The Red Army's Treatment to the SS.
This is an oversimplification but the Truman Doctrine was a Cold War policy intended to help nations who were "resisting Communist expansion" and it helped them militarily and later economically in order to contain Soviet Communism. There was no WWIII but it took 45 years to defeat the Soviet Union. Never did the establishment fear that theymight lose this war, which never became hysterical as did the containment of Nazi Germany.POW wrote:After the war the Americans did't had the intensions to help Germans. There was no plan to rebuild the economy as well. The sudden charity the Germans received they have to thank to the atomic bomb and the iron courtain. However the Marshall plan made only a difference of a few percent to the entire remaining German economy it was a good idea of course.witness wrote:I think that after the war most nations cared pretty much for themselves given the degree of destruction and human losses.
At the same time I think Americans with their Marshall plan helped Germans to rebuild their economy and infrastructure quite a bit
I am curious what our Amercan Isolationist (SS) thinks about it.
Scott was the Marshall plan a bad idea ? From your Isolationist perspective ..?
I guess it would not be too compatible with each other -to like Germany and preach the ideas of American Isolationism in this case...
Weird ahh ?
http://www.marshallfoundation.org/about ... l_plan.htm
This began with the Forrestal Plan, after the Secretary of the Navy and later the first Secretary of Defense (1947) where Greece and Turkey were given foreign aid. At first the Truman Administration took a fairly hardline with a Rightwing Democrat, James Bynes as Secretary of State. But Truman was a fiscal conservative who wanted to control military costs so he gutted the armed forces. Then the Internationalist Democrats like Dean Acheson began to take over the Administration representing a new spirit of "labor finance-capitalism," which would not choke and crush the Soviet Union but would alternately contain and appease it in whatever manner to promote global Democracy-Capitalism and world markets. Secretary of State/Defense Marshall borrowed Forrestal's idea with broader economic assistance to rebuild shattered European commerce. These countries would learn to become good consumers with strong capitalistic economies in order to fight the appeal of totalitarian socialism, and the aid sent would be financed by the U. S. taxpayers but the goods would be produced by the American heartland and purchased by the U.S. Government, which made it very popular program. Financial markets would grow, a Win/Win situation.
Contrary to popular belief, the lion's share of the Marshall Plan aid did not go to Germany but to other countries in war-torn Europe including England. Some charity which prevented millions from starving to death came from religious organizations like the Quakers, however. One of these experts in international relief efforts was former President Herbert Hoover who had been in charge of an enormous relief project following the First World War, most of which did not go to the defeated enemy.
The rearmament of West Germany and its admittance into NATO in the mid-fifties had nothing to do with the Marshall Plan. The West German German economic miracle stems from monetary policies enacted after 1949 (the year the Soviets exploded their atomic bomb) and the complete lifting of repressive occupational policies that can be collectively but erroneously called the Morgenthau Plan because of its draconian nature intended to keep Germany economically prostrate.
You ask what I think about the Marshall Plan? Well, Senator McCarthy was a strong critic of Secretary Marshall. The Cold War begins with Churchill's Iron Curtain speech in Truman's native Missouri in 1946. The United States was not reaping the fruits of its great global crusade and McCarthy longed for an American Churchill. McCarthy represented the Rightwing of the Republican party which was composed of ultra-nationalists like McCarthy and Isolationists like Senator Taft and the usual conservatives and moderates. McCarthy was unhappy with the phony Pax Americana following the great American victory in WWII and essentially argued that the victory had been sold to the highest bidder for a mess of pottage.
Internationalist groups like the UN where the Soviets carried a veto power had more say on foreign affairs than the United States Senate! Not only did the United States not have a hegemonic position in the world but Communism was on march everywhere. China had gone Red in 1949, after all this talk about freeing China from colonialism, it was now a Soviet satellite (in theory).
On the other hand, Senator Taft had been critical of American Interventionism and Globaloney since the Roosevelt Administration had embarked on an adventurous foreign policy in 1937. Lend-Lease was passed in March, 1941, essentially making the United States all but an open belligerent in the European civil-war. Roosevelt had sold Lend-Lease to Congress on the idea that if your neighbor's house is on fire you will be a good neighbor and Lend or Lease him your firehose. Taft astutely observed that Lend-Lease was like lending chewing gun--you don't want it back!
So while McCarthy would have favored a traditional imperialistic American World Superpower, Taft had been a critic of Wilsonian Globaloney and Interventionism from the outset and all of the problems that came with it, including the march of Communism in the first place, of which both saw the Marshall Plan as a mere bandaid. When the Soviet Union exploded their own atomic bomb in 1949, McCarthy's strategy was to whip-up the very real fears of Communist infiltration at home in order to drive American foreign policy to the right. How could the Soviets get the atomic bomb when it was the most closely-guarded secret of the war? And why was the United States fighting a UN war in Korea that it didn't even intend to win for fear of escalating a war in Asia that would leave Europe open to Soviet expansion? For a time McCarthy was very successful with his tactic of tarring liberals with the Communist brush and helped to oust the Democrats in 1952.
Taft was dying of cancer so Eisenhower ran for President on the Republican ticket. McCarthy would have preferred an American Churchill or a Teddy Roosevelt imperialist to the bland and almost apolitical Eisenhower. MacArthur had been discredited politically for his role in the Korean War and could not hope for high office.
When McCarthy tried to drive the moderate Eisenhower Republicans to the Right by investigating misconduct in the Army, the Republicans were divided and started investigating McCarthy and the antics of his overzealous assistant, attorney Roy Cohn. The Senate voted to Censure McCarthy in 1954 and this shut him up; the second Red Scare was at its close. With the end of the Cold War and the opening of Russian archives it has been shown that McCarthy was essentially correct, that the government and especially the State Department was riddled with Communist agents; he just couldn't prove it. And his ulterior goal was to change foreign policy not to clean out government anyway.
Subsequently, Kennedy was able to capitalize of the national paranoia engendered by the Russian launching of Sputnik in 1957 and narrowly beat Vice President Nixon for the election in 1960 by criticizing a supposed (but nonexistent) missile-gap, due to Eisenhower's refusal to develop rocket and space technology, which he had seen as an escalation of the Cold War. Upon leaving office Eisenhower warned of a Military-Industrial Complex that was driving arms spending for its own sake. The U.S. Army had developed Sputnik technology from captured German scientists for ten years before launching old V-2s into space and devekloping the Redstone and Jupiter missiles. My father went into aerospace engineering due to the effects of Sputnik. Universities actively recruited mechanically-inclined men from rural communities and encouraged them to go into engineering. The new arms-race lasted until 1971 when the space program was drastically cut.
With resentment from the middle classes over conscription, and the failure of American policies in Vietnam, despite American military victories in a war-of-attrition and containment, critics of Internationalism from the Right wondered why a war was being fought at all ostensibly against Communism in Asia when they remained huge trading partners elsewhere. We never even blockaded North Vietnam nor did we declare war. Vietnam wasn't Munich at all, like the "Best and Brightest" of the Liberal-Interventionists had believed. Therefore, Nixon used the Kissinger strategy of divide-and-rule by playing the Red Chinese off against the Soviet Union. Nixon had been a McCarthyite and had become an expert in proactive foreign affairs; he recognized that Communism was not monolithic indeed and that the Chinese and Russians were not even natural allies but superpowers with strategic considerations of their own. The United States had at last gained some small measure of Internationalist expertise that Hitler had forseen that America lacked with its inexperience in foreign affairs and traditional antipathy to useless Interventionism.
With the destabilizing of the Islamic revolution in Iran and the resultant Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, the Carter Administration adopted the Brzezinski doctrine of supporting Islamic radicals against the multinational Soviet Empire and effectively turned the war in Afghanistan into Russia's Vietnam. Furthermore, in 1983 Reagan upped the ante by restarted the arms-race on a technological plane that was difficult for the Soviets to match with Star Wars, originally called High Frontiers, officially called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Its intent was to bankrupt the Soviet Union, which had been in an arms-race from 1928-53 under Stalin and from 1964-1991 under Brezhnev and his successors. Andropov and Gorbachev had tried to end this race with internal reforms and arms-control treaties but were unsucessful.
So that is a brief and oversimplified version of Soviet containment from 1946-1991. Ain't Globaloney great...
You want McFreedom Fries with that?
) to this plan per ser .
)
