Bush’s smear of FDR gives opening to Hitler fellow traveller

I wrote a few days ago about President Bush’s speech in Latvia about FDR and Yalta:

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).

In fact the parallel is not correct. At the time of the Yalta meeting, as I indicated, Stalin’s divisions were already in possession or rapidly coming into possession of Eastern Europe, and President Roosevelt could have done nothing to stop that. It was wrong that FDR in his naïveté about Communism gave his seal of approval to the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe, but he was not responsible for it. By contrast, at Munich, Britain and France, instead of opposing Hitler’s demand that the Sudetenland be transferred to Germany, which they could have done, surrendered to it, which led six months later to Hitler’s effortless swallowing up of the rest of Czechoslovakia and six months later to his invasion of Poland.

I also wrote about Bush’s speech:

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 was bad enough that Bush did this. But I hadn’t noticed that Bush’s high-minded (and obnoxiously self-serving) moral equivalency between FDR and Hitler gave an opening to the wretched Patrick Buchanan to chime in:

If Yalta was a betrayal of small nations as immoral as the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, why do we venerate Churchill and FDR?

Once again we see how utopian liberal high-mindedness, such as Bush expressed in Latvia, by erasing the distinctions between varying degrees of good and evil, allows leftists and nihilists to deny any distinction at all between good and evil. And so we end up with Buchanan’s thesis that Hitler was not so bad and the Western democracies should have let him conquer Poland and Russia. In Buchanan’s view, this would have led to an acceptable situation in which Hitler was the “master of Europe” (not to mention much of Asia and the Mideast as well) and America the “mistress of the Western hemisphere.” (A Republic Not an Empire, p. 269.) Try to imagine the life of our society and civilization with a triumphant, demonic Nazi Germany permanently in charge of half the globe, reducing all non-Aryan peoples (except for the Nazis’ Japanese, Italian, and Arab allies) to slavery and death, with Britain reduced to a satellite of Hitler’s Europe, and with America, as Hitler’s co-sharer of the globe, having to accede to all this. That’s Patrick Buchanan’s preferred outcome of World War II.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 20, 2005 08:37 AM | Send