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This year is the 75th anniversary of the end of World War Two. One of
the biggest frauds of the final stage of that war was the meeting at
Yalta of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin, British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill, and President Franklin Roosevelt. Yalta has become a
synonym for the abandonment of oppressed people and helped inspire the
1952 Republican campaign theme, “20 years of treason.”

The American media uncorked a barrage of tributes to Roosevelt on the
75th anniversary of his death in April. CNN, for instance, trumpeted
Roosevelt as “the wartime president who Trump should learn from.” But
there was scant coverage of one of his greatest betrayals.

Roosevelt painted World War II as a crusade for democracy — hailing
Stalin as a partner in liberation. From 1942 through 1945, the U.S.
government consistently deceived the American people about the
character of the Soviet Union. Roosevelt praised Soviet Russia as one
of the “freedom-loving nations” and stressed that Stalin is
“thoroughly conversant with the provisions of our Constitution.” But
as Rexford Tugwell, one of Roosevelt’s Brain Trusters and an open
admirer of the Soviet system, groused, “The Constitution was a
negative document, meant mostly to protect citizens from their
government.” And when government is the personification of
benevolence, no protection is needed.

Harold Ickes, one of Roosevelt’s top aides, proclaimed that communism
was “the antithesis of Nazism” because it was based on a “belief in
the control of the government, including the economic system, by the
people themselves.” The fact that the Soviet regime had been the most
oppressive government in the world in the 1930s was irrelevant, as far
as Roosevelt was concerned. As Georgetown University professor Derek
Leebaert, author of Magic and Mayhem, observed, “FDR remarked that
most of what he knew about the world came from his stamp collection.”

Giving Stalin everything

The Roosevelt administration engineered a movie tribute to Stalin —
Mission to Moscow — that was so slavish that Russian composer Dimitri
Shostakovich observed that “no Soviet propaganda agency would dare to
present such outrageous lies.” In his 1944 State of the Union address,
Roosevelt denounced those Americans with “such suspicious souls — who
feared that I have made ‘commitments’ for the future which might
pledge this Nation to secret treaties” with Stalin at the summit of
Allied leaders in Tehran the previous month. Roosevelt helped set the
two-tier attack that permeated much of postwar American foreign policy
— denouncing cynics, while betraying foreigners whom the U.S.
government claimed to champion. (Someone should ask the Kurds if
anything has changed on that score.)

Prior to the Yalta conference, Roosevelt confided to the U.S.
ambassador to Russia that he believed that if he gave Stalin
“everything I possibly can and ask for nothing in return, noblesse
oblige, he won’t try to annex anything and will work with me for a
world of democracy and peace.” Stalin wanted assurances from Roosevelt
and Churchill that millions of Soviet citizens who had been captured
during the war by the Germans or who had abandoned the Soviet Union
would be forcibly returned. After the war ended, Operation Keelhaul
forcibly sent two million Soviets to certain death or long-term
imprisonment in Siberia or elsewhere. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn called
Operation Keelhaul “the last secret” of World War II and it was
covered up or ignored by Western media until the 1970s. The fact is
that those mass deaths that were facilitated by the U.S. and British
governments rarely rated even an asterisk by the media-beloved
historians who tout the “Good War.”

In the final communiqué from Yalta, Roosevelt, along with Churchill
and Stalin, declared that “a new situation has been created in Poland
as a result of her complete liberation by the Red Army.” Liberation?
Tell that to the Marines. A few weeks later, on March 1, 1945, he gave
a speech to Congress touting his triumph at Yalta. In it he declared,
“The decision with respect to the boundaries of Poland was, frankly, a
compromise…. It will include, in the new, strong Poland, quite a large
slice of what now is called Germany.” He agreed with Stalin at Yalta
on moving the border of the Soviet Union far to the west — thereby
effectively conscripting 11 million Poles as new Soviet Union
citizens.

Poland was “compensated” with a huge swath of Germany, a simple
cartographic revision that spurred vast human carnage. As author R.M.
Douglas noted in his 2012 book Orderly and Humane: The Expulsion of
the Germans after the Second World War (Yale University Press), the
result was “the largest episode of forced migration, and perhaps the
single greatest movement of population, in human history. Between 12
million and 14 million German-speaking civilians — the overwhelming
majority of whom were women, old people, and children under 16 — were
forcibly ejected from their places of birth in Czechoslovakia,
Hungary, Romania, Yugoslavia, and what are today the western districts
of Poland.” At least half a million died as a result. George Orwell
denounced the relocation as an “enormous crime” that was “equivalent
to transplanting the entire population of Australia.” Philosopher
Bertrand Russell protested, “Are mass deportations crimes when
committed by our enemies during war and justifiable measures of social
adjustment when carried out by our allies in time of peace?” Roosevelt
signed those death warrants at Yalta. Freda Utley, the mother of the
late publisher and author Jon Utley, did some of the first and best
reporting on the vast suffering ensuing from the German expulsions.
Chapters from her book The High Cost of Vengeance are available at
fredautley.com. (The U.S. government approved similar brutal mass
forcible transfers in former Yugoslavia during the Clinton
administration.) But the German civilians killed after the war were
simply another asterisk that could safely be ignored by Good War
chroniclers.

Roosevelt boasted to Congress, “As the Allied armies have marched to
military victory, they have liberated people whose liberties had been
crushed by the Nazis for four long years.” At that point, he and the
State Department knew that this was a total lie for areas that had
fallen under the control of the Red Army, which was busy killing or
deporting to Siberia any potential political opponents. Roosevelt
claimed that the deal at Yalta was “the most hopeful agreement
possible for a free, independent, and prosperous Polish people.” But
he betrayed the exiled Polish government in London and signed off on
Soviet-style elections with no international observers — effectively
giving Stalin unlimited sway on choosing Poland’s rulers. Any
illusions about Soviet benevolence towards Poland should have been
banished when the Red Army massacred the Polish officer corps at Katyn
Forest — an atrocity that the U.S. government assiduously covered up
(and blamed on the Nazis) during the war.

The façade of benevolence

In a private conversation at Yalta, Roosevelt assured Stalin that he
was feeling “more bloodthirsty” than when they previously met.
Immediately after the Yalta conference concluded, the British and
American air forces turned Dresden into an inferno, killing up to
50,000 civilians. The Associated Press reported that “Allied air
bosses” had adopted “deliberate terror bombing of great German
population centers as a ruthless expedient to hasten Hitler’s doom.”
Ravaging Dresden was intended to “‘add immeasurably’ to Roosevelt’s
strength in negotiating with the Russians at the postwar peace table,”
as Thomas Fleming noted in The New Dealers’ War. Vast numbers of dead
women and children became simply one more poker chip. Shortly after
the residents of Dresden were obliterated, Roosevelt pompously
announced, “I know that there is not room enough on Earth for both
German militarism and Christian decency.” Government censorship and
intimidation helped minimize critical coverage of the civilian carnage
resulting from U.S. carpet-bombing of cities in both Germany and
Japan.

Roosevelt told Congress that the Yalta Agreement “spells the end of
the system of unilateral action and exclusive alliance and spheres of
influence.” By the time he died the following month, he knew that
democracy was doomed in any turf conquered by the Red Army. But the
sham had been immensely politically profitable for Roosevelt, and his
successors kept up much of the charade.

U.S. government secrecy and propaganda efforts did their best to
continue portraying World War Two as the triumph of good over evil. If
Americans had been told in early 1945 of the barbarities that Yalta
had approved regarding captured Soviet soldiers and the brutal mass
transfer of German women and children, much of the nation would have
been aghast. War correspondent Ernie Pyle offered a far more honest
assessment than did Roosevelt: “The war gets so complicated and
confused in my mind; on especially sad days, it’s almost impossible to
believe that anything is worth such mass slaughter and misery.”

In the decades after Yalta, presidents continued to invoke lofty goals
to justify U.S. military intervention in Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq,
Libya, and Syria. In each case, massive secrecy and perennial lies
were necessary to maintain a façade of benevolence. Americans have
still not seen the secret files behind the harebrained, contradictory
interventions in Syria from the George W. Bush administration onwards.
The only certainty is that, if we ever learn the full truth, plenty of
politicians and other government officials will be revealed to be
bigger scoundrels than suspected. Some of the orchestrators of mass
misery might even be compelled to reduce their speaking fees.

“Presidents have lied so much to us about foreign policy that they’ve
established almost a common-law right to do so,” George Washington
University history professor Leo Ribuffo observed in 1998. Presidents
have perennially used uplifting rhetoric to expunge their atrocities.
On the 75th anniversary of Yalta, Americans have no reason to presume
that presidents, top government officials, or much of the media are
more trustworthy now than they were during the finale of the Good War.
Have there been other Operation Keelhaul equivalents in recent years
that Americans have not yet learned about? The fact that Yalta can now
clearly be seen to have been a betrayal is another reason to be wary
when pundits and talk-show hosts jump on the bandwagon for the next
killing spree abroad.

This article was originally published in the June 2020 edition of
Future of Freedom.