Lies America Told You – How the NYTimes’, on October 11, 1938, shattered the U.S. View of Geo-Politics.
Many Americans believe that Trump was soft on Russia. Biden has expressed an interest in resuming a hardline against Russia. (Although Biden has expressed belligerence toward Russia, he has been quite passive in regard to the Taliban and the progeny of Osama Bin Ladin) Biden’s view of Russia is part and parcel of the “conventional wisdom.”
The conventional wisdom are ideas which are commonly accepted, without question, which are often wrong (John Kenneth Galbraith, “The Affluent Society,” 1957). It’s easy for an idea to become part of the canon that is the conventional wisdom. One grey-haired, gray-flannel, old fart of an eminence in the media, or a greedy, grubby politician who is euphemistically termed a “statesman,” makes an observation, several dozen additional old farts and distinguished, wholly unoriginal automatons in the press or politics repeat the observation, and the observation is accepted as gospel truth. Here are three examples of the conventional wisdom, or ideas that are commonly accepted as gospel truth which are actually wrong:
A) The United States military destroyed Nazi Germany. Actually, the USSR by far did the lion’s share of the fighting, and for most of the war the US sat on the sidelines in the battle against Germany. For example, in the autumn of 1943, the ratio of German troops on the Eastern front, facing the Soviets, to German troops fighting the US and the Brits in Italy, was 8 to 1, i.e., for every German fighting the Western allies, eight Germans were fighting Moscow. (This is universally accepted in Europe and Israel, but the American people live in the benighted bliss that America did it all and that America is perfect.)
B) Poverty has been wholly or almost wholly eradicated in the United States. Until CBS’s broadcast of “The Harvest in Shame” in 1959 or 1960, and the publication of Michael Harrington’s “The Other America,” the media conveyed the idiotic idea that almost all of America lived like the cutesy idiots on situation comedies like “Leave it to Beaver” and “The Donna Reed Show.”
C) It will be a cinch to defeat the communists in South Vietnam. I need not elaborate with respect to this monumental misrepresentation.
The conventional wisdom has corrupted almost everything Americans believe about the Soviet Union. With regard to World War Two, most Americans believe that Stalin’s opposition to Hitler was insincere or even bogus (until, of course, Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union and his extermination of 20 million people living in the Soviet Union). The Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact of August 1939 is the centerpiece of their argument that Russia wasn’t truly interested in combatting Hitler.
In this pact, Russia and Germany agreed not to make war on each other. This was the match that started world war two. However, the great majority of Americans don’t know what induced Stalin to agree to this. The great majority of Americans are deaf, dumb and blind to European history. Of course, the American State does not make it illegal to teach history. Of course, schools, and the media, if it deigned to, could discuss what really took place in the past.
By opting not to discuss the past, they bury the ghosts of the past. In Russia, the state tried to bury the legacy of Trotsky. In this country the media and the schools buried most of the history of the 30’s and the 40’s. The collective American memory has been effectively lobotomized.
We suffer from self-censorship, i.e., the media and academia, in the absence of compulsion from the State, prettifies, cleanses and sanitizes the truth, eradicating any blemishes which might mar the sunny, lying countenance that America shines on her people.
Because the United States does not prohibit the publication of historical facts, one can learn almost anything, but one must know how to search.
I have recently become very, very much in love with reading “primary sources.” These are accounts about 1938 that were written in 1938, not in 1999 after the accumulation of several decades of cowardly obfuscations have enshrouded the truth in a tomb of lies.
Do what I do if you want to really learn about the Past: Go to the Index of the New York Times and put in the terms Stalin, Chamberlain, Pilsudski etc., set the date range from 1929 to 1946 and you will realize that what you have heard for most of your life is a goddamn lie. You will expand your minds as dramatically as the Beatles expanded their minds with LSD and scaled new heights of the aural imagination in Rubber Soul. Revolver and Sargeant Pepper. (Perhaps this analogy is misleading. While an examination of primary sources will rock your consciousness, there is nothing illogical or whimsical about it as in the case of some great music.)
Some of my readers might object to my examination of ancient articles from the Times. Some will say the Times is too liberal, others will say that the Times is too conservative. Actually, the New York Times is two newspapers in one. In consists of its editorial and Op ed pages, but it also consists of its actual news reporting. Its editorial and op ed pages are the boring acme of sclerotic bourgeois liberalism. However, its news reporting is exquisite. It is bereft of pollical blinders, covers a panoply of stories from all over the world, and its frequent publication of stories that embarrass both the right and the left demonstrates its objectivity. (Ann Coulter, the brainy, intellectual witch of the far right, says that although she hates the editorials of the Times, she avidly reads the hard news reporting.) The Times’ editorial pages try to bury the truth of the 30’s and 40’s. But the truth can be uncovered if one reads the dispatches from around the globe which were written in the bad old days when the dye was cast.
Now, without further ado: What the New York Times said on October 11, 1938 and how that shatters the American conventional wisdom:
The New York Times said, in an article by Walter Duranty, that Russia, which was the nemesis of Nazi Germany, might enter into a pact with Nazi Germany. This article (It appeared on page 14, column 4 of the edition of October 11, 1938) said that the West had made so many concessions to Hitler that one must conclude that Neville Chamberlain, the conservative prime minister of England, had given the go ahead to Hitler to send his panzers East. The New York Times said that Russia was utterly isolated. (Russia was prepared to send troops to fight Germany to stop the obliteration of Czechoslovakia, but England wasn’t talking to Russia) The aforesaid article said that Russia might try to beat the West at playing the game of appeasement. In short, The New York Times predicted the Nazi Soviet non-aggression pact almost one year before it can into existence. (Incidentally, this non-aggression pact, gave Russia the opportunity to shore-up its defenses before its inevitable clash with Germany as Russia took Baltic states, which were swarming with fascists, and Germany agreed to let Russia try to conquer Finland, which had been aligned with Germany. Indeed, Lillian Hellman writes that when she visited Helsinki, Nazism was everywhere to be seen, and the Horst Wessel song, a Nazis anthem, was played incessantly)
After World War Two, some pro soviet scholars argued that Stalin entered his Pact with Hitler to pre-empt the West’s game of appeasement, but this article, from 1938, shows that Chamberlain’s pro Hitler policies were so blatant that people opined, even then, that Russia would make a deal with Hitler to beat Chamberlain at his rotten game.
Of course, most Americans, having had a pitiful education, don’t know much about Germany’s numerous lunges to the East, before World War Two, which Chamberlain acquiesced to and which suggested that the West wanted Hitler to strike in the East to demolish Marxism. Americans only knew of Chamberlain’s political malpractice at Munich, and they wrongly ascribe it to his “failure of nerve.” Americans, knowing very little, believed that since Chamberlain twirled umbrellas, and probably drank tea with his pinkie extended, he was a woos and that this explained Munich. In fact, Chamberlain was an imperialistic son of a bitch insofar as India or the rights of the Yishuv, the Jewish community in embryonic Israel, were concerned. He made concessions to Hitler not because he was a softie but because he wanted Hitler to destroy the nightmare of the English aristocracy: Bolshevism.
In any event, the American people are mostly wholly unaware of these examples of German aggressive designs on the East, before world war two, which Britain acceded to:
a) Most Americans, who major in football and cheerleading, don’t know that shortly after Hitler took over the Sudetenland, the balance of Czechoslovakia was carved up by Germany with a little help from Poland and Hungary. (The behavior of Poland and Hungary is part of another story, regarding the states betwixt Germany and Russia, which America lauds as .lands of innocents toiling under the Soviet yoke but which were in fact monstrously reactionary, anti-Semitic, and often accomplices of Hitler. Ah, but if I were to discuss this in detail, this essay would be too long and would irritate my American readership. )
b) Most Americans, who dress like 6 year olds at the age of 60, don’t know that Hitler made a lunge to the East when he took over Memel
c) Most Americans, who rush through a tour of the Louvre because they can’t wait to stuff their ugly mugs with onion soup au gratin which is often just as excellent in America, don’t know that Germany’s ravenous Eastern glare bore down on Danzig and the Polish Corridor like sunlight streaming through a magnifying glass.
d) Most Americans, who sometimes spend their junior year of college in a European country without bothering to learn the language of that country, don’t know that France and Britain allowed Germany to muscle into Rumania, The New York Times, October 24, 1938, Page 7, column 3
e) Most Americans, who vote for politicians because they are entertaining (Trump) or good-looking (John and Bobby Kennedy) and who are unfamiliar with the issues, don’t know that Britain and France let Germany seize the Saarland.
f) Most Americans don’t know that George Kennan, sometimes called the Father of America’s anti Soviet containment doctrine, wrote in 1940 that Russia was being terribly unfair to Germany because it tried to stop Germany’s growing dominance in Rumania (Rumania eventually became an ally of Nazi Germany, its troops joined Germany in invading Russia and the Rumanian government put an ad in the New York Times boasting that it would not kill Rumania’s Jews if the U.S. would buy its Jewish captives at the price of one hundred dollars a head.)
g) While Germany was building concentration and death camps in newly occupied Poland, American conservatives were busy attacking Russia for trying to conquer Finland, which, as I said a few paragraphs previously, had been aligned with Germany.
Because most Americans are as innocent of the world as deer in their favorite Walt Disney movie, their minds are pliable mush that Biden and company can mold into any shape he sees fit. He can tell us that Russia is the eternal big bad bear, and in his infantile telling, Biden is transmogrified into the Good Witch of the North in “The Wizard of Oz.” Of course, the media is characteristically mum about the salient facts which might animate apparent Russian hostility:
a) In the past three decades, Nato has advanced about 1000 miles to the East. Nato troops used to stand at the border between East and West Germany. However, today East Germany is part of Germany, which is of course part of Nato, and Poland and the Baltic States are part of Nato. The armies of the West are almost at the gates of Leningrad (St. Petersberg). Any patriotic Russian should be incensed or at the very least alarmed. Nato is a Western alliance that was formed in opposition to Russia, and it has grown with the virulence of a cancer. From Barbarossa to the Pope’s Livonian knights, to the anti-Russian wrath of Queen Elizabeth the First, to Napolean, to Disraeli’s machinations at the Berlin Conference of 1880, to the monumental crimes of Nazi Germany, effectively a nation of millions of Adolf Hitlers, the West has been making war on Russia.
b) Americans were told, by their lying press, that Russia’s recent seizure of the Crimea was another example of Russian aggression. Most Americans don’t know that the Crimea is mostly Russian, that the Russians of Crimea wanted to remain in Russia, and that the Crimea was never really part of the Ukraine. In 1954, when the Ukraine was part of the Soviet Union, Russia gifted the Ukraine with the Crimea. However, it never really ceased to be a part of Russia because Russia dominated the Soviet Union which dominated the Ukraine. With the break-up of the Soviet Union, FAIRNESS AND EQUITY DEMANDED THAT THE CRIMEA BE RETURNED TO RUSSIA.
c) Americans were told that Russia is absolutely awful because the Eastern Urkaine is swarming with pro-Russian fighters. However, most Americans don’t know that the Eastern Ukraine and the Western Ukraine have as much in common as England and Ireland. The Eastern Ukraine is mostly Eastern Orthodox, the Western Ukraine is Roman Catholic, and the religious rift is enormous. Until only two or three centuries ago, the Vatican held, as slaves, members of the Greek Orthodox, sometimes called the Eastern Orthodox, Church. In World War Two, Catholic Croatian fascists held Serbian members of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and Jews, in the Jasenovac Concentration Camp. (See the work of the Jasenovac Research Institute for more information) The Western Ukraine often sided with Hitler while the Eastern Ukraine, finding greater kinship with Russia, recoiled at Western Ukraine’s German affiliations.
My Rebuttal of Anticipated Attacks regarding my discussion of Walter Duranty’s article:
In all fairness, I should note that in the Fifties, Walter Duranty was ridiculed by his fellow Americans for being an alleged lacky of the Soviet Union. However, almost all progressives were similarly slandered. In the 1950’s, defenders of the New Pax Americana tarred progressives with the label “premature anti-fascist.” Time magazine and the hoary commentators who followed its edicts said that people who opposed Nazism from the start were suspect and were probably opposing Hitler because they were communists. Scads of people lost their jobs or went to prison simply because they had the sense to join with other anti-fascists in trying to stop Hitler. Lillian Hellman, Dashiell Hammett’s longtime lover, said that even though Hammet fought in the US armed forces in the Pacific Theatre – and Hammet was a successful writer, in his 40’s, who did not have to serve -- Hammet was jailed for not telling the HUAC that his friends and associates were evil, duplicitous reds. I strongly recommend Hellman’s riveting account of this period in “Scoundrel Time.” Hellman uttered one of the greatest lines at the Mc Carthy hearings, claiming, “I won’t cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”
As I said, Walter Duranty was derided for being a premature anti-fascist. Quite frankly, I don’t think it was ever too soon to oppose fascism and Nazism.