Undoctrination.org

“He’s been out in these countries for decades, building schools, building roads, building infrastructure, building day-care facilities, building health-care facilities, and the people are extremely grateful. He’s made their lives better.”

Yes he has, that cuddly old teddy bear. The Democratic senator from Washington who said that about Osama Bin Laden way too soon after the September 11 attacks, Patty Murray, was, of course, re-elected. Washington is an oblast infested with progressive intelligentsia, and this is the sort of brilliance they like to hear out of their politicians. The worst possible people—the mass murderers and slaughterers of innocents—must have a warm and fuzzy side if they are an enemy of the United States, and it’s important to talented and gifted pips like Patty Murray that such a truth be understood. The causes of this Slinky-action type of thought process, where the mouth-end has gone ahead of the brain end as the whole thing tumbles down the stairs, is an ongoing point of study; but unfortunately for the safety and security of the country, the Patty Murrays of the world attain positions of power in American government all too easily. Sometimes they even become presidents.

In the spring of 1940, some 20,000 Polish military officers were pulled out of cattle cars in a remote forest west of Smolensk, Russia. Their Bolshevik guards herded them through the woods into a clearing and then opened fire. Three years later, Hitler’s army found the gruesome killing fields in Katyn Woods as they pushed into the Russian interior. Stalin’s crew had only covered their atrocity with a thin sheet of dirt, and Hitler saw a potential propaganda tool for dividing his enemies, for turning the U.S. and Great Britain against Russia. He announced his discovery and invited the world to come and see it for themselves. Stalin denied it all and blamed it on Hitler, of course, because that’s what communists do.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt did not want to believe that his friend “Uncle Joe” Stalin—and he did refer to him as Uncle Joe—would have done such a thing. Uncle Joe was a proud nationalist who only cared for the safety and security of his country; that Nazi Hitler was certainly up to his tricks. Sure, the United States was in a position where a wartime alignment with the Bolsheviks was crucial, but Stalin was a good man in FDR’s eyes, and a good friend. Warm relations with the Soviet Union would have been the order of the day war or not. FDR’s chief advisor, Harry Hopkins, had spent countless hours with Uncle Joe in Moscow, and spoke about him only in glowing terms. (A U.S. military officer who observed Hopkins in Moscow described his behavior toward Stalin as fanaticism.)  In fact, FDR was surrounded by Democratic staff who could not say enough about Stalin’s greatness or his genius as an administrator of Russia’s affairs.

Still, the predominant sentiment around the world was inclined to Stalin’s guilt in the Katyn Woods matter, so FDR was compelled to learn the truth; or, more accurately, compelled to prove everybody wrong. To those ends, he called upon the man whose judgment he could most trust. George Earl III had served in Roosevelt’s administration before becoming the governor of Pennsylvania. He joined the Navy at the outset of the war, and was now a lieutenant commander with expertise in the affairs of Eastern Europe, where he had solid contacts. Earle was the best available man to investigate the massacre, and he was duly dispatched to the task.

The evidence of Russian culpability was overwhelming. Earle returned with all the photographs, reports, and documentation he should’ve needed to convince his boss. Before meeting with the president, however, he discussed his findings with a friend, Joe Levy of the New York Times, who warned him not to expect a warm reception at the White House: “George, you do not know what you are going to get over there. Harry Hopkins has complete domination over the president, and the whole atmosphere over there is pink.”

It was an understatement. Not only did FDR argue with his old and trustworthy friend while completely ignoring the copious evidence in front of him, he effectively exiled him. Shortly after Earle told FDR that he would like permission to go public with his findings, the president reprimanded him in a letter, and then sent two FBI agents to tell him to pack his bags. Earle would be assigned to a remote Pacific outpost in American Samoa. It was positively Uncle Joe-esque.

Publicizing such disturbing information would not have done well at all—not so soon after FDR’s Christmas Eve 1943 fireside speech, in which he said about his recent meeting with Stalin in Tehran: “To use an American and somewhat ungrammatical colloquialism, I may say that ‘I got along fine’ with Marshal Stalin. He is a man who combines a tremendous, relentless determination with a stalwart good humor. I believe he is truly representative of the heart and soul of Russia; and I believe that we are going to get along very well with him and the Russian people—very well indeed.”  Good humor? You betcha. Imagine this speech on television in split-screen, with the president in his seat on one side, and on the other, images of churches being rent asunder, priests being arrested, peasants in day-long food lines, piles of emaciated Ukrainian corpses, citizens being forced into train cars, and thousands of Russian officers being executed. That would’ve been truly representative of the heart and soul of Communist Russia.

Nor would the cold reality of Stalin’s paranoid, iron-fisted cruelty, foisted upon the awareness of the American public, sit well with FDR’s friends in Hollywood who had just released a movie that depicted a Soviet socialist paradise. The president’s former ambassador to the USSR, Joseph Davies, had published a book in 1941 titled Mission to Moscow. The Bolsheviks could well have written the book themselves, as it portrayed the most notorious of Communist leaders as benign humanitarians who only wanted the best for their country and peace with the world. The president pressed the ambassador to make this fantasy into a film, a documentary, and Davies agreed. To say FDR was excited about the movie would be to downplay it. FDR met with Davies several times during its production, anxiously receiving updates and assurances. As ridiculous as the book was, the movie was even worse. It opened with Davies sitting in a comfortable armchair a la FDR, reciting these words:  “No leaders of a nation have been so misrepresented and misunderstood as those in the Soviet government during those critical years between the two world wars.” And the film went downhill from there, suggesting to viewers that the Soviet Union, under the sage leadership of Comrade Uncle Joe, was ringing in a new era of peace and tranquility for all the nations of the world.

During that same year, Chemator, an American chemical company, received a request from the Soviet Union for a quantity of uranium. Uranium was not a well-known material at the time, and the crew at Chemator did not know for what purpose the American government had been using it; they simply filled the government’s order. The vital material, of course, was being used in the Manhattan Project—the creation of the atomic bomb. But now the Soviets wanted some, which sparked the doubts of Chemator workers, who brought the order to the attention of the government—specifically, the officials of the Lend-Lease program. It was the Lend-Lease people who had instructed the company to provide the Soviets with whatever they requested. Presidential advisor and Stalin sycophant Harry Hopkins ran the program, and the order was approved. A month later, a much larger order for uranium came in from the Soviets, and again was approved. Someone was overstepping the boundaries of giving aid to a wartime ally. We don’t know if it was Hopkins himself who had approved the sales, but the technologically-backward Soviets had their bomb six years later. There exists a general view by experts in the field that this could not have happened without American help.

FDR, immediately after taking office, did something the conservative administrations of the 1920s refused to do: give diplomatic recognition to the Soviet government, whereupon he began referring to Stalin as “His Excellency,” a title not commonly bestowed upon despots. He also surrounded himself with pro-Soviet staffers and advisors. One exception was William Bullitt, who was the president’s first ambassador to Moscow from 1933 to 1936. Bullitt had traveled to the Soviet Union shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution in the 1920s, and had been duped by his hosts into believing in a Communist paradise. But Bullitt’s eyes were opened to Soviet treachery and brutality during the ensuing years, and in 1941, he did his best to warn FDR about whom he was dealing with. He exhorted his former boss that the Communists had infiltrated American society and were closer to the president than he knew. FDR’s response? “Bill, I don’t doubt your facts or the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry [Hopkins, not Truman] says he’s not and that he doesn’t want anything but security for his country, and I think that if I give him everything I possibly can and ask nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of democracy and peace.” Bullitt then enjoined the president that Stalin had no respect for weakness or kind overtures. He said that Stalin was “a Caucasian bandit whose only thought when he got something for nothing was that the other fellow was an ass.”

FDR’s insistence that Uncle Joe was a genuine and sincere man remained unchanged until the last moments of his life. His unfortunate gullibility was put on display many times in many ways. Although liberal historians will argue it, he handed Poland and Eastern Europe over to Soviet tyranny at Yalta, trusting the upstanding Stalin to keep his communist word. Returning from Yalta, FDR pondered in a cabinet meeting that he had sensed “something else” about Stalin in addition his “elegance” and “magnificence.” He surmised it had been the Marshal’s early training for the priesthood that had taught him about the “way in which a Christian gentleman should behave.” The vicious atheist Stalin behaved like a Christian gentleman. Uh, yeah, in the eyes of a deluded fool.

FDR was no communist, probably; but he was a liberal—a liberal responsible for the greatest expansion of the federal government since its formation to that time. Perhaps he saw Stalin and his “successful” communist programs as paving the way for a socialist America. Who knows; but the precedent and the terrible truth were right in front of his face—pointed out to him even—and he refused to accept it. An immeasurable price in terms of lives and treasure would have to be paid for the great president’s disregard of reality.

The parallels between FDR with his blind eye toward communism, and today’s prominent liberal establishment with their denials of an Islamic threat, are uncanny. The terrible truth is right in front of their faces, yet they defend that supremacist ideology even as its innocent victims are laid to rest. The words of William Bullitt bear repeating: Their only thought when they get something for nothing is what an ass the other fellow is. Progressives don’t understand that—and I mean not at all—and they continue to “reach out,” to “build bridges,” to “engage in dialogue”—to bear their naked, stretched necks. The psychology of liberalism, the ill-conceived motivations and the snotty dismissal of historical probability, is a matter of study and debate still; but it is a study that should continue until it can be resolved (read: cured.) “Please come kill me” is a doctrine we can tolerate, but “Please come kill us all” is something else entirely. Meanwhile, the rest of us go hoarse invoking Santayana.