Would Roosevelt have used nuclear weapons?
That’s an interesting question. I think there was a side of him that reflected the common views in the United States about the Japanese. That was not his strong point, Japan.
He came to accept terror bombing, it seems.
He did. You know, the terror bombing that took place in German towns—Dresden, and so on—was it militarily necessary? I don’t think so. But once you accept that, then the jump from the terror bombing of Dresden and Hamburg to using and testing these new weapons in Japan is not a big leap. I always wonder whether they would’ve tested these weapons out on a white race. Let’s put it bluntly. Somehow the Japanese had been demonized so much that wiping out two whole cities didn’t really matter. Everyone agreed to it. It wasn’t just the Americans. The British agreed, the Russians agreed to it. Left-wing—
You say the Russians agreed to it?
The Russians agreed to it.
To Hiroshima?
Stalin agreed to it. Even though it was a shot across their own bow, the Russians were informed that these weapons were going to be tested on Japan and they didn’t protest.
Postwar anticommunism took root more in the United States than in France or other parts of Europe. What was the reason behind that?
I think in France, of course, you had a large resistance during the Second World War. And there were two components of that resistance. There was a nationalist resistance under General de Gaulle. He was greatly admired because he had stood firm when France fell, and said we will fight these guys until the end. Then, after the Soviet Union was attacked—and only after then—did the French Communist Party throw itself heart and soul into the resistance, and they lost many, many people. So the traditions of that resistance remained very strong in France right until the 1980s. And the communist role in that resistance meant that it wasn’t easy to vilify or demonize them. And the French intelligentsia that grew up in that particular period, whether they were members of the Communist Party or not, were in general sympathetic to Marxist ideas. I talk particularly of Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, the whole school of younger people around them and Les Temps modernes, the magazine they set up. In addition, you had with de Gaulle a president who, in later years of the Cold War, didn’t want to be part of the American plans for global domination. He took France out of NATO, and he opposed the war in Vietnam. He came to Montreal, not far from the United States and said, “Vive le Québec libre!” You know, what more could he do? So that meant that France was never part of the Cold War ideology in the same way as the United States.
McCarthyism in that exact form in which it formed in the United States couldn’t have been found in too many countries in Europe, Scandinavia excluded. Italy had a giant communist party, largely because of the role it had played in the resistance.
Yet in the United States we had numerous strikes during World War II, and the question is why we changed so abruptly from 1944 to 1947, when Truman signed the antilabor Taft-Hartley law? Looking back, Eugene Debs ran for president, and he ends up in jail. Big Bill Haywood ends up running away from America because he’s sentenced to jail. It seems that we broke the back of the labor unions with Emma Goldman’s deportation and the Palmer Raids. There seems to be an ongoing war against labor.
There was a total war against the American labor movement, especially from the beginning from the 1920s onward. And if you look at the statistics of the number of physical attacks on striking workers, either by the police or by private companies and goons hired by the corporations, it’s quite astonishing. Repression backed by the state, or accepted by the state, was used to crush a labor movement in this country. In this time, the “Bolshevik threat” played a very big part, too. And it’s at this same time that US leaders began to use religious imagery. The motto “In God We Trust” was put on the dollar in the 1950s. And increasingly presidents who were not deeply religious started paying lip service to religion. Why? Because religion was seen as a weapon against communism. And the state began to use religious emblems, as well. That is quite an interesting feature of the Cold War, which has led us partially where we are today. The United States has become a much more religious country than it used to be, with religion being taken far more seriously. Before the Cold War, religion was a sort of private matter; it didn’t really enter into the functioning of the life of the state.
But instead of Wallace as president, we had Truman.
The removal of Henry Wallace and the election of Harry Truman meant that the United States had decided to embark on a certain course. That course was an aggressive foreign policy, taking on the Russians. The first big outbreak as a consequence of this was the Korean War. With the defeat of the Japanese, Korea became vulnerable to nationalism, to communism, to radical currents. Had the United States not intervened, there is very little doubt that the whole of the peninsula would have fallen to the communists, who interestingly were more popular in what is now South Korea than what is now North Korea. In Seoul, for example, you had much more genuine popular support for the Korean communists. Kim Il-sung didn’t like many of the communists of Seoul because they reminded him of a period when communism was genuinely popular, and he didn’t like to be reminded of that. So a lot of communists from the South were repressed by Kim Il-sung when he established this parody of a Stalinist dictatorship in North Korea, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea. Many communists from the South were not given positions. Many were killed, some were imprisoned.
So, the United States decided that it wasn’t going to allow Korea to “fall” to communism. The United States had sent troops into Korea and a border had been established on the forty-ninth parallel between North and South Korea. The North Koreans then decided on a raid, and crossed the border, which gave the United States a pretext for a war. This war went on for three years. It was the first of the hot wars of the Cold War. And had the Chinese armies not entered, North Korea would have fallen to MacArthur. MacArthur had started saying we are going to win against the communists of North Korea, and if necessary we’ll cross the Yalu River and go into China. This sort of talk was very dangerous. The Chinese Revolution had succeeded in October 1949. We talked earlier about the wave of enthusiasm for the Russian Revolution in Europe. There was a similar wave of enthusiasm for the Chinese Revolution in Asia—the Chinese way, the Chinese path. Mao Zedong was a popular hero. They had taken the world’s largest country, not a small thing. So when the Korean War began, the Chinese decided we can’t allow North Korea to fall, and sent in Chinese. The Chinese army fought the United States to a standstill, ultimately leading to an armistice in 1953. But it produced a lot of casualties. Mao Zedong’s son died fighting in the Korean War. So that was the first of these wars. The early period of the Cold War saw the breakup of old empires, with the United States essentially increasingly taking over the role of these empires. The Korean War, the breakup of the Japanese Empire. The Vietnam War, the breakup of the French Empire.