In 1934, Kansas City Democratic party boss Tom Pendergast promoted his friend, failed businessman Harry Truman, for a Senate seat. In that office months before U.S. entry into World War II, Sen. Truman declared, “If we see that Germany is winning, we ought to help Russia, and if Russia is winning we ought to help Germany, and that way let them kill as many as possible.”
In 1944, conservative Democrats tragically rejected President Roosevelt’s brilliant and dedicated right hand man Henry Wallace as too liberal, replacing him as vice president with Truman. With Roosevelt’s death, Truman became president.
As president, he abandoned the presidential and American people’s bonding with Russians that had occurred, as well as promised aid to rebuild this devastated ally. Instead of cooperation Roosevelt had created, Truman arrogantly treated the Soviet Union as an aggressive rival and supported rebuilding Germany as an ally against Russians. Planting the deepest roots, he bears full responsibility for creation of the Cold War.
As we know, hostility to another only fosters resentment. A belligerent Vladimir Putin is a lengthened shadow of that Truman hostility.
The U.S. House recently endorsed 2022 defense spending of $768 billion, an increase of $40 billion over last year. Support was bipartisan. This is the 60th year of such pro forma Defense authorizations and continues U.S. military expenditures that exceed sums spent by China, the Russian Federation, and ten other major countries combined. It is also an expression of the lobbying power of our military and industrialists that President Eisenhower wisely warned against.
So now we have Cold War renewal and the usual effort to blame “the other.” Putin has massed troops ands supplies, as if to spring invasion on Ukraine. China has muscled its claims on Taiwan. In both cases, the US has militarily supported independence of these targets.
What provocative business does the U.S. have in promoting NATO membership for Ukraine — an organization formed against Russians?
Remember Cold War history? Adults were urged to dig bomb shelters in their back yards. Children were trained to hide beneath school desks to survive atomic blasts that would have leveled school buildings. Mind control was being managed while the military and big business were profiting as they had during the war. Wars are very lucrative — for those who provide the tools.
Once referred to as Formosa, Taiwan, an island the size of one of our smaller states. has a long-anchored cultural history of the native Taiwanese people. It was colonized in the 17th Century by the Dutch until Chinese dynasties seized control. Settlement of an 1895 war between Japan and China brought the island into the Japanese Empire. Taiwanese served in the Japanese army in World War II.
It is important in the present to understand how the defense of China against the Japanese invasion that began in 1931 played out. Sun Yat-sen had led creation of a republic of China in 1912. Warlords seized regional power. China was treated as an insignificant entity in the Treaty of Versailles that settled global conflict of World War I. Two factions emerged, the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek and the Chinese Communist Party of Mao Tse-tung.
Throughout World War II, the U.S. supplied and allied with Chiang. Nonetheless, the communists proved the popular force that would subdue the Japanese invaders and, in so doing, occupy much of China. A bitter civil war was waged between the two factions. When the Communists prevailed in 1948, Chiang retreated with his forces to Taiwan, which he labeled Republic of China.
Chiang’s 30-year rule was ruthlessly autocratic. His wife lobbied in the U.S., and it is that economic and military support that has allowed the island nation to prosper. In the 1970s, his Republic of China claim was dismissed as other nations adopted a “one China” policy.
This threat to,Taiwan’s independence takes place in the dimension of China-U.S. trade tensions and the latter’s valid criticism of China’s record on human rights.
Ukraine presents more challenging circumstances. Russia can claim it was a part of its empire, then of the USSR. Ukraine gained independence in 1991, but the tumult of the 20th century is instructive.
1930s Soviet industrialization drew sufficient resources from Ukraine that starvation ensued. Resentment led some Ukrainians to naively welcome Germans invaders as liberators. Ethnically Slavic, like Jews they were to be eradicated as part of quest for living space for pure white Germans.
None want the costs of war. It is this contrived cost of peace that should matter.
Charlemont resident Carl Doerner is an author and historian currently at work on a re-examination of and challenge to the “American narrative.”