Geopolitics of Atlanticism
Winston Churchill and U.S. President Truman arrive at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri,
March 5, 1946, where Churchill would deliver his warmongering "Iron Curtain" speech.
Many
U.S. presidents argue that their leadership be accepted on the
basis that they
alone can establish an international order that could bring about peace
and stability. Prior to
the advent of the doctrine which claims that the U.S. is the one
indispensable nation to which
all must submit, that order has traditionally been equated with the
interests and demands of an
"international community." To their chagrin, the peoples of the world
are witness to the
genocide of the Palestinian people being carried out by the U.S./Israel
and their appeasers
including Canada and are opposed to the conception of "the interests
and demands of the
international community" this represents.
The pretense of representing "the international community" is
that there is adherence to the
post-World War II racist conception of the Anglo-American imperialists
that the
"English-speaking peoples" should decide and rule over the destiny of
the world. For them the
"international community" is equated with the "English-speaking
peoples" (USA, Britain,
Canada, Australia, New Zealand) and includes whoever they pragmatically
deem to be part of
it. This is what Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and Foreign
Minister Mélanie Joly
push today when they present themselves on behalf of a self-proclaimed
"international
community" dictating who are the representatives of the people of Haiti
and so too, of the
Palestinians and other countries. The aim of this racist world view is
to divert attention from
the essence of the matter: the failure to uphold the right of nations
to decide themselves their
internal affairs without foreign interference which is enshrined in the
Charter of the
United Nations.
The following article which elaborates the geopolitics of Atlanticism -- NATO's founding values and ideology -- was written by Tony Seed and published by TML Weekly Information Project in Vol. 49 No. 12 Supplement, April 6, 2019. Tony Seed writes:
The most significant document elaborating the racist view of the superiority of the "English-speaking world" and expressing the aims and mandate for which NATO was created was the so-called Iron Curtain speech delivered by Winston Churchill on March 5, 1946. This speech was delivered barely six months after V-J (Victory over Japan) Day, after his Tory Party was crushed in the election in England and the crisis in which the British Empire was mired was deepening. Winston Churchill rediscovered both the Atlanticist race doctrine of "manifest destiny" proclaimed by Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the century and the Hitlerite "menace of Bolshevism."
Churchill's Iron Curtain speech which was the cause of so much uproar was delivered at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, where he went ostensibly to receive an honorary degree. The little-known college was located approximately 240 kilometres from the hometown of President Truman who travelled there to introduce Churchill. Truman's presence was necessary because without him, the show could not be staged. He was conspicuously present at the time of its delivery not only to introduce Churchill to the audience but to underline its import and assure saturation media coverage.
There is no doubt that Truman and Churchill had agreed on the contents of the speech and had weighed its consequences. "In the light of Truman's strongly hardened determination to quit 'babying' the Soviets, he was probably the originator" of the speech, assesses the American historian D.F. Fleming. As is known, British Prime Minister Attlee, Foreign Minister Bevin, and also Truman and U.S. Secretary of State Byrnes knew that this speech was to be made and had given their approval. Lester Pearson also read a draft and boasted that he was proud to have contributed a line.[1] In other words, the "greatness" of Churchill was to be used to justify any and every kind of infamy and aggression. All these facts prove that Churchill did not only express his personal views, but promulgated the anti-Soviet program of the ruling elite in Britain, the United States of America and Canada.
In Britain, Churchill could not have publicly announced the Cold War against the Soviet Union. Such a speech could have ended very embarrassingly for him at that time. The British people were militant supporters of the Soviet Union and their leader J.V. Stalin who led the brilliant victory over the Nazi hordes who invaded the Soviet Union. They had suffered great losses during the war and had just drummed Churchill and his party out of office in the 1945 General Election. Their disagreement with the former government's foreign policy line which Churchill was to now formulate in the Fulton speech would have been unmistakable. Taking into consideration the state of affairs in Britain, the leaders of the social democratic Labour government did not dare express official solidarity with Churchill; they were to do that a few years later.
It was another matter in the U.S. where the government openly preached Churchill's anti-Soviet ideas. Truman's presence at Fulton underlined the importance attached by the U.S. ruling elite to this speech. Furthermore, the United States was obliged, by virtue of its position in the imperialist world, to play the leading role in carrying out Churchill's proposed plan.
The Soviet Union, having paid with colossal human and material losses for victory over fascism, was solely concerned to restore what had been destroyed by the aggressors, to progress further along the road of socialist construction and to vigorously defend the cause of humanity for liberation and peace, against war. Yet to the great astonishment of his audience, the guest speaker announced that they were in direct and immediate danger of another world war and tyranny, and that the cause of this threat was the Soviet Union and the international communist movement.
Churchill declared that the main purpose of his speech was to propose the creation of a "fraternal association of English-speaking peoples." He said this meant "a special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States. Fraternal association requires not only the growing friendship between our two vast but kindred systems of society, but the continuance of the intimate relationships between our military advisers, leading to common study of potential danger, the similarity of weapons and manuals of instruction and to the interchange of officers and cadets at technical colleges. It should carry with it the continuance of the present facilities for mutual security by the joint use of all Naval and Air Force bases in possession of either country all over the world.
"This would perhaps double the mobility of the American navy and air force. It would greatly expand that of the British Empire's Forces and it might well lead, if and as the world calms down, to important financial savings [...] Eventually there may come [...] the principle of common citizenship, but that we may be content to leave to destiny, whose outstretched arm so many of us can already clearly see."
Churchill tried to put the wind behind the sails of the ruling elite in the U.S., Britain and other countries:
"Beware, I say: time may be short. Do not let us take the course of letting events drift along till it is too late."
Who was to be the target of the Anglo-American military alliance? Churchill made his meaning absolutely clear. He said it was against "the growing challenge to Christian civilization" and war against "the menace of Bolshevism," the developing socialist revolution. He demanded an Anglo-American preponderance of power against the Soviet Union, with reference to Eastern Europe. He made explicit the division of Europe and the world into two spheres of influence, one led by the U.S., the other by the USSR, i.e., two camps, formally declaring the Cold War and enunciating what would be the original mandate of NATO, launching the idea of a military bloc of nations with common ideals, allegedly under the auspices of the United Nations. Churchill stated:
"Courts and magistrates cannot function without sheriffs and constables. The United Nations Organization must immediately begin to be equipped with an international armed force. [...] They would wear the uniform of their own countries with different badges. They would not be required to act against their own nation but in other respects they would be directed by the world organization. [...] I wished to see this done after the First World War and trust it may be done forthwith."
Churchill heralded on the one hand the "special relationship between the British Commonwealth and Empire and the United States" and on the other hand declared cold war on the Soviet Union. He proclaimed Europe and the Anglo-American world as a victim:
"From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an Iron Curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in the Soviet sphere and all are subject, in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and increasing measure of control from Moscow [...]
"I do not believe that...Russia desires war [but] the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and their doctrines. [...]"[2]
This was the first mention of the phrase "special relationship" but not the first of the "iron curtain" which was to become popular with Cold War propagandists. The 1948 edition of Bartlett's Familiar Quotations states: "According to the London Times, the expression 'iron curtain' was coined by von Krosigk, Hitler's Minister of Finance, and was used by Goebbels, in his propaganda for some years before Mr. Churchill adopted it." In spite of this, British communist R. Palme Dutt wrote at the time, "[T]his formula is universally stated to have been coined by the genius of Sir Winston Churchill."[3]
Churchill's notion of an iron curtain was the salvo to justify every kind of brutality in order to keep the peoples and nations enslaved. It served as a reminder that what the Anglo-American chauvinists feared the most was a world in which the peoples were all liberated. Instead of having one world united against fascism and reaction, for peace, freedom, independence and democracy, they divided humanity by championing the anti-democratic and imperialist forces and creating two camps.
Condemning the democratic transformations in the countries of Eastern Europe, Churchill indicated what he had in mind for these countries. "Athens alone," he said, "with its immortal glories, is free to decide its future at an election under British, American and French observation." But Athens was a symbol of the shame with which Churchill covered himself in December 1944 when he ordered his troops and local Nazi collaborators to openly fire on unarmed Greeks demonstrating in support of the Greek partisans, who were Britain's allies in the war, because of the influence of the Communist Party in the resistance movement.
Churchill recommended the use of force against the USSR, and soon -- while the USA had the atomic bomb and the Soviet Union had not yet developed it. Churchill made it absolutely clear that he meant the application of military force against the USSR. "From what I have seen from our Russian friends and allies during the war," he said, "I am convinced there is nothing they admire so much as strength." He had proposed achieving in 1946 "a good understanding on all points with Russia." This meant that if the Soviet Union did not capitulate when threatened with the use of force, then it would be essential to start a preventive war against it.
Churchill was no longer content with the traditional British principle of a balance of power when Britain had carried out its policy on the continent of Europe by playing one country off against another. "The old doctrine of a balance of power is unsound," he said. "We cannot afford, if we can help it, to work on narrow margins offering temptations to a trial of strength." On behalf of Truman, he presented a new policy for the Anglo-American imperialists which was subsequently to become known as the "position of strength" or "peace through strength" policy.
The "good understanding on all points with Russia" which Churchill hoped for was to be "supported by the whole strength of the English-speaking world and all its connections." In this way, the idea was expressed of setting up Anglo-American world domination. There was nothing new about this. The "cooperation and fraternity of the English-speaking peoples committed to the ideals of democracy and liberty had long been Winston Churchill's great interest, and was his greatest hope for the future of mankind." His literary project, begun in the 1930s, was the four-volume A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. Churchill was known to have been harbouring it throughout World War II.[4]
Following the collapse of the Maginot Line and the humiliation of "Dunkirk," Churchill then made his "grand gesture" to France proposing common citizenship. ("Thank God for the French Army," Churchill had said, time and again.) Churchill advocated the subjection of France to England under the auspices of the United States and held that "the principle of common citizenship may arise later" for the USA and England.[5]
Churchill believed that if Britain and the USA could suppress the revolutionary movements and subject the Soviet Union to their will, they would be able to ensure domination over the world for the next one hundred years. In his Fulton speech he said:
"If the population of the English-speaking Commonwealths be added to that of the United States, with all that such co-operation implies in the air, on the sea, and in science and industry, and in moral force, there will be no quivering, precarious balance of power to offer its temptation to ambition or adventure. [... I]f all British moral and material forces and convictions are joined with your own in fraternal association, the highroads of the future will be clear, not only for us but for all, not only for our time but for a century to come."
With Napoleonic hubris, Churchill announced that he intended to define the task facing humanity and explain how it should be accomplished. Characteristically he pointed out that in the latter part of the 1930s, when a second world war was imminent, he alone had offered the right advice on how it should be averted, but his efforts had failed because those in power at the time had proved incapable of understanding the full significance of his suggestions. This was more than his habitual self-promotion and aggrandizement. He was also implying that the counsel he was giving to humanity on this occasion was as well-founded and justified as his attitude on the eve of the Second World War.
The thrust of Churchill's Fulton speech was as follows: The Soviet Union was the main threat to the security and freedom of all other nations and therefore humanity must unite under Anglo-American leadership and avert this threat by use of force. Churchill aimed to stir up the whole world against the Soviet Union. All this was being said less than a year after the Soviet Union, at the cost of appalling sacrifices and sufferings, had ensured the defeat of fascism and had helped bring freedom to the enslaved peoples; after Britain, thanks to the sacrifices, had been saved from the threat of imminent destruction; and at the time when, as Anglo-American military experts believed, Britain and the USA would have been still fighting a war with Japan in the Far East if the Soviet Union had not stepped in on the side of the Allies, thereby ensuring its swift and early conclusion. The truth is now known about Churchill's development of "Operation Unthinkable" -- a plan for war against the Soviet Union that was to have begun on July 1, 1945 with 112-113 divisions, including a dozen Wehrmacht divisions that were kept in readiness in Schleswig-Holstein and southern Denmark until the spring of 1946.[6] The plan assumed a surprise attack by as many as 47 British and American divisions in the area of Dresden, in the middle of Soviet lines.
Coursing through Churchill's speech was a hatred for the peoples of the Soviet Union, whose crime was that they had built their own life in accordance with their own desires and ways of thinking, and not as he would have approved. Churchill had waged war on the October Revolution in Russia by building the interventionist block of the 14 nations including the U.S. and Canada during 1918, 1919 and 1920 which was thrashed by the Red Army and sent packing. He was to declare: "The failure to strangle Bolshevism at its birth and to bring Russia, then prostrate, by one means or another into the general democratic system, lies heavy upon us today."[7] Then throughout the twenties he had preached the menace of the "red revolution," never losing an opportunity to refer to the Bolshevik leaders as "murderers and ministers of hell."
Besides taking up the Jewish-Bolshevik conspiracy theories of the Hitlerites, Churchill avidly promoted national chauvinism, the racial division of the peoples into superior and inferior tiers to sow discord and line them up behind the aims of the Anglo-American imperialists and reactionary ruling classes. Racism, anti-communism and anti-worker propaganda are the three components of fascist ideology. This is what Hitler pushed and acted on under the banner of national socialism; he began to set war loose by announcing his racial theory, declaring that only those speaking the German language represented a really valuable nation.
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The essence of the policy of the ruling circles of Britain and France in that period was disclosed by Joseph Stalin in an interview with Pravda. Exposing the true meaning of this summons, Stalin pointed out:
"Mr. Churchill has, in point of fact, taken up the position of war instigator. And Mr. Churchill is not alone in this -- he has friends not only in Britain, but in the United States of America as well." Stalin went on to note that Churchill's Fulton speech was strikingly reminiscent of Hitler:
"Hitler went about the business of unleashing a war by promulgating a racist theory, announcing that the German-speaking peoples were the master race. Mr. Churchill likewise begins the business of unleashing a war with a racist theory, claiming that the English-speaking nations are the master race called upon to fulfill the destinies of the whole world.... The British race theory leads Mr. Churchill and his friends to the conclusion that the English-speaking nations, as the master race, must dominate the other nations of the world. In point of fact, Mr. Churchill and his friends in Britain and the U.S. are offering the non-English-speaking nations something in the nature of an ultimatum: recognize our domination voluntarily and then everything will be settled -- otherwise war is inevitable.... There can be no doubt that Mr. Churchill's aim is war, a call to war with the USSR."[8]
Reaction to Churchill's Speech
The Churchill-Truman speech was greeted with indignation and emphatic condemnation in the democratic circles of various countries, including the United States of America, Great Britain and France. Churchill's speech caused alarm. Many realized it was a call to unleash another world war. Over 100 Labour MPs in the British Parliament condemned Churchill's address. The reaction from the Canadian government was obsequious. His cheerleader Lester Pearson admitted in an official dispatch: "The popular and press reaction to Mr. Churchill's Westminster College speech is about what I expected, mixed, but with the preponderance of opinion critical."
The influential columnist Walter Lippmann, Pearson said, "felt that an alliance with the United Kingdom and the Dominions was one thing; an alliance with the British Empire quite another. This is the traditional and deeply rooted fear of being linked with 'Imperialism'; a fear which is increased at this time as the British Imperial system faces a post-war upsurge of native nationalism which may be expected to express itself violently. Underwriting the United Kingdom is one thing; underwriting Malaya, Burma and Hong Kong something else, though the two can hardly be separated. This is perplexing to the 'Lippmann' school."[9]
Churchill's attack on Stalin for the so-called "division of Europe" legitimized the perfidious violation of all the important Anglo-American-Soviet agreements then underway -- of Teheran, Yalta and Potsdam. According to Jacob Heilbrunn, writing for the Los Angeles Times in 2005, the case was developed by Joseph McCarthy and others of his ilk against "what [they] viewed as a consistent pattern of 'appeasement' in the Democratic Party. In parallel, the Trotskyite 'left' contended that Stalin 'sold out' the French resistance, the Greek communists and even the Palestinians. The right contended that Roosevelt 'sold out' Eastern Europe at the Yalta conference by promising the Soviets an unchallenged sphere of influence in the region."[10]
Heilbrunn adds that "One element of the right-wing mythology developed in those years was that Alger Hiss, who served during the war as an assistant to Secretary of State Edward Stettinius Jr. -- and who was charged in the years that followed with being a Soviet spy and was convicted of perjury -- was instrumental in getting Roosevelt to collude with Stalin against Churchill. It was none other than Joseph McCarthy who declared in February 1950 that 'if time permitted, it might be well to go into detail about the fact that Hiss was Roosevelt's chief advisor at Yalta when Roosevelt was admittedly in ill health and tired physically and mentally.' In later decades, conservatives such as Ronald Reagan would denounce any negotiations with the Soviet Union as portending a new 'Yalta.' Read the text of the Yalta Protocol for yourself. It nowhere formally speaks of the 'division' either of the continent, of any region, or of any country. Nor is there any informal record. The joint powers agreed on a division of one city, Berlin, under a unified command. The Anglo-American historians themselves have established the canard of the 'division of Europe'; it was the U.S. who unilaterally extended the division of Berlin to the unilateral proclamation of West Germany in contravention to the Potsdam Agreement."[11]
During his visit to the United States in May of 1943, Churchill had propounded the idea of "common citizenship" between the Anglo-Saxon countries and suggested that the structure of their military alliance be kept after the war and that the two countries collaborate closely on the chief questions of foreign policy. He then revealed the blackness of his soul, maintaining in his exhortation that only "English-speaking" nations are fully valuable nations, calling on them to decide the destiny of the world. Churchill attributed to them "constancy of mind, persistency of purpose and the grand simplicity of decision." Here is the notion of the moral superiority of Anglo-American values, today being raised once again to fever-pitch, in the name of "Euro-Atlanticism," "trans-Atlantic values" and "the international community" -- the same ones who dropped humanitarian bombs on Afghanistan, Libya, Syria. Here is replicated the ideology of Anglo-Saxon superiority proclaimed as the justification for the new American imperialist power which used the Spanish-American War of 1898 to devour the Americas and the Philippines -- the "civilizing mission" of "white man's burden." The "greatness" of the "English-speaking" nations advocates the division of the world between superior and inferior peoples, between superior and inferior states.
Churchill's call was aimed not only at the "English-speaking peoples" but also constituted a civil war incitement to all the bourgeois nationalist and chauvinist forces in Central and Eastern Europe which had been gathered during World War Two under Anglo-American tutelage -- "all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Prague, Vienna, Budapest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie" -- where the national question had become one of the most profound questions taken up for solution in the form of the new people's democracies. These émigré forces had fled in 1945 to Munich occupied by the Third American Army where they were being reformed into clandestine political and terrorist forces.
Atlanticism
"I am for the world nation," says the racist of the Anglo-Saxon doctrine, "but precisely my nation is the world nation." On the basis of this outlook, all other nations must adapt themselves to this Anglo-American nation, dissolve themselves in it, lose their national identity, and forget about their national traditions, philosophy and thought material. One does not look at what each people have accomplished as a starting point, namely that "The philosophy and thought material of each people poses problems which are of their own, brings forth those personalities who will tackle these problems and who knows, there is no reason it might not go beyond the previous developments on the world scale."[12]
The cosmopolitan theory and geopolitics of Atlanticism forms one of the main underpinnings for NATO and the global drive for Anglo-American supremacy -- the Anglosphere -- declaring the cultural unity and community of interests of all peoples of the Atlantic lake, about "world culture" (meaning Anglo-American and Euro-culture), and the reciprocal influence and penetration of cultures. It was and is a Eurocentric, racist doctrine.
"Atlanticism" signifies the "spiritual unity" of "the North Atlantic community," i.e., states straddling the Atlantic Ocean. "Atlantic Union" is essentially based on an Anglo-Saxon union. It is a successive strategy that takes different political forms of Atlantic unity according to the different offensive periods of American imperialism. At its heart is Manifest Destiny and the Monroe Doctrine.[13]
The proclamation of the Truman Doctrine in 1947 and the Marshall Plan in 1948 meant that the core of the foreign policy plan had been accepted as U.S. state policy. As a result of efforts by the U.S., Britain and Canada, NATO was set up as an aggressive military-political bloc in 1949. This was the Fulton programme in action.
Canadians should be clear that this is what the Government of Canada means when it talks about the "values" Canada espouses as justification for its participation in NATO. As mentioned, Lester Pearson personally took credit for contributing to Churchill's speech and Canada aggressively promoted the division of Germany, Europe and all humanity. The post-war records of the Department of External Affairs with all their prattle about their new "non-colonial" "universalism" and "internationalism" were imbued with the 19th century prejudices of empire-building. On March 19, 1946, George Ritchie, first secretary in the Department of External Affairs and later Canadian Ambassador to West Germany, the United Nations and the United States, wrote frankly that this is "a tussle of power politics" and Canada is "part of an Anglo-Saxon team."[14]
During World War II, Canadians and other peoples of the world shed their blood in the course of five years' fierce war for the sake of the democracy, freedom and independence, and not in order to exchange the domination of the Hitlers for the domination of the Churchills. They did not agree with nor did they have a say in the creation of NATO as a war bloc four years later. Today the vast majority of the population of the world do not agree to submit to a new slavery in the name of an "international community" championed by the Trudeaus and Trumps. They will have their say on the basis of defending the rights of all nations to decide their own affairs without foreign interference.
Notes
1. Pearson's comments on Churchill's speech characteristically reveal the Liberal duplicity and how, even in 1946, the Canadian government was intriguing to form a new aggressive military bloc:
"Finally, Mr. Churchill's proposals have been vigorously attacked by those who see in a strong and universal -- or as nearly universal as possible -- United Nations Organization the only hope for peace. They feel, and with some reason, that an Anglo-American military alliance might weaken and eventually destroy the United Nations Organization. Mr. Churchill, of course, attempted to combat these fears by his 'In My Father's House are Many Mansions' argument. But he has not been successful. He might have been more successful if he had broadened the basis of his 'fraternal association' proposals to include all peace-loving states, who might wish to strengthen their defence relationships within the United Nations Organization. From this point of view, and in my opinion from others, also, it would have been better if Mr. Churchill had made a plea for strengthening the United Nations Organization and for the alteration of the Charter, if necessary, to make such strengthening possible. He then would have been on much stronger ground in arguing that, if one state, or more than one, blocked such a strengthening, a special relationship between the others would be justified. However, it is pretty clear that Mr. Churchill did not have this in mind in his speech. He was thinking of an intimate military association of the English-speaking people alone.
"In the draft of the speech which I read, there was a specific reference to the advisability of continuing the Combined Chiefs of staff. I mentioned at the time to Lord Halifax that I thought this would be unwelcome even to those United States and British service authorities who were hoping most for such a continuance, but thought that the best chance of bringing it about was not to call attention to the matter, but to let the wartime arrangements quietly go on. Lord Halifax agreed and the sentence in question was later amended. However, as amended, it was clear enough to what it referred; clear enough already to cause a discussion which may prejudice these arrangements by bringing them into the open. The attached article by Arthur Krock in the New York Times is interesting in this connection.
"You may also have noticed that a question was asked President Truman at last Thursday's Press Conference on this point. Mr. Truman explained that the Combined Chiefs of Staff were still functioning because peace had not yet been formally made, but that this situation would not, he hoped, last much longer. This part of Mr. Churchill's remarks, therefore, may have hindered rather than helped the cause he hoped to promote; the closest possible association of the armed services of the two countries. [Emphasis added.]
[...]
"If no real success is achieved at such a conference (of the Big Three), then the United States and the United Kingdom should convert the United Nations into a really effective agent to preserve the peace and prevent aggression. This means revising it radically. If the Russians veto such a revision, agreed on by others, a new organization must be created which, as the guardian of the peace for all nations, and not merely the English speaking ones, can function without the Russians and, as a last resort, against them." (Ambassador in United States to Secretary of State for External Affairs, DESPATCH 511, Washington, March 11th, 1946.)
At the same time, dispatches from the Canadian Ambassador to the USSR, Hume Wrong, acknowledged that the Soviet Union was not at all preparing for war.
2. Cited in Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, Co., 1977), pp. 175-6.
3. The "iron curtain" formula came to be used millions of times by anti-communists. "This formula," wrote British communist R. Palme Dutt, "... in fact was first used in this sense... by Josef Goebells in an editorial published in Das Reich on February 25, 1945....[It] continues to be used on every side without recognition of its Nazi origin. If a royalty had to be paid for its use each time by Western publicists and politicians to the original author, the shade of Goebbels would now be the wealthiest shade in Hades." In that article Goebbels wrote:
"If the German people lay down their weapons, the Soviets, according to the agreement between Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin, would occupy all of East and Southeast Europe along with the greater part of the Reich. An iron curtain would fall over this enormous territory controlled by the Soviet Union, behind which nations would be slaughtered."
The "Nazi megaphone" himself may have gotten the term from the Wehrmacht propaganda publication Signal which in 1943 published an article by Randall Bytwerk entitled "Behind the Iron Curtain" who stated:
"He who has listened in on the interrogation of a Soviet prisoner of war knows that once the dam is broken, a flood of words begins as he tries to make clear what he experienced behind the mysterious iron curtain, which more than ever separates the world from the Soviet Union."
4. In a speech on April 27, 1941 following Nazi Germany's invasion of Denmark, Holland, Belgium and France, ending the so-called "phony war," Churchill had quoted poet Arthur Hugh Clough:
For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
Comes silent, flooding in the main.
And not by eastern windows only,
When daylight comes, comes in the light;
In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
But westward, look, the land is bright!
5. British newspaper The Times wrote on May 8, 1945: "Unable to stem the German rush to the coast, [the French General] Weygand reformed his armies behind the Somme and the Aisne and a small British Expeditionary Force was landed in their support. It was too late, and on June 14 the Germans entered Paris, which had been declared an open city. From Bordeaux, whither it had withdrawn, the French Cabinet requested the British Government to release it from its obligation not to make a separate peace. To this the British Government -- the Coalition Ministry which Mr. Churchill had formed a month before -- was prepared to consent if the French fleet first sailed to safety in British ports.
"But the British proposal went farther.
"It offered the union of the two States in a common citizenship if France would fight on. The French Cabinet rejected this proposal, M. Reynaud, who had favoured it, resigned, and the octogenarian Pétain took his place to become the central figure in the most humiliating episode in French history." ("The Long Road To Victory; A Historical Narrative and a Chronological Register Of The Events Of The War In Europe And Africa 1939-1945," The Times, May 8, 1945.)
6. "'Operation Unthinkable' Churchill's Planned Invasion of the Soviet Union," July 1945, Yuriy Rubtsov, Strategic Culture Foundation, May 25, 2015.
7. Speech delivered by Churchill March 31, 1949 at Mid-Century Convocation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
8. J.V. Stalin, Interview with Pravda Correspondent Concerning Mr. Winston Churchill's Speech at Fulton, March, 1946, Source: J.V. Stalin on Post-War International Relations, Soviet News, 1947.
9. Ambassador in United States to Secretary of State for External Affairs, DESPATCH 511, Washington, March 11th, 1946.
10. "Once Again, the Big Yalta Lie," Jacob Heilbrunn, Los Angeles Times, May 10, 2005.
11. Ibid.
12. "A Look at Indian Philosophy -- The Zero Period," Discussion, Vol. 1, No. 2, 1992.
13. During World War II journalist Walter Lippmann, in his 1944 book U.S. War Aims (a sequel to his earlier United States Foreign Policy), sketched a picture of cultural and historical affinities on both sides of the Atlantic -- what he described as an "Atlantic civilization," which came to be picked up by others.
Charles Cogan, Senior Research Associate at the Kennedy School at Harvard University wrote of Lippmann's influence in a 2009 article entitled "American and European Foreign Relations":
"Little by little, by way of filling a spiritual void, and at the same time of providing a strategic and moral raison d'être for a new engagement of the United States in Europe, a number of American and European intellectuals seemed to take up the theme of the influential journalist Walter Lippmann." (International Relations, Volume 1, UNESCO/EOLSS, 2009)
Cogan points out that In the post-war period, a joint study was published on the same theme, by a Frenchman, Jacques Godechot, and an American, Robert Palmer, with the title of The Problem of the Atlantic. Cogan cites the authors as follows:
"Lippmann was clearly the first to use the expression 'Atlantic Community.' For him the Atlantic Community was a political and economic grouping, established little by little by all the great powers bordering the ocean, strengthened by the 'Atlantic Charter,' and destined to develop in the future, thanks to the good neighbor principle and to the organization of increasingly active economic exchanges."
In U.S. War Aims and other writings, Lippmann proposed a series of "orbits" that would coexist peacefully after the war: an Atlantic orbit, a Soviet orbit, and an eventual Chinese orbit. Lippmann's view, according to his biographer Ronald Steel was that "the 'primary aim' of American responsibility was the basin of the Atlantic on both sides, and the Pacific islands -- in other words, the Atlantic community plus a 'bluewater' strategy of naval bases and roaming fleets. Outside these regions there should be no permanent military or political commitments."
The term "Atlantic" had an unwelcome ring to French ears. France's difficulty with this emphasis on Atlantic affinities, linking the Old World with the New, was that the Atlantic, as Jacques Godechot and Robert Palmer put it, had been dominated by England from the eighteenth century onwards and that at the end of the nineteenth century this hegemony had been replaced by a combined American, British, and Canadian one. Thus, the "Atlantic" world was a world in which France could never enjoy first place.
14. Ritchie was the scion of a prominent Loyalist family that fled to Nova Scotia's Annapolis Valley following the American Revolution with enslaved Africans as personal chattel.
This article was published in
Volume 54 Number 40 - July 8, 2024
Article Link:
https://cpcml.ca/Tmlm2024/Articles/MS544011.HTM
Website: www.cpcml.ca Email: editor@cpcml.ca