Two Crooked Mirrors
CHAMBERLAIN, WILLIAM HENRY
PERSPECTIVES Two Crooked Mirrors By William Henry Chamberlin Sometimes bad books are as worthy of discussion as good ones—particularly when they put forward fallacious and distorted views on...
...Fleming starts off on the wrong foot by preposterously exaggerating the dimensions and significance of Western intervention in Russia during and after World War I. The high point of absurdity comes when he accuses the West of causing "the death of 7.5 million Russians...
...Basically, his method is to excuse every Soviet breach of faith and every territorial grab beyond Russian frontiers on the ground of "national defense...
...In his book Tetens, a German émigré who has not been in his native country for many years, tries to prove that Konrad Adenauer's Germany is a thin camouflage for the return to power of the Nazis...
...the savage Soviet purges of the 1930s, for instance, are given no more than six lines...
...This would make the West responsible not only for the Russian Civil War but for the famine that followed...
...Two recent works of this kind are The Cold War and its Origins, by D. F. Fleming (Doubleday, two volumes, 1158 pp., $15.00), and The New Germany and the Old Nazis by T. H. Tetens (Random House, 286 pp., $4.95...
...But, to an objective observer, it is surprising that there is so little...
...Later in the book, wherever the evidence of Soviet guilt in mass murder or crass aggression is overwhelming—as in the Katyn Forest massacre of Polish war prisoners in 1940, or the invasion of South Korea in 1950—Fleming always attempts to inject a sly note of doubt...
...The author would have us believe that the cold war is almost entirely our fault, that the Soviet Union is a peace-loving, much wronged country and that its enormous geographical and political expansion since the end of the War is quite natural and justifiable in the interest of national defense...
...Surely the main portion of this responsibility lies with Communist tyranny and misgovernment...
...If Fleming is right, the policy of standing up to Communist aggression pursued by three successive presidents, Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy, is hopelessly wrong...
...Secret Nazi groups are so strong that they are likely to take over the Bonn government almost any day now...
...He seems abysmally ignorant of the world revolutionary implications of Leninist doctrine, and is quite blind to the tragedy of allowing large areas of Europe to fall under Soviet domination...
...The distortions of truth and the contortions of logic in which Fleming indulges in his effort to indict America for the cold war have to be read to be believed...
...Every reported case of hoodlumism or vandalism with an antiSemitic tinge, which the author has stored up in voluminous files, is blown up to major proportions...
...He assumes that if the Western powers had simply pursued a policy of appeasement, all would have been well...
...The Federal Republic is also a hotbed of violent nationalism and anti-Semitism...
...Not a single Nazi has been elected to the Bundestag...
...Every economic and political principle of the Adenauer government is contrary to Nazi philosophy: close association with Europe, free trade and cultural exchange with other countries, exposure of Nazi crimes in the schools and punishment of the criminals in the courts...
...A similarly bad case could be made for America if someone took the trouble to compile a list of every act of juvenile delinquency and every outburst of crackpot extremists—and included no other aspect of American life...
...That Nazism, dominant in Germany for 12 years, has left behind some taint is obvious...
...Only the case would be completely false...
...PERSPECTIVES Two Crooked Mirrors By William Henry Chamberlin Sometimes bad books are as worthy of discussion as good ones—particularly when they put forward fallacious and distorted views on important public questions...
...When the nominations for the Lenin Peace Prizes are made in Moscow, Fleming's work should not be forgotten...
...Fleming's book is the most elaborate apology for appeasement and defeatism that has come to my attention...
...And Soviet delegates to the UN will be remiss if they fail to file for copious references from his book for their labored and farfetched apologetics for Soviet aggression...
...The internal nature of the Soviet regime concerns him very little...
...By slanting his selection of facts and quotations, Tetens has drawn a fantastically distorted picture of the free German Republic today...
...To Tetens, West Germany (he is silent on the East Zone) is unregenerate...
Vol. 45 • January 1962 • No. 2
