Despotism Loves Company: The Story of Roosevelt and Stalin

0:00Well, good morning. I would like to introduce myself. My name is Yuri Maltsev. I am professor of economics at Carthage College in Wisconsin. And before that I worked for the federal government in Washington, D.C., and before that for Soviet government in Moscow. So I have quite a bizarre experience of dealing with all kinds of bureaucrats and tyrants. And in Washington was, funny enough, I worked for the Congressional Think Tank, United States Institute of Peace, which was, I think, the greatest kind of feature of it, that it was not thinking at all, but it was thinking quite a lot.

0:45a lot. And before that I worked for the Soviet government for Mr. Gorbachev. I was one of economic advisors. I wasn't the advisor. I wouldn't take the blame. But I was an advisor who nobody listened to. So today I am really very privileged and honored to be here near near the shrine of modern liberalism, Warm Springs, Georgia. And so it's a privilege to be among the people who are on the side of freedom. It's one of very few audiences you can find, I think, this time on both sides of Atlantic where people who cherish freedom are congregating with each other.

1:33Well, I will start with a quote from my favorite H.L. Mencken. Mencken, in his diary, on April 13th, 1945, the day after the death of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he said, It seems to me to be very likely that Roosevelt will take a high place in American popular history, maybe even alongside Washington and Lincoln. He had every quality that mourns his team in their heroes. And that's right. He took this place. Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who inflicted a lot of pain and suffering on this country, the countries of Eastern Europe, my own country, Russia, is considered to be a hero by the left liberals, by communist party hacks alike.

2:27He was praised by Stalin. He was praised by Khrushchev. He was praised by Brezhnev. He was praised by Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott. The absurdity of this praise, going to the 32nd President of the United States, is obvious after 12 years of his governing, where he practically, to my mind, he undermined the Constitution of the United States. He violated the oath he took as the President of the United States. And today, the techniques of manipulation of public thinking, of public opinion, being honed to a very high art in the United States and elsewhere, There is my favorite quip from Churchill. He said once that the Soviet Union is the only country in the world with unpredictable past.

3:28I would think that Churchill was wrong as usual. He was wrong as usual because the United States became the country already with unpredictable past. That we can see that liberal and socialist historians, outrightly socialist historians, are rewriting American history the same way Soviet historians are rewriting Soviet history. In a lot of cases, American historians, especially radical historians like Gabriel Kolko, they openly admit that history is nothing but politics, that it is politics directed to the past. suggests that politics of today is dictating what the historians should write.

4:19Ludwig von Mises was the first who attacked the German historical school for exactly these laws of raising governments. And that's what historians are doing all around. The perceived greatness of Franklin Delano Roosevelt is a good example of unpredictable past manufacturing by these historians. Modern welfare-warfare state and anarchist tyranny in the words of Murray Rothbard, based on Rooseveltian delusions. Tyrannical oppressive legacy of Roosevelt could be found in Lyndon Johnson's great society, proudly modeled after the New Deal. Corporate bureaucratic state, which is praised by Democrats and Republicans alike.

5:08like social and economic engineering, which is found today in the workings of Clinton administration, the first and the second families themselves, they could be called Roosevelt's offspring. Numerous social engineers and thinkers like Al Gore, Hillary Rodham Clinton, Donna Shalala, Comrade Ira Magaziner proudly use the name, legacy and ideologies of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt by Roosevelt to legitimize further destruction of constitutional freedoms and cultural norms of America. Just a week ago, Clinton announced that the whole world needs a new New Deal. Like Stalin, like other talents, Roosevelt heavily relied on fabricated by intellectual elite's charisma and the executive power of his office, to bludgeon his critics, to bludgeon them in submission.

6:07Ralph Reiko, in his excellent introduction to the 50th anniversary edition of John Flynn classics, The Roosevelt Miss, it's a great book, a great book, what's amazing about this book, that Mr. Flynn couldn't know the secret Soviet archives, what's there, But then, when revealed, his work was completely vindicated, completely vindicated. Fifty years ago, he predicted that Roosevelt was sworn by Soviet spies, and that came out of Soviet archives. I'll talk about that a little bit later. So, Ralph Rico wrote that Roosevelt always viewed any criticism of himself as a perversion of the true democracy. In the years to come, FDI would use FBI, the IRS and other agencies to spy on, harass and intimidate his critics.

7:01Sixty years before the vast right-wing conspiracy of Mrs. Clinton, Roosevelt blamed any unfavorable turn to the secret plotting of his enemies. Flynn provides a wealth of evidence of intimidation, coercion and outright bribery used to affect election results. This was in America, the America of the men who were chanting and crooning about liberty and freedom 365 days a year, who were talking about democracy and freedom for all men everywhere. Roosevelt's welfare projects followed the Stalinist idea of exploiting social divisions between different groups. Roosevelt wound up bribing whole sectors of American society, farmers, certain businesses, banks, and more than anyone else, intellectuals.

7:52Intellectuals were put into dependence on him and the state which he created. In the sphere of economy, his model was a Mussolini-style corporate state. In the cultural sphere, Roosevelt was the first politician to practically implement recipes of another Italian enemy of freedom, Marxist Antonin Gramsci. Through his subsidies to intellectuals and artists, wrote the sympathetic to him historian Richard Hofstadter, a generation of artists and intellectuals became wedded to the New Deal and devoted to Rooseveltian liberalism. Their corrupted descendants still thrive today through federal endowments for the arts and humanities and ideologically disciplined universities and colleges dependent on federal and state support.

8:43Roosevelt's role in promoting and building the mustallini-type corporate leviathan state in America is well known. He and his advisors designed and to a large degree implemented an American version of corporate statism, surpassed in his era only by Hitler and Stalin. Keynesian and outrightly socialist economic policy, additional tax burden were the building blocks of this state. The National Industrial Recovery Act closely resembles the corporate state constructed by Mussolini. We should keep in mind, however, that NRA was the beginning and not the end of Roosevelt's design. The NRA created a union of big business and big government against small independent people.

9:34In his fury, well, if you remember maybe that, the Supreme Court stroke it down as unconstitutional, the NAIRA. In his fury at the court's decision, Roosevelt turned his wrath against nine old men who had dared defy his titanic will. Social Security, another achievement of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, is a long-running insurance fraud created as a part of the New Deal. Lew Rockwell wrote three years ago, based on Otto von Bismarck's early scam, social security was irrational to begin with. It was based on the premise that government is a better manager of funds than private individuals and financial institutions.

10:22Naive is not quite the word for that notion. It made political sense for the slippery FDR, however. He could bribe some voters with other people's money, buttress his Mussolinian view of the state and pose as a savior of the weak and infirm. How fitting that today's younger generation curses his name for starting the social security chain letter. In foreign affairs, Roosevelt pushed and pulled the country towards war. and the World's War, even as he before that fiercely promised peace. A lot of liberal historians are saying that Roosevelt before 1940 was isolationist.

11:08And then he just changed his mind being an objective person with open mind. No, this is not the case. His belligerency toward the Japanese helped cause the attack on Pearl Harbor and resulted in the criminal deportation of Americans of Japanese descent into inhuman concentration camps. Critics of the President and the First Lady were badmouthed as Nazis and traitors. Later, under President Reagan, American people paid for this crime to survive a South Japanese roundup out of their own pockets. And it's all the time interesting that nobody blamed Roosevelt for that. It kind of mistakes occurred, happened by themselves, erupted, erupted. It's a game, I think it's a style, for me it's interesting. The style of politics is the same as Moscow as it is in Washington.

12:00That mistake erupt, that nobody is personally could be blamed for that. In this case, I would agree even with Stalin. He said, on one of the party congresses, he said, every mistake, comrades, he said, has a first name and last name and a street address and social security number. We don't have this approach. We would do all kinds of experiments on life people, put them away, infect them with all kinds of deadly viruses, and then pay out of the taxpayers' pocket for these so-called mistakes which erupted, say, in 1950s and 1940s during the Cold War. I was thinking about Stalin, today I was re-reading in the morning my speech and if you remember, yesterday I had moustaches and kind of went and shaved them away not to have the charming Stalinist look

12:58Roosevelt's wartime activities resulted, and I believe deliberately resulted, in turning half of the population of this planet over to communism His own administration was riddled with Soviet agents, whose ideology was all but indistinguishable from the liberalism they officially professed. In March 1996, a year before the inauguration of the Roosevelt's Memorial in Washington, D.C., the National Security Agency released a batch of papers, including intercepted Soviet cables. This revealed that the late Senator Joseph McCarthy, who was ostracized and ridiculed for his anti-communist crusade, have seriously understated the case.

13:43He didn't overstate it as the liberals are trying to tell you. He seriously understated the case when he asserted that U.S. government agencies and institutions were stuffed with communist and Soviet spies. The papers from the Soviet KGB archives, reported Washington Post, describe Moscow's successful penetration of major U.S. government agencies and institutions, including the White House, War Department, State Department during the Roosevelt and Truman administration. Moreover, right now, if you will read the reminiscences or memoirs of the Soviet master spy, Anatoly Sudoplatov, it looks like all Manhattan project, nuclear project of the United States was working for Stalin, was working for Stalin, with people like Robert Oppenheimer, passing his secrets, and that's, he was all the time trying to be vindicated by the left, but right now Soviet archives show what he did, and he, so the plot of met with him he said you should pass to us information wherever and Oppenheimer said no I will never do that I will never do that I

14:57will never work for KGB he said but leaving the room he said if you can recommend me a good research assistant I would definitely hire him can you Right now it's documented. The two dozen Soviet agents named in the documents just released included Lachlan Carrier, personal aide to President Roosevelt, Mary Price, the secretary to the influential columnist Walter Liebman, Harry Dexter White of the Treasury Department, actually I'm the Secretary of Treasury. This new batch of intercepted cables, decrypted under the so-called Winona Program confirms the charges made in the 1950s by former Soviet spy Elizabeth Bentley, who the left horribly vilified. One of these documents included a March 30, 1945 cable from the Soviet intelligence representative in Washington to Moscow that refers to Soviet agent Alice.

15:58An NCA notation reports the post states that Alice is alter-hissed. The accused Soviet Spy who was at FDR's right hand at the 1945 Yalta Conference. And we then are surprised why FDR delivered all Eastern Europe to murderers hands of Stalin. The cable also says that Hiss had been working for Soviet intelligence continuously since 1935. Since 1935, Roger Mr. His had access to all classified materials of the United States government, to all, including secret codes, including all strategic, military and Department of State information.

16:43At the end of the Second World War, he was promoted to be Assistant Secretary of State of the United States. It's more interesting that in 1950 when he was apprehended and being accused of Soviet spy, the people like Adlai Stevenson and presumably conservative John Foster Dulles testified in his defense. Dulles even said that he swears that he cannot be a spy, he knows him a man of high integrity. So it makes us feel whether, I don't know, maybe John Foster Dulles, The Venona document should put an end to the argument about many of these cases, wrote in Washington Post, which is not right-wing paper at all, John Haynes, a Library of Congress historian.

17:36This will be painful to many historians, he added. Bentley has been mocked in many books as a spy queen. These documents support everything she was saying. Hundreds of Soviets, and I would like to add British spies around FDR, were complemented by a lot of fools, idiots and imbeciles in his administration. United States Ambassador to Moscow, Joe Davis, is one of them. Joe Davis, during the purges, when Soviets were killing up to 20,000 people a day, was praising these purges, saying that if Stalin will get rid of his enemies, then he can achieve more to better the lives of Soviet people. Vice President Henry Wallace, journalist Alexander Wirth, were among these imbeciles.

18:28What centered around Roosevelt, and especially Eleanor Roosevelt, were a lot of pro-British, pro-internationalist groups. And they immediately, after the beginning of the war with Stalin, when Hitler attacked Soviet Russia on the 22nd of June 1941, they immediately embraced Stalin is a great ally and friend. Back from his first mission to Moscow, Harry Hopkins, the president's most intimate advisor and friend, is reported to have said, it is ridiculous to think of Stalin as a communist. He is a Russian nationalist and a Russian patriot. Harriman told various persons that Stalin was not at all a revolutionary communist, but also was just a Russian patriot.

19:21Can you imagine a patriot who created a killer state which murdered physically 42 million of his fellow Russians and fellow Soviets? While the personal relationship of world politics was to Roosevelt's means of dealing with Stalin, what were the ends he wished to attain in this unholy alliance? The President, all the time, viewed himself as fulfilling the great mission of Woodrow Wilson to make upon himself the moral leadership of making the world safe for democracy and to mold the world into his own schemes of social and economic engineering.

20:06Roosevelt introduced internationalism and globalism in American foreign policy, Policy, which later was embraced by leaders of both parties. Having given the nation a social democratic new deal at home, Roosevelt wanted to give the entire world a new deal. Globalization of his welfare state required the support of the competing socialist model of the Soviet Union. One of historians, Robert Niesbett, wrote, somehow in Roosevelt's vision, all the ugliness of Soviet Brutality was squeezed out, and what was left was a system in Russia not extremely different from his own New Deal. The Soviet Union, with all words considered in advance, was still constitutionally pledged to its people to provide jobs, medical care and welfare very much on the order of his own New Deal. There was also the constitutional pledge to To build a classless society, the Soviet Union, according to FDR, was forward-looking, progressive in thrust.

21:10FDR has enamored of the Stalinist socioeconomic system. One of the instruments used by Roosevelt to support and propel Stalin's murderous regime was land lease. About $11 billion in war material was sent to Stalin under that program. Additional assistance came from US-Russian War Relief, which was also a kind of semi-government institution based on both private donations and government appropriations for Stalin. Grateful Stalin never revealed to his own people the full contribution of Lend-Lease to their own country's survival. But he referred to the program in the 1945 Yalta Conference saying that Lend-Lease is one of Franklin Roosevelt's most remarkable and great achievements in the formation of an anti-Hilary Alliance.

22:01Lend-Lease helped the Soviet Union to conquer captive nations of Eastern Europe and to start the Cold War with Western imperialism and World Zionism much stronger than it would be without Lend-Lease's support. Moreover, Lend-Lease, because of bureaucratic inertia, both in Moscow and Washington DC, led to the fact that Lend-Lease, the major shipments of Lend-Lease came to Soviet Union at the end of 1944 and the beginning of 1945, when the war was practically over. So, what we were doing, we were arming murderous dictator to take over, to use Lend-Lease armaments against American and British interests in Europe and Stalin was openly threatening the West that his tanks can reach Paris in one week and we are forgetting that a lot of the fuel for these tanks, a lot of armaments were supplied by Lend-Lease just before the end of the Second World War.

23:11By Roosevelt's perverted logic, the major enemy of peace and order in the post-war era wouldn't be Soviet communism, but interestingly enough, the colonialism of the European empires, particularly Great Britain, this was a threat to the future of Soviet American democracy. He really referred in his letters to Stalin, he referred the future world as a Soviet-American democracy. Roosevelt argued that Stalin was a good guy, Uncle Joe, he called him, but he was suspicious of the capitalist West. So he had to be coaxed into trusting the West and working for the worldwide New Deal as well. This was the motive behind Roosevelt's infamous remark that I think if I give Stalin everything I possibly can, said Roosevelt, and ask nothing from him in return, Nablus oblige, he won't try to annex anything and will work with me for a world of peace and democracy.

24:12Roosevelt's delusions of Stalin's Nablus were enforced both by leftists in the mass media as well as by Soviet agents who surrounded the president during the New Deal days and the war years. Stalin didn't have to worry about pushing his own post-war demands. At the November 1943 Teheran Conference, where Roosevelt and Stalin met for the first time, the President held informal secret meetings with the Soviet dictator. In defiance of the Acts of Congress in 1940, Roosevelt hand-delivered Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, as well as Eastern Poland, into murderous hands of Stalin. All he asked of Stalin was that he remains quiet about it, so Roosevelt could get the Polish-American vote in 1944 elections.

25:02Can you imagine if Roosevelt asked, and according to Soviet archives he did, he said, Yes, Uncle Joe, you get all this, but keep quiet until 1944. For Stalin it was an open invitation to plunder everything he could, everything he could. because that was the best, I think, kind of blackmailing device any leader of any country could give to his presumed friend and ally. Roosevelt also accepted the idea of post-war Eastern European governments that would be friendly to the Soviet Union. He all the time is writing that in Soviet Union, Russia right now, they published three volumes of correspondence between Stalin, Churchill and Roosevelt, all classified before, and it's amazing to read it, because really at first you think that he was a naive idiot, but it looks like he was not.

25:59I don't think that the idea that he was stupid and naive, no, I think it's, I would prefer to call him evil rather than stupid. And so what he was doing, he was sending the real countries, the real people, to Soviets to murder the Stalinist regime in exchange of one promise of Stalin to support the United Nations, new world order. He was saying, for example, that it's all right, he gave up all poles and bolts and other Eastern Europeans, but in exchange he got the promise of Stalin to have only three woods in the United Nations of Soviet Union, Belarus and Ukraine, which was completely, I mean, this is just instead of betraying 120 million people by that, He was getting three absolutely worthless so-called votes in the United Nations.

27:00The Yalta Conference of February 1945 formalized what Roosevelt had promised in Tehran. The importance of this last conference was that Yalta performed the service to the Soviets, which already delivered to him everything which was promised before. Yalta legitimized and justified Soviet domination of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, East Germany, and Mongolia, it gave moral standing to the Soviet Empire. As the President's confidant Harry Hopkins wrote, the Russians have given us so much at this conference that I don't think we should let them down. So what did Stalin have given? Again, he agreed only for the United Nations.

27:45That was it. And the true Stalin, the true Uncle Joe, as both Roosevelt and Churchill affectionately called him, achieved almost everything during the Second World War. It looks like it was only Stalin who won the war, only Stalin who won the war. The Bolts were taking for a ride in the most atrocious way. Roosevelt suggested to Stalin that Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians should be removed from Baltic states, should be sent to Sweden, to Sweden, a permanent exile. And these three countries should be turned to Stalin empty.

28:35So Stalin, who, from the perspective of him, whom he dealt with, whom he dealt with. Stalin, a Russian steelman, he earnestly thought that Russia and the world cannot survive without him. His real name was Joseph Vissarionovich Jugashvili, and he was a son of, he was born in Gori, Georgia, the Soviet Georgia, to Shoemaker and Washerwoman and object poverty. His father was a drunk, abusive husband, and his son Joseph, not many people know because also archives were opened quite recently, didn't know that Stalin was the fundraiser of the Communist Party in Georgia, and this fundraiser, he was their chief fundraiser, and fundraising was done through the bank and highway robberies.

29:26Bank, and throw highway robbers. He killed 47 people himself, just robbing banks, getting money for the Bolshevik cause, for the Bolshevik cause. Moreover, once apprehended by the police, he became a secret police informer, he became a secret police informer of Akhrana. And he worked for the Akhrana from 1906 to 1912 to work for the Tsarist secret police. He was very paranoid about that, and so he killed almost everybody who could know, who could kind of have a slightest idea what was really going on. All Georgian and Armenian communists were slaughtered just because of the fact that Stalin was suspicious that maybe they would know, maybe they would know that.

30:14He killed almost everybody. He worked with all his life. That was the worst thing was to be his relative. They went first. They went first. According to KGB archives, again I want to repeat that, according to KGB archives, 42 million perished in Gulag, 42 million perished in Gulag. And that was the person whom Roosevelt was very proud to call his best friend. And in Tagheran, Churchill wrote that he was very suspicious of Stalin, but when he came into the room, he said, I rose, I rose, and this man had such a charisma, he had such a trust in his eyes that he could not refrain from standing up and embracing him as a friend.

31:11Roosevelt couldn't do that, writes Churchill, just because of being a handicapped person.

31:21Traveling in Lithuania a couple of years ago, I was struck by a huge poster displayed near Vilnius International Airport. There was a troika there, but it was interesting, I thought there's something wrong with this, something wrong. It's free Lithuania already, put a huge poster near the International Airport. The West should be blamed. There are three people there. And guess who are there? Roosevelt, Stalin, but instead of Churchill, they put Hitler. Hitler, Roosevelt and Stalin, saying that we were betrayed twice. I think that was absolutely right. So what kind of legacy right now we have? A lot of conservative even historians, like Amos Perlmutter, who is quite good, were saying that Roosevelt was naive, that he was stupid, he was fooled by Stalin.

32:16No, I believe he was not. He achieved what he wanted. He achieved this global only world order. He achieved the dominance of the United States through United Nations. All the institutions we are paying right now for, United Nations, IMF, World Bank, were all parts of Rooseveltian legacy. I started with, quote from Mencken, I'll finish with that. He was the first American, wrote Mencken, to penetrate to the real depths of vulgar stupidity. He never made the mistake of overestimating the intelligence of the American mob. He was its unparalleled professor. That's I think I would be happy to finish with.