Yalta betrayal revisited.(CORRECTION, PLEASE!)(Correction Notice)

ITEM: Jacob Heilbrunn wrote in the Los Angeles Times for May 10 (and other papers) about President George Bush's visit to the Baltics. When the president compared "the Yalta accord among Franklin D. Roosevelt, Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin in [February of] 1945 to the Hitler-Stalin pact," said Heilbrunn, that should have caused "outrage here at home." Heilbrunn went on: "The claim that Roosevelt betrayed Eastern Europe and set the stage for 40 years of Soviet domination is an old right-wing canard. By repeating it, and by publicly charging that the Yalta agreement was in the 'unjust tradition' of Hitler's deal with Stalin, Bush was simply engaging in cheap historical revisionism...."

Continued Heilbrunn: "The slander against Roosevelt that Bush has taken up dates back to the early 1950s, after Harry Truman and Dean Acheson had supposedly 'lost' China to communism. That's when the American right first decried what it viewed as a consistent pattern of 'appeasement' in the Democratic Party."

ITEM: In the New York Observer on May 12, Joe Conason accused President Bush of "historical falsification," saying that he had "slander[ed] one of his greatest predecessors." Conason continued: "In a display of the extremist ideology that drives politics and policy in his administration, George W. Bush chose a platform in Latvia to repeat an old right-wing slur against Franklin Delano Roosevelt."

CORRECTION: Just because an inconvenient or uncomfortable charge has been made before does not make it untrue. It remains a sad fact that the pattern of acquiescence and assistance to Moscow, which the Yalta conference rightly came to symbolize, helped betray millions of people, entire nations, into the maw of Communism.

The arrangements made in Yalta furthered the collaboration with Stalin, whose joint dismembering of Poland with Hitler started World War II in Europe. The war that Britain and France ostensibly entered to free the Poles ended with the West helping lock the shackles on Poland for decades, as well as on most of Eastern and Central Europe, and set the stage for China's takeover by Mao.

Poland was "written off at Yalta," notes military historian John Keegan in The Second World War (1989), "though it had fought every day of the war since 1 September 1939, maintaining an army in exile which stood fourth in size among those opposed to the Wehrmacht...."

Apologists have long maintained that the Soviet takeover of Eastern and Central Europe was inevitable. Even if that were so, why bless it? Yet, there was much more than "inevitability" involved. Well before Yalta, Roosevelt had revealed his willingness to appease Communists (e.g., he recognized Stalin's regime diplomatically in 1933 even as the dictator was starving millions of Ukrainians to death). President Roosevelt even admitted to (later Cardinal) Francis Spellman in 1943, "the European people will simply have to endure the Russian domination in the hope that--in ten or twenty years--the ...