How many times do I have to listen to conservative radio hosts bash FDR in a week? Okay, so someone decided to portray Obama as a skinny, black Roosevelt in a fedora hat with a cigarette holder in his mouth... that doesn't mean that it is now OK to employ blatant revisionist history when discussing FDR and his Presidency.
Background: I'm on my way home from the casino in 10 degree weather with a heavy snow falling. I'm on the phone with Jambo until my cell looses service, then I'm forced to resort to satellite radio for entertainment until I get back to the farmhouse.
On the radio, I'm listening to one of the more "controversial" hosts doing his 5-day a week, 3-hours a day show from "the underground command post" (big hint there) talk about Obama being compared to FDR. The jist of the rant was that FDR was mentally unfit for office and was directly responsible for Soviet control of eastern Europe after WWII because of his "concessions" at the 1945 Yalta Conference.
I'm not a doctor, and I didn't know FDR personally (neither is true of the radio host, either), so I can't speak on FDR's "mental capacity" to exercise the office of President. I can speak on his "concessions" though... and I will!
It is repeatedly suggested that FDR GAVE the Soviets Eastern Europe... that the fact that Red Army boots were marching across Poland, Czeckoslovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia, and right into Berlin itself was Franklin D. Roosevelt's PERSONAL doing. I want anyone reading this that thinks this is TRUE to defend that position. ANYONE!
By 1945, Stalin ALREADY had complete and utter control of all the vital and strategic centers of Eastern Europe... Warsaw, Krakow, Riga, Vilnius, Danzig, Bucharest, Budapest, Sarajevo, Skopje, Belgrade... even the Golden Apple itself... Berlin. He OWNED the Ploiesti oil fields of Romania. It was HIS workers digging the copper, tin and iron ore out of southern Poland. It was SOVIET railroads that were moving machines, material and MEN across the steppe and into the Eastern Front lines. WHAT was FDR supposed to have GIVEN Stalin that he didn't already have???
What could FDR and Churchill have done to get those things from Stalin? NOTHING short of another 2 to 4 years of constant warfare with a nation that controlled every bit as much natural resources as the rest of the Allies, AND was getting militarily stronger every day. Was THAT what people think SHOULD have happened? That was the BEST course of action the US could have taken from Yalta in '45?
Please... give me a break.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment