Herbert Hoover: As Bad to Ally with Stalin and Churchill Against Hitler as to Ally with Hitler Against Stalin and Churchill: Hoisted from the Archives from 2018
Herbert Hoover: As Bad to Ally with Stalin and Churchill Against Hitler as to Ally with Hitler Against Stalin and Churchill https://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/08/herbert-hoover-as-bad-to-ally-with-stalin-and-churchill-against-hitler-as-to-ally-with-hitler-against-stalin-and-churchill.html: I was reading Herbert Hoover (1964): Freedom Betrayed https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0817912363 on the plane, and it is really clear to me why nobody wanted Hoover to publish it during his lifetime and why his heirs buried it for half a century. I will tell you what I think. I think Hoover does not quite dare say:
When Hitler attacked Stalin in June 1941, the U.S. should have told Britain to cool it—embargoed Britain until, and then offered it security guarantees when, it made peace with Germany. And then the U.S. should have supported Hitler in his war on Communism, by far the worst of the three totalitarianism of Communism, Naziism, and New Dealism. Afterwards, Hitler and his successors would have had their hands full ruling their Eurasian empire, and Naziism would have normalized itself, and Communism would be gone. Too bad about Nazi rule over the French, Belgians, Dutch, Danes, and Norwegians, but that would have been a price well worth paying...
He does not quite dare say it, but he is thinking it. It is Jeanne Kirkpatrick's: "we should always and everywhere support authoritarian regimes and movements against communist regimes and movements" turned up to 11.
And he tiptoes way way way up to it and almost gets there...
Herbert Hoover:
When American alliance with Russia in the Second World War loomed up at the time of Hitler’s attack upon Stalin, I stated in a nation-wide address on June 29, 1941: "Now we find ourselves promising aid to Stalin and his militant Communist conspiracy against the whole democratic ideals of the world.... It makes the whole argument of our joining the war to bring the four freedoms to mankind a gargantuan jest.... If we go further and join the war and we win, then we have won for Stalin the grip of Communism on Russia and more opportunity for it to extend in the world.... Statesmanship demands that the United States stand aside in watchful waiting, armed to the teeth, while these men exhaust themselves. Then the most powerful and potent nation in the world can talk to mankind with a voice that will be heard. If we get involved in this struggle we, too, will be exhausted and feeble. To align American ideals alongside Stalin will be as great a violation of everything American as to align ourselves with Hitler...
George Nash on Herbert Hoover on WWII:
As it happened, Hoover had been planning another major address on the war to the American people. He now saw an opportunity to change the course of world history. To his confidant John C. O’Laughlin he wrote on June 26[, 1941]:
I am convinced Germany will defeat Russia and dispose of that infecting center of Communism. And I am convinced that at the end of the campaign, which I think will move rapidly, that Hitler will propose terms to the British that they will accept. I am hoping for this speech only that it may help stay our hands from the trigger until these events arrive...
It was a remarkable disclosure. If Hoover’s geopolitical scenario played out as he expected, Nazi Germany would soon be the unchallenged master of continental Europe, Great Britain would be forced into a modus vivendi, and the war would end....
Three nights later, Hoover spoke to the American people on national radio. For the rest of his days, he considered this speech the most important one of his life.... He exhorted his fellow citizens not to make an alliance with the Soviet Union—“one of the bloodiest tyrannies and terrors ever erected in history.” Why should we hasten to the rescue of Stalin’s “militant Communist conspiracy against the whole democratic ideals of the world”?
To collaborate now with the Soviets would make “the whole argument of our joining the war to bring the four freedoms to mankind a gargantuan jest.... Joining in a war alongside Stalin to impose freedom is a travesty.”... ”Evil ideas contain the germs of their own defeat,” he asserted. Hitler might prove victorious on the European continent, but he would then be saddled with tens of millions of rebellious subjects filled with “undying hate.”
When peace came, Hoover prophesied, the Nazi system would “begin to go to pieces.” The once-free, conquered nationalities of Europe would never accept “a new order based on slavery.... Conquest always dies of indigestion.” No longer was the world conflict an unambiguous struggle “between tyranny and freedom,” Hoover declared in August. The alliance of the British with the Russians against Germany had destroyed “that illusion.”...
Be patient, he urged Americans in mid-September; Hitler was “on his way to be crushed by the vicious forces within his own regime.” The danger of “ultimate totalitarian success” was “very much less than even ten weeks ago.” The “fratricidal war” between Hitler and Stalin was weakening both of them every day.... What will happen, he asked, “to the millions of enslaved people of Russia and to all Europe and to our own freedoms if we shall send our sons to win this war for Communism?”...
Memo to Self: Timothy Walch & Dwight M. Miller, eds.: Herbert Hoover and Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Documentary History (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998), 209–11.
Memo to Self: All of Hoover's mentions of "Jews" in Freedom Betrayed:
The Nazi regime, with its destruction of personal liberty, its materialistic and militaristic aspects, and its persecution of the Jews, has been fully described elsewhere...
The Liberty Magazine article was an analysis of the rising dangerous ideologies of Hitler and Stalin, saying in part:... Most of us intensely dislike every color of Nazism, Fascism, Socialism, and Communism. They are the negation of every ideal that we hold. They are the suppression of all liberty. In Germany the persecution of the Jews... in Russia the wholesale executions, the destruction of... worship... all of them outrage our every sense of justice...
At this moment in history, Hitler could count his new acquisitions as some 15,000,000 people from Poland, including 5,000,000 Jews in Poland and Lithuania. But Stalin’s gains were greater. He had annexed six nations totaling about 35,000,000 people, who ultimately were reduced from freedom to Communism...
Early in the war, the Jewish community in the United States had started a renewed and determined drive to force Britain to reverse her policies of restricted immigration of Jews to Palestine. In the Congress majorities of the Foreign Relations Committee of the House were supporting pleas for a Jewish homeland...
About 250,000 Jews had been buried in the Ghetto by artillery and bombs...
We noted that the population of Poland was diminished by the war, and as a result of Tehran and Yalta, from about 35,000,000 to 23,000,000. This 12,000,000 decrease was partly due to the Russian annexation of East Poland; partly to the death in battle and air raids and the execution of about 3,000,000 Jews by the Germans; and the transport of 1,400,000 Poles by the Russians to slave camps in Siberia—few of whom ever returned. We were able to confirm that some 6,000,000 Poles were expelled from the Russian-annexed area and some 6,000,000 Germans were driven from the Polish-annexed German area. We found from the press reports and many eye witnesses that both of these human migrations were pitiable beyond any power to describe...
Note to Self: Hoover on Mussolini:
In 1938 Benito Mussolini, acknowledged founder of Fascism, was at the peak of his dictatorial glory. He had, beginning in 1922, introduced great reforms into Italy. He had reorganized the government and the army; established integrity in public officials and efficiency in the railways and public utilities; encouraged industry and agriculture. Because of these measures Italy had gained in prosperity.
Due to failures in the parliamentary form of government, Mussolini’s system had been adopted by a large part of Europe, including Germany. Few Americans observed that the economic part of Fascism was simply the adoption of the measures applied in the United States, Britain and other democracies when combatants in the First World War. In May 1936 Italy had seized Ethiopia, and as a result economic sanctions had been imposed on her by the League of Nations, but they were short-lived.
Mussolini was in 1938 making common cause with Hitler against Communism. He was a founding partner of the Anti-Comintern Pact, and jointly, he and Hitler had successfully backed General Francisco Franco in the defeat of the Russian-supported Communist revolution in Spain...
Note to Self: Hoover on the Economic Consequences of the New Deal:
No one will today doubt the enmity of many of Mr. Roosevelt’s associates to free enterprise.... The introduction of this power or compulsion economy into free enterprise is not always direct. It is often indirect through monetary and credit policies and spending. It is in part by beguilement of subsidies with public money.... My constant curiosity is whether it leads to complete Fascism, or to complete Socialism, or just plain economic nonsense.
In any event these children of men have erected a new Tower of Babel which they also camouflaged under the European term, Planned Economy. The true name is Coerced Economy. The headlines tell us of its bricks and mortar—Government Devalues Currency; Government Manages Currency; Government Manages Credit; Government Deficits; Government Debt Double Great War; Government Forced Monopolies in the N.R.A.; Government Dictation to Business, to Labor, to Farmers; Government Competes in Business with Citizens; Government Fixes Prices; Government Restricts Production; Government Pump Priming; Government Controls Elections; Abundant Life; Objectives.
It mixes all the stimulating drinks on the bartender’s shelf. This does not make for sobriety. You will find every one of these powers and these economic ideas somewhere along the Berlin-Rome-Moscow axis. And to force these ideas on America you have seen attempts to control our Courts, to control our Congress, to control our elections, to control our public opinion with mass propaganda and slogans. All that at least has a faint odor of totalitarian government…
#fascism #hoistedfromteharchives #moralresponsibility #orangehairedbaboons #politicaleconomy #2020-05-31
