Anti-Hitler
Hysteria
September 23, 1999
When
Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union an “evil empire”
and “the focus of evil in the modern world,” liberals angrily
assailed and mocked his view of Communism as “Manichean”
and “black-and-white,” recalling the “McCarthyite
hysteria” of the early 1950s. Yet Reagan’s words sum up the
liberals’ own attitude toward Hitler’s Germany — not
only in the 1930s, but even today.
Hitler died in 1945, but anti-Hitler
hysteria is still going strong, as witness the current attacks on two
prominent Catholics: Pope Pius XII and Patrick Buchanan. A new book
accuses Pius of anti-Semitism for his public silence about Hitler’s
persecution of the Jews; and about half the political pundits in this
country are accusing Buchanan of the same sin for contending that the
United States should have stayed out of both the First and Second World
Wars.
World War II, in particular, is the
liberals’ holy war, the one “good war” in modern
memory. They still see it just as it was portrayed in official U.S. wartime
propaganda, allowing no dissent, second thoughts, or reinterpretation. If
anything, Hitler is now portrayed in even darker colors than he was during
the war, when neither Franklin Roosevelt nor the major American Jewish
organizations ever spoke of a “Holocaust.”
In fact, the word
“Holocaust” didn’t come into vogue until the late
1960s. Today it’s as ubiquitous as an advertising slogan. Young
people may easily get the impression that the Holocaust was the central
event of World War II and that everyone recognized it as such at the time.
This impression can lead one to imagine that Pius was both preoccupied
with the Jewish question and evasive about it. But he had plenty of other
things to worry about.
As the world’s foremost Christian
leader, Pius recognized Hitler as one of the dark forces he had to contend
with. At the same time, he knew that militantly atheistic Communism was
the archenemy of Christianity. It had already murdered tens of millions of
Christians, beginning with priests. An Allied victory might well mean
Soviet control and persecution of the traditionally Christian countries of
Central and Eastern Europe.
And so it did. Franklin Roosevelt had a
fatuous admiration for Joseph Stalin, whom he described as “a
Christian gentleman” — which would have come as news to the
Christians who froze and starved in the Gulag camps. “Of one thing I
am certain,” he told an aide at the 1945 Yalta conference,
“Stalin is not an imperialist.” The conference ended with
Poland ceded to Stalin’s tender mercies; within three years the
Soviets had enslaved ten Christian nations, comprising nearly 100 million
people.
Contrary to liberal mythology, Roosevelt
wasn’t reluctantly forced into a regrettable but necessary wartime
alliance with the Soviets; he truly admired them, and he preferred Stalin
to Winston Churchill. He had extended diplomatic recognition to the pariah
state of the Soviet Union shortly after he became president, just after the
Soviets had imposed forced starvation on millions of Ukrainians. He
praised the Soviet constitution for protecting freedom of religion, and his
ambassador to Moscow, Joseph Davies, wrote a foolish book defending the
Soviet Union, show trials and all — a book Roosevelt
recommended.
Roosevelt’s filthy bargain with
Stalin was the most disgraceful alliance in American history, a betrayal
not only of American principles but of European Christians. Yet the
standard accounts of World War II rarely mention the fate of
Communism’s countless Christian victims and martyrs. Even now
the scandalous silence continues.
The Catholic Buchanan remembers what
happened. Yet his critics say nary a word about Christian suffering under
our Soviet ally.
If they were honest, they might argue:
“Yes, the United States paid a monstrous moral price for victory
over Hitler by allowing the Soviet Union to conquer and persecute ten
Christian countries. And while destroying whole cities with aerial
bombing, the United States introduced the horror of nuclear weapons that
threatened all human survival. But in the end it was worth it. A German
victory would have been even worse.”
Of course they would then have to explain
why a victorious Hitler would have been worse than a victorious Stalin,
but at least they would be facing the facts they prefer to ignore.
Joseph Sobran
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