Mrs. Roosevelt, Comrade Molotov, & “Human Rights”

FDR & Molotov, June 1942

2,312 words

There is the old adage: A picture is worth a thousand words. Well, grit your teeth, comrade, and click on this link. Behold a snapshot of infamy that’s worth enough words to fill a multi-volume encyclopedia with the title: The 3 C’s of our Ruling Class: Collusion, Corruption, Coercion.

The photo captures Eleanor Roosevelt mugging with a big, toothy grin for the camera, an unnerving glimpse at the avatar of mid-1940s American feminism and “civil rights” activism. With the angle of the hat and the bulky coat, she looks like a hulking, unconvincing female impersonator you’d piss off at your peril. Opposite her stands none other than a steely-eyed, unsmiling Vyacheslav Molotov, Joseph Stalin’s Foreign Minister. With resolution and determination written in his face, sans his signature pince-nez, he could pass for an American college football coach doing a pre-game interview – a perfect Russian masculine counterpoise to American androgyny. His jaw is firmly set as he submits to this fatuous PR ritual while barely repressing his contempt for the useful idiot grasping his paw – posterchild for the fellow-traveling, Stalin-loving fifth-columnists that infested FDR’s administration from its earliest days.

In the center is the star performer from Stalin’s 1930s show trials and the chief Soviet Prosecutor at Nuremberg, Andrei Vyshinsky. His face beams with the gleaming radiation of Soviet triumph, an expression that seems to say: “Who would have believed they’d be so easy to dupe? I wish the Boss could experience in person this dumpy Roosevelt broad falling all over us.”

As the photo caption notes: Molotov and Vyshinsky were among an entourage of United Nations delegates making a “pilgrimage to President Roosevelt’s grave in Hyde Park.” Yes, a “pilgrimage,” described by the caption’s author so as to give an awe-tinged, religious solemnity to the event. So, you might pause to wonder: what kind of “pilgrims” was the recently-widowed Mrs. Roosevelt so enthusiastically escorting on their way to pay homage to the dead saint who had been her husband?

As pilgrims go, these characters are in a class of a special kind. Apart from Stalin himself, it would be difficult to find more slippery performers who more embody the essence of Stalinist treachery and duplicity than this diabolical duo.

It was Molotov who partnered up with Hitler’s foreign minister, Joachim Ribbentrop, to make the “agreement” – “the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact” – a “non-aggression” pact that turned both countries’ signatories into mutual collaborators in unabated aggression. It got the Second World War show on the road and let Stalin devour eastern Poland and the Baltic states while supplying his partner, Hitler, with the raw materials to fuel his war machine. Ribbentrop was hanged at Nuremberg as a war criminal. Why, then, was his war-criminal partner not dangling at the end of a rope alongside of him instead of becoming an honored, feted guest of the American government? It’s called Siegerjustiz, “victor’s justice.”

Vyshinsky’s life was devoted exclusively to making Stalin happy, which involved helping him frame and murder the higher-ups who landed on the Boss’s extensive shit list and making it look “legal.” Many of the General Secretary’s old Bolshevik comrades in the 1930s got the “Vyshinsky treatment” during their staged trials, which basically amounted to them as defendants reciting their rehearsed, torture-extracted confessions in the courtroom under Andrei’s threatening – and sometimes correctional – supervision. When seeking the death penalty for the convictions that had been planned in advance, this “prosecutor” would take the language of vilification and denunciation to levels approaching comedic parody.

Nikolai Bukharin, fictionalized by Arthur Koestler as the noblest of the old Bolsheviks, Nikolai Rubashov, in the classic novel Darkness at Noon, immersed in the personal agony of rationalizing his suicidal submission to “the party,” was an “accursed crossbreed of fox and pig” who supposedly committed a “whole nightmare of vile crimes.” What penalty did this ardent, highly intellectual Communist, described by Harrison Salisbury in the New York Times as “Lenin’s most brilliant disciple,” deserve for helping the fake prosecutor pull of the farce of a trial? “All our country, from small one to old one, awaits and demands one thing: traitors and spies who sold to the enemy our homeland to be shot like mad dogs. Our people demand one thing: crush the accursed vermin!” The “accursed vermin” would include Bukharin’s wife, the beautiful Anna Mikhailovna Larina, who was arrested and separated from her one-year old son. She would spend twenty years of her life toiling in Stalin’s gulags for the crime of being married to an imaginary mad dog.

Molotov and Vyshinsky – “pilgrims” on their way to commune with the spirit of FDR, Stalin’s partner in the “liberation of Europe” from – what was it now? Ah, yes – a “tyranny.” That partnership, as Sean McMeekin’s recently-published Stalin’s War  reveals, was largely a one-way street for FDR’s insane Lend-Lease generosity to the Soviets, carried out by his bagman, Harry Hopkins, one of Eleanor’s favorites. Franklin would shower his “Uncle Joe” with all the materials he would need to fend off his former partner in non-aggression and eventually put those portions of Europe that Hitler had coveted under his heel.

Welcome to the alternative universe of Eleanor Roosevelt carrying on Franklin’s vision of it, a place where you polish your heart-warming abstractions – liberty, equality, social justice, world peace, etc. – until they are mirrors of your imagined moral perfection. That they have no connection to the actual doings of the real world enables you to magnify your own virtue and dim-wittingly embrace the “realists” like Molotov and Vyshinsky, men who talk your language and trumpet your “ideals” but, when seen in action, don’t let the “talking points” get in the way of taking care of business.

For the feckless institutionalization of that alternative universe, the United Nations, Mrs. Roosevelt would go on to play a major role. Thus, another picture worth a thousand words and more. This one is a bit easier on the eyes, as Lady Eleanor is at least not glad-handing Stalin’s chief hatchet man. Here, she solemnly surveys the fruit of her labors as chair of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights. “Commission” in this context signals a collection of high-minded apparatchiks trying to outdo each other as peerless do-gooders. This Commission gathered together the ne plus ultra congregation of the “We are the World” do-gooders.

Thus: the “Universal Declaration of Human Rights.” You see, it’s called a “universal declaration,” meaning that it is for all times and everywhere – a document endowed supposedly with the same moral-theological status as the Ten Commandments, this one channeled from the ghost of FDR as God’s placeman with the widow Roosevelt playing the part of Moses. In the photo, she is holding “the tablets.” God is speaking to us through her.

Much derision can and should be heaped upon this “Declaration,” but perhaps the most succinct, accurate comment to be made about it would be: It is the kind of document meant to be admired for the loftiness of its title but not to be seriously or thoughtfully read. A close reading shows it to be a bad joke. By the time the reader has slogged his way through the thirty articles and almost two thousand words, it becomes obvious that he is looking at a bewildering word salad composed, as they say, “by committee,” a “diverse” committee of delusional people who imagine that the intonation of soothing vocables will turn the entire world into modern-day Sweden and everyone in it into a model Social Democrat loaded up with enough “rights” to ensure happy time, cradle to grave.

New York, sometime in the late 1940s: A spectator at a meeting of the United Nations Commission on Human Rights might have observed something like this in progress.

UNCHR member: Hey, what about a ‘right to favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment’?

UNCHR Chair, ER: Yes. No one should be unemployed – no excuses.

UNCHR member: Wait, shouldn’t everyone have “the right to equal pay for equal work”?

UNCHR Chair, ER: Of course. Equality. You can’t have enough of it. Why didn’t I think of that?

UNCHR member: We can do better. “Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.”

UNCHR Chair, ER: Yes, human dignity demands no less, and social protection if stingy types who are against dignity are in charge of the workplace. Over there, Delegate Wadimba, you had your hand up. What else are we missing?

On and on it goes until they get tired and head out for cocktails on the US taxpayer’s tab. The “Declaration” begins by aping Jefferson rather badly: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights . . .” No hint on how “dignity” gets ladled out in equal portions. It culminates in reductio ad absurdum in Article 24 with: “Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.”

When everyone in the world is declared to have “a right” to a paid vacation, you know something has gone terribly wrong, and that the United Nations was a bad idea conceived by corrupt and/or delusional people who should be locked up or heavily medicated and ignored.

Several of the articles are, however, worth a second look because they give the thoughtful reader a sense of the schizophrenic, gaslighting mentality of the drafters and the utter worthlessness of this document.

Article 5: “No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.” “Cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” one would think, captures the American bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the Allied firebombing of Dresden, Cologne, Hamburg, and other German cities that targeted civilian populations. This is why Harry Truman, Winston Churchill, and Arthur “Bomber” Harris were tried and executed after the war as “war criminals.” Oh, wait . . . “No one” didn’t apply to the German and Japanese women, children, and old people who got incinerated.

Article 17: “No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.” “No one” except for about 120,000 American citizens of Japanese ancestry from the West coast, who Eleanor’s husband ordered to be forcibly relocated and incarcerated in concentration camps. What became, you might ask, of their hard-earned and valuable West Coast properties? David Bazelon, FDR’s Assistant Attorney General, took over as head of the Office of Alien Property Custodian created by the President. Being the expert “custodian” that he was, he auctioned off them off to his buddies at bargain rates with generous kickbacks. Bazelon was the personification of the 3 C’s at work in FDR’s repeat of the war to “make the world safe for democracy,” the kind of “democracy” that the East Germans experienced in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Gus Russo’s Supermob: How Sidney Korshak and His Criminal Associates Became America’s Hidden Powers paints the ugly picture of the violation of this particular “human right,” among others.

These are just two examples of the “do as we say and not as we do” mentality of the New Deal gang.

Fast-forward to March 2021 and remarks by United States Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield at a United Nations General Assembly Commemorative Meeting for International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination: “I thank the Secretary-General, Madam High Commissioner, and Dr. Iweala for your leadership in pressing us all to do more toward the elimination of racial discrimination, wherever and by whomever.” (italics mine)

The “wherever” part, as she goes on to say, is everywhere: “[Racism] is the problem of the society that produces the racist. And in today’s world, that is every society.” Proof or evidence for this astonishing assertion? Remember: We are at the United Nations, where proclamations and declarations are all that matter. Then, Linda moves on to the specifics of the “whomever” and the what “more” there is to “do”: “[B]ecause Black Lives Matter, we need to dismantle white supremacy at every turn.” One hundred thousand white American soldiers conscripted by Eleanor Roosevelt’s husband died fighting the “racist” Hitler, but remember, we are peering into the alternate universe of the United Nations founded by FDR fellow travelers, traitors (like Alger Hiss), and mass-murdering cynics from Stalin’s entourage. What could go wrong?

In the post-war years of the late 1940s, the “whomever” was confined mainly to Germans, subjected to heavy doses of denazification. By 2021, the “whomever” has been expanded to all those folks bearing the stain of “whiteness.” Such is the march of “progress.”

You don’t have to be a whiz at hermeneutics to figure out that dismantling “white supremacy at every turn” means getting rid of white people, the racists churned out by every society. That Linda doesn’t just come out and say it is a ruse to keep the gaslighting moving along and the good whites embracing their guilt and marching Pied Piper-like toward the cliff.

So, the “progressivism” of the brightest lights among American Stalinists like Eleanor Roosevelt has moved stealthily along over the decades. “Progress” turns out to be US Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield in her perch at the United Nations, braying in that coded argot of the critical race theorists who seek the elimination of white people. One of Ambassador Thomas-Greenfield’s colleagues should remind her of the “Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide” approved and ratified by the UN General Assembly on January 12, 1951: “In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group . . .”

Thomas-Greenfield knows the meaning of the word “ethnical,” but think of Eleanor Roosevelt enthusing over Molotov and Vyshinsky seventy-five years ago. The United Nations was destined to be the kind of venue where a black American woman representing the United States would propose the genocide of white people and find no resistance.

Stephen Paul Foster’s latest novel

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