Posted on 04/11/2024 5:32:29 AM PDT by daniel1212
Roosevelt, argues Arnold Beichman, misread Stalin—and proved naive about communism itself....
Professor Arthur Schlesinger Jr., who has argued that the 1989 counter-revolution in Central Europe vindicates President Roosevelt’s wartime diplomacy,...
However, I argue that, from the time he took office in 1933, FDR ignored informed assessments from within the State Department of the nature of Soviet diplomacy and that, consequently, the peoples of Central Europe for some four decades paid the price....
In the early years after the Bolshevik revolution, some U.S. diplomats who had begun to specialize in Soviet affairs believed that we should have as few dealings with the USSR as possible. Loy W. Henderson, a longtime career diplomat and one of the principal architects of twentieth-century U.S. diplomacy...was concerned that Lenin’s revolutionary ambitions had rendered the USSR institutionally incapable of fulfilling the international accords it had signed, let alone of abiding by the private assurances it had given. He wrote:
It was my belief that since leaders of the Kremlin eventually were intending to contribute to the violent overthrow of all the countries with which the Soviet Union maintained relations, they considered Soviet relations with every country to be of a temporary or transitional character, subject to change at any moment...
The United States government was fully warned, almost prophetically, by its diplomats who had studied the Soviet Union and understood what recognition entailed. As late as 1953, George Kennan wrote that the United States “should never have established de jure relations with the Soviet government.
Yet FDR, with willful ignorance, embarked on a recognition policy without even seeking an enforceable quid pro quo. American recognition of the USSR, formally announced on November 16, 1933, only strengthened that totalitarian state.
What else but this same willful ignorance would account for the foolish White House statements about Stalin during World War II? What else but a frightening opportunism could account for President Roosevelt’s silence on the Katyn Forest massacre when he knew from Winston Churchill that Stalin was responsible for this atrocity? Despite Professor Schlesinger’s ex post facto apologia, one observer at Yalta, Charles Bohlen, the president’s interpreter, sharply criticized FDR:
I did not like the attitude of the President, who not only backed Stalin but seemed to enjoy the Churchill-Stalin exchanges. Roosevelt should have come to the defense of a close friend and ally, who was really being put upon by Stalin. . . . [Roosevelt’s] apparent belief that ganging up on the Russians was to be avoided at all cost was, in my mind, a basic error, stemming from Roosevelt’s lack of understanding of the Bolsheviks. . . . In his rather transparent attempt to dissociate himself from Churchill, the President was not fooling anybody and in all probability aroused the secret amusement of Stalin...
Had political leaders like President Roosevelt (who, at war’s end, held the world in his hands) and his éminence grise, presidential adviser Harry Hopkins, understood Lenin’s revolution, they would have understood Stalin’s resolution. Thus they would not have mindlessly and naively misjudged the imperialist treaty diplomacy of the Soviet Union, quondam ally of Nazi Germany...
And listen to the words of FDR himself talking about Stalin: “I think that if I give him everything that I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work for a world of democracy and peace.” Noblesse oblige, indeed!
By the time FDR realized he had failed at Yalta, it was too late to do anything about it. On March 23, 1945, nineteen days before he died, President Roosevelt confided to Anna Rosenberg, “Averell is right. We can’t do business with Stalin. He has broken every one of the promises he made at Yalta.” In other words, FDR had really believed that Stalin would keep his promises and treaty engagements.
I don’t care about the British. Roosevelt was a stupid leftist who got suckered by all the usual leftist nonsense and that’s why he was sympathetic to the Russians, because he was a fool. Go write your thesis to someone who cares.
Giant sucker, at best. Traitor, at worst. Not really any other options.
FDR was a Socialist - heart and soul.
His only concern in life was being reelected every four years.
He was not naive, and he did not blunder away anything.
Everything that FDR did at Yalta was deliberate.
Everything Dementia Joe does is also deliberate.
A country of over 300 million people and the few hundred in Congress, one in the WH, and 50 in state houses as well as all the state legislatures have to be the most stupid .01% in the country. Amazing we can't do any better.
Several dermatologists and neurologists agree with you.
FDR had a pigmented mole (or lesion) above one eye for at least three decades.
News photographs show that it began to increase in size, and then suddenly disappeared.
The mole disappeared before Yalta, but I do not recall exactly how long before Yalta.
Was the mole surgically removed?
Or, did it vanish by itself, which often happens to a primary melanoma tumor.
Several dermatologists are on the record stating that they believe FDR was killed by metastatic melanoma.
The official cause of death was cerebral hemorrhage, but several neurologists have suggested that FDR had symptoms that were consistent with a metastatic brain cancer caused by melanoma.
Problem is - all of FDR's medical records - if any - have vanished.
A mystery for the ages, I suspect.
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