“American foreign policy was far less worried about Communist expansion in the waning days of WWII (before China became Communist and Communist activities heated up in Southeast Asia and Korea) than it was with the French, British, and Dutch looking to reestablish their colonies. In fact, anti-colonialism had been a sort of bugbear for Franklin Roosevelt, who put Joseph Stalin on a somewhat higher moral plane than Winston Churchill. As Roosevelt put it, “Of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist”1—unlike the devotedly imperialist British prime minister. No doubt that was small comfort to the people of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and elsewhere, who would gladly have traded Soviet “friendship” for British imperialism. (For those who have forgotten, Communism had an even more murderous record than Hitler’s Nazis and represented a far more oppressive and tyrannical regime than your average fascist state. Mussolini’s Italy was a libertarian paradise compared to Stalin’s Russia.) Still, even after Roosevelt’s death, anti-colonialism remained the fall-back position of American foreign policy, equally popular on the isolationist-leaning Right and the “progressive” Left.” Excerpt From: Jennings, Phillip. “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Vietnam War.”
Posted on: Wed, 10 Dec 2014 07:24:59 +0000
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