Dine with Jesus at the Last Supper.
Breakfast the next morning with Pontius Pilate.
Such moral equivocation is the hallmark of foreign policy.
Consider World War II and the Cold War.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill roared in defending the 1941 Anglo-Soviet Pact with the fiendish genocidal murderer Joseph Stalin: “If Hitler invaded hell I would make at least a favorable reference to the devil in the House of Commons.”
The United States bettered Churchill’s instruction. It not only forged an alliance with Stalin after Pearl Harbor, but virtually lionized the devil.
Exemplary was the book “Mission to Moscow” by former U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union Joseph E. Davies and a derivative movie production. The producer described the film as “an expedient lie for political purposes.”
President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Office of War Information (OWI) vetted the screenplay for revisions and advised the producer on perfuming the malodorous Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact and the Red Army’s invasion of Finland. The OWI saluted “Mission to Moscow” as: “[A] most convincing means of helping Americans to understand their Russian allies. Every effort has been made to show that Russians and Americans are not so very different after all. The Russians are shown to eat well and live comfortably, which will be a surprise to many Americans. The leaders of both countries desire peace and both possess a blunt honesty of address and purpose … One of the best services performed by this picture is the presentation of Russian leaders, not as wild-eyed madmen, but as far-seeing, earnest, responsible statesmen. They have proved very good neighbors, and this picture will help to explain why, as well as to encourage faith in the feasibility of post-war cooperation.”
Never in the annals of wartime propaganda have so many owed so much to so few truths.
Then came the surprise O Henry ending to the war. Stalin returned to form and became a monster. Now former Nazis needed recruitment to oppose the Soviet Union and an imaginary Communist juggernaut.
Eric Lichtblau of The New York Times reported this week that the military, the CIA, the FBI and other agencies employed at least 1,000 Nazis as Cold War spies and informants against the Soviet Union.
Emblematic was SS officer Otto von Bolschwing, mentor and assistant to Adolph Eichmann, who was tasked with organizing the logistics and transportation of millions of Jews to extermination camps. Von Bolschwing was hired by the CIA as a spy after the war, and relocated with his family to New York City. The agency characterized his Nazi Party activities as innocuous, like describing Lucifer as an innocuous devil.
Senior Nazi collaborator Aleksandras Lileikis was retained by the CIA as a spy in East Germany despite his known link to the machine-gun murders of 60,000 Jews in Lithuania.
And then there was Operation Paperclip, approved by then-Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, in which approximately 500 Nazi scientists were brought to the United States with their families to work on missile programs. The supernova was diehard Nazi Werner von Braun, architect of Hitler’s V-2 rockets built with slave labor to fire on London. He was haloed with a National Medal of Science in 1975 by the Presidential Committee on the National Medal of Science. The National Space Society, among others, makes awards in his name.
Annie Jacobson, author of “Operation Paperclip: The Secret Program to Bring Nazi Scientists to America,” has written: “The legacy of Paperclip speaks to the triumph of pragmatism and self-interest above unthinkable atrocity.”
But there is nothing new under the sun. South Africa’s Nelson Mandela, garlanded with a Nobel Peace Prize and honored as a virtual saint, danced with human rights villains Mao Zedong, Fidel Castro and Muammar Gaddafi.
The United States would gain international respect if it began to judge other nations by the same standards it applies to itself in making pacts with the devil.
For more information about Bruce Fein, visit brucefeinlaw.
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