I love a battle!
Coming up, a question of the facts about President Roosevelt's foreign policy.
Me, the facts, and my opponent, History Butt, a Roosevelt apologist who can never see a problem with his idol.
To shed light on the question, I asked a series of questions about the former President, History Butt gave his considered opinions.
You decide.
1. PC:
Was Roosevelt mentally unstable, and unable to objectively view the world scene?
Why did Four Presidents and their six Secretaries of State for over a decade and a half refuse to recognize the Soviet government?
HB: Your questions are just stupid and can not be debated or discussed to any kind of conclusion. Lets look at those questions.
Was FDR mentally unstable? No.
PC: OK, I admit that the phrasing was...incendiary, but it gets to this point: there were so very
many reasons not to recognize the USSR....one wonders if a rational person would have...
a.
Previous occupants of the office refused to. Almost as soon as he was President, FDR recognized the Soviet Union.... He assumed office in March of 1933, and on November 16th, 1933, signed a worthless agreement with Litvinov, recognizing the USSR.
b. Did Roosevelt have any reason to
believe that Stalin would live up to his word?
Roosevelt signed the recognition agreement: Litvinov "returned to the Soviet embassy.....all smiles....and said 'Well, it's all in the bag; we have it.'" On September 23, 1939, Dr. D. H. Dombrowsky testified before the Dies committee.
The Winona Republican-Herald on Newspapers.com
And Dombrowsky testified that Litvinov boasted that he pulled the wool over FDR's eyes:
"Well, it's all in the bag. They wanted us to recognize the debts we owed them and I promised we were going to negotiate. But they did not know we were going to negotiate until doomsday. The next one was a corker; they wanted us to promise freedom of religion in the Soviet Union, and I promised that, too. I was very much prompted to offer that I would personally collect all the Bibles and ship them over."
Manly, "The Twenty Year Revolution," p.33.
Why, ever, sign treaties with the communists? Why?
c. In 1982, Ronald Reagan asked his arms control advisory committee to conduct a review of Soviet compliance in the 25 years of arms control treaties. It was the first such concerted review ever. The answer to the question of Soviet arms controls compliance was that there was
none.
West, "American Betrayal," p. 198.
"The Soviet Union repeatedly violates treaties, and the rest of the world turns their heads and proceeds to enter into still more treaties, which the Soviets violate with impunity." Joseph D. Douglass, Jr., "Why the Soviets Violate Arms Control Treaties," vii, 83.
d. The agreement that Litvinov signed promised " To respect scrupulously the indisputable right of the United States to order its own life within its own jurisdiction in its own way and to refrain from interfering in any manner in the internal affairs of the United States, its territories or possessions.... in particular,
from any act tending to incite or encourage armed intervention, or any agitation or propaganda having as an aim, the violation of the territorial integrity of the United States, its territories or possessions, or the bringing about by force of a change in the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States, its territories or possessions....
Not to permit the formation or residence on its territory of any organization or group--and to prevent the activity on its territory of any organization or group, or of representatives or officials of any organization or group--which makes claim to be the Government of,...
...prevent the activity on its territory of any organization or group, or of representatives or officials of any organization or group--which has as an aim the overthrow or the preparation for the overthrow of, or the bringing about by force of a change in, the political or social order of the whole or any part of the United States,...etc."
Roosevelt-Litvinov
Get it? They promised no espionage, no Communist Part of the United States of America (CPUSA)....
e. "FDR had knowledge of two glaring examples of communist conspiracy specifically directed against the United States." Hoover, in his "Freedom Betrayed: Herbert Hoover's Secret History of the Second World War and Its Aftermath," by George H. Nash, published posthumously, obviously, in 2011.
Yeah....
FDR knew.
Were FDR's action vis-a-vis the USSR those of a rational man? Or, if they appear irrational, is there an explanation for them?
So....you might call it an error in judgment....
I call it mentally unstable.