Back in the 1960’s I was in high school. I used a litmus test on history books to see if they could be trusted. Most of the books gave cover to Stalin by failing to mention that he and Hitler were allies during the start of WWII.
Another litmus test was to see if they mentioned temporal relationship between Stalin’s death and the conclusion of hostilities in the Korean War. The left was willing to concede that Mao was propping up the North Koreans, but they gave a pass to Stalin.
My father said that Americans were quite aware that Stalin had been allied with Hitler at the beginning of the war. Hitler turned on Stalin, or the Axis would have continued.
When the U.S. decided to send supplies to the Russians under the lend-lease program, the government actually engaged in outright propaganda to sell Stalin as a grandfatherly type of figure in order to justify the alignment. This propaganda program fit well with the leftist advisors to FDR, such as Alger Hiss, who were actually Soviet agents at the time.
When Senator Joe McCarthy uncovered Soviet spies embedded in the U.S. government, he had to overcome the previous propaganda and the exuberance of having the Soviets as “allies” at the close of the war.
The movie Patton was one of the few to faithfully highlight the uneasy alliance between the west and the Soviets.
Stalin was never mentioned as a belligerent on the MASH television series. The only time Stalin was mentioned was to belittle Frank, the straw man weak conservative.
The reality was that China was not a power house and supplied only part of the support needed by the North. American troops faced a lot of supplies from the WWII lend-lease program which was handed over to the North Koreans by the Russians.
When Stalin died the Russian people insisted that more attention be given to food for Russians and less support for the war effort. Thus, Stalin died in March 1953. The treaty ending hostilities was signed in July of 1953.
It was also the reason Whitaker Chambers,a communist here in the U.S.,turned against the Communists.
It’s in his book,”Witness”
Great post - and spot on!
Ah, a kindred soul. I am an amateur McCarthy historian, and I think the slandering of him is one of the heinous things the left has done to this country. McCarthy should be revered as a hero in this country, before him, communist affiliation had been viewed as a peccadillo, or dalliance by people, slightly odd, but not necessarily a deal breaker for judging a person. It was not uncommon for someone in college in those days to have poked around with Communism.
This was aided by leftist apologists, cheerleaders, and propagandists that infested the New Dealers through the 1930’s leading up to WWII that made the Soviet Union appear to be things it wasn’t...efficient, humane, and respectable.
During and after McCarthy, it became a dirty secret with people, and openly regarded as disreputable. That is something good that came out of his public scourging.
But back to this subject...I have always felt that it should have been insanely apparent to anyone watching (as it clearly was to people like Whittaker Chambers) the nature of Communism and the nature of Americans who had Communist sympathies, when the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact was signed.
There were non-interventionalists (and I have a modicum of respect for many people at that time who were opposed to getting involved in the war unless we had to) who were protesting outside the White House and yelling with nearly insane religious fervor from any pulpit they could reach that we should stay out of the war and not get involved in it.
Then, when Germany attacked the Soviet Union in June 1941...these EXACT SAME people, overnight, and with no shame at all, completely and 180 degrees reversed their interventionalist stance and became the people screaming the loudest to get involved in the war.
It was enough to make your head spin with dizziness. No shame. No explanations. They went to bed being fervently against joining the war on June 21st, and woke up on June 22nd feverishly FOR joining the war.
That tells you volumes right there.
And you are right...but I understand the concept of war making strange bedfellows. Churchill had an unusually difficult transition to make in this regard, and I respect him even more for being able to suck it up and make that horrible alliance with the Soviet Communists, being the staunch anti-Bolshevist that he was leading up to that.
A very odd time in history, indeed.