An Epilogue to Kolko’s “The Politics of War”

I finally finished this, after being interrupted by other pursuits, and I have a few notes.

Perhaps the most striking part is the extent to which the Soviets placed national interests above those of left movements in Europe. Of course, everybody sort of knows this from the “socialism in one country” discourse, but still the volume of detail surprised me. The U.S.S.R. systematically traded away left movements and interests for the sake of security on its borders, which meant friendly – not necessarily socialist – governments.

Complementary to this was the extent of left agitation following the war, including in Germany itself, especially local “ANTIFA” committees that formed spontaneously at war’s end, eventually supplanted by the German Communist Party under Stalin’s direction.

The grand compromise was to acknowledge Soviet supremacy in the areas the Red Army had taken from the Nazis, while the U.S. and Britain avidly collaborated with assorted Nazi and Japanese allies elsewhere to put down left and anti-colonialist resistance movements that emerged from the wreckage of the war. Indeed, notwithstanding the “unconditional surrender” demand of Japan, the employment of the Japanese elites, minus a few prominent militarist leaders, was a linchpin of anti-communist power in the East.

Another thing you already knew but still surprises is the decline in power of the British Empire, which went from one of the big three to virtually zilch. The latter is evident now, but its power prior to 1940 as the center of an empire is not.

A new bit for me is that FDR was a bit of a bumbler. I recall he had some wacky economic ideas, in the laudable interest of experimenting, but this extended to foreign policy as well. These latter were typically scotched by his heavyweight advisers, people like Averill Harriman, Henry Stimson, Edward Stettinius, and Henry Morgenthau.

Truman was amoral and stupid in his own way, such as in his widely quoted wish for Nazis and Soviets to keep killing each other without interference, and his insistence on using the atomic bomb to assert American power in 1945. By Kolko, at that point the idea of the bomb as a particularly destabilizing weapon, as far as damage goes, might be overstated. He says that firebombing of Tokyo, Hamburg, and Dresden (immortalized by Kurt Vonnegut in Slaughterhouse-Five) might have taken more lives, at least initially.

I had an English professor, the brilliant Paul Fussell, who wrote a widely reviled book, “Thank God for the Atom Bomb,” inspired by his wartime service in the Pacific theater. To be sure, invading Japan in 1945, which by then had no navy or air force but millions of ground troops, would have been extremely costly to the U.S. But the Japanese were well aware the Allies were going to win and were desperate to surrender. In light of the subsequent, tight integration of Japan with U.S. defense and political interests after the war, one could be forgiven for wondering what advantages gained by the U.S. justified the instant incineration of some 66,000 Japanese in Hiroshima.

Perhaps the lead takeaway is that ignorant, inflexible U.S. hostility to any sort of social-democratic, neutralist development in Europe helped fuel the rupture with the Soviets that culminated in their lockdown of Eastern Europe, and forty years of ensuing Warsaw Pack misery. The Soviet line was for communists to join broad, “United Front” efforts, rather than organize to take power. Only out of Anglo-American stubbornness were they obliged to just stand up their own client governments in Eastern Europe.

In the same way, the failure of the U.S. to see its way to collaborating with anti-colonialist forces in Asia unleashed by the defeat of Japan, especially Mao, paved the way to the debacles (from the U.S. standpoint) of the Chinese revolution and the war in Vietnam.

Of course, social-democratic tendencies largely prevailed for a good while in European nations under Anglo-American control nevertheless, and both the Peoples Republic of China and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam now have their own kind of capitalisms. (Now immigration from the Balkans, Africa, and South Asia is blowing that up.) In Europe, the big exception was Greece, where thanks to the craven British obsession with sway in the Middle East (for the sake of blooming oil fields and the Suez Canal connection to its prize colony, India), anti-fascist resistance forces were forcibly put down and a brutal military dictatorship stood up.

A key theme in Kolko is the extent to which much history overlooks the role of political agitation at the grassroots for the sake of focusing on the deliberations of great men. In particular, the experience of war blows up preexisting social relations, including oppressive ones, and can rapidly make space for new and otherwise unpredictable, unforeseeable events. One can only wonder what this will mean for Ukraine and Russia.