Crimes and Mercies. James Bacque

for help after the fall of France in 1940 and Hitler’s attack on the USSR in June 1941, the British and Canadians began to revise public opinion about the tyrannical Soviet regime. It was clearly ludicrous to pretend that the Soviets were helping the democracies, but the Western Allies did it anyway, manufacturing public opinion through their control of press, film and radio. The major thrust of this propaganda was to demonize Germany and later Japan, while praising the Russians for their heroic struggle to defend their homeland. On the June day in 1941 that marked the beginning of Hitler’s assault on Russia, Churchill said with a smile, ‘If Hitler invaded Hell, I would at least make a favourable reference to the Devil in the House of Commons.’³

      Pondering how to conduct the war from 1941 on, Western leaders did not choose the democratic way, to obey the public will. Instead, having determined their policy in secret, they deceived the public. They suppressed the brutal truth, that they believed the West was so weak that they had to support one criminal regime in order to beat another. So the Western leaders pretended that the greatest mass-murderer of all time, Joseph Stalin, was a wise and heroic leader resolutely defending Mother Russia against the fascist hordes. And it was the democracies’ duty to help defend him.

      Soon after Hitler declared war on the USA in December 1941, the American government, with the willing co-operation of the press, created a vast propaganda machine to dupe their people about the Soviets. This was necessary for several reasons, one being that the American public, even nine months after the Japanese sneak attack at Pearl Harbor, was still confused as to why they were in the war at all. According to a Gallup Poll in September 1942, almost 40 per cent of Americans had no idea ‘what this war was all about’. The pollsters concluded that ‘this large minority of the population has not been adequately sold on the war’.⁴ There was such a widespread indifference or opposition to government policies that their report had to be marked confidential, and circulated only among the top echelons of the media, with recommendations on how to change public opinion to favour the war.

      As the war progressed, the Allies gradually extended their military co-operation with the Soviets, championing their cause against all kinds of critics. The mass killer Stalin was pictured in the Western press with a benign smile over the caption ‘Uncle Joe.’ Life magazine stated unequivocally in 1943 that the Russians ‘look like Americans, dress like Americans and think like Americans.’ The New York Times took the long view, saying that ‘Marxian thinking in Russia is out.’⁵ No mention was ever made of the vast atrocities committed before and during the war by the Soviets.

      Then Roosevelt and Churchill took the next step: they began to cover up Soviet war crimes against their allies, the Poles. And finally, after the war, they helped the Soviets commit new crimes, against the democratic leaders of Poland, and against former allies of the West. These were White Russians who had fought first with Western troops against the communists in the Russian Civil War, then later sided with Hitler against Stalin. Victory over Germany justified for some people in the West the totalitarian means that had gained the end, so these people were sent by force to Stalin, although they had never been Soviet citizens. Finally, the Western democracies co-operated in the bloody Soviet-Polish expulsions from eastern Germany, maintained camps where about one million German prisoners of war died of starvation, exposure or disease, and countenanced or contributed to the starvation of millions of German civilians from 1946 to 1950.

      The influential American columnist Dorothy Thompson clearly saw and eloquently warned against the danger that Western democratic leaders would continue to adapt some totalitarian methods to their own use after the war. She was joined by Harvard President Conant and many others. Herbert Hoover condemned the whole process in 1948: ‘I felt deeply that … we were aligning ourselves with wicked processes and that the old biblical injunction that “the wages of sin are death” was still working. We see the consequences today.’⁶

      The democracies accommodated the Soviets in 1945 partly because they still feared and hated the Germans. The democracies were also indifferent to the Soviets’ totalitarian cruelties. They were co-operating with the Soviets in hiding atrocities in the east, and in the murderous expulsions from the seized territories of Germany. But their refusal to fight the Soviets was more fundamental. A fascinating change had begun that is still going on in the English-speaking democracies: the peacemakers were beginning to win their struggle with the militarists.

      In most crises in the Anglo-Saxon nations before 1945, the victors had usually been the militarists. And with good reason, for Anglo-Saxon military power was by far the most successful that the world has ever known. Neither England nor the United States had ever lost a war against non-Anglo-Saxons in over five centuries of struggles with the greatest military powers on every continent, in the air, on the sea, under the sea, on land, under every kind of regime.

      After the United States, Britain in 1945 was probably the most powerful nation on the face of the devastated earth, with the biggest empire in the history of the world. The Soviets had to remember that in any confrontation with Britain, huge resources might be available to Britain from Canada and the USA, who were able to pour billions of dollars in food, munitions, and advanced equipment into her ports. The Royal Navy was the strongest on earth, after the American fleet; the Royal Air Force enormous and highly skilled; the armies numbering millions of men, well-equipped and flush with victory.

      There was recent and powerful precedent for the British to resist Russian influence in Europe. Britain had actually sent troops and ships against Russia twice before in recent times, once against the Tsar in the Crimea, and once again during the Russian Civil War. To assist them in a land battle, the British could call on more than two million German captives in their possession in the summer of 1945. The warlike spirit was still strong in the land. Churchill in May 1945 was keeping many German prisoners ready for battle, in their original formations, with all their guns and other equipment intact.⁷ For the British of yore, personified in Churchill, the commitment to Poland would have been a matter of Britain’s national honour, and her ancient pride – a test of British mettle. To fulfil it by driving out Russia would have been a stern duty. But the Empire’s power depended largely on the willingness of the Canadians and Americans to go on subsidizing the British. Billions of Canadian dollars had already been sent, billions more were on their way to shore up the British economy. How long would it last?

      Mackenzie King, the grandson of William Lyon Mackenzie, who had been arrested and jailed for leading a Canadian rebellion against the British in 1837, was opposed to an Empire dominated by the British. On a visit to Downing Street in September 1945 to receive British petitions for food and money, he wrote: ‘It is strange that Mackenzie [his grandfather] should have gone to Downing Street to try and get self-government, Canada’s grievances remedied and that Downing Street today should be asking me to come to help Britain with her difficult problems.’⁸ By King’s decision, Canada would not send the troops Churchill had wanted to help the British reconquer south-east Asia. But his objections went deeper than that. ‘I was thinking a day or two ago, that I had first my grandfather’s work to carry on; then Mulock’s work, Laurier’s work, and now my own work. All on this one theme, seeking to have the organization of Empire such that it will hold together by its several supports rather than all fall asunder through the efforts of Tory imperialists to create a vaster Empire than has been, thereby sowing the seeds of another world war.’⁹

      Bankrupt, short of food, weary of war, lacking warlike allies, the British made no threats against the Russians. Most of the imperial grandeur was swept overboard like cannon from the deck of a listing ship. The guarantee to Poland was ignored by all but the Poles.

      The Americans had made no guarantee to Poland, but they felt strong sympathy for her people, and the politicians were keenly aware of the large Polish vote in the USA. Herbert Hoover had toured the US raising millions of dollars for relief to Poland in both the wars. By March 1945, even Roosevelt, invincibly credulous about Stalin, was beginning to wonder if the Soviets had any intention of accepting Anglo-Saxon ideas for sharing world power, or of making the United Nations work. By September 1945, when the Japanese war was over and the atomic cloud had spread around the world, no one could doubt that the Soviets were already breaking all their promises about Poland. The Western sympathizers in Poland were being arrested and murdered, the communist