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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Feb 23, 2014 0:24:20 GMT

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Post by Admin on Feb 23, 2014 0:24:20 GMT

=== Some historical facts on Ancient Japan's Korean roots ===

The Yamato Kingdom itself had Korean roots and the kingdom could have been a Korean military outpost established in the Kyushu region, which was just a stone's throw from the Korean Peninsula, in the style of the Norman conquest of England in 1066 (Hong 2009). Yamato rulers at the time still maintained family ties with their Korean counterparts and they undoubtedly exerted significant influence on what was happening in the Korean Peninsula as was the case with the Normans from northern France, who made themselves the ruling classes of Britain while maintaining their French connections (i.e. French was their official language for sometime and English has many borrowed terms from French as a result.) The ancient Yemaek people who founded the Three Kingdoms in the Korean Peninsula are genetically linked to present-day Japanese people and the word 'Yamato' is likely to be a phonetically different form of 'Yemaek'. Most Japanese historians are reluctant to accept this theory because it undermines the official or nationalist version of Japanese history that focuses on the uniqueness of the Yamato race and Korean historians are also responsible for distorting Korean history to suit their nationalist agendas, adamantly denying any positive Japanese contributions or civilising influences to modern Korea and concocting fictional accounts of Japanese brutality during the colonial era. For example, those Korean aristocrats who fled to Japan were 'hostages' in Korean textbooks but in reality, the emperor at the time was part Korean himself and he treated them courteously as his relatives.

Emperor Jimmu (or Ojin)

Historical evidence suggests that a Korean military general named Homuda and his army landed on the beaches of Kyushu in the 370s and he went on to make an eastward expedition to conquer the western half of the Japanese archipelago. The Paekche court in Korea bestowed him with the mandate to rule the new kingdom in Japan and Homuda is thought to be identical with Emperor Jimmu, who is the mystical founder of the Yamato Kingdom. Subsequently, Korean aristocrats imposed themselves on the indigenous Japanese as the ruling classes and introduced Korean culture to Japan and ancient Japan was rapidly civilised under their influence. This process of colonisation is similar to the Normandy conquest of England and Britain's upper classes can trace their ancestry to the Normans and Japan's royal family originated from Paekche royal families in Korea. It can be confirmed without DNA evidence and the facial features of one of the Baekje court girls below closely resemble those of Japan's Crown Prince Naruhito.

Moreover, Emperor Jimmu, Homuda and Emperor Ojin are thought to be the same person. Ojin is also known as Homutawake, which sounds similar to Homuda in Korean, and he is the earliest "historical" emperor. Ojin's mausoleum is not open to history researchers because it may contain artefacts that can trace the Japanese royal family's origins back to Paekche and opening the tomb for further research could possibly rewrite ancient Japanese history. Emperor Ojin is the real founder of the Yamato Kingdom and his mausoleum was built in the early 5th century upon his death, consistent with the timeline that he conquered Japan in the late 4th century.

The Basque people speak the only non-Indo-European language in Western Europe and the Ainu words are surprisingly similar to the Basque language, which points to a common cultural origin of the two peoples. It was found that 9.1 per cent of the ancient Basque mtDNA was haplogroup X, which was also detected in Altaians at a frequency of 3.5% and there is a distinct possibility that the Basques descended from ancient Siberian migrants who shared a common language and culture with the Ainu. The Chinese language was first introduced as an administrative language of the Yamato Kingdom, which was founded by the Korean prince Homuda hailed from Paekche royal families, after the Korean conquest of Japan in the 4th century and the indigenous Japanese spoke mainly the Ainu language. The ancient Britons who spoke the Anglo-Saxon language later adopted the Roman language after the Roman conquest of Britain in AD 43 and there are historical parallels between Britain and Japan. Both the Ainu and ancient Britons had to adopt other cultures after their countries were conquered by more civilised powers and Old English borrowed many Latin words to describe abstract ideas, which made it a more sophisticated language, and the Ainu language evolved into the modern Japanese language by introducing Chinese characters.

The Japanese royal family

THE FOUNDER OF THE YAMATO KINGDOM

According to the Nihongi, Homuda (Ōjin) became the king of Yamato state in 270 CE. Quite a few Japanese historians believe that the Yamato Kingdom began with Ōjin, despite the fact that, according to the Kojiki and Nihongi, Ōjin was the fifteenth, not the first, king of Yamato Kingdom. Tsuda Sōkichi (1873-1961) contended that the records of Kojiki and Nihongi on the Yamato kings prior to Ōjin were nothing but a simple fabrication for the purpose of making the Yamato royal family the rulers of Japanese archipelago since ancient times. [27]

The first evidence advanced by Tsuda to support his thesis is as follows. In the original text of Kojiki and Nihongi, all thirteen kings between Jimmu the Founder and the fifteenth king Ōjin were recorded in traditional Japanese style posthumous formulaic titles, none of them individual or unique. From this, Tsuda reasons that posterity manufactured the titles, rendering them uniform. Beginning with Ōjin, however, the unique name that was actually used since the time of the princedom was recorded as the posthumous title of each king. From this, Tsuda reasons that the name of each king was authentic. For example, the name of Ōjin when he was a prince is Homuda, and the latter became his traditional Japanese style posthumous title. [28] The Chinese-style titles, such as Jimmu or Ōjin, though most familiar to the general public these days, are not the ones we see in the original Kojiki and Nihongi. These are the titles that are believed to have been manufactured later by a scholar called Oumi Mihune (722-85).

The second evidence presented by Tsuda is as follows. According to the Kojiki and Nihongi, from Jimmu to the fifteenth king Ōjin, the pattern of succession was strictly lineal, from father to son. Between Ōjin and Tenji, however, the pattern of succession was mostly fraternal, with kingship passing from brother to brother. The practice of father-to-son succession was not firmly established even after Tenji in the late seventh century. Tsuda therefore contended that the records of Kojiki and Nihongi on all kings prior to Ōjin were fictitious.[8]

Baekje court girls

Hong finds four additional pieces of evidence to support the thesis that the Yamato Kingdom began with Ōjin.[9] [29] The first supporting piece of evidence is as follows. Tsuda had focused on the fact that both Kojiki and Nihongi record strict father-to-son successions prior to Ōjin. More importantly, however, is the fact that the credibility of them is cast into doubt by the peaceful nature of the transitions ascribed to them, so unlike other transitions. There was a bloody feud among brothers when Nintoku succeeded Ōjin. There was another bloody feud when the Richiu-Hanzei brothers succeeded Nintoku. Peculiar circumstances developed when Ingyou succeeded Hanzei. There was another bloody feud when the Ankau-Yūriaku brothers succeeded Ingyou. More peculiar circumstances occurred when the Kenzou-Ninken brothers succeeded Yūriaku-Seinei, and when Keitai succeeded Ninken-Buretsu. In other words, conflict and bloodshed, mostly between brothers, characterize post-Ōjin successions, giving us no reason to suppose that pre-Ōjin successions were peaceful.

Second, according to the Nihongi, the 70-year interval between the death of the so-called fourteenth king Chiuai (in 200) and the enthronement of the fifteenth king Ōjin (in 270) was ruled by Empress Jingū as regent (201-69). Yet Jingū is commonly acknowledged to be a fictitious figure apparently inspired by the third century Pimihu. The story of Jingū’s regency makes the thesis that only the post-Ōjin kings did actually exist sound more reasonable.

Third, immediately after the compilation of Kojiki in 712, the Yamato court ordered the governors of all provinces to compile surveys of products, animals, plants, and land conditions, etymologies of place names, and written versions of oral traditions. The Harima Fudoki, one of the few such records extant, is believed to have been compiled between 713 and 715. The Harima Fudoki includes so many anecdotes related to Homuda (Ōjin) that one may readily believe Homuda to have been the founder of the Yamato Kingdom. It is blanketed with a myriad of accounts about Homuda’s activities such as visiting villages and people, going on hunting expeditions, and the naming of places after his trifling words and deeds. Other kings are scarcely mentioned.

According to Aoki, the Harima Fudoki is full of accounts of Homuda’s “fighting career and aggressive profile,” and yet “it is interesting to note that neither Kojiki nor Nihon shoki speak much of the belligerent activities of Homuda, while other provincial accounts are full of such episodes. . . . This must be an indication of some effort made to cover up Homuda’s undesirable aspects for records. In fact, the compilers of the Kojiki and Nihon shoki seem to have taken pains to conceal his belligerence before and after his emergence as the ruler of Yamato state . . . Compilers’ mention of his birthmark of an archery arm-piece seems to imply that he was a man of martial strength. . . .The silence of both Kojiki and Nihon shoki regarding Homuda’s aggressiveness seems intentional.” [30] Whatever the cover-up, until this very day, as many as 25,000 Hachiman Shrines all over the Japanese Islands continue to worship the deified spirit of Homuda, not Jimmu, as the god of war.

Fourth, according to the Kojiki and Nihongi, among all Yamato kings, only Jimmu the official Founder and the so-called fifteenth king Ōjin were born in Kyūshū: Jimmu shortly after the imperial ancestor deity Ninigi descended to Kyūshū from heaven, and Homuda immediately after his mother (Empress Jingū) landed on Kyūshū, crossing the sea from Korea. [31] From Kyūshū, Jimmu makes an epic Eastward Expedition, while Ōjin makes a miniature expedition eastward with his mother. [32] The fact that only Jimmu the official founder and Ōjin the fifteenth king were recorded to have been born in Kyūshū (only to conquer unruly elements in the Yamato area) implies that both Jimmu and Ōjin represent the one and only founder of the Yamato Kingdom.

EMBARKING ON THE EXPEDITION TO THE JAPANESE ISLANDS

Leaving the southeastern shore of the Korean Peninsula, crossing the Korea Strait, and passing the islands of Tsushima and Iki, the expeditionary force led by Homuda lands on Kyūshū, not on the northern plain area crowded by the Yayoi aborigine but, passing the Kammon Straight (at the modern-day Shimonoseki City), on the secluded southeastern shore of Kyūshū Island, the modern Hyūga. In the Age of Gods, however, the Kojiki and Nihongi specify the Peak of Kuji-furu of Taka-chiho in the Hyūga area as the very spot where the godly founder of Yamato Kingdom descended from “Heaven.” [33]

According to the Kojiki, immediately after Ninigi descended from heaven to the peak of Kuji-furu, he made the following statement: “This place faces towards Kara Kuni (Korea); it is…a land where the morning sun shines directly, a land where the rays of the evening sun are brilliant.” [34] According to Egami, this conspicuous mention of Korea at the very starting point of the foundation myth leads us “to regard Korea as the original home of the gods of heaven.” [35] Chamberlain, who had translated the Kojiki into English, notes the attempt by Motowori Norinaga (1730-1801), the leader of the so-called Kokugaku (National Learning) tradition that supposedly takes words and phrases in the Kojiki and Nihongi “literally” and then interprets their meaning in the most nationalistic way, to delete the word Korea: “though not daring actually to alter the characters (of the original text), assumes that they are corrupt and in his Kana rendering” omits the sentence mentioning Korea. Chamberlain further notes that: “His evident reason for wishing to alter the reading is simply and solely to conceal the fact that Korea is mentioned in a not unfriendly manner, in the traditional account of the divine age. … [There] is no excuse for so dishonest a treatment of the text he undertakes to commentate.” [36]

Last Edit: Nov 15, 2018 19:32:03 GMT by Admin

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Feb 23, 2014 14:56:30 GMT

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Post by Admin on Feb 23, 2014 14:56:30 GMT

In this undated image released by the Yokosuka City Council in Japan, U.S. sailors gather in front of a Yasu-ura House "comfort station" in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo.

An Associated Press review of historical documents and records — some never before translated into English — shows American authorities permitted the official brothel system to operate despite internal reports that women were being coerced into prostitution. The Americans also had full knowledge by then of Japan’s atrocious treatment of women in countries across Asia that it conquered during the war. Tens of thousands of women were employed to provide cheap sex to U.S. troops until the spring of 1946, when Gen. Douglas MacArthur shut the brothels down. The documents show the brothels were rushed into operation as American forces poured into Japan beginning in August 1945.

The orders from the Ministry of the Interior came on Aug. 18, 1945, one day before a Japanese delegation flew to the Philippines to negotiate the terms of their country’s surrender and occupation. The Ibaraki police immediately set to work. The only suitable facility was a dormitory for single police officers, which they quickly converted into a brothel. Bedding from the navy was brought in, along with 20 comfort women. The brothel opened for business Sept. 20.

Police officials and Tokyo businessmen established a network of brothels under the auspices of the Recreation and Amusement Association, which operated with government funds. On Aug. 28, 1945, an advance wave of occupation troops arrived in Atsugi, just south of Tokyo. By nightfall, the troops found the RAA’s first brothel. Though arranged and supervised by the police and civilian government, the system mirrored the comfort stations established by the Japanese military abroad during the war.

By the end of 1945, about 350,000 U.S. troops were occupying Japan. At its peak, Kaburagi wrote, the RAA employed 70,000 prostitutes to serve them. Although there are suspicions, there is not clear evidence non-Japanese comfort women were imported to Japan as part of the program. Toshiyuki Tanaka, a history professor at the Hiroshima Peace Institute, cautioned that Kaburagi’s number is hard to document. But he added the RAA was also only part of the picture — the number of private brothels outside the official system was likely even higher.

The U.S. occupation leadership provided the Japanese government with penicillin for comfort women servicing occupation troops, established prophylactic stations near the RAA brothels and, initially, condoned the troops’ use of them, according to documents discovered by Tanaka. Occupation leaders were not blind to the similarities between the comfort women procured by Japan for its own troops and those it recruited for the GIs.

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Mar 7, 2014 1:49:29 GMT

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Post by Admin on Mar 7, 2014 1:49:29 GMT

Early in his political career, Adolf Hitler regarded economic issues as relatively unimportant. In 1922, Hitler proclaimed that "world history teaches us that no people has become great through its economy but that a person can very well perish thereby", and later concluded that "the economy is something of secondary importance".[10] Hitler and the Nazis held a very strong idealist conception of history, which held that human events are guided by small numbers of exceptional individuals following a higher ideal. They believed that all economic concerns, being purely material, were unworthy of their consideration. Hitler went as far as to blame all previous German governments since Bismarck of having "subjugated the nation to materialism" by relying more on peaceful economic development than on expansion through war.[11]

For these reasons, the Nazis never had a clearly defined economic programme. The original "Twenty-Five Point Programme" of the party, adopted in 1920, listed several economic demands (including "the abolition of all incomes unearned by work," "the ruthless confiscation of all war profits," "the nationalization of all businesses which have been formed into corporations," "profit-sharing in large enterprises," "extensive development of insurance for old-age," and "land reform suitable to our national requirements"),[12] but the degree to which the Nazis supported this programme in later years has been questioned. Several attempts were made in the 1920s to change some of the program or replace it entirely. For instance, in 1924, Gottfried Feder proposed a new 39-point program that kept some of the old planks, replaced others and added many completely new ones.[13] Hitler refused to allow any discussion of the party programme after 1925, ostensibly on the grounds that no discussion was necessary because the programme was "inviolable" and did not need any changes. At the same time, however, Hitler never voiced public support for the programme and many historians argue that he was in fact privately opposed to it. Hitler did not mention any of the planks of the programme in his book, Mein Kampf, and only talked about it in passing as "the so-called programme of the movement".[14]

Nazis came to power in the midst of the Great Depression. When the Nazis came to power the most pressing issue was an unemployment rate of close to 30%.[24] Before World War II, Hitler appointed Hjalmar Schacht, a former member of the German Democratic Party, as President of the Reichsbank in 1933 and Minister of Economics in 1934.[24]

At first, Schacht continued the economic policies introduced by the government of Kurt von Schleicher in 1932 to combat the effects of the Great Depression. These policies were mostly Keynesian, relying on large public works programs supported by deficit spending – such as the construction of the Autobahn network – to stimulate the economy and reduce unemployment. There was major reduction in unemployment over the following years, while price controls prevented the recurrence of inflation. However, price controls in agriculture also squeezed out small farmers.[25] Similarly, while unemployment decreased, standards of living languished: rationing of key goods like food and clothing, and long lines became common.[26]

The economic policies of the Third Reich were in the beginning the brainchildren of Schacht, who assumed office as president of the central bank under Hitler in 1933, and became finance minister in the following year. Schacht was one of the few finance ministers to take advantage of the freedom provided by the end of the gold standard to keep interest rates low and government budget deficits high, with massive public works funded by large budget deficits.[24] The consequence was an extremely rapid decline in unemployment – the most rapid decline in unemployment in any country during the Great Depression.[24] But whether this helped the average German is a matter of debate—while more Germans had jobs, a focus on rearmament meant rationing in food, clothing, metal, and wood [30] for most citizens. Rationing eventually extended to use of fuel and production of cars, leaving many Germans unable to drive.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Mar 8, 2014 6:13:21 GMT

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Post by Admin on Mar 8, 2014 6:13:21 GMT

The Cold War was more than the product of post-World War II tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union argues John Lewis Gaddis, Robert A. Lovett Professor of History at Yale University.

I like this quotation from the other Marx because it suggests how limited our view of the Cold War, until quite recently, has actually been. In contrast to the way most history is written, Cold War historians through the end of the 1980s were working within rather than after the event they were trying to describe. We had no way of knowing the final outcome, and we could determine the motivations of only some — but by no means all — of the major actors. We were in something like the position of those puzzled poseurs Rosencrantz and Guildenstern in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, wondering what in the world was going on and how it was all going to come out.

We now know, to coin a phrase. Or, at least, we know a good deal more than we once did. We will never have the full story: we don’t have that for any historical event, no matter how far back in the past. Historians can no more reconstruct what actually happened than maps can replicate what is really there. But we can represent the past, just as cartographers approximate terrain. And with the end of the Cold War and at least the partial opening of documents from the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China, the fit between our representations and the reality they describe has become a lot closer than it once was.

So what does it all add up to? What is the new Cold War history — that is, histories of the Cold War written after the Cold War ended — all about? First, it is clear now that, contrary to what historians and theorists of international relations expected when the Cold War began, democratic governments behaved more realistically throughout than did their authoritarian counterparts. By realism, I mean the ability to align one’s actions with one’s interests. The fact that the Cold War ended as it did — with the world more democratic than it has ever been — suggests strongly that authoritarianism gave rise to illusions more often than it did effective policy.

We now know what some of these illusions were. Stalin, for example, believed to his dying day that the capitalist states would never join together to contain Soviet expansionism. Why? Because Lenin had taught that capitalists were too greedy ever to cooperate with one another: this idea left the Soviet leader ill-equipped to deal such initiatives as the Marshall Plan, NATO, and the reintegration of Germany and Japan into an American-run system of alliances.

Mao Zedong, also for ideological reasons, saw the Soviet Union as an ally of the newly-established People’s Republic of China; that view too, in time, he had to rethink. And Nikita Khrushchev risked the fate of his country and possibly of the entire world by placing missiles in Cuba in 1962, in the absurd hope that this could somehow ensure the spread of Castro’s revolution throughout Latin America.

What these errors have in common is a romantic rather than a realist view of the world: one gets a certain idea in one’s head, rather like Cervantes’ Don Quixote, and in an authoritarian system no one is in a position to tell the top leader that his conclusions make no sense. Democratic leaders were often no wiser. But democratic systems did at least provide ways to challenge illusions at the top when they arose, and ultimately to remove leaders who persisted in holding onto them. Far from being progressive states, then, the Soviet Union, its Eastern European satellites, and China functioned for many years as absolute monarchies, with all the possibilities for impractical illusions that such a system entails.

Second, and as a consequence, Cold War historians are giving greater weight than they once did to the role of ideas in shaping that conflict. We traditionally had viewed the Cold War as a clash of great powers — as a continuation of rivalries that had characterized international relations during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries. We had calculated power in terms of material indices, giving the greatest emphasis to the military capabilities that existed on each side. Despite the fact that both the United States and the Soviet Union were strongly ideological states, neither historians nor theorists of international relations tended to give sufficient attention to the comparative content of these ideologies, or to the extent to which they elicited support from the people who had to live with them.

What we now can see, though, is that one of the Cold War super-powers — the Soviet Union — abruptly and completely collapsed, despite the fact that its military strength remained unimpaired. That suggests strongly that we who have studied the Cold War over many years neglected the nonmilitary components of power, and especially the role of ideas. For Marxism-Leninism was itself an idea, which in turn determined how the Soviet Union and the other socialist states organized their power, their politics, their economics, and ultimately the appeals they made to their own people as well as to those beyond their borders. And as the events of 1989-91 all too clearly show, that idea had by then lost its legitimacy.

Cold War history is, therefore, the story of how the Soviet Union and its allies managed to squander their ideological appeal over many years, while the Western democracies retained and even expanded their own. In the end, what people thought counted for much more than what states could do — and that is a big change from how we’ve previously conceived Cold War history.

The pattern, in retrospect, was clear by the early 1960s. Capitalism had revived, and the record of command economies had shown no signs of matching it. Marxism-Leninism had suffered devastating setbacks with the suppression of the Hungarian revolution in 1956, the outbreak of the Sino-Soviet split, and the humiliation of the Cuban missile crisis. Germany and Japan had been successfully reintegrated into the Western defense bloc at the time, and the West was well ahead in nuclear weaponry. Why, then, didn’t the Cold War end at that point?

Here, there’s yet a third new insight into Cold War history: it is that nuclear weapons stabilized but probably also prolonged that conflict. We’ve suspected for a long time that these weapons discouraged escalation of the kind that had caused pre-Cold War crises to lead to hot wars. The Cold War was full of crises, none of them escalated to all-out war, and in this sense nuclear weapons were beneficial.

In another sense, though, they may have extended the Cold War beyond the point at which it might otherwise have ended. Nuclear weapons were so awesome — and the world had apparently come so close to seeing them used during the Cuban missile crisis — that the tendency developed to measure world power almost entirely in terms of nuclear capabilities, and to neglect its other dimensions of power. It was as if in assessing the health of some great beast one looked only at its external armaments, paying no intention to the functioning of its brain, heart, and liver. Such an animal would remain formidable in appearance until the day it suddenly keeled over and died.

What nuclear weapons did, then, was to conceal the condition of an aging, formidably armed, but internally deteriorating state. With its sudden death, the Cold War was suddenly over. That brings up a final, albeit controversial, point: can we really separate the Cold War from the Soviet Union itself? Could such a state have functioned in any other environment? It’s worth recalling that the Bolshevik Revolution was itself a declaration of cold war against all other states in the international system at the time. No Soviet leader until Mikhail Gorbachev disavowed the goal of ultimately overthrowing capitalism everywhere, however distant that prospect might have come to seem. The Soviet Union was, therefore, a state uniquely configured for the Cold War — and it has become a good deal more difficult, now that that conflict has ended, to see how it could have done so without the Soviet Union itself having passed from the scene.

Cold War history is becoming at last normal history, in that we can at last write it from beyond a Rosencrantz and Guildenstern point of view. We have finally managed to get outside Groucho’s dog, and it’s a lot easier now to see what’s been going on. Given our contentious character, historians are not about to agree, now or for decades to come, about the precise details and what they mean. We can at least accept the fact, though, that the view is exhilarating.

Last Edit: Mar 9, 2014 22:18:03 GMT by Admin

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Use of Weapon Against Third Parties (FRUS) Apr 4, 2014 21:47:22 GMT

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Post by Admin on Apr 4, 2014 21:47:22 GMT

LAURENCE REES: To what extent did Roosevelt really believe all the nice things he was saying about Stalin during and after the Tehran conference?

ROBERT DALLEK: He had a certain regard for Stalin as Churchill did too, and a regard for the Soviet fighting forces. They had fought so hard, so courageously, had sacrificed so greatly in the war that there was the feeling, and this was true in the United States as well, that because of all the positive propaganda about Russia during the war - it’s becoming like us, it’s becoming a democracy and accepting religion again instead of Communism. And it was the right-wing in America, Conservatives who were talking about this, but it was part of this whole mood of regard for them because they were the ones who were doing the principle fighting while, you know, we were preparing to cross the channel. So there was a certain genuine regard for the Soviets and for Stalin, but at the same time there was huge suspicion and doubt about what the post-war period would bring.

LAURENCE REES: So, essentially, the view was taken that the Soviets deserved something after they’d borne the brunt of the fighting?

ROBERT DALLEK: Oh, without question. Roosevelt’s conclusion, I think, about Eastern Europe, was that if the Soviets can be convinced that these Eastern European countries will be pro-Soviet in their foreign policy, and give them certain assurances that they’re not going to be threatened with another German invasion, which had happened twice in a generation, that then the Soviets will relax their hold on the domestic life of these countries. They won’t compel them to bend the knee to what the Soviets want. They won’t make them into satellites. Roosevelt saw that this was the prospect and his hope was - it was proved to be false, naïve - but his hope was that somehow the Soviets can be convinced that if there’s a pro-Soviet foreign policy in Eastern European countries that then they will not be so inclined to try and impose a kind of imperium on these nations.

LAURENCE REES: But the Roosevelt you describe is one of the least naïve people that’s ever lived, so, in reality, he must have not minded too much if Stalin did impose his will on these countries?

ROBERT DALLEK: Well, there was an element of that, that he didn’t care, but by the same token I think what, what he understood was that America had limited power; how much could we influence things? And this was a hope, maybe a dream. You know, you’ve got to have certain dreams, certain hopes, and that’s what he invests in with the United Nations too, because he doesn’t believe the United Nations can really preserve the peace after the war, what you’ve got to have are the 'four policemen' and regional power. And he hopes, naively there, that China can do the job, but, again, he and Stalin are both naïve about China in that they are hoping they can establish a nationalist and communist coalition. They can’t control events in China, and yet this is the agreement they reach in essence; that they will try and create a coalition, that China will then be stabilised and can play a role in South East Asia, for example, and remain friendly with the United States.

LAURENCE REES: The Roosevelt you describe is always going to trade-off Stalin getting into Eastern Europe, against the balance of American public opinion and less American casualties.

ROBERT DALLEK: Yes. He’s held fast by the importance of American opinion. This is priority number one, to control the way in which the public thinks and moves in a particular political direction. Because what people lost sight of is how powerful the isolationist impulse was in this country, and this was a monumental achievement for him to bring this country through the war abandoning isolationism. Now, there was a kind of reality to it, could we possibly have gone back to isolationism? I would doubt it. But, nevertheless, at that time it had such a powerful hold on the country’s imagination and they were so embittered by the experience of World War One, they were so reluctant to get into yet other wars, and so this is his number one priority, changing the public mood in this country.