An essay in universal history

I. THE DANGEROUS YEARS (1945-1953)

1. THE AMERICAN JANUS

The new American President in 1945, Harry S. Truman, represented both the strengths and the weaknesses of the American state and people. After a hesitant start at Potsdam at which he displayed his predecessor’s underestimation of Stalin⁵, and an unnecessarily passive acceptance of the decision to drop the bomb on the Japanese, he acted decisively to stop Soviet expansion in Western Europe, Iran, Turkey and Greece, where he took the place of the exhausted and bankrupt British, thereby winning “the war of the British successon”.⁶ Displaying imagination and generosity, he approved the Marshall Plan for Europe, which was almost as important as American troops in saving the West from Soviet tyranny. Again, he displayed firmness and courage in defending South Korea from invasion from the North. By the Providence of God, he played the decisive role in shoring up the Western world against Stalin, the most evil and powerful dictator in history, fulfilling the vital function, if not of “him who restrains” the coming of the Antichrist (for such a role could be played only by an Orthodox Autocrat), at any rate of “world policeman”. For that, the whole world should be grateful to him and to the American people. Indeed, there can be no doubt that in a secular sense America saved humanity in the immediate post-war era. It is sufficient to imagine what the world would have been like if Stalin had not had had in the Americans a powerful and determined opponent, or how many millions would have starved to death if America had not “fed the world” in accordance with the 1911 prophecy of St. Aristocles of Moscow.

Also vital was America’s contribution to the post-war economic order. According to Yanis Varoufakis, America “came out of the Second World War as the major (indeed, if one excludes Switzerland, the only) creditor nation. For the first time since the rise of capitalism, all of the world’s trade relied on a single currency (the dollar) and was financed from a single epicenter (Wall Street). While half of Europe was under the control of the Red Army and Europeans generally were openly questioning the merits of the capitalist system, the New Dealers who had been running Washington since 1932 realized that history had presented them with a remarkable opportunity: to erect a post-war global order that would cast American hegemony in stainless steel. It was an opportunity that they seized upon with glee.
“Their audacious scheme sprang from the two sources that lie behind every great [secular] achievement – fear and power. The war endowed the United States with unprecedented military and economic might. But, at the same time, it acted as a constant reminder of America’s failure properly to come to terms with the legacy of 1929 before the Japanese navy unleashed its bombs and torpedoes on Pearl Harbor. The New Dealers never forgot the unexpectedness of the Great Depression and its resistance to ‘treatment’. The more power they felt they had in their hands, the greater was their fear that a new 1929 could turn it into ash that trickled through their fingers.
“Even before the guns had fallen silent in Europe, and even before the Soviet Union emerged as a dragon to be slain, the United States understood that it had inherited the historic role of reconstructing, in its own image, the world of global capitalism. For if 1929 nearly ended the dominion of capital at a time of multiple capitalist centres, what would a new 1929 do when the larger game, global capitalism, revolved around a single axis, the dollar?
“In 1944, the New Dealers’ anxieties led to the famous Bretton Woods conference. The idea of designing a new global order was not so much grandiose as essential. At Bretton Woods a new monetary framework was designed, acknowledging the dollar’s centrality but also taking steps to create international shock absorbers in case the US economy wavered. It took fifteen years before the agreement could be fully implemented. During the preparatory phase, the United States had to put together the essential pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of the Global Plan, of which Bretton Woods was an important piece.
“While the war was still raging in Europe and the Pacific, in July 1944, 730 delegates converged on the plush Mount Washington Hotel located in the New Hampshire town of Bretton Woods. Over three weeks of intensive negotiations, they hammered out the nature and institutions of the post-war global monetary order.
“They did not come to Bretton Woods spontaneously, but at the behest of President Roosevelt, whose New Deal administration was determined to win the peace, after having almost lost the war against the Great Depression. The one lesson the New Dealers had learned was that capitalism cannot be managed effectively at the national level. In his opening speech, Roosevelt made that point with commendable clarity: ‘The economic health of every country is a proper matter of concern to all its neighbours, near and far.’
“The two issues that were ostensibly central to the conference were the design of the post-war monetary system and the reconstruction of the war-torn economies of Europe and Japan. However, under the surface, the real questions concerned (a) the institutional framework that would keep a new Great Depression at bay, and (b) who would be in control of that framework. Both questions created specific tensions, especially between the two great allies represented, in the US corner, by Harry Dexter White and, in the British corner, by none other than John Maynard Keynes. In the aftermath of the conference, Keynes remarked: ‘We have had to perform at one and the same time the tasks appropriate to the economist, to the financier, to the politician, to the journalist, to the propagandist, to the lawyer, to the statesman – even, I think, to the prophet and to the soothsayer.’
“Two of the institutions that were designed at Bretton Woods are still with us and still in the news. One is the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the other the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), today known simply as the World Bank. The IMF was to be global capitalist system’s ‘fire brigade’ – an institution that would rush to the assistance of any country whose house caught (fiscal) fire, handing out loans on strict conditions that would ensure that any balance of payments deficit would be fixed and the loans repaid. As for the World Bank, its role would be that of an international investment bank, with a remit to channel productive investments to regions of the world devastated by the war.”⁷
Most important was the creation of the “Bretton Woods system”, which, according to Liam Halligan, has meant that the world since then “has traded relatively freely, with the short-term protectionist instincts of politicians being kept in check by WTO [World Trade Organisation] rules”, with the result that there was “a 12-fold expansion in global trade between 1950 and 2010 – and a huge increase in global prosperity”.⁸
The Bretton Woods system is “a system of fixed exchange rates, with the dollar at its heart. The main idea was that each currency would be locked to the dollar at a given exchange rate. Fluctuations would be allowed only within a narrow band of plus or minus 1 per cent, and governments would strive to stay within this band by buying or selling their own dollar reserves. A renegotiation of the exchange rate of a particular country was only allowed if it could be demonstrated that its balance of trade and its balance of capital flows could not be maintained, given its dollar reserves. As for the United States, to create the requisite confidence in the international system, it committed itself to pegging the dollar to gold at the fixed exchange rate of $35 per ounce of gold and to guarantee full gold convertibility for anyone, American or non-American, who wanted to swap their dollars for gold.”⁹
The Bretton Woods system, together with the Marshall Plan and other American-sponsored initiatives, formed the basis for the greatest rise in prosperity in the whole of world history. However, two flaws were to become increasingly evident in America’s behaviour in the following decades. The first was her Rousseauist tendency to force people to be free by means that betrayed her own liberal ideals. And the second was the tendency to choose corrupt allies – Masonic businessmen, oil-rich kings, the kingdom of Mammon in general – to help her attain her generally well-intentioned ends.
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After a short period in which the Americans followed Roosevelt’s policy of showing “respect” and some indulgence towards their Soviet wartime allies, an important change of policy took place. In June, 1946 President Truman declared his determination not to “baby” the Soviets, as he put it, and to prevent their expansion into Western Europe. A plan was drawn up to drop nuclear bombs on a series of Soviet cities, and in September his Secretary of State Byrnes declared in Germany that American troops would stay there as long as they were needed – an implicit reversal of Roosevelt’s promise that they would be recalled home within two years.
At first Truman had not understood the truly desperate plight of the Europeans. Lend-lease was halted after VE Day, and even the Americans’ closest allies, the British, were almost denied a desperately needed loan. Loans were provided to some nations – but only as stop-gaps to save the starving, not as the basis for a real revival of the European economy. The Bretton Woods agreement in 1944 had envisaged such a revival of the European economies as part of a new system of convertible currencies and international free trade. But in the beginning America, the world’s only economic super-power, which “by the spring of 1945 accounted for half the world’s manufacturing capacity, most of its food surpluses and virtually all international financial reserves”¹⁰, was not willing to provide the cash that alone could kick-start such a revival.
However, the president was persuaded to change course by a variety of factors: the withdrawal of the British from Greece for mainly financial reasons, the terrible winter of 1946-47 and the real threat of starvation and anarchy hanging over large areas of Western Europe – which in turn threatened the coming to power of communist regimes in France and Italy. In March, 1947, in a speech that came to be called “the Truman doctrine”, he put the case for helping Greece and Turkey: “[T]otalitarian regimes imposed upon free peoples, by direct or indirect aggression, undermine the foundations of international peace and hence the security of the United States… At the present moment in world history nearly every nation must choose between alternative ways of life. The choice is too often not a free one. One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions, representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech and religion, and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the will of a minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression, a controlled press and radio, fixed elections, and the suppression of personal freedom. I believe that it must be the policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed minorities or by outside pressures.”¹¹
In June, Secretary of State Marshall put forward a European Recovery Program. “It would take Truman months to get what became known as the Marshall Plan through Congress, but in four years from 1948 the United States provided $13 billion [$210 billion in early twenty-first-century prices] of aid to western Europe. During that same period the Soviet Union took out roughly the same amount from eastern Europe.”¹² Marshall Aid was also offered to Eastern Europe – all the European countries, in fact, except Franco’s Spain. This unprecedented act of enlightened self-interest did the trick; the Western European economy spluttered into life.
“At first,” writes Jean-François Revel, “instead of lambasting American generosity, as it later did, pretending to see the plan as a satanic maneuver by Western imperialism and its ‘trusts’, the USSR showed great interest in the offer. Stalin even sent Vyacheslav M. Molotov to Paris to discuss it with the British and French Foreign Ministers. But he quickly realized that acceptance of Marshall Plan aid would hamper the process of absorption and consolidation then nearing fulfillment in satellite Europe and might even shake the totalitarian Soviet system. For an American condition to granting credits was that the beneficiary countries coordinate their reconstruction and harmonize their economies. This was the embryo of the future Common Market. To the Communist leadership. This meant creation of a pan-European network of consultation and exchanges, an imbrication of economies and interpenetration of societies that would in any case have shattered totalitarian power in the satellites and put even Moscow’s on shaky ground. How could Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, East Germany have resisted the attraction of a Western Europe that, in 1950, was about to embark on the most vigorous economic expansion in its history? To force them to remain in the Soviet orbit, to put up with the pervasive beggary of daily life that marks socialist economies, Moscow had to separate them forcibly and totally from the West. So the Soviet Union refused Marshall Plan aid for itself and obliged its satellites to do the same. An ultimatum from Stalin barred Czechoslovakia, which maintained its hopes until the last minute, from accepting American assistance.”¹³
Nevertheless, and in spite of this rebuff, the Americans succeeded in keeping Western Europe in their sphere when it was by no means certain the Communists would not win. “Truman showed great dexterity in determining which of the Western European leftist parties could become U.S. allies. He correctly concluded that Italy’s Communists and Socialists were monolithic: they were united in supporting the Soviet Union and opposing the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan. Truman instead cultivated the Christian Democrats, helping them win a crucial election in 1948. In France, however, Truman recognized that the Socialists opposed communism and struck a deal with them, allowing France to become an ornery but genuine U.S. partner.”¹⁴ And so the West was saved; for the time being the threat of Communism receded…
The main problem for those trying to kick-start the European economy was Germany, which as the industrial power-house of Europe held the key to her economic recovery, but which was still ruled by the armies of the four Great Powers and which therefore could not be treated like any other European country. Both France and the Soviet Union feared German revanchism, which is why France, on the one hand, wanted reparations and control of the coal-producing regions of the Ruhr and the Rhineland, while the Soviets, on the other, wanted a restoration of reparations from the Western zone (they had already grabbed what they wanted from the East) and the single administrative system and economy over the whole of Germany which would enable them to obtain that. However, the Anglo-Americans (who had merged their two military districts into a “Bizone”) no longer feared German revanchism, and in general wanted, instead of reparations, a swift recovery of the German economy that would benefit all. And so in August, 1947 “they unilaterally increased output in the Bizone (to a chorus of Soviet and French criticism). The Joint Chiefs of Staff directive ICS 1067 (the ‘Morgenthau plan’) was replaced by JCS 1779 which formally acknowledged the new American goals: economic unification of the western zone of Germany and the encouragement of German self-government. For the Americans especially, Germans were rapidly ceasing to be the enemy…”¹⁵ Although the French disapproved, they finally came round to the idea provided Germany could be “hooked” up into a European framework that would neutralize her militarily.
By March, 1948 the joint Allied occupation of Germany had collapsed, being superseded by a two-state solution: a Communist East Germany and a Capitalist West Germany. On April 1, the Soviets cut off all transport links from the West to West Berlin, offering to lift the ban if the West withdrew their newly-introduced Deutschmark from West Berlin. The West refused – “we stay in Berlin,” as Truman put it in a telegram to London. “We will supply the city by air as a beleaguered garrison…”
However, as David Reynolds writes, “this seemed a very tall order. Many pundits believed it impossible to keep 2 million people supplied by air but the Americans and British mounted ‘Operation Vittles’, as the Americans called it (the RAF code-name was ‘Operation Plain Fare’). Against all the odds the airlift continued all through the winter; at its height a plane landed every thirty seconds, carrying essentials such as food, coal and clothing.”¹⁶ Over 200,000 flights in one year led to a Soviet climb-down on May 12, 1949.
Forty years later, Henry Kissinger asked the Soviet Foreign Minister at the time, Andrei Gromyko, “how, in light of the vast casualties and devastation it had suffered in the war, the Soviet Union could have dealt with an American military response to the Berlin blockade. Gromyko replied that Stalin had answered similar questions from subordinates to this effect: he doubted the United States would use nuclear weapons on so local an issue. If the Western allies undertook a conventional ground force probe along the access routes to Berlin, Soviet forces were ordered to resist without referring the decision to Stalin. If America were mobilizing along the entire front, Stalin said, ‘Come to me’. In other words, Stalin felt strong enough for a local war but would not risk general war with the United States…”¹⁷
We may wonder whether the Soviets would have dared any kind of war at that point. Revel argues that if the Americans had made a determined effort to enforce their agreements with the Soviets over Berlin, it is possible that they could have achieved, not just the relief of West Berlin, but the reunification of Germany: “It was not only in 1952 [when Stalin dangled the prospect of the reunification of Germany before the West] that the West let a chance go by to negotiate a German reunification treaty, which would have eliminated one of the most glaring weaknesses in the democratic camp and one of Moscow’s most effective means of blackmail. Truman fumbled a first opportunity during the 1948 Berlin blockade when he refused to send an armored train from West Germany to Berlin to see if the Soviets would dare to attack it. Whether they did or not, they were beaten and the United States could have capitalized on their blunder to demand clarification of the German situation. Instead, the American airlift eluded the blockade, in a sense, without really breaking it. Washington was unable to follow up its prestige victory with a diplomatic victory. When the blockade was lifted in 1949, the Allies, as usual, returned to their old stances, as shaky militarily as they were confused juridically. Under the elementary rules of diplomacy, the Allies should have demanded that, in reparation for the Soviet treaty violation, Moscow negotiate an immediate German peace treaty. Their failure to do so is proof of their diplomatic incompetence. That the Allies failed to press the advantage granted them by the Soviet setback during that brief period when the United States had a monopoly on the atomic bomb, which gave it an absolute superiority unprecedented in history, has no rational explanation, however blind we may think Western leaders were at the time – an estimate we need not be tender about. There certainly would have been nothing immoral about using our atomic monopoly to force Stalin to agree to a German peace treaty, since we would have been using our military superiority not to make war but to eliminate a cause of future war or, at least, of permanent friction and of fundamental Western weakness.”¹⁸
However, the Berlin blockade did spur the West into creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). Its aim was to defend its members – Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxemburg, The Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, the United Kingdom and the United States – against Soviet aggression. The critical Article 5 began with the words: “The parties agree that an armed attack against one or more of them in Europe or North America shall be considered an attack against them all.”
“NATO,” writes Kissinger, “was a new departure in the establishment of European security. The international order no longer was characterized by the traditional European balance of power distilled from shifting coalitions of multiple states. Rather, whatever equilibrium prevailed had been reduced to that existing between the two nuclear superpowers. If either disappeared or failed to engage, the equilibrium would be lost, and its opponent would become dominant. The first was what happened in 1990 with the collapse of the Soviet Union; the second was the perennial fear of America’s allies during the Cold War that America might lose interest in the defence of Europe. The nations joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization provided some military forces but more in the nature of an admission ticket for a shelter under America’s nuclear umbrella than as an instrument of local defense. What America was constructing in the Truman era was a unilateral guarantee in the form of a traditional alliance…”¹⁹
And so the Cold War had begun…
In retrospect, we can see that the two decisive events that elicited this war were Stalin’s rejection of Marshall Aid for Eastern Europe and the communist coup in Czechoslovakia in February, 1948, which put paid to the last hopes of a peaceful evolution to a non-communist system in the East. In reality, however, a cold war had existed between the Communist East and the Capitalist West since the early 1920s, interrupted only briefly during the war years 1941-45. Such a war had been declared on all “normal” governments by Lenin, and Stalin had faithfully followed the Leninist line except for the short period of the Popular Fronts in the late 1930s and the wartime alliance of 1941-45. So 1948-49 simply marked a return to the norm with regard to the relationship of normal governments to the profoundly abnormal anti-state of the Soviet Union. Only now, thanks to the firmness and imagination of the American leaders, Western Europe was on the road to economic recovery without the temptations of communism and fascism that had so weakened it in the 1930s, while Eastern Europe, more firmly enslaved than ever, was falling further and further behind economically. Thus the advantage gained by Stalin after his victory in the war was being whittled away.
However, at this peak moment in the power and success of the United States, another American weakness began to appear – and was again reflected in the life of her chief executive… Truman owed his rise in politics before the war to “Boss” Tom Pendergast, who, as Victor Sebestyen writes, “controlled Kansas City business and the State of Missouri’s elected offices. The Pendergast ‘machine’ was sophisticated. It went beyond stuffing ballot boxes and other vote-rigging tactics. It turned politics, prohibition, prostitution and gambling into thriving enterprises, the profits of which could be invested into more legitimate areas. Truman never took cash for favours, thus squaring his conscience, but he depended on the Pendergast machine to deliver, by hook or by crook, large lopsided majorities for ‘his’ candidates. Typically, Truman stayed loyal to Pendergast well after it was politically expedient to do so, and even after Pendergast was convicted of tax evasion and sent to Leavensworth jail Truman defended him. ‘He has been a friend to me when I needed it,’ he said. ‘I am not one to desert a ship when it is about to go down, Besides, Truman admired Pendergast, ‘… even if he did own a bawdy house, a saloon and a gambling establishment, because he was a man of his word.’…”²⁰ We see here the besetting sin of American politics and politicians, which got worse over time: a tendency to justify evil means by good ends, to choose sleazy and corrupt friends and allies to carry out well-intentioned goals. “The path to hell is paved with good intentions”, and this could be said particularly of American politics in the post-war era. So often good intentions such as freedom from oppression and prosperity for all were undermined by ill-chosen methods and allies, leading inevitably to charges of inconsistency and hypocrisy. Perhaps this is an inevitably feature of realpolitik in most historical eras. Certainly it appears to be inevitable in modern democracies, where unsavoury deals with unsavoury characters have to be struck for a politician to make any impact on domestic or international politics.
Truman is not singled out here because he was any worse than very many before and after him. On the contrary, he was one of the best of American presidents, who, as we have seen, did much to save western civilization at a particularly critical time of anarchy and chaos. But the deal he struck, and stuck to, with the unsavoury Pendergast is symbolic…
The struggle against communism was (and is) a sacred and utterly necessary struggle. And after the war it seemed to be a struggle of good against evil as Christian democrats in America and Europe struggled – successfully, in this period – to save their societies from a truly mortal threat. But the trouble with “Christian democracy”, as more and more people came to see as the century wore on, was that it was not really Christian at all…
Truman is again a good example. He was a regular church-goer. But at the same time he was a Freemason – and not just a low-level, relatively inactive Mason (like Churchill), but a very high ranking one. Thus “In 1959, he was given a 50-year award by the Masons, recognizing his longstanding involvement: he was initiated on February 9, 1909 into the Belton Freemasonry Lodge in Missouri. In 1911, he helped establish the Grandview Lodge, and he served as its first Worshipful Master. In September 1940, during his Senate re-election campaign, Truman was elected Grand Master of the Missouri Grand Lodge of Freemasonry; Truman said later that the Masonic election assured his victory in the general election. In 1945, he was made a 33° Sovereign Grand Inspector General and an Honorary Member of the supreme council at the Supreme Council A.A.S.R. Southern Jurisdiction Headquarters in Washington D.C.”²¹
Truman’s Masonry not only assured his victory in the election: it was also probably decisive in motivating his support for the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Roosevelt had abandoned his Zionism towards the end of his life, and both the American State Department and Defense Department, as well as the oil companies, were strongly against it.²² But the central myth of Masonry is the rebuilding of the Temple at Zion, so how could Truman have resisted that call?
It is this combination of (heretical) Christianity with anti-Christian Masonry, the controllers of most of the world’s wealth, which would be the Achilles heel of post-war “Christian democracy” not only in America, but throughout the West, ensuring that the victory over Communism attained in 1989-91 as the Iron Curtain fell would be incomplete and illusory… The American empire – for that’s what it was, albeit an unusually benign one - probably reached its peak in 1945 and the immediate post-war years. There then began a slow but steady decline in relative power and influence that has continued to the present day.