Disappear, Asshole

"It was the deployment of Lend Lease, not negotiating concessions, that caused the division of Europe."

Oh, wait. That's not what the notorious professional commie-licker Arthur Schlesinger Jr. wrote. He actually only starts in mid-air as if the Red Army would have stomped halfway across Europe without Americans breaking their necks to help make it happen. There was never an infatuation with "Uncle Joe" in the White House and nobody ever had any reason to even suspect that the USSR was a bloody cannibal hothouse.

No.

It all just happened because the Sovs "held all the cards", especially between the second week of August 1945 and the last week of August 1949, and there was never anything that anybody could do about it.

Who does this runt think he's kidding?

Piss off, Arthur.

More, even -- Eric Florack points out and quotes John Hinderaker at Power Line:

"To my knowledge, the United States was in no position to bargain for the freedom of the Baltic countries."

To begin with, I say that it is an outrage -- prima facie -- to talk about the "freedom" (let's keep the importance of concepts, ladies & gentlemen) of tens of millions of people in terms of a "bargain". Try it like this: who would have "bargain[ed]" with Adolph Hitler? Even after that animal was dead, it had to be pointed out to Karl Doenitz that there would be no negotiated terms of surrender. Once more, with feeling: a "bargain" implies an exchange of values. What could Stalin have offered us? Peace, or something like that, for not pressing the rights of the people of eastern Europe? Was that the value at issue? Zoom this look back out to the big picture of general principles: was "peace" less valuable in 1941, and if so, then why? What was the difference between, say, France and Poland versus the Baltic states and Hungary? The "facts" were "on the ground" of western Europe right up until the audacity of Normandy, no less than they were in the east after V-E Day, and if the difference is that it was Hitler on the ground in France instead of Stalin on the ground in Poland, then there was no difference at all, all while The Grand Alliance was making all its vaunted noise about "freedom".

Or; maybe the difference was "exhaustion" after the effort in Europe. Well, guess what, kids: technology exists to solve those sorts of problems, and there was nearly exactly a four year long opportunity to put it to work in exactly the same way that it was put to work in Japan and for exactly the same reasons. I have never ever endorsed or even entertained the lefties' "Fry The Little Yellow People" thesis of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but there remains a serious question about discriminations in nuclear war, which immediate production problems in 1945 do not seriously answer. Whole succeeding decades were filled with much concern with the "credibility" of nuclear threat, but there had been a point at which there was absolutely no doubt about it: the threat could not have been mitigated with the complications of Mutually Assured Destruction.

Make no mistake about it: there was a "bargain", and it was struck at Yalta. And let me tell you what got traded away.

I keep a ballet slipper on a bookshelf. It was autographed and given to me by a woman who danced with the Bolshoi Ballet in 1989 during their tour of America. We got to know each other over the course of that tour, and she told me about her mother, who died in Siberia, far away from her home in Vilnius and on the order of some Soviet monster working in the margins of Yalta.

It looks pretty bloody easy for people in the west, now, who pride themselves on the achievements of "The Greatest Generation", to excuse what happened to my friend's mother, but I would dare them to look her in the eye and try it.