Bush, FDR, and the Hitler-Stalin pact

President Bush said in his speech in Latvia on May 5:

The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The parallel between Yalta and Munich is arguably correct, since Chamberlain at Munich accepted Hitler’s takeover of the Sudetenland, and Roosevelt at Yalta accepted Stalin’s domination of Eastern Europe (though it’s not at all clear that FDR by that point had any realistic choice in the matter). However, Bush’s parallel between Yalta and the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact is problematic. The Molotov-Ribbentrop pact didn’t simply involve one power giving the go-ahead to another power to occupy some country; it involved the two powers’ mutual carving up of that country. Stalin said Hitler could take western Poland, and Hitler said Stalin could take eastern Poland. It was an agreement between two totalitarian regimes to invade, annex, and destroy a third country. No matter how foolish, benighted, and horrible in its results Roosevelt’s deal with Stalin may have been, for Bush to draw a moral equivalence between it and the Hitler-Stalin pact is to portray America as the moral equivalent of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia. It is utterly wrong and an insult to our country. Bush, of course, is indifferent to such piddling details of historical truth. And, as he has repeatedly shown, he couldn’t care less about showing a decent respect for his own country and for former U.S. presidents when he is speaking as U.S. president in a foreign land. No. The main thing for Bush is to place himself, the avatar of pure democracy, on a moral plane above the whole world, and particularly above everyone and everything in the American past.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 15, 2005 05:44 PM | Send