Partitions VII — The Iron Curtain

Nobody asked but …

Joseph Stalin always had the annexation of the world — the Iron Curtain — in mind.  It was at the Yalta Conference where he finessed FDR and Churchill to make his dreams come true.  Maybe it was because he had the home court advantage, since Yalta was the major resort city in Crimea, Ukraine, USSR.

It is difficult to get a straight story about what really went on at Yalta, mostly because the official written report of the conference was designed as a CYA for the Big Three.  But the consequences of Yalta soon became clear.  First of all, Poland was sold out.  The leaders of Poland, in exile in England, were supposed to be restored at Yalta, but Churchill and FDR were content to delegate the implementation to Stalin, the last person who wanted to see the exiles return to Poland.  Then the entirety of Eastern Europe was thrown into a similar pot, by a similar but more imperceptible rejection of the hopes of the peoples in those lands.  A year later, Winston Churchill would own, in a speech in Missouri, “from Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.”  I’m sure he meant to cover his and FDR’s complicity by playing “I told you so!”

FDR’s treachery was even worse, because he traded Eastern Europe’s people, half a century’s worth, into penury for a half-vast concession from Stalin regarding the founding of the UN, with the truly stinking idea of stacking vetoes in the Security Council.  As a side, FDR also sold out Chiang Kai-shek, opening China for Mao Zedong.  In stroking his own ego, hiding behind the apparent conquering of Hitler, FDR opened the door to two murdering statists, Stalin and Mao, who both would make Hitler look like a piker.

— Kilgore Forelle

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