believed what they believed because they were told what to believe the these Americans]. The real error of the McCarthyists and Birchers was that in their naivete and innocence, when they saw this organized insanity emanating from the highest reaches of the government, academia, NGOs, etc., they simply couldn’t bring themselves to believe that it might be anything other than an un-American foreign body implanted by nefarious aliens and traitors. They didn’t realize that the political, intellectual, and cultural war they were fighting was a civil war, not a struggle against foreign invasion. It is clear who eventually won decisively in this struggle — and whose side, for all practical purposes, Eisenhower was on.

Commenter Doug adds a rather conventional take on Eisenhower’s “stopping short”:

What I’ve read about that is that it wasn’t that Ike wanted the Soviets to get more territory, it was that he didn’t much care if they got the glory of capturing Berlin and all of Eastern Germany, with the attendant costs in Red Army lives (which were heavy in the final months of the war), and was glad to trade that off for fewer American and British casualties. I don’t know that Ike was aware that the Soviets would keep an iron curtain Red Army control over eastern Germany and Europe for decades, but probably thought they’d want to give up the burdens of occupation as the US wanted to when it could. It was more that he (and Roosevelt) were naïve about the Soviets than supporting them versus liberal western democracies.

It must be remembered that the Soviet Union looked it’s best to the outside world in the 20s and especially the 1930s and early 40s, peaking at the end of WWII. The Soviet Union grew much faster economically in the 1930s than the depression plagued United States or rest of Europe. It was undergoing the early and relatively simple stages of copy cat industrialization, where a command economy could do relatively well. It was also not greatly overspending on defense until attacked in WWII by the Nazis.

Moldbug disagrees:

There were plenty of people reporting the truth about Bolshevism in the teens, ’20s, ’30s and ’40s. They were mocked and ignored by the conventional wisdom, which you repeat. Read communists — repeat lies.

For instance, the Germans were amazed to discover the size of the prewar Soviet military machine. The Soviet Union began the war with more tanks than the rest of the world combined. Purely for self-defence, Comrade Litvinov assures you!

FDR was in no sense “naive” about the Russians. For instance, he helped cover up Katyn. 20C history isn’t a children’s game.

Vladimir cites a passage from Caught between Roosevelt & Stalin: America’s ambassadors to Moscow, by Dennis J. Dunn, a historian from Texas State University:

The Rooseveltians, however, added a revolutionary and paradoxical twist to Wilsonianism when dealing with the Soviet Union. They subsumed the Wilsonian legacy into the pseudoprofound theory of convergence. This theory held that Soviet Russia and the United States were on convergent paths, where the United States was moving from laissez-faire capitalism to welfare state socialism and the Soviet Union was evolving from totalitarianism to social democracy.

Moldbug does not disagree:

This is right on the money. Moreover, this interpretation of the Soviet Union is the mainstream American position, at least among intellectuals, and never changes — from 1917 to 1989. Even military conflict with the Soviet is intended to coerce it into convergence, not to defeat it as Nazi Germany was defeated. Of course we see this both in Korea and Vietnam.

There’s so much more.

Comments

  1. Borepatch says:

    Man, everyone is getting in on this.

  2. Isegoria says:

    All the cool kids are discussing political phylogeny. You want to be cool, right?

  3. Aretae says:

    Ok, fine…

    The core issue (for me) is that in the ’20s, half the folks were communists, and the other half were fascists. Fundamentally, the core issue was that everyone was pro-autocracy of one form or another. And honestly, the positions were effectively indistinguishable, but for a bit of rhetoric.

    I’ll buy in, if we admit that fascism was an acceptable ideology in that time frame, and that it was effectively indistinguishable from communism.

  4. Isegoria says:

    From a libertarian perspective, yes, fascism and communism are just two forms of totalitarian tyranny with different rhetorical trappings — one claiming to struggle on behalf of a particular volk and the other on behalf of the workers of the world. From a progressive perspective though, revolutionary socialism (communism) is a necessary evil — breaking a few eggs to make an omelette — while fascism is simply evil.

Leave a Reply