Letter to the Editor

I write the occasional letter to the editor of our local paper here, the Greenville News, but it usually takes them so long to publish them when I write that I'm now going to put them on the blog first, so here you go:

Jonah Goldberg, following George Bush, argues that the U.S. betrayed Eastern Europe at the end of World War II at the Yalta Conference. He fails to acknowledge the historical reality that Eastern Europe was already under the control of the Soviet Union, which had thousands of troops there, fresh from defeating the Nazis. It would have required another war to remove them by force. Thousands would have died, perhaps millions if the U.S. had chosen to use atomic bombs in Eastern Europe or Russia. The bomb was still a well-kept secret; Roosevelt would have been foolish to use it as a bargaining chip to get the Russians out of Eastern Europe.

By overlooking history and painting Franklin D. Roosevelt as a traitor to Eastern Europe, Goldberg seeks to tarnish the image of the 20^th century’s greatest president. By doing so, he can undermine faith in Roosevelt’s other accomplishments, particularly Social Security. Roosevelt’s greatest achievement, saving capitalism itself in the United States, is never mentioned by his many detractors on the right, Goldberg included.

If Goldberg wants the U.S. to apologize for something, he should go to Central America, where Cold War policies of Republican presidents caused the CIA-led overthrow of an elected government in Guatemala (1954) or to the support of death squads and the attempted overthrow of an elected government in El Salvador and Nicaragua, respectively (1980s). Why select only the politically and militarily necessary consequences of Yalta for criticism instead of more outrageous breaches of human rights and international law? It’s obvious that the politics of 2005 are more at issue here than the history of 1945.

It was longer at first, but I had to cut it for publication. In the future, I'll post the longer versions.