The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 shook the elites of Europe. They likely hadn’t been that uneasy since the guillotines were getting worn out in France in 1794. In the 2021 book “The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II” Jonathan Haslam makes the case that the fear of Communism was a significant driver behind WWII.
Haslam has another book, “Hubris,” just recently out in which he argues “a gross and systemic lack of understanding by Britian and its allies concerning Russia’s intentions and likely actions is ultimately to blame for the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian War.”
There’s another telling of that story in which the US and UK knew exactly what they were doing, but that gives you an idea of where Haslam’s coming from. He takes a similar stance on the UK elite in “The Spectre of War”: that it was British misconceptions about Hitler that led them to pursue a pact with the Nazis or at least use Hitler against Russia.
On one hand Haslam argues that the British view of fascism as the only force standing between the Communist overthrow of the existing order was understandable; on the other he faults the British rich for politically misreading Hitler’s Germany in courting it to battle communism.
The logical conclusion, which he never quite nails down, is that it’s unfortunate Hitler didn’t play ball. In attempting steer clear of that point, however, he does (unintentionally I think) make the case that the elites in our supposedly democratic societies vastly prefer fascism to losing any of their wealth. That’s because while the book is primarily concerned with the communist menace, it’s hard to provide convincing evidence of it being such an existential threat without referring to that fact.
From his telling of history, Haslam issues warnings for today, including that “today’s great state of balance will not last” and that Bolshevism or fascism could soon re-emerge.
What could lead to their re-emergence? Haslam offers a smorgasbord of threats, including that “the confidence to invest is being undermined by revolutionary extremism,” which sounds oddly like a call for fascism in order to preserve the existing order and wealth. Other threats include runaway inflation, a lack of economic freedom in China, crime in the US, and Iran’s “bid for hegemony in the Middle East.” Okay, then.
Nowhere does our elites’ attraction to fascism in order to protect their wealth factor in, which is probably understandable considering the point of view Haslam is writing from is as a member of that elite. He is George F. Kennan Professor in the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and Professor of the History of International Relations at the University of Cambridge and is widely considered a Soviet Union expert in the West.
Haslam relied on whatever documents — British, French, Russian, etc. — he could get his hands on from the time period, which is still limited (one can only guess as to why):
Not all of those [diplomatic documents] for the interwar period are declassified, even now. For instance, annual reports written by British diplomats stationed in foreign capitals such as Paris are still unaccountably closed…We still have no access to the files of Britain’s secret service, MI6, for the interwar period.
I wonder what a book based on the same documents but solely focused on Western elites’ attraction to fascism would read like. Maybe that book is still to be written (or I’ve missed it).
Nonetheless, while Haslam wrote a book about the threat of communism, what jumped out to me were the periodic details of UK plutocrats’ love of fascism and how it lay bare the true nature of the British ragion di stato. That’s what I’ll detail here, and in doing so, hopefully shed some light on how the Soviets and Russians have so long been a thorn in the wealthy Brit’s sides that they now hate them today the same as their dads and granddads.
***
Following the Bolshevik Revolution the consensus among the UK establishment was that the Soviets must be defeated at all costs. That thinking was put into practice almost immediately when British troops landed in Murmansk eight months after the Bolsheviks seized power. The UK bombed Petrograd and even enlisted German troops to fight the Soviets in the Baltics.
It continued in the late 1920s when the British tried to embrace the Kremlin’s only ally Weimar Germany, which was still practicing former Chancellor Otto von Bismarck’s late 19th century strategy of counting on the natural trading relationship of Russian raw materials for German industry to neutralize any rivalry. As Haslam writes, “…the massive [British] army that had been rapidly mobilized in 1914 was no more. The only means of containing Bolshevism was through diplomacy. By undermining the Soviet-German entente, the British were securing Europe.”
Those efforts continued when Hitler was in power, and despite a few brief pauses, they never really ended to this day despite Communism’s defeat.
Why? If we go back to the beginning, while Britain wasn’t overcome with class struggle, there was widespread fear of it among the wealthy. And the Bolsheviks did cause major problems for the empire, such as in China where they provided early support for the Chinese Communist Party. Haslam can go on for pages about the Japanese running amok, committing endless atrocities in Manchuria and then turn around and write something like this:
In the Far East as in Europe, the Western powers feared that undoing the status quo would unleash the forces of disorder.
Which of course were the communists and why the UK and US supported Japan despite the horrors they were unleashing on civilians. That’s because the true victims were traumatized British bourgeois in Haslam’s telling:
The customary forms of international relations were thus systematically overturned by Moscow’s messianic commitment to overturning the established international order at all costs and as soon as practicable. At the receiving end throughout Europe, the bureaucratic elite, dressed for the day in detachable collars and morning suits, sitting down to work despatching and receiving deciphered telegrams to and from the embassies of Europe, found their customary conduct of diplomacy repeatedly frustrated by Comintern subversion across the globe.
That’s all fine and good, but there are two problems with Haslam’s apologia:
- He frequently depicts the Communist International (Comintern) as ineffective.
- According to Haslam, it was the British who didn’t take diplomacy with the Russians seriously as the Nazi storm clouds gathered over Europe. They instead wanted a deal with Hitler to form a united front against Communism. Here’s one such example from the book:
Moscow, faced with German enmity, was actually working hard to make friends across Europe. It wanted to avoid unexpected crises arising from Comintern operations and was willing to make concessions to appease potential partners. …the problem for Soviet diplomacy was that the core objective of Comintern’s Popular Front strategy was…aimed, of course, not merely at isolating German fascism but at combating fascism in general.
Let’s look at what the UK, in comparison, was up to in the interwar years:
Alberto de Stefani, italy’s finance minister, reported to the prime minster (and foreign minister) Benito Mussolini from Paris on 7 January 1925 that “[I]n a discussion that I had today with [Winston] Churchill [then chancellor of the exchequer]…the latter expressed his sympathy for Your Excellency and his esteem for the energetic work carried out by Your Excellency in suppressing Bolshevism.”
At that point Mussolini had murdered hundreds and imprisoned thousands of Italians in those suppression efforts. Haslam goes on to quote a 1927 piece from the British newspaper Morning Post entitled “The Fascist Ideal”:
When Mussolini took hold of Italy, democracy, delirious with Communism, was swiftly and bloodily ruining the country. And because every other nation is menaced by the same disaster, the example of Italy is peculiarly illuminating, as a ‘contribution to civilisation.’
In London on 19 October 1930 Churchill, now on the back benches, told Prince Otto von Bismarck, the counsellor at the German embassy in London, that “the burgeoning industrialization of the Soviet state presents a great danger to the whole of Europe that can be dealt with only through the establishment of an alliance with the whole of the rest of Europe and America against Russia.”
Here’s the US ambassador to Germany echoing that sentiment:
[President] Hindenburg backs Bruening on the question that Germany is facing a Russian menace,” reported the US ambassador to Germany Frederic Sackett, a solid Republican businessman. “They believe that eventually Russia will be compelled by public opinion to take back Bessarabia and that this will reopen the whole question of the spread of Bolshevism throughout Europe. In this maelstrom Germany will be the buffer state and must be ready to defend itself and the rest of Europe against Bolshevism.
Here is former British Prime Minister Lloyd George in September 1933 explaining that Hitler was the only alternative to communism:
If the Powers succeed in overthrowing Nazism in Germany, what would follow? Not a Conservative, Socialist or Liberal regime, but extreme Communism. Surely that could not be their objective. A Communist Germany would be infinitely more formidable than a Communist Russia.
This belief was widespread at the British Foreign Office:
The red-headed young Robert Hadow, then first secretary of the embassy in Vienna, argued that weakening Hitler would lead towards a Communist Germany “led by utterly unreasonable men — which I do not consider Hitler to be.”
Haslam has harsher words for the Germans like Hindenburg and Schleicher who “arrogantly deluded themselves that they could simultaneously use, contain and control a populist agitator [?] like Hitler to their own ends.” It would appear they were not the only ones, however:
The British were utterly unavailable and had no intention of taking any initiative…tending towards the containment of Nazi Germany. France was thus on its own. Worse than that, the British, with no illusions about French motives, exerted their utmost influence “to prevent the Franco-Russian alliance.”
…No one could deny that the British knew exactly what they were doing, though they had as yet no clear idea as to the longer-term consequences of their actions.
Did they not though? Haslam cites the following examples, which show they did know:
A junior minister at the Foreign Office, Anthony Eden, had begun to shift from the consensus that Germany was much misunderstood and deserved the benefit of the doubt to a more realistic assessment of where the Nazis were heading. His superior Sir John Simon, however, was of a different mould. He held out to Hitler the prospect of a deal on Air Force limitation in return for a more general European settlement. When Hitler showed himself willing to take the deal without the quid pro quo, Eden of course protested. But Simon characteristically gave way.
“Simon toys with [the] idea of letting [Germany] expand eastwards,” Eden surmised…”Apart from its dishonesty…it would be our turn next.” Simon nonetheless drew consolation from Hitler’s obsession with marching to Eastern Europe.
British diplomat Sir Orme Sargent saw a war by Germany against the Soviet Union as welcome inevitable:
“The need of expansion will force Germany towards the East a being the only field open to her, and as long as the Bolshevist regime exists in Russia it is impossible for this expansion to take merely the form of peaceful penetration.”
And here’s Ambassador Phipps in Berlin:
He proffered the tactical objection that by “erect[ing too much barbed wire, whether along Hitler’s southern or eastern frontier, we will head the beast back to the west.” Sargent commented with respect to this that a “great deal” could be said for Britain making no commitments to defend Eastern Europe.
How about Lord Londonderry, “one of Churchill’s innumerable cousins”?
He was an extraordinarily wealthy man, with more than most to lose were genuine socialism to take power. Londonderry was of the view that Germany was the lesser evil.
Here is Colonel Rogers of British intelligence to his counterparts in France:
The liquidation of the growing danger [the Soviet Union] is entirely in the interests of Britain. The British will in no way attempt to do this with their own hands and will not take part openly in any anti-Soviet combinations…But should there be emerge the possibility of defeating the Bolsheviks by any combination of forces, then the British will look upon it with sympathy and will at the decisive moment themselves take part in it. If another government forms in Russia, then the possibility is not to be excluded that Britain will support it, thereby finally re-establishing the balance of power in Europe.
France signed a pact with the Soviets nonetheless, and the Brits replied by breaching part five of the Versailles Treaty with an agreement with Berlin that legitimized German naval rearmament at 35% of the British level. The UK would go on to pressure Paris to abandon the treaty as the foreign office saw it as the greatest obstacle to “any attempt at collaboration in Europe.” France had to choose between Russia and the Western European Great Powers.” Here’s Sargent again:
Sargent in late 1936 sought to revive a Concert of Europe…What he foresaw, as did The Economist, was the division of the continent into ideologically opposing camps. Spain was the catalyst, but France, as he saw it, was the real problem…As to the two fascist powers, however, the task lay in removing their “feeling” of being isolated.
Here’s Oliver Harvey, private secretary to foreign secretary Lord Halifax in June of 1938:
…the British were “praying for Franco’s victory and bringing all the influence they can bear on France to stop the inflow of munitions to Barcelona.” Halifax was no exception. He believed the civil war made it easier to find common ground with Germany, because the Communist role would cause the British to see Germany “as an ally of ours and of all order-loving folk.” The pressure from London under Chamberlain was unremitting. On 13 June French Prime Minister Edouard Daladier finally closed the frontier to arms traffic heading into Spain. Thereafter the Republic was doomed.
Somewhat unexpectedly British public opinion was staunchly against Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia in 1935 and demanded action. The government, which looked favorably upon Mussolini’s efforts against communism, was unmoved.
“That was what was at the back of their minds,” recalled [British historian] A.L. Rowse: “the anti-Red theme that confused their minds when they should have been thinking in terms of their country’s interests and safety.”
Were they not though? As Haslam admits at one point, “This was, after all, a society run by a homogeneous caste who had, with very few exceptions, attended the leading private schools and university at Oxford and Cambridge.” If their idea of country is their caste, then they were looking out for their interests by offering tacit support for Mussolini and Hitler. And that leads to the prime ministership of Neville Chamberlain.
Chamberlain as Appeaser?
The simple story told in the history books is that Chamberlain’s run as prime minister (1937-40) was one of naivety and weakness. He was an appeaser who failed to stand up to dictators and prevent WWII. In reality he was representing the interests of much of the British upper class, which preferred a pact with Nazi Germany.
In 1938 the British politician and diplomat Sir Harold Nicholson wrote in his diary the following:
“People of the governing classes think only of their own fortunes, which means hatred of the Reds. This creates a perfectly artificial but at present most effective secret bond between ourselves and Hitler. Our class interests, on both sides.”
Or consider Lord Privy Seal Viscount Halifax on a trip to Germany in 1937 on the Chamberlain government’s behalf:
Halifax was hosted by Goring and visited Hitler at Berchtesgaden, where he thought it appropriate to congratulate the dictator on performing what he described as “great services in Germany.” Halifax added that Hitler “also, as he would no doubt feel, had been able, by preventing the entry of communism into his own country, to bar its passage further west.”
Halifax…”liked all the Nazi leaders, even Goebbels! Whom no one likes”…He believed it vital that Britain “get on with them.”
When Germany invaded Czechoslovakia in 1939 Britain exerted maximum pressure on Prague to bow to the Germans. In July of that year Head of the Home Civil Service Horace Wilson met with the German ambassador and proposed that Britain and Germany divide Europe into “economic spheres of influence, which involved directing the Germans towards eastern and south-eastern Europe…”
Ahead of the Munich Conference, ‘Chamberlain, confident of royal support, said he would outline “the prospect of Germany and England as the two pillars of European peace and buttresses against Communism.”’
There was a reason he was confident of royal support. Here’s King Edward VIII’s hand-picked equerry, Dudley Forwood:
“We were not averse to Hitler politically. We felt that the Nazi regime was a more appropriate government than the Weimar Republic, which had been extremely socialist.”
The Duke of Windsor was “very pro-German.” As were the Duke and Duchess of Kent and Queen Mary. Moscow, slowly but surely, was beginning to figure out what was going on. Here’s a Kremlin memo following the capitulation of Czechoslovakia:
“From an analysis of the current military-political situation in Europe it follows that the main organiser and inspiration for war against the Soviet Union in the West is Fascist Germany evidently under the patronage of England and France.”
Moscow had a different word for Chamberlain’s “appeasement.” They called it “pro-fascist.”
Even as 1939 was drawing to a close Britain was making preparations for war with the Soviets, and it wasn’t so much that Chamberlain’s successor Churchill was anti-fascist, but he was worried about the German threat to the British empire. Or the view from Comintern: “The war is turning out to be between two groups of capitalist countries for the domination of the world.”
After Churchill’s rise to prime minister he refuted rumors of peace talks with Germany and declared that Britain would fight to the end as it was “a matter of life or death for England and the British empire.”
There were, however, repeated attempts still to come to terms with Berlin. Here’s one such example involving the Duke of Windsor (formerly King Edward VIII), according to the foreign department of Soviet state security:
“…Edward, together with his wife Simpson, are currently in Madrid where they are in contact with Hitler. Edward is conducting negotiations with Hitler on the question of forming a new English government, the conclusion of peace with Germany conditional upon establishing a military alliance against the USSR.”
Hitler was coming to similar conclusions about the UK that the communists were. According to Rudolf Hess’s personal adjutant, Hitler believed “that after the fall of France, Britain was more likely to come to terms if Germany attacked the Soviet Union.” Hard to blame him for thinking so.
Lessons
The lesson, we are told repeatedly, learned from WWII is to never appease dictators. This is used to sell so many of the US and friends’ interventions today.
Maybe that lesson is apt for the plutocrats and their court jesters who rued (still rue?) the fact that Hitler wouldn’t play along. Maybe they still have a lingering sense of a missed opportunity to conquer Russia.
The meme becomes reality yet again. pic.twitter.com/iY7xLFhkq2
— c s hughes (@InkDilettante) May 2, 2024
For the rest of us the lesson from WWII might be very different: that the concentration of wealth and its stranglehold on politics and government are preludes to fascism. As Haslam writes:
Fascism in Germany, as in Italy and then in Spain, was viewed as a necessary antidote to revolutionary excesses. In some senses the official British interpretation was justifiable.
While the Western plutocrats might have missed their WWII opportunity to defeat Russia due to infighting over empire, they are on the same page this go-round. As Diana Johnstone wrote shortly after the official beginning of the war in Ukraine:
When Western leaders speak of “economic war against Russia,” or “ruining Russia” by arming and supporting Ukraine, one wonders whether they are consciously preparing World War III, or trying to provide a new ending to World War II. Or will the two merge?
As it shapes up, with NATO openly trying to “overextend” and thus defeat Russia with a war of attrition in Ukraine, it is somewhat as if Britain and the United States, some 80 years later, switched sides and joined German-dominated Europe to wage war against Russia, alongside the heirs to Eastern European anticommunism, some of whom were allied to Nazi Germany.
Unfortunately for this new alliance, the Nazis appear to be on the losing end against Russia yet again.
Another topical lesson that didn’t get learned is that the UK and other Western powers shouldn’t try to control and steer Nazis. If we want to imagine a real nightmare for Europe (as opposed to the imagined one of Putin conquering the continent), how about if Ukraine, feeling betrayed by Europe, turns its still-large army and all its toys westwards while the Americans and Russians look away? As Anthony Eden told Russian Ambassador to the UK Ivan Maisky in 1940:
“You know the greatest difficulty for me at this time was to convince my friends that Hitler and Mussolini were not quite similar to in psychology, in motive and methods, in their entire cast of mind anything like English ‘business men or country gentlemen.’ This they could never get themselves to believe. They though that I was ‘biased’ against the ‘dictators’ and that I didn’t wish to understand them…Some of our statesmen even after me attempted to communicate with ‘dictators’ as with ‘business men.’
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one of the most monumental epiphanies of my life was the realisation that the USA was the Fourth Reich.
(see: operation paperclip,etc)
Yep, mine too. Germany may have lost the war, but fascism just moved its headquarters to Washington
Lots have gone to Brussels as well. It would be an interesting project to note western leaders & officials and check to see how many have Nazi grandparents like Ursula and Canada’s Freeland.
I started making a list of Americans who should have been executed for treason for their Nazi collaborations before, during, and after WWII, but gave up because the list was endless. FDR ordered the de-cartelization of German industry after VE Day, but the dollar-a-year men subverted him at every turn. I.G. Farben is alive and well today under some of the same names.
A shout out to two books by Norman Ohler, Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich, and the follow-up, Tripped: Nazi Germany, the CIA, and the Dawn of the Psychedelic Age. Both well worth a read, and full of might-have-beens
Yep, Operation Paper Clip continues. After the new Red Army cleans up the Ukraine…yet again…expect to see the angry and demented remnants of the Azovs wallowing in revanchist mawkishness in a neighborhood near you.
and at Foggy Bottom, and out around Langley, and Reston, etc.
dipped in democtratic norms, and then dragged through a featherhouse of “Our Values”…and then tossed in the giant piles of Dry powder, to roll around and cavort.
it’ll be great.
And US armed forces will develop a new doctrine to fight Russians based on the memoirs of Ukrainian generals, who certainly would have won if it were not for the betrayal of their allies and micromanagement by Zelensky…
Pockets and Cannon Fodder, Memoirs of Ukrainian General Sirsky
“Is”, not “was”
And it is becoming even more overt.
You know that UNGA resolution condemning the glorification of fascism that Russia submits every year? Until 2022 two countries used to vote against it — one was, naturally, Ukraine, the other the USA.
After 2022 all the vassals were ordered to vote against it too, so now it’s 50 countries supporting the glorification of nazism…
How did Israel vote?
id wager a quarter i dont have that they voted an enthusiastic “No”.
even the nicer zionists in charge of that place have always been secret nazis.
what was that movie?…some years ago, about the Golda Era assassination team, at the olympics, etc.
and they did a good job at the time of getting the viewer to justify, often unconsciously, extrajudicial and terroristic assholery…because “Never Again”.
i feel used.
Sword of Gideon, I believe.
The story was retold in the 2005 film Munich by Steven Spielberg.
Hitler was the one who wouldn’t play ball with Chamberlain, not because he mistrusted Chanberlain, but because he wasn’t certain of Chamberlain’s grip on power. He knew that if he got deep into the USSR, and Chamberlain was removed, it would be really bad.
“All it needs is for Mr Chamberlain to be replaced by Mr. Churchill or Mr Eden, and I know very well what those gentlemen would do.”
That’s why he sent Her von Ribbentrop to knock on the Kremlin door, even though his ambassador in London, Herbert von Dirksen, was making rapid progress in his talks with British cabinet members.
As Marshal Zhukov commented after the war: We were the ones who liberated Europe from fascism, not they. We were the ones who liberated each and every killing field and concentration camp, from Auschwitz and Treblinka to Maidanek and Sobibor. We were the ones who chased the beast back to its lair, and killed it. And they will never forgive us for that.
Yes, but then Soviet Russia owned eastern Europe for the next 40 years. That wasn’t about Communism vs. Fascism but German empire vs. Russian empire.
No agrement from me. I spent my childhood and teens in one of said Eastern European countries – in fact I’m still here but the country was taken away from me – and cosider these times the high point of my country’s civilisation, precisely because of communism. You have no idea what difference does it make when you take money out of the equation. But my ancestry were poor peasants so there’s that.
i think i speak for most, if not all, NC regulars when i say, We’d love to hear more.
boots on the ground is one of the reasons i come to this place.
so, do tell…
Soviet Russia didn’t even own Russia.
i grok that russians own russia in a way that i have never owned the usa.
i remain unrepresented.
but one mustnt mention such things….
lest some rich folks get the vapors.
Yes-ish. Stalin occupied Eastern Europe and wanted a buffer zone to be protected from the West. FDR and Churchill agreed to it especially after Stalin made a couple of nice promises. So in the sense that the Soviets had control over the area, it was an empire. In the sense that there was the economic fleecing like Britain did when it’s empire controlled India, or the US with some of its possessions; it wasn’t the same. In the end I think it cost the Soviets more than they got from it. And man, look how fast the West moved in with NATO after the Soviet system went away.
I’m going to say that this hatred goes back well before the 20th century and it certainly was firmly entrenched by the time of the Crimean war back in the 1850s when they would be singing rousing songs of fighting the Russian bear in the music halls before sending the troops off to war. A generation later and this phobia had not gone away as a late 1870s music hall song had the chorus-
‘We don’t want to fight but by Jingo if we do,
We’ve got the ships, we’ve got the men, we’ve got the money too,
We’ve fought the Bear before, and while we’re Britons true,
The Russians shall not have Constantinople.’
The politicians headed off that war simply because they did not need to deal with such a war and its astronomical costs even as the British public were demanding it. There is an echo of this hatred here in Oz that I have visited. Back in 1839 two US warships slipped unannounced into Sydney Harbour which made the colonial government give thought to building a fort on a island in the middle of the harbour called Pinchgut. But when the Crimean war broke out a panic hit as there was the thought of Russian raiders so they turned to and built Fort Denison. Point being that a large percentage of Aussies back then were English born and carried the same fears & hatreds, even if Vladivostok in Russia was over five and a half thousand miles from Sydney-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Denison
Yeah, this is increasingly my understanding as well: the Brits dreaded any Russian overland threat to India, the crown jewel of Empire — hence “the great game” in Afghanistan and the Crimean War.
Here is something intriguing for history buffs, with an India (through Mountbatten), Russia, UK connection…. from the British archives:
“Mountbatten had, in fact, been Churchill’s luncheon guest along with Max
Beaverbrook, the newspaper publisher, on Saturday, June 21 194′- The Prime
Minister announced when he joined his guests, T ve got some very exciting
news. Hitler is going to attack Russia tomorrow. We’ve spent all morning
trying to evaluate what it means.’
‘I’ll tell you what’ll happen,’ Beaverbrook said. ‘They’ll go through the
Russians like a dose of salts. God, they’ll wipe them up! They’ll be through
in a month or six weeks.’ ‘Well,’ said Churchill, the Americans think it will
take more like two months and our own chiefs think at least that. 1 myself
think they may last as long as three months, but then they 11 fold up and
we’ll be back where we started with our backs to the wall.’
Mountbatten was forgotten for some time until Churchill turned to him
and said, almost apologetically, ‘Ah, Dickie, do tell us about your battle in
Crete.’
‘It’s past history,’ Mountbatten replied, ‘but may I be allowed to give an
opinion about what’s going to happen in Russia?’
Somewhat reluctantly Churchill agreed.
‘I disagree with Max,’ said Mountbatten, T disagree with the Americans,
our chiefs and, quite honestly, I disagree with you. Prime Minister. I don’t
think the Russians are going to fold up. I don’t think they re going to be
defeated. This is the end of Hitler. It’s the turning point of the war.’
‘Well, now Dickie,’ said Churchill, ‘why should your views be so different?’
‘First,’ answered Mountbatten, ‘because Stalin’s purge trials have elimin-
ated much potential internal opposition to which the Nazis might have
appealed. Second, and it’s painful for me to say this because my family ruled
there for so long, but the people now feel they have a stake in the country.
This time they’ll fight. They feel they have something to lose.’
Churchill was not impressed. ‘Well, Dickie,’ he said, ‘it’s very nice to hear
a young, enthusiastic voice like yours. But we’ll see.’ “
Shines a much better light on Mountbatten’s strategic acumen than other stories or his later behaviour
The roots of Russophobia have been traced all the way to Charlemagne, who was carving his new Germanic empire as an inheritor of the Roman Empire. His big problem was that the Roman Empire was still alive and well in Byzantine.
So, he started a huge PR campaign to convince his Europe that Franks were superior to that weird Greek multicultural thing they had in the East. Until then there wasn’t that much difference in the liturgies in Constantinople and Rome, but Charlemagne sort of forced the Frankish liturgy on the Roman church, against the will of the Italian clergy.
Besides causing later all kinds of religious issues, this had the side effect that the late medieval and especially renaissance Europe did have a tendency to see the Antiquity, that is South, as the civilized world, which was not good after the leading powers appeared in the North. The new, emerging powers needed again to make sure that it was not them who were identified as barbarians but the weird people in the East.
Even doubly so, since the weird, barbarian people of the East on the surface often seemed to be more civilized, philosophical, educated and humane than “the heirs of the Rome”.
Not to mention that after the fall of Constantinople the Ivan III of powerful Moscow had married a Byzantine princess and was declared the new Basileus by many orthodox bishops, while Mehmet II claimed to be the Roman Emperor on the sole fact that he had conquered Constantinople and nominated a new patriarch who supported his claim, while the Holy Roman Empire was largely ruled by a succession of robber barons.
Legitimizing all that required some quite heavy and imaginative propaganda.
Voltaire once quipped about the Holy Roman Empire that ‘The Holy Roman Empire was in no way holy, nor Roman, nor an empire’ so I guess that that heavy and imaginative propaganda was there right from the start.
Great piece! One parallel that strikes me about the modern crisis is that much like Hitler wouldn’t “play ball” / couldn’t be checked by British elites, Putin is not playing ball with the ruling structures of today (no intention meant of comparing the two on any dimension other than their willingness to fall in line). There may have been some alternate reality post shock doctrine 90s where class solidarity of wealthy across the West-East were able to build some durable coalition, but maybe the remnant factions of anti communist / cold warrior class on the West plus historical Russian geopolitical considerations of wanting buffer from invansion was a limiting factor of that outcome no matter how much Putin and Russia fell in line.
It is only as I reach retirement age that I’m in the process of unlearning everything I thought I knew about WWII. I recently finished a 600 page book by Guido Giacomo Perparata titled,” Conjuring Hitler: How Britain and America Made the Third Reich and Destroyed Europe.”
In addition to reading books on the subject, I’ve listened to hundreds of hours of podcast on the subject. At this point I can only marvel at how distorted my understand was, how effective propaganda works, and how hopeless it is to have an honest discussion on the subject with friends and family. They have zero desire to read or even the patience to sit through a 1 hour podcast. They think they know the true story without ever having had to crack a book open, read an article (like the one above), or conjuring up any skepticism that what they have been told is a distortion. Since through a process of cultural osmosis via having digested thousand of Hollywood movies on the subject, there is no impulse/curiosity to peel back the veil.
Well said. I feel exactly the same.
I read this book last year and while I agree with Conor that some of the more obvious conclusions were too much for the author to embrace completely, it is still a very valuable book.
The echoes of historic misdeeds are still being felt now. I am amazed that we could have been so naive to think that cataclysmic events like The Russian Revolution, WWI and WWII could been gotten over so easily and forgotten about. And that doesn’t even include events before that which are still being felt.
Partly I think our blindness was due to the fact that the simple idea of “class” as the motor of history and conflict has been suppressed so effectively.
Plus Charge of the Light Brigade
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade
and Gunga Din
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gunga_Din
Excellent. Thank you, Connor. I get angry when interlocutors shoot the appeasement rhetorical weapon at me when I mention that Russia has security interests and capabilities.
Thanks also for introducing me to Diana Johnstone, Connor. She’s a very good writer.
I think while this premise (the wealthy want(ed) to protect their wealth) is probably valid, my personal experience is most Russia haters really have no idea about any of this, including the history of Russia, Europe, WW1+2, Tsars, monarchies, bolshevism or even communism (Russia was never communist, by the way) or socialism, none of it. Their hatred is not remotely based on any facts.
It’s like any other kind of hatred for an identifiable group – at its core a set of unexamined and unfounded beliefs and generalizations, likely intergenerational. Nobody knows or remembers what the source of those beliefs was, but it’s easy to establish they’re unfounded.
DEI challenges people to examine commonly held biases (e.g. about women, about the disabled, about ethinic groups, etc.). I think a reason there is opposition to DEI initiatives, other than some are really attached to their bigotries and hatreds, is it might lead to to a situation where people no longer hate the Russians or (insert group here) for no valid reason, which would be unacceptable for some.
Wonderful amalgamation of revisionist deeper look. There also is the simple notion / added benefit that a foil, an enemy, allows the rationalization of all sorts of behaviors and expenditures. Think Patriot Act, the notion and actual naming of “Homeland” Security, and the plump and well-fed M I C.
And its been going on — as noted in the article—but to my tangential point… for over a century . Much to do with industrialization and the globalization that Oil enabled, in my oilcentric myopic view.
Anyone else frazzled with global and national news and events?
Mid-rifle/ big game season here, dropped by Cabela’s in Billinks for an alternative socio-economic indicator browse… very low on center-fire ammo of most sorts… no 30-30… the favorite of Pancho Villa and his merry band of insurgents. Is it all being gobbled up by the New Yellowstoners who are consuming their new lifestyle and activities, like hunting chronic-wasting infested ungulates, or is some getting laid by for the Big Post Election Troubles?
Gawd hep US awl.
If I recall Isaiah Berlin had an exchange in the late 1930s in the All Souls common room with Sir John Simon, the ‘National Liberal’ foreign secretary and chancellor of the exchequer, in which Berlin questioned why the UK was being so equivocal about the danger of Nazism, and Simon’s response was that Nazism was a natural bulwark against communism. In other words, to the British Empire (which in the inter-war USSR was the first amongst enemies) communism was the main threat, and this may help to explain the extraordinary investment in the suppression of real and imagined Bolshevism both at home and abroad by British intelligence, including in India where the security services genuinely believed that the communists were working hand in glove with Congress. Moreover, to much of the British governing class fascism or crypto-fascistic authoritarianism had preserved pre-1914 class structures and/or monarchies in many European countries. Its success was therefore deserving of a qualified welcome, given the alternative, not least because the continuance of class power in Iberia or Central Europe helped reinforced the legitimacy and reduced the anxiety of a governing class which was on the slide economically. These anxieties went hand in glove with concern for the preservation of a waning religious establishment (a factor of especial importance to high churchmen like Halifax); Nazi Germany might have been in a state of tension with the papacy, at least under Pius XI, but at least it was not demolishing churches or turning them into museums of atheism, and it was purging the degeneracy which characterised Weimar; Hungary under Horthy might not have a king, but it was at least still a kingdom with successive cabinets riddled with devout titled aristocrats. And so on.
However the real or imagined threat posed by Russia and the USSR, and the susceptibility of the British governing class to Russophobia, has deeper roots recently explored here: https://www.hurstpublishers.com/book/the-first-cold-war/. To some extent, this was explained by Paul I’s attempted invasion of India in 1801 (amongst other things Paul had been outraged by the way in which Russian troops had been treated in England), but more especially by British political officers operating in Central Asia who saw the rapid advance of Russian rule as threatening Britain in India. However, the comprehension of these political officers was limited, and their information came very largely from Central Asian rulers in Bukhara, Kiva, etc., who were more immediately threatened. Thus, in the generation between the 1820s and 1840s Russia came to be perceived as *the* signal threat to Europe. This was partly because of the personality of Nicholas I, ‘Europe’s gendarme’ and effective founder of the infamous ‘Third Department’ (which allied the British Left against Russia) as well as Russia’s candid designs on the Ottoman empire and Levant (which allied the British Right against it, though these designs had not been such an issue under Catherine the Great). As Malcolm Yapp showed in ‘Strategies of British India’ (1980), this reasoning was also all-too-convenient: Britain needed to control India at a discount and at the expense of Indian taxpayers. To do so it needed to maintain a large permanent military establishment which could be deployed as an auxiliary to the British Army (so as to reduce the burden on British taxpayers), but which was really there to function as a police force which could suppress dissent within India. This, then entailed the creation of an ‘external threat’ in the form of Russia against which India could unite, and which could be used as a pretext for extracting the taxes to pay for the military establishment. This narrative management continued throughout the Raj, and many British officials came to believe in it quite sincerely. The narrative also had overspill effects in the UK, even though as Alexander Morrison has demonstrated (from a detailed examination of Russian archives) the threat was baseless. Russia had no designs on India, and the reasons for its rapid expansion into Central Asia had more to do with the initiative of civil and military officials operating on a shifting and permeable frontier, and in pursuit of a quest to establish natural frontiers, than any other factors: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/russian-conquest-of-central-asia/60AD9B4DF95196BEA2F8EF67AF0CB8BB
This. I have John Colvin’s “The Fringes of Power” his diary he kept while he was a young staffer at 10 Downing Street. One day in October ‘39, shortly after the capitulation of the Poles, Chamberlain’s Principal Private Secretary (Chief of Staff in American) told his subordinates that “Communism is now the great danger, greater even than Nazi Germany… and with the advance of the Soviet into Eastern Poland, Eastern European resistance to Communism will be very much weakened. Therefore, we must play our cards with Russia very carefully, and not destroy the possibility of uniting with a new German government to oppose the Communist menace.”
Within 6 months, Adolf had saved all Eastern European countries except the kingdoms of Yugoslavia & Greece from Communism by incorporating them into the Axis, and in another month, there was a German army on the English Channel.
So, that catastrophically distorted British threat perception, and the consequent eagerness to cooperate with the Germans to oppose Communism has to be the critical factor in Hitler’s politico-military success up to 22 June 1941.
Thank you so much for the quote from Jock Colville! Yes, and I think that at least part of the neuralgia about the Soviets was something to do with the experience the British had of Bolshevism in the late 1910s and 1920s: (i) the repudiation of debts to France, which caused the inter-allied debt crisis (since French wartime transfers to Russia were to a large extent, prior to 1916, transfers from the UK itself), and British participation in the Russian Civil War on several fronts; (ii) the Soviet backing (via Borodin) of the KMT and the attacks on British treaty ports in China, especially in 1927; (iii) perceived Soviet backing of Congress and infiltration into Afghanistan, especially during the period of British hysteria in India in 1919-20; and (iv) the Zinoviev letter affair of 1924 (the centenary of which has just passed), which was used by the Tories to evict MacDonald from office, and imagined Soviet participation in the General Strike of 1926. During the 1920s the ardent imperialists on the Tory side (and even many Liberal imperialists) found communism to be a convenient lightning rod which would explain the perceived concatenation of events which were believed to be striking against British power almost everywhere. It helped to account for the absurd red-baiting of Jix or the ravings of H. A. Gwynne, Rudyard Kipling, Lord Bathurst or the duke of Northumberland. If all these problems had one root cause, then everything became much more explicable, even if that ‘explanation’ collapsed as soon as it was exposed to the facts. All this propaganda cast a long shadow, and as you note so well, completely deranged British strategic calculations into the late 1930s (Halifax, for instance, had been a cabinet colleague of Jix in Baldwin’s first and second ministries and was exposed to the full force of the Indian CID’s paranoia, culminating in the infamous Meerut Conspiracy Case of 1929, whilst – as Irwin – he was viceroy).
Next to last London Review of Books has Neil Ascherson on Patrick Cockburn’s bio of his father, Claud (paywalled). Cockburn, antifascist and a member of the CP, used his thin The Week to publish stories that the very clamped down MSM of the time wouldn’t touch:
Many thanks for that quote and the reference to the LRB review. Yes, it was Cockburn (and Spivak) who coined and promoted the concept of the ‘Cliveden Set’, and the Times editors Dawson and Barrington-Ward were essential elements of that coterie (through Dawson there was also an affiliated All Souls nexus, castigated by Leslie Rowse in ‘All Souls and Appeasement’, of which Halifax was also a part). I live not a million miles from Patrick Cockburn (one of the very few outstanding British journalists of our time).
Mention of Halifax’s mission to Berchtesgarden reminds me of the amusing scene of the very tall Halifax alighting from his limousine to be greeted by a comparatively diminutive Hitler and, mistaking Hitler for a footman or valet, proceeded to hand Hitler his overcoat, causing a senior Nazi standing next to Halifax to hiss sotto voce “Der Führer! Der Führer!” A diplomatic catastrophe was saved just in time. Although possessed of an atrophied arm (like Wilhelm II), the figure, presence and personality of Halifax led Hitler to believe that the ‘Holy Fox’ was obviously the representative of a master race and class, and the decision of Halifax to shift away from appeasement in 1939 may have prompted feelings in Hitler of ‘betrayal’ which might help to explain the repeated wartime pillorying of ‘English lords’ manipulating British public opinion in German propaganda. Many thanks again!
Re Lady Astor. Just finished reading her Wikipedia entry and she was quite the piece of work. She was actually an American but she really hated Jews, Catholics and was really keen on the Nazis-
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nancy_Astor,_Viscountess_Astor
I suspect her bigotry was probably the result of her Virginia upbringing, at Danville and Greenwood. Harry and Chilly Langhorne had owned slaves and a factory at Lynchburg, and Chilly had fought on the Confederate side. There was also a Jeb Stuart connection. James Fox wrote a quite interesting book about the Langhorne siblings, ‘The Langhorne Sisters’ (1998). Perhaps piqued about not being part of the Tidewater gentry (her grandfather Harry had moved from Warwick County up country to make his fortune), she had designs on the Social Register and then the British aristocracy. A social climbing Social Darwinist perhaps. In any event she was, all her life, quite a piece of work.
There are so many reasons to kill Russians. Not only did they kill Queen Victoria’s grandchildren, they continue to control so much of the planet and its oil. I believe MI6 had a black hand in the color revolutions that destroyed Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. What was T. E. Lawrence doing in Arabia? Working as an archaeologist for the British Museum??
The First Lord of the Admiralty needed that oil for his navy. Couldn’t let the Germans get rail access to it! After the war, Cousin Nicolas was supposed to exert friendly “control”. So many reasons.
This article did not touch on anti-semitism and pogroms. Jacob Schiff was quite explicit that Kuhn, Loeb & Co funded Japan’s acquisition of battleships used to defeat the Russian navy in 1905. One could argue that that was personal against Czar Nicholas II, but I think that reducing geopolitics to personal disputes is generally not the correct perspective. Anthony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution was consistent with that, although one could argue that it did not show anti-Russia basis, rather anti-Czar bias.
I also recall MSM coverage generally portrayed Russia in a rather sympathetic light in the late 1990s-2000s, but at some point, the wind shifted and Russia became public enemy number one. My impression is that it preceded Russia’s Syrian intervention and was related to Putin’s successful lawfare against the Oligarchs. I have always felt that if those Oligarchs and the City of London still effectively controlled Russia’s economy and media, we would have absolutely no problem with Russia. The Russian people however would still be destitute.
Yes, this is an important point that is hardly ever mentioned anywhere. And it wasn’t just funding Japanese battleships, but the entire Japanese war effort against Russia in the 1904 war. This whole episode is covered very well in a book on Japan’s very colourful (later) finance minister, Takahashi Korekiyo; “From Foot Soldier to Finance Minister: Takahashi Korekiyo, Japan’s Keynes, by Richard Smethurst”.
Takahashi was sent to London and New York to raise war bonds in the amount of 10 million pounds, which was considered out of the question as the Western financiers would only cover 5 million pounds at most. Schiff met Takahashi at a dinner party and the next day offered to issue 5 million pounds of Japan’s bonds in New York, which left Takahashi dumfounded. Why the interest in supporting Japan? Schiff had a hatred of the Romanov dynasty and its anti-Semitism, and he essentially was on a personal crusade against Russia in the period from the 1890s-1917 and did his utmost to prevent investment in Russia by London and New York financiers.
Thank you, Conor.
This strikes me as a helpful interpretation of West/USSR relations up until the mid ’90s. The idea that, at Munich, Chamberlain was intentionally accommodating Hitler in the interest of promoting UK/Germany cooperation against USSR is especially intriguing.
That there is continuing hatred after the collapse of ideologically communist governance in Russia calls, I think, for an auxiliary or supplemental hypothesis, since the existence of the Russian state no longer poses the same kind of threat to Western ruling class interests that USSR seemed to pose.
It has been proposed that there is a colonial project in view, to weaken the Russian state and break the country into smaller and more easily controlled entities whose resources could be extracted on terms favorable to Western corporations, and that present hatred toward RF is due to the obstacle it presents to that project.
“…since the existence of the Russian state no longer poses the same kind of threat to Western ruling class interests that USSR seemed to pose…”
Putin and BRICS all tread carefully because they do not want to be mistaken as an organization that is a threat to the concept of concentrated wealth. Each of those countries also has their own concentrated wealth that they also want to protect.
At least, that’s where things stand now.
There. I said it.
It is true that China, Russia, Iran don’t have a problem with concentrated wealth. The caveat here is that this is conditional. As long as there is something for the general population, that doesn’t become restless. US & UK don’t have this “problem”. They behave towards their populations like the Normans towards the conquered Saxons…
The English, the American, the French Revolutions were all oligarchic revolutions, that nipped in the bud any diggers, levelers, Shays followers, etc. that wanted a much cleaner slate and similar rights/oportunities for everyone. The US had all that land to steal from the natives (one of the main reson for the revolution – the “indians” that burned the ship with tea in Boston could also have been a good excuse to start a war with the natives), and Great Britain had America to push away all its unwanted, and of course Ireland and Scotland to pillage and rob.
I first heard Gabriel Rockhill describing how liberalism and fascism are the two sides of the capitalist coin.
“It is true that China, Russia, Iran don’t have a problem with concentrated wealth.”
I think problems of concentrated wealth can be found in those countries. Some like China may try a bit harder to reign it in, but it’s there.
Restless populations or not.
WHat I tried to say is that said countries political class do not perceive concentrated wealth as intrinsically bad, but only bad as it has the potential to interfere with the politics and as it has the potential to lead to popular dissatisfaction, and as such it is kept under much tighter control than in the west.
I am more clear now?
None of the three countries you’ve named have renounced neoliberal economics. Debates and some other practices, sure…but a repudiation? No.
I don’t see evidence of neoliberal economics in these countries. They still continue to produce actual goods and not financial products.
While true that they have is most akin to state capitalism and that labour is on a short leash, this is only as long as the proles get their bill of goods delivered, even at the end of a day of hard work. If that deal falls appart, uh-oh…
Before the recent talk of break to a new system of some sort, decades was spent adapting to the economic ideologies of the West. It’s not unwound as quickly as suspected.
Russia has revived & funded a pretty comprehensive Bismarkian social insurance state, with a fairly hefty dollop of cream for families with children, in the form of “Maternal capital” subsidized daycare, and pretty heavily subsidized mortgages.
And the Russian government has started closing a modest 2% of GNP wartime budget deficit with a tax increase on top incomes, making a heretofore flat income tax into a slightly progressive one.
Lord only knows when Americans will see improvements like that from their present baseline.
It wasn’t appeasment, it was encouragment.
One thing nobody ever does is to try to look at the situation from the point of view of Moscow in the summer of 1939.
What had happened?
You had effectively the UK, France, Germany and Poland ganging up on Czechoslovakia. With Poland refusing to provide passage for Russian troops to defend it (there was no direct border at the time — Poland bordered Romania directly as Eastern Galicia was Polish).
What does that look like to you if you are the Russian leadership?
It looks like an alliance of the whole of capitalist and fascist Europe that may soon attack you.
A lot of the moves that follow and that are usually blamed on Russian “imperialism” and “aggression” stem directly from that consideration — the Molotov-Ribentrop pact, the war with Finland, the annexation of the Baltics, etc. And subsequent history justified them.
Imagine what effect losing Leningrad would have had (because that would have meant also losing Murmansk and perhaps Arkhangelsk too, severing that transport link), then consider how close that came to happening, then think whether it would have been more or less likely had the border not been moved away from the city by force.
Also imagine that Operation Barbarossa does not begin from Brest, but from the pre-1939 Polish-Russian border. In the real timeline, the Nazis reached 30 km from Moscow. May they have taken it had they not had to cross those additional 200 km in modern Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania?
That sort of thing.
Thanks GM. All very good points.
As you say, there is a severe lack of looking at things from the other point of view. Something that has been pointed out repeatedly by Scott Ritter, Ray McGovern etc for a long time.
What does NATO creeping from Germany to Ukraine look like from Moscow?
No need to ask that really is there?
It looks like the lessons from Hitler’s mistakes — overextending himself by occupying too much land too quickly and not properly consolidating control and establishing logistics — have been learned and someone is planning on launching an Operation Barbarossa 2.0, but this time much better planned and executed.
And quite possibly a Generalplan Ost 2.0 too — the dehumanization of Russians in Western media in the last three years is actually more severe than it was in WWII…
Like Nazi Germany reoccupying Rhineland, annexing Austria, and taking over Czechoslovakia.
That is, that’s how NATO expansion would have looked from Moscow.
Not to mention carving up Yugoslavia yet again.
To confirm what GM is saying, Russia cast about to find anyone to be an ally other than Germany. I recall reading about aborted negotiations with Spain. But no one no how wanted to help the Red Peril.
I think the telling point here, from the pre WWII period, is that Stalin wanted to defend Czechoslovakia from Hitler but Poland, and the other Western countries, would not allow that.
There is a long buried history of territorial rivalry in Eastern Europe that obscures a lot of what was going on then. And now.
The multiple divisions of what once was Poland during the Napoleonic era between Russia, Austria and Prussia helped sow division among the anti French Allies right up until 1814. Napoleon used this tension to divide his enemies until the end.
This is also how NATO has come to have divided priorities. Poland is the most most fanatical anti Russian war monger partly because it wishes to reclaim some of the lands of Western Ukraine that used to be Polish.
People forget how elastic the European borders have been in only relatively recent periods. Especially Poland which was a great power in the 1600s but not so much since then. It used to be a LOT bigger than it is now.
Yes, but it was a lot bigger basically because Grand Duchy of Lithuania had taken advantage of Russian principalities infighting. As soon as Moscow became the top dog and started incorporating other principalities, it became too strong for Lithuania and after a century of losing (back) the Russian lands, Lithuania entered a union with Poland at the end of 16th century.
The Union did not help much, by 1795 both Poland and Lithuania had disappeared from the map.
The telling point here is that Poland got a piece of that Czechoslovakian pie.
I have not read the book but Patrick Armstrong has an interesting review of Stalin’s Gamble: The Search for Allies against Hitler, 1930–1936 by Michael Jabara Carley describing the USSR’s increasing desperate attempts to form a viable alliance against Nazi Germany.
Stalin was under no illusions about Hitler’s intentions towards the Soviet Union, or the rest of Europe for that matter.
I agree on most points, but the last paragraph is somewhat problematic, even if it does drive the point.
The Russian military history in 1990’s reached the conclusion that a major factor contributing the success of Barbarossa in the early phase was Stalin’s insistence on the “buffer zone”. Red Army had been preparing years for the German invasion by constructing deep defenses along the border.
The new conquests forced Red Army to began construction new defensive position several hundreds kilometers west from the original. Most of the vehicle pool of the western military districts was mobilized for the construction work, so when the hammer fell, Red Army units were spread between the two defensive lines and separated from their trucks and tractors.
On paper Red Army was way more mobile than Wehrmacht, but for the reasons mentioned it could not neither deploy nor withdraw properly in the first weeks of the war. Only in Kola and Ukraine, where the original plans and positions remained intact.
There are gravestones to British troops that died in Murmansk in the cemeteries in France, making it look like they died in WW1.
But this is a distraction. The roots of European dislike of Russia go back to Peter the Great and the formation of Russia as a cohesive political economic and military power that could threaten the western Europeans. Unlike the Polish, Swedish empires, Russia was a large cohesive mass with a perceived common language and culture (there are 100 languages in Russia, 25 official).
Russia was ‘the threat from the East’, a problem discussed by Pushkin and Russian authors since. Reading biographies in the West, there are frequent references to the backwardness of Russia and lack of intelligence of most of the people.
The Crimea War, fought between the British and Turks and Russa, was over access to the Black Sea and joining the western and eastern parts of the British Empire (see also the wars in Afghanistan).
There are claims that Russia has been trying to occupy Ukraine for 300 years (long before it existed and before it was partly occupied by Sweden and Poland as they expanded their empires). It also ignores regional wars by both sides.
The European Arts broadcaster ARTE is running a show about Russian occupation of Eastern Europe but they haven’t run similar shows on western occupation of Africa etc.
During WW2, the west supplied some weaponry to the USSR but it did not supply penicillin, a medicine with could have drastically reduced Soviet deaths.
After WW2, the USA was supplying training and arming the Ukrainian fascists until about 1952
When Yeltsin was set to lose the 1996 election the US pumped in $Mns to the media, blocking all opposition advertising and giving Yeltsin a second term, when he appointed Putin.
The west hates Russia just as it hates any other state it does not control and it will never be large enough to dominate Russia or China
frligf,
There’s no question that the Red Army played a great, or the greatest, part in defeating Germany. It’s worth keeping in mind that the US, with help from the UK, supplied a great deal of material that helped keep the Red Army capable of its great effort. Among other things, shiploads of magnesium ore for steel manufacture, (which braved German U-boats) thousands of miles of rails and hundreds of locomotives, hundreds of Studebaker(!) trucks, whole refineries, and shiploads of food (Russian survivors of WWII, including Russian instructors at the Defense Language Institute while I was a student there in 1966, still told stories about Spam), and much more, played a role too. Stalin was quoted (sadly, I no longer have the reference but I believe it was from Naked Capitalism) as having said in conversation that he had not been sure that the Soviet Union could have defeated Germany without that aid.
It’s also worth remembering that, while the US did not play the principal role in Europe that Americans often seem to think it did, it was, after all, fighting another war against a powerful enemy on the other side of the planet.
In my youth, ROTC, we learned of the continental powers theory aka MacKinder, and the maritime naval powers Alfred Thayer Mahan (TR’s inspiration for the US Navy) theories.
Russia is MacKinder’s objective heartland.
US and Britain were the naval dynasties from the 19th century. Sadly US naval power is diluted by the profit over performance creed of the MIC, and US Army lobby with the USAF lobby grabbing funds to go MacKinder!.
The Crimea thing and defending the cash cow in India were attempts to stem the Russians from grabbing up the crescent and shore lands to negate the naval powers.
Liebensraum was slogan/motive for grabbing the heartland, as today insisting that Ukraine SSR borders are sacred to US’ “norms and rules” (quote Harris from ABC debate) for empire.
Russia is merely the name of the heartlands that the US empire covet.
If Churchill had not feared Hitler, taking over Albion……
To China MacKinder is neophyte!
A small additional investment and DPRK will hold the empire in the western Pacific, China and Russia can hold the heartland!
Of some interest is the desire by some, especially the more navy to counter PRC factions, to see Germany rearm to balance and make Europe do its part to grab the heartlands.
It used to be :”keep Germany down”. now it is “get Germany to pay for and grab the heartlands”!
If FDR had lived the Morganthau plan could have avoided a lot of militarism for a few years anyway.
No war for US is “just”!
The Morganthau (a Jew) plan was to de-industrialize Germany and punish the civilian population by starvation for having supported Hitler. Morganthau was a sadist.
The Allies had agreed in Yalta and in Potsdam to disarm Germany totally, and dismantle all heavy industry that would allow it to rebuild it’s military. US State Department (taken over by Wall Street) opposed vehemently this – they were afraid of a new recession in US once war was over and war economy subsidies went away, if the destroyed Europe was not rebuild, and Germany was in the center of this rebuilding plan.
Morgenthau plan was a hasty counter to State Department plan, and along the lines Roosevelt had already agreed with Churchill and Stalin as post-war treatment of Germany. Had it been adopted, cold war would have been less likely (even if some in the West were hell bent on it) and Europe would have recovered maybe a year of two slower, but way, way more sovereign that what it was.
Morgenthau himself estimated some 10 million Germans would starve to death as result. He accepted them as “collateral damage”.
Not familiar with “quora” but below synopsis fits with what I’ve read in various books over the year.
https://www.quora.com/What-would-have-happened-if-the-Morgenthau-plan-was-used-for-Germany
I do prefer academic or original sources. According to which it was sectary of war Stimson who claimed Morgenthau’s plan would kill 30 million Germans (half, that is). Morgenthau then made a detailed argument why turning a nation from industry to agriculture would be extremely unlikely to cause starvation.
Especially given that post-war Germany had no means of importing food, which it had done to great extent before and during the war. Given the givens, starvation in Germany was more likely, if reparation focused only on heavy industry.
The irony part of the whole story is that Truman sacked Morgenthau because his plan was so unpopular, and yet for the next thing in Potsdam he agreed on a plan that was almost a carbon copy of Morgenthau’s plan.
“Jewish Murder Plan!”, by the way, is a direct translation of a Völkischer Beobachter headline.
German agriculture would have abided!
The idea was 4 never to arm states, never to be as Bismarck built it.
As below FDR was for it.
Torpedoed by Churchill and U.S. empire builder, with huge gaslighting blaming Stalin.
But the Germans were funded and helped arm once by USUK and that was a lost bet. It looked like a lost bet since 1943, after Stalingrad and Kursk. The US invasion of Fortress Europe looks more like an attempt to minimize the Soviet advance in Europe than the defeat of Germany. The Germans themselves fought to the bitter end against the Soviets but not so much against the Americans…
Rinse and repeat?! As if China will really be convinced to stay idle, when she is already considered the main dish…?
the capitalists embrace free trade because it always has to be growing. and a ultra financialized capitalism turbo charges whats mine is mine, whats yours is mine and their will be no discussions about this period, it creates the inevitable outcome of embracing fascism.
the only problem is, fascists and capitalists objectives deviate once the fascists gain power. then the rich find out that their great wealth means nothing to the fascists, who view them as they view anyone under the fist of fascism.
their great wealth does not protect them, it actually makes them a target. in the end, their over reach comes crashing down into defeat.
In the era of imperialism, businessmen became politicians and were acclaimed as statesmen, while statesmen were taken seriously only if they talked the language of successful businessmen.
—Hannah Arendt
https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/trade/globalization
“My early readings of the novels missed the irony. Enchanted by the beauty of Conrad’s prose, I thought he was in the business of writing romance. I was twenty-five and reading
Nostromo for the second time before I perceived the reversed meanings of civilization and savagery, recognized in the character of the San Francisco banker Holroyd the voice and disposition of my godfather Torkild “Cap” Rieber, chairman of the Texas Oil Company that in the 1930s was supplying aviation fuel to the Nazi Condor Legion bombing castles in Spain.
My connection to the captain followed from his having commanded the first tanker owned by Texaco, a company of which great-grandfather Lapham was also a founding partner. The tanker sailed out of Port Arthur, Texas, in 1905, and over the course of the next thirty years, Rieber proved himself so adept at running the world’s business (by land as well as by sea) that in 1935, the year of my birth, he was the CEO giving the word for everything in what Time magazine admiringly likened to the “hardheaded, steel-willed” voice of a “triple expansion engine.”
Although I met Rieber once or twice in the 1940s and 1950s, I didn’t come to know him until the winter of 1960, traveling with him to Hamburg, Germany, for the launching of a tanker of which he was part owner. No longer chairman of Texaco, Rieber at the age of seventy-eight walked with the vigorous, rolling gait of a ship captain (barrel-chested, round-faced, amiable grin, bright blue eyes, fierce shock of white hair), who still boasted of holding active master-mariner’s licenses to command any ship (sail or steam) of any tonnage on any ocean.
For the launching ceremony, Rieber brought with him his daughter and two other merchant adventurers and their wives, all of us staying for three days in the Vier Jahreszeiten Hotel, Rieber every night giving a formal-dress dinner (tuxedo for the gentlemen, long gown for the ladies) at which we were joined by the owners of the shipyard—the same shipyard under the same owners that in 1939 built the tanker Skandinavia for the Texas Oil Company.
Everybody spoke English, old friends talking old times, fondly remembering how Cap managed to get Skandinavia back to the American side of the Atlantic after the outbreak of World War II in September 1939. The admirals in Berlin wanted to retain the tanker in German custody for fear of its use in the convoys supplying Great Britain. Cap stayed a long weekend at Carinhall, Hermann Göring’s Gothic hunting lodge in the Schorfheide, dining on wild boar, listening to the music of Richard Wagner, petting the pet lion, admiring the swans. The soon-to-be Reichsmarschall granted exit visas for the tankers in return for continuing shipments of fuel to the Nazi war effort in 1940.
The history lesson spread for three nights across a table always festive with wildflowers, oysters, and champagne, and over the many courses of gemütlichkeit, money was invariably the hero of the tale. Governments come and go, and so do wars and ideologies; money lives forever. The shipyard owners made no apologies for Hitler, nor did the captain regret his dealings with Göring and Francisco Franco, the Spanish dictator who made Rieber a Knight Grand Cross of Isabella the Catholic. For a good many American corporations in the 1930s, dealing with Nazi Germany was standard operating procedure; Ford and General Motors building trucks for the Wehrmacht, the Rockefeller Foundation funding Nazi eugenics programs. The oil tanker sliding the next day into the Elbe River was a multinational corporate enterprise, free and clear of romantic sentiment, union labor, or nationalist entanglements—American ownership headquartered in the Bahamas, Greek officers, Malay crew, Panamanian registry and flag.
Street Scene in Nihonbashi, attributed to the workshop of Hokusai, c. 1826. © BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
Street Scene in Nihonbashi (detail), attributed to the workshop of Hokusai, c. 1826. © BnF, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.
Toward the end of an evening, the captain liked to review the story of his life, and through the drift of cigar smoke it wasn’t hard to hear variations on a theme by Joseph Conrad. Born in 1882 in Norway, Rieber had gone to sea at age fifteen as deckhand on a six-month voyage from Europe around Cape Horn to San Francisco aboard the full-rigged clipper ship Hiawatha. A year later he was quartermaster of a three-masted barkentine carrying slave labor from Calcutta to the sugar plantations in the British West Indies. Rising in the ranks of the Texas Oil Company from ship captain in 1905 to chief executive in the 1930s, he acquired a concession to oil rights in Colombia for $14.5 million, supervised the building of a 263-mile pipeline from the refineries of Tibú and La Petrólea to the port at Coveñas. The pipeline crossed the Andes at an altitude of 5,284 feet through the Captain Rieber Pass.
Recalling problems encountered in Colombia, Rieber paused to consider a question of economic policy. “It’s always better to deal with dictators than with democrats. A dictator you have to bribe only once; democrats you have to keep bribing over and over again.” In Conrad’s imaginary republic of Costaguana, a silver mine is the source of wealth.
The banker Holroyd supplies the capital to develop it on condition the local government stays bought. What is wanted is order and security, no daydreaming with unreal objectives such as democratization and human rights. To the businessman operating the mine Holroyd says, “You go ahead in your own way, and I shall know how to help you as long as you hold your own.
But you may rest assured that in a given case, we shall know how to drop you in time.” The businessmen conducting America’s foreign affairs throughout the twentieth century adopted Holroyd’s approach to the funding and defunding of dictators in Guatemala, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Panama, and Iraq. America’s commercial empire embodied the attempt to buy the future instead of making it.
Rieber delighted in his resemblance to the driving force of a machine. Conrad despaired of the capitalist dynamic as a mechanical loom, saying of it in a letter to a friend, “It knits us in and it knits us out. It has knitted time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair, and all the illusions—and nothing matters.” One can’t interfere with it; “you can’t even smash it.” You can just “stand appalled” and watch the cogs and wheels continue their “remorseless process.””
Thanks so much for this. Churchill said that history would approve of his actions because “we shall write it” and so it turned out. Whereas the reality of the “good war” was a lot seamier than many would want to admit.
Cut to now and the notion that plutocracy is at the root of much evil will never be heard from the millionaires of the D party. On a human level they are merely defending a lifestyle they’ve grown up feeling they can’t do without. On a moral level it’s time for someone else to start writing the history and for everyone to start reading a lot more of it. It’s our always relevant database of international relations.
Let’s not forget the the GOP has always been and still is the party of the plutocrats. I know Democrat bashing is all the rage here but plutocrats basically just follow the money and donate to both parties. Hedging is after all a market strategy.
I have to disagree with the overall thrust of this article. There is indeed an Anglo-American “thing” about Russia, but is is not about communism. I once thought so myself, but this has become untenable. China is communist. Russia is not. China was a darling up until recently, Russia was not.
Russians are frequently regarded as being “otherly”, “asiatic”, “barbaric”, “backward”, “undemocratic”, etc at least in English speaking countries. And moreso that just the casual racism applied to anyone farther than a 3 hour flight away. Where it comes from, I don’t know. Maybe it goes back to the first English embassy to Russia in the days of Ivan the Terrible, and is shaped by stories about him. Maybe it’s from the days when the British Empire vied with the Russian Empire for control of central Asia. It could be a holdover from Communism which a certain generation can’t let go of. Also possible are the attitudes of the Russo-Jewish diaspora towards the “old country”, given the dominance of the sect in anglophonia. But whatever the cause of it, the “attitude” about Russians is definitely there, and it’s specific to Russians per se.
I’m not the only one who notices this. Putin has referenced the dreaded “Anglos” on several occasions. Maybe the feeling is mutual.
Agree that it is not necessarily communism, but I believe that the China issue is a bit more nuanced. With very little to support this supposition other than random tidbits I read over the years,China was tolerated because it was expected that after we moved manufacturing there, CCP would “cash out” and sell substantial interests in those facilities to Western investors. I doubt that there was ever any explicit acknowledgment of that, but the collective West is acting as if China committed some type of massive betrayal. That said, it could also be a fear of multi-polarity, but why didn’t the west think of that sooner?
A related issue is the drama over Huawei once the US realized that a privately-held entity with no potential for Wall Street or the West to control it was about to produce a majority of the world’s networking gear.
The western’s world’s meltdown over Putin de facto nationalizing entities formerly owned by the Oligarchs is entirely consistent with the preceding paragraphs. As is our reaction to Iran nationalizing natural resources in 1953 and 1979-80 Venezuela doing so under Chavez.
Not just China, but look at Iran and Venezuela
The fascination with China (at least in US) goes back farther than that: before there was the Israel Lobby, there was China Lobby, dominated by a coalition of missionaries and businesspeople who felt that Chona could be “Christianized and Americanized,” with people like Herbert Hoover and Henry Luce leading the charge and played along by the likes of Soong Meiling on the Chinese side. Things got messier since “their” China got kicked off the mainland and is being transmogrified to “Taiwan,” although, I still insist, the process is a lor more nuanced than the Manichaean view of the continuing “China” Lobby…
Russia, in the other hand, never had such a “Lobby” in Washington.
Perhaps this loathing and fear is older still, genetic in some ways, a generational memory and horror of the Mongol Hordes that overran the steppes centuries ago, an inbred terror of the people from the Urals and beyond who became Slavs and then Russians…..maybe the many invasions of Russia from the West are less to capture the mineral riches than they are of smiting the Slavs in punishment and retribution from those now nearly forgotten Mongol invasions…..
Except rhe Mongols hardly did a thing to the West. They overran Central Asia, China, Korea, the Middle East, oh, and Russia. But what does the West have to dislike the Mongols for?
My standard poodle is always excited to meet another poodle or a poodle mix, seemingly recognizing them as kin. Apparently this is very common behavior in poodles. In humans too, I think.
“Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto” – Terrence
Nothing human is alien to me
Because all the repeated conquest attempts failed eventually. West did love Yeltsin’s Russia.
I don’t think it’s that much of a mystery. I have written about this at some length and won’t repeat myself here but in essence the hatred derives from (1) the traditional fear of the barbarians to the East, mixed with nineteenth-century racialism (2) Russia’s status as the “anti-West” and especially “anti-Europe” in its rejection of Liberal social and economic norms and its preference for older like ideas tradition, religion and nation and (3) residual enmity from the Cold War when the enemy went away and the Big One never happened.
As for the historiography of writing about relations between Russia and the West, this goes through phases, as all writing about history does. Because they’re not making the past any more, all that historians can offer is an Oedipal assassination of their predecessors, a cycle which produces new schools of interpretation every 25-30 years, each school being “revisionist” with respect to its predecessor. And as time passes, either people do genuinely new work, which is tedious, or they produce more and more extreme versions of existing theses, as here. For some time now, the pendulum has been swinging very far in this direction, to the point that it has found its way into popular culture.
It’s also true that the last historians who lived through the period are long dead and as the understanding of the interwar years fades, historical interpretations become more and more removed from the environment of the time. Increasingly, historians know lots of individual things but don’t know the wider significance of what they know, and there’s very little understanding now of the mindset of western elites in the 20s and 30s. Just three brief points.
First, when the Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, the Allies were engaged in a desperate war which there was no certainty they would win. All political forces except the Bolsheviks were in favour of continuing the war, and even the Bolsheviks were divided. A separate piece was the worst disaster that could befall the Allies, and naturally enough they intervened to support the forces that wanted to fight on.
Second, Europe was wracked by violent conflict including attempted and actual seizures of power by Communist Parties between 1918 and 1923. Even countries (like France) that avoided this saw the rise of strong and militant Communist parties explicitly advocating violent revolution. In the circumstances, it’s not surprising that western governments feared becoming the victims of what we would now call a Colour Revolution, directed from Moscow (and which anyway was pretty much what some of the Bolsheviks, at least, hoped for).
Third, whilst uncomplicated admirers of Fascism and even Hitler did exist, they were on the fringes of politics and of the elites. Britain and France did, after all, begin crash rearmament programmes after 1936, and it was generally thought that war with Germany, if not inevitable, was highly likely. But it needs to be remembered that most educated people at the time believed that parliamentary democracy was effectively dead, and the choice lay between two forms of authoritarian regime. Some (intellectuals, scientists, trades unionists among others) chose Communism, and cheerfully supported Stalin’s purges and the Russo-German pact. Others supported fascism as the only reliable safeguard against a Communist revolution. People like Orwell who refused what they saw as an artificial choice were in the minority. Ever since 1918, the West had hoped that a strong Germany would keep the Soviet Union at bay. The descent of Germany into financial and political chaos after 1929 made some think that bringing a hick politician from Austria with considerable if declining support into government, where he would be safely neutered, might keep Germany from coming apart and avoid a revolution. It made more sense then than it does now.
The “doom-loop” of historiography. Well, that’s comforting. Clearly we need more historians in the field of Economics. Except they would be barred, because we all know that “Economics” is a science.
My UG advisor, fwiw, is a historian who was accepted by most econs as one of them (a social historian who specialized in the role of religion in his original training, in fact), and he was more scientist than most of them, too–he was originally a mathematician by training, who had the bright idea to quit grad school in the middle of Vietnam War, spent about a decade in wilderness, then went back grad school in history instead.
Brad Delong teaches an unbarred course in economic history at UC Berkeley, or at least he used to.
“Clearly we need more historians in the field of Economics. Except they would be barred…”
Please, there are any number of historians of mathematics and the physical sciences.
As a one time econ historian who was originally trained by a historian who was originally a mathematician, I found the original comment very strange…
I think Chuck is referring here to the disdain shown for the Humanities by the neoclassical orthodoxy which, among other acts of vandalism upon the study of political economy (the original and still correct term, especially with regard to macro), has banished the study of the history of economics from the academy almost entirely, especially in undergraduate programs.
Aurelian, can you really be unaware of the short footage published in 2015?
The Prince of Wales (Edward viii, Duke of Windsor)
Duchess of York (Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, Queen Mother)
Princess Elizabeth aged seven and Princess Margaret aged about three
about twelve seconds of “home movie” footage doing enthusiastic Nazi salutes, led by the Duchess of York.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OB0YAVF-eOI
What do you make of that?
I am not Aurelien but since Her Highness looks to be about 4 or 5 years old, I’d say doing that kind of a salute in about 1931 does not mean much of anything. Maybe she was pretending to be a Roman soldier?
See US children saluting the flag in the 1930’s.
I am not particularly well qualified to evaluate responses to this question, but I’ll say that yours at least has the virtue of offering a clear answer.
I struggled to find much of an answer to the headline question in the article. Apparently the thesis is that we hated Russia in the WW2 era because they were Communist. However (as others have pointed out) Russia isn’t Communist any more and hasn’t been for some time now, and yet we apparently hate them more than ever. So I find that lacking as an explanation of today’s situation, even if the historical context is interesting.
It may have started with such motivations, but very soon it changed to “let’s hurt and dismember Russia”.
By 1919 you had Germans fighting in the Baltics against the Red Army with naval support from the UK and France (!).
Which is the ultimate reason the Baltics are independent today — had they not acquired statehood at that moment, quite possibly they never do after that.
And look what problems this is causing now…
>> Why does the West hate Russia so much?
It could not be simpler. Russia is a huge chunk of value that great white sahibs, as they see themselves, have no or to little share in. Since the 1500s they’ve been trying, but no luck.
It’s been said that even the Salem witch trials were a land grab.
“More weight!”
re: history of Russophobia
This essay was published by the remarkable German news site Multipolar which is the most important alternative news source I would guess, and as such under immense pressure by the state.
The Long Lines of Russophobia
Western politicians and journalists can repeatedly make extremely derogatory comments about Russia without being publicly criticized. Rhetorically, it seems that any taboo can be broken. This negative attitude, which is hardly imaginable in relation to other countries, goes far beyond objectively justified criticism of the Russian government and can be observed in times of war as well as in times of peace. Those responsible resort to certain stereotypes and insinuations about Russia that have been repeated for centuries and are deeply ingrained in the Western subconscious.
by STEFAN KORINTH , April 24, 2023
https://multipolar-magazin.de/artikel/die-langen-linien-der-russophobie
An English translation of the entire page, making it readable:
https://archive.is/fviWY
Thanks AG.
Habeck out-Baerbocks Baerbock muchly in all her Goebbels-like Zen artistry in this quote that’s sure to become the highlight of any visit to the perfumed Nauseleum of the Ministry of Really Strange Quotations by Psychologically Maladjusted Greens:
“The only truth that comes from Russia is the lie.”
Robert Habeck, German Minister of Economics (2022)
I’m going to have it printed on my teeshirt to remind people that the Germans don’t change. It’s just that one generation managed to skip the infection only for it to return in the next.
So Germanophobia instead of Russophobia? What does this mean, that “the Germans do not change?” Is this genetic Germans? Awful lot of at least partially German Americans. Like Eisenhower. Cultural Germans? Germanophones? Maybe the problem isn’t the language or the people but a certain set of traits in power seekers and politicians?
One could modify the quote about Russians above (from, evidently, a member of “the Germans.): “…can make extremely derogatory comments about [Germans] without being criticized…goes far beyond justified criticism of the [German] government…certain stereotypes and insinuations that have been repeated for [decades anyway]…”
Yes, the article above refers to the notorious book by the French traveler the Marquis Astolphe de Custine, a colorful figure who in 1843 published his scathing, “Russia in 1839”, based on his three-month visit there and modeled after Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America”. “Russia in 1839” describes Russia as a cruel and barbarous tyranny inhabited by an obsequious and complicit population. Custine himself drew on statements of previous commenters and historians going back to the 1500s. The book was a widely read in England and France and was banned in Russia, where it nevertheless made a deep and disturbing impression on literate Russians. In Alexander Sokurov’s 2002 film The Russian Ark, a ghostly narrator is accompanied by the Marquis Custine (referred to as ‘the European’), on a tour of the Winter Palace (now a part of the Hermitage Museum) where they encounter other ghosts (if I remember correctly) of historical figures. How I would like to see the rest of Alexander Sokurov’s movies! Have only been able to get hold of “Francofonia,” and “The Sun” a study of the Emperor Hirohito, part of a three part series about autocratic rulers.
Firstly, thanks for the article, Conor!
Secondly, many great comments so far … thanks for all the insights!
From frligf above:
> The west hates Russia just as it hates any other state it does not control and it will never be large enough to dominate Russia or China
… aligns most closely to my own distilled beliefs right now. Pointing out the Yeltsin –> Putin progression is delicious irony. The US gov’t FA’d (family-blogged around) and then FO’d (found out), and continues to do so today with Ukraine. Once the reality of a multipolar world becomes sufficiently formed, it’s going to be interesting to see where that hatred will turn when it has little further outlet toward Russia. My opinion has always been that the hatred has nowhere to go but inward, and we’re seeing the first wave of it with US imperialism being used to dismantle European economic sufficiencies. Will the citizens of the EU be able to rid themselves of the current crop of compromised lap-dog leaders? We shall see.
Anti-Russia feeling in the collective west is not a constant but comes and goes in waves, and it’s a mistake to conflate “the west” with the UK or USA. Even during the Cold War, Italy and Germany had extensive trade and cultural links with the USSR. As recently as 20 years ago, Putin enjoyed excellent diplomatic relations with Chirac-Schroeder-Berlusconi (and Russian business links with those three countries were booming right up until 24/2/22). If we glance at the James Bond movie franchise as a barometer of Anglo-American opinion, their portrayal of Russia/USSR has varied wildly over the last 60 years: some of the Roger Moore films in the 70s (an era of detente) take a rather humorous view of the USSR (it’s certainly not depicted as a mortal enemy, at any rate).
What’s driving the current anti-Russia zeitgeist is a combination of factors, perhaps the most important of which is that a generation of western politicians have become accustomed since 1989 to getting their own way in international affairs (whether political, military, financial, etc). And suddenly, Putin’s (successful) refusal to play ball re Project Ukraine has shattered their world view. Plus the inconvenient facts that Russia’s heavily sanctioned economy is chugging along nicely while many EU economies (notably Germany) are struggling. And Russian weapons are no worse than their NATO counterparts. And most of the world outside the collective west refuses to go along with the sanctions. It’s all very frustrating and disheartening for them to accept. At some point in the future, the anti-Russia hysteria will die down. But this will require a wholesale replacement of the current generation of western elites (especially the political class), so it might take a while for things to cool off. I’m not holding my breath.
For this round of hate, Putin/Russia is just one in a long line staring an Castro/Cuba , Gadaffia/ Libya, Maduro/Venezuela, Ortega/Nicaragua, and so on. Insert others as they occur to you.
The difference is Russia is a world power and Putin much more of a world leader so he must be hated more.
It is interesting that the USA seems to have forgotten the Russian fleets in New York and San Francisco during the US Civil War as a bit of protection if things went badly with the British.
The French have hated Russia since at least the 1700s, the British ever since Russia became a great power by defeating Napoleon. Some of the hatred even goes back to the Great Schism as Guy Mettan so well covers in his book “Creating Russophobia: From the Great Religious Schism to Anti-Putin Hysteria”. Of course the Bolshevik Revolution gave another reason for the West to hate Russia, but now Russia is most definitely not communist (quite neoliberal in a number of respects) and still the hatred persists.
Russia represents a massive nation with extensive natural resources which maintains a nationalist leadership, and therefore is not allowing for the exploitation of those resources by the Western oligarchy. The only time the West was happy with Russia was in the 1990s as they happily gouged themselves on Russian resources with the aid of the utterly weak Yeltsin leadership and the economic chaos of that period. The Western oligarchs hate any nation that they cannot dominate and exploit. The new “Soviet Union” is of course an actually socialist China that resists both foreign and domestic capitalist oligarchic subjugation, and is being extremely economically successful.
I always had a notion that there is somewhat of a “Prester John Syndrome” in the way Latins (and their descendants) view the “East”: the world is divided into either the “known enemies,” whether Muslim infidels or the Greek schismatics, and the potential Prester Johns, those who are already “Christians” or potential “Christians” (of the right kind) who would willingly and selflessly aid their brethren, just because. (The Church of the Orient, the Copts, the Ethiopians, and so on, gets a weird place here since the Latins knew very little about them before they ran into them in the Middle East and even mistook some of them for the tribe of Prester John…)
Russians have always been “schismatics.” As such, they would never be a “Prester John.” They had to be conquered and converted to “real” Christianity, like the Greeks during the 4th Crusade (which, in a way, the Russia under Yeltsin sort of was). And, like the Greeks, they resist. Unlike the 15th century, there are no Turks besieging the Greeks.
Among the “schismatics” are also Serbs, Georgians, Armenianas, and Christians in Syria, Palestine and Lebanon. Greeks themselves have folded, and some satan’s ass-kisser sits in Constantinople pretending to be a patriarch.
Yeah. The point, to me, is that the Latins will never make peaxe with “Greeks” or Muslims.
Comment: I wonder what a book based on the same documents but solely focused on Western elites’ attraction to fascism would read like. Maybe that book is still to be written (or I’ve missed it).
I dimly recall that many Brutish Archives are subject to a 100 or 101 year period of secrecy.
If so it might illuminate actions leading WW 1, and Possible the years between WW 1 and WW 2
While it might not focus on the same documents and is mainly about the time before fascism received its brand: The Great Class War: 1914 -1928 by Jacques R. Pauwels provides insight into how elites would be attracted to fascism.
But non elites saw something in it too. Chomsky and Herman used to call (I think this is the Washington Connection and Third-World Fascism where they make the distinction) the dictators in the American orbit (Diem, Marcos, Suharto, various Americans south of Mexico and ij the Caribbean, etc) “subfascist” because they lacked any veneer of popular support. Then there was the Kirkpatrick distinction between authoritarian and totalitarian. We were supposed to be ok with Reza Pahlavi and José Napoleon Duarte because they were authoritarian and Fidel and Ortega were beyond the pale for being totalitarian. Can anyone really say Putin is totalitarian with a straight face?
I wonder how much of the “hatred of Russia” is just PR. “We can’t let Russia prevent Ukraine from joining NATO because that would threaten our ability to make any agreement we want with anybody we want” doesn’t exactly rope people in. “Evil Putin wants to conquer Ukraine and restore the Soviet Union” gets their attention.
Texas as an independent state until 1846 was an obstruction to realisation of bi-coastal USA as a complete coastline. Since USA dominates its northern neighbour having supplanted British influence postwar – it is only loathed by nations to the south.
Most of South and Central America resents and loathes USA but lacks power and allies to make its resentment clear to U.S. A other than by civil invasion
Russia spans the Eurasian continent and has has to contend with invaders from the west including USA and U.K. in addition to France and Germany. Japan tried and was ejected – twice.
China was weak and humiliated by West and Japan – go Google “Hunnenrede“ or „Hun Speech“ by Kaiser Wilhelm 1900 to relate to what Chinese children learn in history
Russia is that vastness that makes the West European appendage feel minor. It is unconquerable and could subsume USA and Western Europe as land mass yet it can reach down to India and Iran and warm water
The Trans-Siberian Railway started in 1891 opened up Central Asia to Russia snd by-passed British naval and merchant fleet control of traffic from Asia – that is just like the Chinese role today makes USA uneasy
There are trains from Wuhan to Duisburg several times a week – it is how laptops are shipped to Germany. This integration of Europe into Eurasia is the reason for the Ukraine war – to sever gas pipelines and trade routes which render maritime powers sidelined
US is simply re-enacting the old British imperial game whereas Germany in two wars wanted to pursue the US historical game of seizing territory and and liquidating people – Slavs as opposed to Indians – and have farmland and raw materials. Recall that before 1945 German industry was in the east and in Berlin with coal from Ruhr and Silesia. German rail ran west to east and post-1945 had to be tilted north to south
Saxony was the powerhouse and Siemens had its own Siemensstadt in Berlin before it relocated to Munich.
In both wars Germany had a Loot List and seized Belgian mines and Chech engineering businesses and went for Russian oil in Baku – to settle Germany‘s expanding birth rate
There are so many problems with all this. For one thing, show me a proper definition of fascism. “Mean right wing dictatorship” won’t cut it. Was Salazar a fascist? Or for that matter Hirohito? (Not a dictator?–tojo then? Mussolini had a monarch too.) Were fascism and national socialism the same? Mussolini had a leftist background. Hitler did not, but there was a branch of nazism that did (the Strassers). Does the economic thought, to the degree that there is anything coherent enough to call it that, have enough in common with each other and with Hrothy ‘s Hungary, the Iron Guard in Romania, imperial Japan, phalangist Spain and Salazar’s Portugal to make the term useful as an umbrella? Is there enough distinguishing this from Peron or the New Deal corporatism? (Not all the New Deal was corporatist…) The unholy aura attached to the words fascism, national socialism, precludes a lot of comparative study–not to vindicate anything but to see how similar or not social and political reactions were to the stress of the times. Also, Brit leaders have no moral authority to pronounce on Mussolini. Lloyd George told the League of Nations that the UK reserved the right to bomb (slur used for people of African descent). Churchill insisted on Britain’s right to gas the Kurds. As for murdering hundreds and killing thousands, ask the Irish about 1916-31.
Funnier still, both Tojo and Mussilini were ousted from power after losing confidence of their parliaments, so to speak.
Yes, and monarchs.
Mussolini was a close associate of Rosa Luxemburg snd Lenin. As a journo in WW1 he was on British payroll to encourage Italy to enter the war
Churchill had a long interwar correspondence with Mussolini which MI6 had to recover post war and rumour has it it was MI6 that executed Mussolini.
Manchester Guardian caused the problem by denouncing the Hoare-Laval Pact over Ethiopia driving Mussolini to ally with Hitler in 1935 and this costing Britain the Med as the huge Italian navy now joined the Kriegsmarine and Britain faced German Navy plus Italian plus Japanese – the U.S. having forced Britain on 1920 not to renew the Anglo-Japanese Naval Treaty 1902 – Plan Orange and Plan Red – US contingency for war with Britain and Japan
Seems a Greek might disagree. 0l
The Elizabethans and late Rurikid Muscovy were not known for religious tolerance yet they were happy to do business together in the Arctic despite being schismatic heretical whatnot to one another. Russia is I think a threat to world domination simply by geography just as it can never achieve world domination (to the degree that anyone can) due to geography. A variation on Mackinder. One will note perhaps that in Risk Russia is split up into many constituent parts.
I don’t know what I did. The linky bits took over. Apologies.
You don’t need to use the link tags at all. Just paste the link as regular text in separate line, like this:
https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/10/14/roots-of-war-western-civilization-and-the-turks/
Strange that USA was omitted from this storyline. No mention of Dawes Plan nor of Young Plan nor of Horace Greeley Schacht as Reichsbank Governor.
Not how GM and Ford and ITT moved into Germany following Dawes Plan and how Dawes became US Veep the following year 1925. Nor that Hitler was sponsored by a Yale friend of FDR and even met with US Embassy staff in 1920s.
As for Communism – it was a German design taken up by Russian Social Democrats modelled on SPD in Germany. It was not Communism that lead Germany to plan war against Russia but rapid economic growth in Russia under Stolypin. Russia in 1912 faced the threat from Germany China now faces from USA
Hitler was driven by „Bolshevik Jewish Menace“ but also by „Jewish Capitalism“ both of which were inimical to German „culture“ in his view. Nazis were determined to eradicate Slavs just like US had eradicated Red Men.
As for Britain it was – as in 1945 – cognisant of Germany as a bulwark against turmoil from Eastern Europe and German borders were only defined in the west by Locarno Treaty but not on East until 2+4 Treaty in 1990 as Oder-Neisse.
Britain signed Anglo-German Naval Treaty – a stupid Act – because of U.S. Treaty of Washington which had limited British naval modernisation – it is why the 1919 battlecruiser Hood was sunk by the 1937 battleship Bismarck with its better guns and heavier armour.
Britain was hobbled by war debt to U.S. and 40% Government Budget going on Debt Servicing – and Churchill‘s Defence Cuts 1925-29. it was Chamberlain that revoked Ten Year Rule in 1932 as Chancellor and started rearmament after 1935 election.
If you go to Kew and read British diplomatic reports from Poland you learn how Warsaw was harassing German speakers and cutting off links to Protestsnt Church in Germany, removing mail boxes in the German city of Danzig, banning German schools and much the same was happening in Moravia on Czechoslovakia. Stresemann even had a Minister for Occupied Territories in his Weimar government and JVs in USSR testing tanks snd aircraft – Guderian trained in USSR
The military cooperation with USSR started 1919 and was ended 1933. Hitler wanted an alliance with Britain but Ribbentrop – one of few English-speaking Nazis – screwed it up with his dire performance in London and his relationship with Wallis Simpson whereby contents of red boxes sent to King Edward VIII were found in the German Embassy where Britsin had a spy – the father of Peter Ustinov.
This is why Baldwin had Edward VIII removed and George VI installed – so called Abdication Crisis
You really need to build in FDR and his fallout with Joseph Kennedy in London as he used his other friend – Biddell ? as Ambassador to Paris who egged on Warsaw to irritate Germany even publicly stating US would defend Poland only to walk back his „misspoken“ words
Diana Johnstone wrote about this topic on the 80th anniversary of D-Day, from which the Russians excluded — the nation who sacrificed so many to actually win the war by inflicting 80 percent of the casualties against Nazi Germany. In the war’s aftermath, American foreign policy was captured by Nazi defectors, Russophobes from central Europe, and mindless neo-McCarthy-ites. Johnstone wrote:
https://consortiumnews.com/2024/06/14/diana-johnstone-d-day-2024/
Psychological
This is the right place to discuss the question, but I don’t think every single devoted reader of Naked will get what I’m saying.
People name various attributes of various societies they think keep or kept whatever society sane. Looking back to a particular era of the Mohawk, Oneida, Onondaga, Cayuga, Seneca, and Tuscarora…they may name democracy. Looking over to China in the present, they may name appreciation of travel. Looking back to Sparta [and somewhat to Toynbee’s emphasizing weather], they may name: challenges. Looking to Cuba right now, they might name: science (medicine). Going back to early Quaker days in England, they might name: work-in-its-proper-perspective (same with Hutterites in the 1970s, and I trust now too). Back in fertile crescent days, Inca dirt farmer days, and Lao Tzu days…appreciation of nature’s ways. From India: their take on Shakti vs the notion of “Yin” farther east?
Re me myself, I’d name all those features except Sparta’s extremes. Don’t know if yall can put those together in your heads; but, for me, Christopher Lasch described in the 90s what happened when anything that was left of those things in the west began to take a seat even farther back on the bus. Information-people began getting pumped up vs those who worked doing really physical things with their hands. It sort of happened when the best schools obtained computers when all the others hadn’t.
I seriously meant to read more psychology earlier on in life, but haven’t quite kept up with my aims, say, as they existed in the above mentioned 90s. Well, the shadow is a concept it’s hard for my own brain and I guess my own legalism to except. But I’m persuaded one way to give it the space/attention/integration it needs is through physical activity…especially creative physical activity. If you keep the shadow pent up, he projects [or “she” I guess, if that’s ever a case]. And what does that mean? I’m open to critique on this, but what it means is that without such activity, if say you dislike one particular character defect that’s out there, your shadow will project into your perception…an apprehension of this attribute as bestowed on a person who has the opposite attribute. Why is this revenge? It’s revenge, because it causes you huge embarrassment later…or it might cause you to get killed. A typical aspect of this projection is when someone dislikes a lousy attribute and should speak in general against the attribute, but doesn’t. Suppose s/he doesn’t speak out due to fear. In that case what’s projected onto another (which the other does not exhibit) would be obsessive fearfulness. Do I have that right?
This phenomenon seems to have mildly exploded when Cuomo sent those patients to the nursing homes. Workers doing things physical in our society have become scapegoats. But in retrospect most can see those care givers with their physical work and their mental responsibilities/liabilities are more capable in many ways than folks in cubes and offices. Sad to be so blunt about it…but the situation’s true. So I think Naked Capitalism folks, of all people, should be able to see that this is why America has dangerously lept far into the prone-to-project category. Like post WWI Germans, but in our case it’s not due to the nation having no capital.
There should be a substack or some place (or here at NC?) where those who get this can talk to one another. Under this YouTube maybe? (check it out at 14:50) https://youtu.be/aJRvIVy6jbM