The Politics of War
Folsom, Bud
Book Review The Politics of War the World and U.S. Foreign Policy: 1943-1945 by Gabriel Kolko Vintage, $3.45 In our present age of recurrent East-West tensions, it is pertinent to re-examine the...
...At Potsdam, Russian support was sought not only to conquer Japan, which many believed would require "perhaps a million or more men," but to render America "very tangible military aid" to protect "American interests in Manchuria...
...The author concludes that America wished to solidify its economic supremacy in China via an Open Door policy and a free port at Dairen...
...That these leftist elements constituted only a tiny minority of France's and Italy's population is irrelevant to an author determined to glorify and expand the radical tradition...
...Well before August, 1945, they had reduced this to a routine...
...After the war, Kolko insists that the anti-Nazi forces in France and Italy should have eventually formed communist states - had not the United States coerced them into following a different course...
...Revisionists David Horowitz and Gar Alperovitz detect hatred and fear of Russia in America's decision to drop the atomic bomb (see Michael Amrine's indicting review of Alperovitz's Atomic Diplomacy: Hiroshima and Potsdam in The New York Herald Tribune, July 18, 1965...
...Kolko contrasts the belligerent and mercenary American policy with that of the benign and "anti-revolutionary" Soviet Union...
...According to Kolko, another theme pervading Potsdam was the insatiable American desire to introduce atomic weapons...
...For an antidote to these staggering Machiavellian speculations, see Herbert Feis, The Atomic Bomb and the End of World War II...
...For example, at Yalta, American objectives were "primarily economic in content," to further United States imperialism by promoting favorable American trade patterns...
...To guarantee Soviet hegemony, American and British observers were not allowed entry into Poland...
...Yet this Manichaean view, replete with conspiracies and deceptive documents, is accepted by most revisionists with only minor variations...
...Fortunately, few revisionists display the imagination of David Leslie Hoggan, who unmasks British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain as a warmonger bullying the pacifist Adolf Hitler...
...Through Kolko's economic blinders, then, American policy was uniformly selfish and irrationally anti-Soviet...
...Molotov further suggested that Soviet boundaries should extend into East Prussia...
...Truman is protrayed as licking his chops "to drop the first bomb as soon as it was ready...
...In The Politics of War, Gabriel Kolko joins a host of New Left historians in flagellating the United States for single-handedly initiating the cold war...
...Foreign Policy: 1943-1945 by Gabriel Kolko Vintage, $3.45 In our present age of recurrent East-West tensions, it is pertinent to re-examine the origins of our frightful cold war...
...When these graves were discovered in 1943, the Polish government-in-exile requested an investigation...
...As early as 1941, Stalin insisted that the disputed land east of the Curzon line be granted to the Soviet Union after the war...
...Furthermore, he demanded that the Polish boundary be extended westward at German expense...
...By early 1945, Stalin recognized the Lublin government, a Soviet based regime, as the legitimate government of Poland...
...Russia promptly denied culpability, severed diplomatic relations with this London based administration, and organized a puppet government in Russia to assume postwar leadership in Poland...
...At the Teheran Conference in 1943, Russia reiterated this demand for East Prussian territory...
...Furthermore, "The Americans decided to use the bomb as a known and now predictable factor of war, an economical means of destroying vast numbers of men, women, and children, soldiers, and civilians...
...Kolko's devil theory of history (with America as the devil) is clearly an inadequate model to describe cold war origins...
...For example, New Left guru Denna Frank Fleming traces cold war origins back to the American failure to join the League of Nations...
...Possibly Stalin's most deceitful and homicidal act, one which Kolko explains away, was the massacre of over 10,000 Polish officer-prisoners in the Katyn Forest during the early stages of the war...
...Moderate Russia disregarded Poland and Yugoslavia and "had no intention of Bolshevizing Eastern Europe in 1945 if - but only if - they could find alternatives...
...The author further argues that the United States provoked and browbeat Russia, not because the Soviets were totalitarian, but because it posed a threat to America's capitalist hegemony - especially in Eastern Europe...
...This was decimation on such a grand scale that, according to one survivor, some Russian soldiers committed suicide rather than obey orders to execute the Poles and pile them into mass graves...
...Bud Folsom...
...But as traditional historians see it, Russia was heavily involved in East European affairs...
...During and after World War II, Kolko asserts, the United States pursued egocentric economic policies designed to promote "American global interests" through a "world capitalist state" under American supervision...
Vol. 6 • May 1973 • No. 8
