The ongoing attack on FDR

George W. Bush, like a lot of Republicans, likes to invoke FDR. Which is puzzling because he is at the forefront of something I thought died in the 1950s; certainly with the passing of hardcore Birchers in the 1970s.

But no. Bush has taken up the mantle passed by the crazies decades ago. First he attacks Roosevelt's most significant continuing legacy, Social Security. Then he nominates for the Federal Appeals court, a Randian objectivist who compares FDR to Lenin, the Soviet revolution of 1917 with FDR's social reforms of 1937.

Now Bush is revising history again, all but comparing FDR with Neville Chamberlain and Yalta with Munich.

The agreement at Yalta followed in the unjust tradition of Munich and the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Once again, when powerful governments negotiated, the freedom of small nations was somehow expendable. Yet this attempt to sacrifice freedom for the sake of stability left a continent divided and unstable. The captivity of millions in Central and Eastern Europe will be remembered as one of the greatest wrongs of history.

Wait. I take back that "all but."

A little history, free of the conspiracy theories the far Right in this country have been peddling since 1945, is in order here.

At Yalta, Stalin wanted FDR and Churchill to recognize the Lublin government. They refused. Instead, all agreed to accept a provisional government, with a pledge to hold "free and unfettered elections" soon. For other liberated European countries, the Big Three also pledged to establish "interim governmental authorities broadly representative of all democratic elements in the population" and committed to free elections.

Roosevelt knew that Stalin might renege, and it was perhaps cynical for him to trumpet elections that might never take place. But as the historian David M. Kennedy has written, he had little choice, "unless Roosevelt was prepared to order Eisenhower to fight his way across the breadth of Germany, take on the Red Army, and drive it out of Poland at gunpoint."

Stalin, of course, never allowed elections in Poland or anywhere else. "Our hopeful assumptions were soon to be falsified," Churchill wrote. "Still, they were the only ones possible at the time." Short of starting a hot war, the West was powerless to intervene, just as it was in Hungary in 1956 or Prague in 1968.

Because FDR kept many details of the Yalta agreements under wraps, people in Washington began whispering conspiratorially about "secret agreements." Soon, critics, especially on the far right, were charging that FDR and Churchill had sold out the people of Eastern Europe—charges that Bush's recent comments echo. They asserted that the ailing Roosevelt—he would die only weeks later—had come under the malign influence of pro-Communist advisers who gave Stalin the store.

But Yalta did not give Stalin control of the Eastern European countries. He was already there. Moreover, as Lloyd C. Gardner has argued, it's possible that postwar Europe could have turned out worse than it did. For all its evident failings, Yalta did lead to a revived Western Europe, a lessening of open warfare on the continent, and, notwithstanding Bush's remarks, relative stability. Without Yalta, Gardner notes, "the uneasy equilibrium of the Cold War might have deteriorated into something much worse—a series of civil wars or possibly an even darker Orwellian condition of localized wars along an uncertain border." Such "what if" games are generally pointless, but they can remind us that the harmonious Europe that Yalta's critics tout as a counter-scenario wasn't the only alternative to the superpower standoff.

If anyone thought the neocons were out of favor at the White House, Bush's speech in Latvia shows that they remain very much in control. For Bush and the neocons, all negotiation is appeasement, and war is something never to be avoided (except for themselves, personally).