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From The Twenty-Year Revolution, Chesly Manly 1954
Robert E. Sherwood, in Roosevelt and Hopkins, notes the �contradictory circumstance of the American representatives constantly sticking to the main topic of the war against Germany, while the British representatives were repeatedly bring up reminders of the war against Japan.�
It was �contradictory� indeed, but it was consonant with a policy that dominated American military and political decisions throughout the war—decisions that insured victory for communism. Militarily, the policy called for the total defeat and destruction of Germany as a European power. Politically,
it called for support of the Soviet Union on all European and Far Eastern questions. Hopkins and Marshall persuaded Roosevelt that, to keep Stalin in the war against Germany and later bring him into the war against Japan, it was necessary to give him everything he wanted. Hopkins persuaded Roosevelt that he could prudently do this because Stalin would cooperate for peace after the war. [*] William C. Bullitt, former ambassador to Moscow, protested to Roosevelt that his Russian policy would fail because Stalin could not be trusted. As quoted by Bullitt in Life magazine, Aug. 23, 1948, Roosevelt said: �Bill, I don�t dispute your facts. They are accurate. I don�t dispute the logic of your reasoning. I just have a hunch that Stalin is not that kind of man. Harry says he�s not, and that he doesn�t want anything but security for his country. And I think that if I give him anything I can and ask for nothing from him in return, noblesse oblige, he wont� try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.�
Chicago : Henry Regnery 1954.
[*] Trotsky 1928 : 'Lenin made certain economic concessions to the imperialists in order to buy himself off from war or to attract international capital upon acceptable terms. But neither in these circumstances nor even in the heaviest moments of the revolution did Lenin ever admit the idea of . . . weakening the tactics of the world revolution in general. . . .
The war of 1914-1918 was a gigantic �accelerator� (Lenin) of the socialist revolution. New wars, . . . in which with a correct policy on our side we should win the sympathy of the laboring masses of the whole earth, can become a still greater �accelerator� of the downfall of world capitalism.' (The Real Situation in Russia,
New York : Harcourt, Brace 1928).
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