As the 75th anniversary of World War II’s end is marked on Friday, few Americans know the Soviet Union’s major role in that victory, making them vulnerable to today’s anti-Russian messaging.
From left to right: Joseph Stalin, Franklin D. Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill on the portico of the Soviet Embassy during the Tehran Conference. (Wikimedia Commons) .
By Ray McGovern
Special to Consortium News
Announcing Germany’s surrender and the end of war in Europe 75 years ago on May 8, 1945, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was quick to acknowledge the vital role played by the Soviet Union in the Allied victory over Germany: “Today, perhaps, we shall think mostly of ourselves. Tomorrow we shall pay a particular tribute to our Russian comrades, whose prowess in the field has been one of the grand contributions to the general victory.”
Churchill was more colloquial when he addressed the House of Commons in October 1944, stating that the Soviets had “torn the guts out of the filthy Nazis.” More than 80 percent of the German soldiers killed in World War II died fighting the Red Army.
The Soviets forced the Germans to retreat long before Allied troops invaded Normandy — a reality that today would surprise many Americans. Before Normandy, the U.S. and Britain were providing the Soviets with key logistical and other support. But it was the Soviet army that held off and decimated several of the Wehrmacht’s strongest divisions.
While it may stun those who still read the Kremlin-baiting Washington Post, it was still possible five years ago to place in that august newspaper an “other-side-of-the-story” article describing who actually did the heavy lifting to defeat the Nazis.
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(Less stunningly, what Churchill called the “grand contributions to the general victory” were reviewed last year in an informal discussion among members of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity.)
Let’s move to more recent history.
From ‘Growing Trust’ to Very Little
Early September 2013 marked a high-water mark for U.S.-Russian relations. Russian President Vladimir Putin helped President Barack Obama resist neocon demands to do “shock and awe” on Syria after a false-flag chemical attack on Aug. 21, 2013 just outside Damascus, an attack which Secretary of State John Kerry immediately blamed on Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.
War was averted when the Russians persuaded Assad to give up Syria’s chemical weapons. The stockpiles were eventually destroyed under UN supervision aboard a U.S. ship in the Atlantic outfitted for chemical weapons destruction. The neocons’ outrage at Moscow’s thwarting of their effort to mousetrap Obama into an overt attack on Syria knew no bounds.
President Vladimir Putin of Russia and U.S. President Barack Obama during a meeting in San Jose Del Cabo, Mexico, June 18, 2012. (White House, Pete Souza)
It was a modicum of trust between Obama and Putin that produced that agreement with Syria on Sept. 9, 2013. Two days later, The New York Times ran an op-ed by Putin in which he said that the tumultuous events of the previous few weeks in Syria had “prompted me to speak directly to the American people and their political leaders. It is important to do so at a time of insufficient communication between our societies.”
Putin argued against a U.S. attack on Syria, a position which was still being advocated passionately by Kerry and many neocons.
Regarding the sarin attack of Aug. 21, 2013, which led to Syria giving up its chemical stocks and avoiding a direct U.S. military intervention, Putin wrote:
“No one doubts that poison gas was used in Syria. But there is every reason to believe it was used not by the Syrian Army, but by opposition forces, to provoke intervention by their powerful foreign patrons. …
I welcome the president’s [Obama’s] interest in continuing the dialogue with Russia on Syria. We must work together to keep this hope alive, as we agreed to at the Group of 8 meeting in Lough Erne in Northern Ireland in June, and steer the discussion back toward negotiations.
If we can avoid force against Syria, this will improve the atmosphere in international affairs and strengthen mutual trust. It will be our shared success and open the door to cooperation on other critical issues.”
Putin would echo these words in his offer to the U.S. at the UN General Assembly in September 2015 to jointly intervene in Syria with air strikes against the Islamic State. He invoked the World War II alliance between the Soviet Union and the West to confront a greater threat than each other. “Similar to the anti-Hitler coalition, it could unite a broad range of parties willing to stand firm against those who, just like the Nazis, sow evil and hatred of humankind,” Putin said.
It was an offer the Obama administration would reject. [See: ‘Obama’s Self-Deceit’ republished today.]
‘Exceptionalism’ — the Fly in the Ointment
Putin ended his Times op-ed by saying that, “My working and personal relationship with President Obama is marked by growing trust.” But then came the caveat:
“I would rather disagree with the case he made [in an earlier speech] on American exceptionalism, stating that the United States’ policy is ‘what makes America different. It’s what makes us exceptional.’ It is extremely dangerous to encourage people to see themselves as exceptional, whatever the motivation. There are big countries and small countries, rich and poor, those with long democratic traditions and those still finding their way to democracy. Their policies differ too. We are all different, but when we ask for the Lord’s blessings, we must not forget that God created us equal.”
At the time, a reliable source told me that Putin had penned that last paragraph himself. Corroboration of a kind came much later, during an unusually comprehensive interview that Putin gave TASS in late February 2020:
Andrey Vandenko (interviewer): “… you did not get along with Obama. Did somebody put you at odds with him?”
President Putin:“No, it has nothing to do with ‘being at odds’. It’s just that, when a person says that ‘the US is an exceptional nation, with special, exclusive rights in the world, I cannot agree. God created us all equal and gave us equal rights. So, I think it is absolutely ungrounded to say that some people should have exclusive rights to anything.”
Vandenko:“On a scale from one to five, not to make it too complicated, how would you rate Russia’s current relationship with the US?”
Putin:“I would give it a three.”
Vandenko:“A three? Not bad.”
Putin:“Between a two and a three. More like a three though. Look … we do cooperate on counter-terrorism. …”
Prospects for a Thaw
The joint statement last month of Trump and Putin commemorating the 75th anniversary of the meeting of U.S. and Soviet forces on the Elbe two weeks before the end of WWII provided a glimmer of hope of improvement in relations between Washington and Moscow.
But Putin probably harbors few illusions that any basic improvement in ties is likely. He and his Kremlin colleagues view Trump as beholden to advisers who, whether they truly believe the U.S. is “exceptional” or not, need an enemy to “justify” obscene amounts of spending on the instruments of war.
The corporate-controlled mainstream media have become a cornerstone of the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT, if you will.
As long as the media echoes inanities from former intelligence chiefs like James Clapper (“Russians typically are almost genetically driven to co-opt, penetrate, gain favor, whatever, which is a typical Russian technique … it’s in their DNA”), and politicians like Nancy Pelosi (“All roads lead to Putin”), the arms profiteers and congressional recipients of their largesse have little to fear.
Throw in the professed views of folks like Rep. Jason Crow (D, CO), who fears that “Putin wakes up every morning and goes to bed every night trying to figure out how to destroy American democracy,” and not many Americans will question U.S. “defense” spending amounting to more than ten times what Moscow allocates for arms.
My nurse friend’s question will go begging: “Why warplanes and not ventilators?”
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. During his 27-year career as a CIA analyst, he led the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and prepared The President’s Daily Brief for three of the seven presidents under whom he served. He is a member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
The views expressed are solely those of the author and may or may not reflect those of Consortium News.
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One of the best pieces I’ve read recently.
My 90 year old mother completely agrees, she has personally been liberated by the U.S. and Canadian troops but knows the Soviet army played a crucial role in defeating the Nazi regime…. She is to this very day grateful to the allied armies !
Thank you CN for helping the world to remember our history !
While publicly praising the USSR, Churchill planned to employ the Wehrmacht to reinvade the Soviet Union in Operation Unthinkable.
Churchill was a duplicit evil person, never to be trusted. Since then, nothing has changed with Perfidious Albion.
I think the bombings killed something in the soul of America. Before them, we thought of ourselves as the good guys, and worked and sacrificed a lot at home and overseas to conquer an enemy. Then out of the blue came the obliteration and frying of one whole city and that was not enough, another. I think that took away our sense of honor and hope for a better world. I was there at the time. I sensed the mood of that time
But only a privileged, white, American man would make that mistake, then or now. The USA began as a white supremacist slave state which attempted to violently erase the Indigenous peoples from their land. Those were hardly the actions of ‘good guys’, yet this persistent self-image, perpetuated by Obama and Trump along with perhaps most white US citizens, of the USA as exceptional needs to be destroyed. The US empire is no better than the British, Belgian, German or any other.
Thank you, Mr McGovern, for this accurate appraisal of the realities (and for supplying us with Putin’s own equally accurate appraisal of our really existing human condition, whether from, e.g. Russia, China, Iran, Somalia, Yemen, Ecuador or the USA. No human society is “exceptional” in the way it is intended, about the USA, by such as Obama, Clinton (as I recall she, too, said something akin). One might argue, justifiably perhaps, that this country is exceptional in its unrelenting desires to rule the world and its willingness to destroy the lives and countries of those peoples who don’t want to get on the lickspittle bandwagon driven by us.
As ever, Putin comes across (at least to this not Russophobe) as completely sensible, diplomatic, knowledgeable, not “full of himself.”
One cannot imagine any US president ever thinking, let alone saying aloud, that we Humans, no matter the size, wealth or poorness of our countries, the ideology, structure, beliefs we hold true, the color of our skins, eyes, hair, our ways of life, are all Equal in every single way: as Human Beings. And as such we have as much right as the richest countries, nation states, peoples to live our lives our way, the way we believe fits our philosophy, beliefs, society, culture; to live in peace and safety; to not have our lives, homes, livelihoods destroyed in order to satisfy the worldview of the richest nations, to satisfy their avarice, their bloodlust.
Such a belief is completely antithetical to the American worldview, to the prism through which the American ruling elites – corporate-capitalist-imperialist, MIC drenched – and to the perspective that all too many Americans, especially in the bourgeoisie, hold dear, believe is the “right” viewpoint. After all: “we’re civilized, they’re not.” And it matters not at all which color face of the Janus party is in the WH or is in the majority in either/both houses of Congress. This attitude, worldview – supremacist, exceptionalist, innocent – is held by all too many here.
It must be taught in primary school and then perpetuated by the propaganda of the MSM.
And this morning, on the MSM as represented in this household NPR, I heard some male pundit, think tanker, military person (don’t recall who he was) make absolutely plain (with regard to our “relationship” with China): we have to maintain the biggest, strongest, best military in the world or, dearie me, China might overtake us (not bomb or obliterate us, mind, just rise far enough above us to, well, diminish our “exceptionalism”). And the interviewer, one of the “stalwarts” of public (funded) broadcasting, did *not* question this assertion. Clearly *we* are exceptional; clearly, therefore, *we should* rule the world and China beware.
Yes, Ray and the tragedy is that it’s almost impossible to get otherwise reasonable people to even read pieces like this, let alone have intelligent conversations about them. Even “liberal” friends of mine seem stunningly ignorant of the actual events of World War II. I doubt that today’s US classrooms acknowledge the sacrifices of the Russian and other so-called “Iron Curtain” nation’s peoples to keep Hitler at bay until the rest of the allies decided to invade France. The Russians lost tens of millions of people, we lost under a million, virtually none of whom were non-combatants. Yet even before the war ended, the likes of Allen Dulles were preparing to launch and fight a protracted Cold War against the USSR. I would have thought that after Vietnam and Iraq, etc., anyone not a member of the Republican Party would have recognized that our intelligence services are dedicated to lying to us in order to protect the war machine. Instead, the election of Trump has made most of my liberal Democratic friends into lunatics.
Thank goodness for you and Bill Binney, your colleagues at VIPS, and the independent journalists still willing and able to try to restore some reason into the debate.
I have the same frustration with friends and family when simply trying to inject common sense into any discussion involving history and Russia/USSR. It’s appalling that red-baiting is still so effective.
Yes, apparently 95% of Nazi division-months were spent in the USSR, often fighting “General January and General February” (per Zhukov) as did Napoleon. The US approach of confronting only Mussolini by invading N Africa, must have been intended to give the Nazis time to inflict maximum damage to the USSR. It is not surprising that the USSR decided afterward to retain control of E Europe through which they had suffered such disastrous invasions.
I am surprised that the US has not yet copied Napoleon and Hitler with an unprovoked invasion of Russia just before winter, but having fallen into the AlQaeda trap it set for the USSR in Afghanistan (after Britain failed in such unprovoked invasions twice in the 19th century) may have delayed that ultimate joke of history for another generation.
The MIC advisers (seeking to increase MIC spending) conspire with political tyrants, who need an enemy just as much (to pose as protectors). Add the IC, media, academia, and think tanks (MICIMATT) and elections, all controlled by the rich, and their complete subversion of democracy requires no cause for war at all. But they get more bribes from the rich for attacking socialist democracies and targets of the zionists, although the US people cannot possibly benefit.
It won’t be Russia or China for that matter that destroys Amerika. It will be Amerikas govt. elites, and the merchants of death that take Amerika down. Sadly it will effect us on Main Street as we see what’s happening around us at this time. A virus that has no borders and unwinnable trade war and the list sadly goes on.
Thanks Ray M.
Those on Main Street have remained oblivious for years, to so much that has been happening in the country.
Hi Ray,
How are you doing? I hope all is well with you.
Is that your photo at the head of this article? I don’t recall the facial hair when I last saw you a few years ago in Berlin where you
to a group of “like-minded” participants.
I have a question regarding the opening statement of this article. You write that “Germany surrendered on May 8, 1945……” I’m sure that you are aware that the “Wehrmacht” surrendered to the “Allies”, i.e. the U.S., Great Britain and France. on May 7, excluding the Soviet Union, who demanded that they be included in a follow-on ceremony, which then took place in Berlin on May 8. Again, it was only the “Wehrmacht” that surrendered ending hostilities, as there was no German government to participate. Correct me if I am wrong.
Best regards and stay well.
Richard
Thanks Richard.
Others have asked about the beard. I explained a year ago and solicited more members to adopt this way of expressing disheveled solidarity with my friend Julian Assange in “The Julian Assange Beard Movement.” (Almost a year later, the JAB is beginning to take off.). Please see:
see: raymcgovern.com/2019/05/28/the-julian-assange-beard-jab-movement-a-suggestion/
Monday will mark the first anniversary of the day they carried Julian out of the Ecuadorian embassy in London.
I think it is time to invoke the “Noah Principle.” NO MORE AWARDS FOR PREDICTING RAIN; AWARDS ONLY FOR BUILDING ARKS.
When Cesar Chavez would urge ACTION, he would typically hear, “Yes, but there are not enough of us.” But there were — and he would just go ahead.
There ARE “enough of us” for Julian Assange. And the stakes could not be higher — personal to Julian, to his fiancee, and to little Gabriel and Max; as well as the social stake to press freedom and media transparency.
And yet, the temptation to acquiesce is strong.
Can we do no better than the bulk of the German people four score and four years ago?
Here are some excerpts from a piece I wrote in 2007, quoting from the diary of a German lawyer in Berlin, who watched, kept predicting rain, but built no arcs until AFTER the war:
see: consortiumnews.com/2007/122707a.html
“There are few things as odd as the calm, superior indifference with which I and those like me watched the beginnings of the Nazi revolution in Germany, as if from a box at the theater. … Perhaps the only comparably odd thing is the way that now, years later….”
These are the words of Sebastian Haffner (pen name for Raimund Pretzel), who as a young lawyer in Berlin during the 1930s experienced the Nazi takeover and wrote a first-hand account. His children found the manuscript when he died in 1999 and published it the following year as “Geschichte eines Deutschen” (The Story of a German).
The book became an immediate bestseller and has been translated into 20 languages—in English as “Defying Hitler.”
I recently learned from his daughter Sarah, an artist in Berlin, that today is the 100th anniversary of Haffner’s birth. She had seen an earlier article in which I quoted her father and e-mailed to ask me to “write some more about the book and the comparison to Bush’s America. … This is almost unbelievable.”
More about Haffner below. Let’s set the stage first by recapping some of what has been going on that may have resonance for readers familiar with the Nazi ascendancy, noting how “odd” it is that the frontal attack on our Constitutional rights is met with such “calm, superior indifference.”
…
Nazis and Their Enablers
You don’t have to be a Nazi. You can just be, well, a sheep.
In his journal, Sebastian Haffner decries what he calls the “sheepish submissiveness” with which the German people reacted to a 9/11-like event, the burning of the German Parliament (Reichstag) on Feb. 27, 1933.
Haffner finds it quite telling that none of his acquaintances “saw anything out of the ordinary in the fact that, from then on, one’s telephone would be tapped, one’s letters opened, and one’s desk might be broken into.”
But it is for the cowardly politicians that Haffner reserves his most vehement condemnation. (Do you see any contemporary parallels here?)
In the elections of March 4, 1933, shortly after the Reichstag fire, the Nazi party garnered only 44 percent of the vote. Only the “cowardly treachery” of the Social Democrats and other parties to whom 56 percent of the German people had entrusted their votes made it possible for the Nazis to seize full power. Haffner adds:
“It is in the final analysis only that betrayal that explains the almost inexplicable fact that a great nation, which cannot have consisted entirely of cowards, fell into ignominy without a fight.”
The Social Democratic leaders betrayed their followers—“for the most part decent, unimportant individuals.” In May, the party leaders sang the Nazi anthem; in June the Social Democratic party was dissolved.
The middle-class Catholic party Zentrum folded in less than a month, and in the end supplied the votes necessary for the two-thirds majority that “legalized” Hitler’s dictatorship. …
++++++++++++++++++++++
Down with “sheepish submissiveness”! There ARE enough of us. Let’s pull the wool from our own and from our friends’ eyes. Can we not try to build an arc to save both Julian and freedom of the press. Perhaps we could announce a “Noah project” Monday, as Julian begins his second year of this imprisonment. (Some of us have already begun to look like Noah.)
NEEDED: Architects and carpenters to build arcs. No time to lose.
Ray McGovern
On May 7 1945, Germany in the person of General Alfred Jodl, unconditionally surrendered ALL armed forces fighting the Allies. You cannot have a partial ‘unconditional’ surrender?
Richard, I hope my note doesn’t deprive us of a direct response from Ray McGovern about his photo… Here in North Carolina many of us have heard Ray declare the urgency of ending the persecution and abuse of Julian Assange. He is letting his beard grow as Julian has, or had, when he was pried out of sanctuary in the embassy in London. While other issues swirl and distract us from the issue of citizens’ access to records informing of government crimes, Ray’s act of solidarity seeks to remind us to ask, as you did, why the beard, how can this be allowed to happen to Assange, and how can we end the cruel campaign that aims to cause this publisher to ultimately die in a “high security” prison… or sooner, through COVID-19 and medical neglect in Britain’s Belmarsh Prison?
Though my beard is less impressive ( had to shave it for my mom’s birthday last February but picking up speed again) it feels great to be in good company….
Ray, I had a physical ark and considered sailing to UK to rescue him from the embassy, but am not an experienced transoceanic sailor, had no contacts with local organizers, and thought the chance of escape very low.
I wrote to the Ecuador embassies before Correa’s ouster to advise on how they could get him to Ecuador.
I considered litigation advice, but knew from experience that the US judiciary is utterly corrupt from top to bottom.
I wondered to others whether other nations could intercede in a prisoner swap etc., but lacked contacts and details.
So it appears that we need Arks of organization and communication. We have CN, but perhaps need more organization.
There was a rump German government after 8 May 1945, headed by Admiral Doenitz. Despite its desperate pretensions, it had no power and was soon disbanded.
Thanks, Ray. So refreshing, amid the current epidemic of mindless, reckless and disgraceful Russia-baiting, to encounter a voice of reason coupled with a historical perspective.
As one grows old enough, I am the age of this same anniversary described in the article, and have lived the propaganda and read and compared it to the history, one can only come to the conclusion that the United States, my country, is the problem. We are the bully of the world. There is no other country in the world that extends its maniacal empire and might with ‘our’ more than 800 military bases and outposts spread across the world (not including our nuclear armed Navy vessels prowling the world’s oceans). To call us a democracy is either outrageous, or it is to call us a nation of citizen bullies in full support of a warmongering government of which we are supposed to have power over.
I don’t know about each of you reading this; but, I for one am sick of being a part of a bully government which wastes trillions of our tax dollars on the military and intelligence complex and hands out billions more to the already wealthy while allowing our citizens in dire need of the basics of life to wither in despair and which allows our basic infrastructure to decay beneath our very feet. We the people must truly be a nation of cowards to allow this. Like a group of school kids standing by while the schoolyard bully beats up one of their fellow students, we stand and salute the bullying. We are a people which our eagle must truly be ashamed.
@Skip Edwards
For me, the next generation after you, my sentiment and alienation commenced with the War on Iraq after 9/11. It just didn’t line up with all I had been taught as a youngster. It has been a long road since then, but I’m coming around to the idea that no change is easy, and for me, it is all about liberty and virtue. I know that might sound goofy and it is easy to say, but it is not easy to live. Best to learn something new every day.
I would like to put out my respect for the Russian nation because it is true, they are the ones who stopped the Nazis. I suspect they will do it again if need be. Napoleon learned that there is no military in the world that can conquer the vast lands of Russia – you’d think the Nazis would have known better, but they were just too full of their hatefulness that seemed to bloom and flourish……propaganda is a powerful tool, but at some point, it stops working, and I hope we get there soon. The clock is ticking.
Thank you Skip Edwards, Ray McGovern and Consortiumnews. Indeed Skip we’ve been indoctrinated and lied to for most of our adult lives but the Jig is nearly up. I note that an article on the grayzone this morning indicates that the NYT plagiarized Russian journalistic writing in the Pulitzer competition. The hypocrisy reaches an absurd level…
We will continue in this same “bullying exceptionalism ” as long as we are pigeon holed into the criminal, political duopoly of the Republican/Democratic Party, calling it “democracy” The citizenry must wake up, and walk out of this self serving system that brings perpetual war, collapsing environment, failed infrastructure and the wholesale destruction of the working class and poor. A third,,independent political party must challenge them. Think Green. Check out the Green Party US for a sane future.
I see one of the obstacles to change as this: unlike the analysis put about by the Occupy movement some years ago that it’s the 1% exploiting the 99%, it’s a gradient not a cliff. The wealthier you are, the more you have a stake in the capitalist system and don’t want radical change, or even the moderate improvements advocated by Mr Sanders. The Dems and GOP know this and use it to ensure nothing will be altered that would disadvantage the already-advantaged.
As usual a great article by Mister McGovern but can’t get out of my head the similar rhythm of MICIMATT and Mickey Mouse. As to Mickey Mouse, he would want to have nothing to do with the MICIATT.
As to Putin, no one has done more to make it possible to work together on common problems and no animal has done more to prevent that than our MICIMATT.
The U.S. population is more than twice Russia’s population and U.S. defense spending is more than 11 times that of Russia. And yet, we are terrified of the Russian threat?????
And we have the audacity to call ourselves “the Land of the Brave”.
Indeed. And all the past and ongoing blather about Russian and Chinese “spying,” “hacking” capabilities, you’d think we were weak, incapable, so very vulnerable in this area when the opposite is the case. Who does more spying and hacking of other countries electronic structures than our lot? All such utter BS this constant wailing and moaning about how our country is so so vulnerable.
Of course, if we minded our own business, stopped devastating other peoples and societies, countries and their ways of life and governance, we would *all* here and abroad be safe.
It is indeed ironic that the country who has killed more innocents, overthrown more democracies, exported more killing machines, establish more troops around the world and spent more trillions on militarism, since WW2, would consider themselves positively “exceptional”.
Absolutely.
The first act of the Cold War was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is a wealth of evidence to show that a Japanese surrender could have been achieved without those bombings.
For a start, the vast majority of Japanese cities had already been destroyed by massive conventional bombing.
If that had not caused Japan to surrender, then the destruction of two more would not have made any difference.
In the end, surrender was achieved by clarifying that unconditional surrender did not mean the abandonment of the emperor. This could have been done before the atomic bombings.
Correct, as this short video documents, Japan’s conditional surrender proposal was ignored until after two atomic bombs could be dropped. Note the link to OPERATION BLACKLIST at the bottom of that video that shows serious planning for the sudden occupation of Japan began three months before the bombs were dropped.
www (dot) youtube (dot) com/watch?v=g6a_ZveCUck
This is certainly known by the US authorities, but is carefully hidden from the public. The bombs were to inform the USSR that their allied status was now finished and they were to be the “enemy”. Decades of completely unnecessary threats and dangers, waste and violence, followed, not even cast away after the USSR collapsed. The USA needs enemies and spends wastefully on “defense” while being undefended when disaster strikes.