SOMETIMES THE NICEST GUYS ARE BOMBED AND BLITZED TO HELL
SOMETIMES THE NICEST GUYS ARE BOMBED AND BLITZED TO HELL
(American generosity to Germany and Japan was succeeded by German and Japanese aggression against America, and overtures of friendship from the Vietnamese Communists to America were succeeded by American barbarism against the Vietnamese)
By
David Gottfried
Most Americans are blind to “Real Politik.” Some Americans – both on the left and on the Right – hold that a generosity of spirt along with hefty doses of goodwill will secure friendship and peace with our adversaries. They say that we should just be “nice.” I will demonstrate that in the years preceding World War Two our most villainous foes, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, received heaps of love and money and succor from the United States. Lastly, I will demonstrate how the United States unleashed near genocidal terror against the Vietnamese even though the Vietnamese communists, in the years preceding the war, made every effort to be our friends.
1) We were very nice to Japan before World War Two:
a) Theodore Roosevelt, in the course of adjudicating an end to the Russo-Japanese War, decided that Japan would be given dominion over Korea – and the Japanese were ruthless occupiers of Korea. And some American morons wonder why North Koreans hate us.
b) At Versailles, the West determined that Germany’s colonies in China would be given to Japan. And from their foothold in China, the Japanese slaughtered countless Chinese. And some American morons wonder why the Chinese Communists hate the West.
c) The British Military helped train and modernize the Japanese Navy.
And Japan attacked both Britain and the United States.
Khrushchev, the Soviet Leader through much of the 1950’s and 1960’s, said, in his memoirs, that Japanese behavior toward the United States was “disgusting.”
2) We were very nice to Germany before World War Two:
It is often argued that Versailles was extremely punitive toward the Germans, but not long after it was signed, and until the eve of World War Two, the West was extremely solicitous of the Germans.
a) In the Locarno agreement of the 1920’s, Western powers agreed that Germany was free to change her Eastern boundaries and to seize territories controlled by Slavic nations in the East. (And you wonder why Russia is so suspicious of us.)
b) America devised the Dawes plan of 1924 or 1925 which resolved Germany’s bout with hyper-inflation on terms very favorable to Germany. Because the existent Deutschmark had become worthless, a new Mark was established. (The Deutschmark had been severely undermined because Germany printed Marks, with extreme abandon, to make reparations payments to Britain and France.) To enable Germany to pay its reparations payments to England and France, America gave Germany the money to make those payments.
c) And then of course a series of concessions were made to Germany after Hitler ascended to power including
i) allowing Germany to remilitarize the west bank of the Rhine,
ii) allowing Germany to breach all agreements limiting the size of her armies,
iii) permitting Germany’s seizure of
a) the Saarland and then
b) Austria, and then
c) the Sudetenland and then
d) Bohemia-Moravia and then
e) Memel.
Indeed, Walter Duranty wrote in the New York Times on Oct 11, 1938 that Stalin might want to enter into a deal with Hitler simply to pre-empt what seemed to be a Western decision to let Germany gobble up everything to her East
I am not counseling that we harass, malign and be warlike toward other nations. I am saying that we must have a foreign policy that incorporates some gray matter. Princes and other aristocrats played chess for centuries to instill the sort of artifice, subterfuge and gracefulness which makes for a winning foreign policy. We need to start playing chess in geo-politics.
3) The Vietnamese Communists tried to forge a rapport with the United States, and we answered with bombs.
The French colonized Indochina. (Vietnam is a part of Indochina) The Vietnamese did not want to be ruled by the haughty French. They fought for their independence.
Soon after World War Two began, France collapsed. The Japanese took over the French colonies in Indochina. The Vietnamese Communists fought the Japanese. The Vietnamese Communists were our allies in fighting the Japanese.
After Japan fell, the Vietnamese communists declared that they were a sovereign state. In announcing statehood, they quoted word for word portions of the founding documents of the United States. In 1947 and 1948, the Ho Chi Minh, the leader of the Vietnamese Communists, sent 8 letters to President Harry Truman expressing his interest in friendship and avowing that he wanted Independence for Vietnam just as America had wanted independence from Britain.
President Harry Truman did not respond to his letters, gave military aid to support the French campaign to conquer Vietnam, and his successor’s Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, offered the French two atom bombs when the French wanted to quit after their defeat at Diem Bien Phu in 1954. Also, the US stopped the elections scheduled for 1956 because our polls showed the communists would win, gave more and more aid to the Government of South Vietnam which held up to 80,000 political prisoner in tiger cages, made large swaths of Vietnam free fire zones where we killed anything that moved, and, according to Robert Kennedy in November 1967, killed 1000 innocent civilians a week (And he would be apt to underestimate the carnage, even though he was against the war, because he was, after all, very much a part of the American foreign policy establishment).