Russia and Germany

Roosevelt's promise and lies to American fathers and mothers not to send their sons to fight and die in foreign wars has long been forgotten by American opinion molders. Almost sixty years ago when writing about FDR and Harry Hopkins, Robert Sherwood expressed some unease when chronicling this and other questionable statements.

What disturbed Charles Beard was the behavior of the American wealthy who had so little confidence in the citizenry and so little respect for the truth that they unashamedly lied about the central issue of war or peace. The question of democracy's future perturbed Mr. Beard as he thought the actions of Mr. Roosevelt had left the populace with no effective choice. The historian interpreted the attack by Japan at Pearl Harbor as being no accident or incident of war, but a culmination of over 100 years of American diplomacy in the Far East. The Japanese attack opened a new and dangerous age for the Republic. He began to collect information and material relative to the attack on Pearl Harbor. Though an advocate of war against Germany, Beard lamented President Roosevelt's duplicity prior to Pearl Harbor.

Stalin explained the poor showing of the Red Army in fighting Finland as due to poor organization rather than the killing of most of the officer corps. Stalin told Churchill that if the Russian peasants would not fight for communism they would fight for Mother Russia. So they did. In August 1942 Stalin confessed to Winston Churchill that the struggle against the kulaks was worse than the war. At that time the German advance had not been blunted, and the tide was still with the Nazis.

One of the greatest myths about the entire war was that the Soviet Union of Joseph Stalin was surprised by the attack of Germany in June 1941. Stalin was warned by Sorge, his spy in Tokyo, and the governments of Great Britain and the United States. Josef Albert Meisinger, the Gestapo attaché of the German Embassy in Tokyo, accused Yosuke Matsuoka, the Japanese Foreign Minister, of informing Stalin of the projected German invasion to secure Stalin's acquiescence to the Japan-Russian neutrality pact. In addition the German Ambassador to Moscow, Count Friedrich von Schulenburg, tried to alert Stalin to the impending attack. Schulenburg described himself along with Hans von Seeckt, the most influential German general of World War II according to Liddell Hart as a German trained in the spirit of Otto von Bismarck who always opposed war with Russia.

The allure of Hitler and Germany has not passed. In April 1941 before Germany attacked the Soviet Union, Stalin told Japanese Foreign Minister Matsuoka that since Japan and the Soviet Union had settled their dispute Japan should straighten out the Far East while Germany and his country took care of Europe. Later all three could confront the United States. After World War II Stalin remarked to his daughter "Well, together with the Germans we would have been invincible." This sentiment must still exist in both countries.

Even more emphatic about the importance of Russia to Germany was philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. Nietzsche much preferred the feelings and intuitions of the Russian Nihilists to the English Utilitarians. The intergrowth of Slav and German races guided by the world's cleverest financiers, the Jews, was necessary for Germany to become master of the world. He wanted to jettison the right of people to representation. He demanded the representation of great interests. Germany required unconditional union with Russia with a mutual plan to exclude English schemes to gain mastery of Russia. Nietzsche, who thought Bismarck a Slav, was appalled by what he saw in the New World: "No American future!" Writing some twenty-five years before World War I started, Nietzsche had a vision that would have forestalled the catastrophic European civil wars of the twentieth century. His empire would not have met the demanding criteria of Woodrow Wilson, who engaged in pressing American national lunacies on older wiser nations in Europe after World War I. Though the resulting Teuton-Slav Empire would not have been democratic, the great slaughters of Europe would have been averted, and his empire surely would have been the strongest in the world.

Now with Putin, who speaks German, Russia and Germany may begin the partnership once so desired. Most Americans, most especially The Nation and its readers, will not welcome this, but it is preferable to American leadership with buffoons like Bush.

Richard Earley

Rutledge, PA