Chapter 04: Hoover: “An Alliance with Stalin Is a Tragedy” 1941 (Part II)

Stalin and Hitler were equally two demonic conspirators who jointly unleashed World War II. Even before Hitler attacked the Soviet Union, the USSR had already invaded and occupied half of Poland, all of Finland, and three small countries including Lithuania. Stalin’s iron heel had already trampled Eastern Europe. Roosevelt chose to assist one devil in order to oppose another. The subsequent course of world history after World War II proved that Hoover’s criticism was correct: colluding and allying with Stalin led to tragedy, unleashed communism across the world, and resulted in the deaths of seventy million people in China alone.

During World War II, in order to defeat the formidable enemy Germany, Roosevelt courted the Soviet Union and formed an alliance with it to fight Germany together. The moment the war ended, however, the Soviet Union immediately revealed its expansionist nature. In 1946, Churchill delivered his “Iron Curtain” speech at Westminster College, announcing to the democratic nations that the curtain had officially fallen on a new Cold War led by Soviet Russia and characterized by communist tyranny. Britain and the United States vowed “to strangle the newborn communist baby in its cradle.”

Subsequent history proved that Churchill’s judgment was entirely correct. Totalitarianism and democracy are, by their very nature, two systems that are fundamentally incompatible. The contradictions and conflicts between them were bound to erupt sooner or later at some flashpoint. At that time, the flashpoint was Berlin. At Potsdam in 1945, the three great powers of World War II—the United States, Britain, and the Soviet Union—agreed to divide Germany into occupation zones: the Soviet Union occupied the eastern half, while the United States, Britain, and France divided the western half. The capital city of Berlin was similarly divided. West Berlin thus became an enclave of West Germany embedded within East Germany. On June 24, 1948, angered by the currency reform introduced by the United States and Britain in their occupation zones, the Soviet Union blockaded all road, rail, and water access routes to the Allied-controlled sectors of Berlin. The blockade cut off electricity, food, and coal supplies to the city, as well as all external connections.

The Berlin Airlift was the first battle of the Cold War, a confrontation that Churchill had long foreseen. In his speech, Churchill emphasized why communism must be opposed. He said that within these countries, sweeping police states imposed control over ordinary people, overriding and violating all democratic principles. Dictators or tightly organized oligarchies exercised unchecked state power through privileged single parties and political police forces. In these troubled times, our duty was not to intervene by force in the internal affairs of countries we had not conquered in war. But we must never abandon the fearless proclamation of the great principles of freedom and fundamental human rights. These shared inheritances of the English-speaking world—following the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights, habeas corpus, trial by jury, and English common law—found their most celebrated expression in the American Declaration of Independence. What communism seeks to destroy are precisely these spiritual legacies, rooted in God, among humanity’s universal values, replacing them with class struggle and tyrannical dictatorship.

Churchill further stated: “I am convinced that our destiny remains in our own hands and that we have the power to save the future. I feel it is my duty to seize this opportunity to say so. I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire are the fruits of war and the unlimited expansion of their power and doctrine. But while there is still time, the question we must consider is how to permanently prevent war and create conditions of freedom and democracy as quickly as possible in all countries. Ignoring difficulties and dangers will not solve the problem; standing aside will not solve it; appeasement will not solve it. What is needed now is a settlement. The longer it is delayed, the more difficult it becomes, and the greater the danger to us.”

Unfortunately, later Western leaders—raised in Catholic and Christian traditions—proved too naïve. Some failed to guard against deception; others were outright misled. The greatest miscalculation was the United States allowing the Chinese Communist Party to grow powerful, naively reaching a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” with Stalin’s Soviet Union, under which neither side would openly assist either the Communists or the Nationalist government. This was a grave error of American politicians judging villains by the standards of gentlemen. Communists do not believe in God; in their dictionary there are no words such as “contract” or “honesty.” They adhere to a utilitarian political philosophy of “the victor is king, the loser is bandit,” and will use any means necessary to achieve their ends. Tearing up agreements means nothing to them. They believe that “history is written by the victors,” and once victory is achieved and objectives are met, they are prepared to tear up any agreement.

There were very few American politicians who truly understood the nature of communism. Their insistence on honoring agreements led them to cut off aid to the Nationalist government. The Soviet Union, meanwhile, violated its promises by secretly transferring weapons and matériel seized from the Japanese army to the Chinese Communist Party, enabling it to survive and recover. On the one hand, the Communists obtained Japanese weapons and equipment, greatly enhancing their strength. On the other hand, they carried out radical land reform in the “liberated areas,” while making empty promises of land redistribution to peasants in the “non-liberated areas,” deceiving farmers who did not understand the true nature of the CCP. These peasants, believing the promises, joined the logistical support forces against the Nationalist government, pushing supplies in wheelbarrows. This gave rise to the saying that “the war of liberation was pushed forward by peasants with wheelbarrows.” As a result, the CCP employed human-wave tactics, aided by weapons from Japan’s Kwantung Army, capturing cities and territories in rapid succession, advancing through the passes, seizing North China, and after the brutal Huaihai Campaign, driving the Nationalist forces—exhausted by years of war and lacking foreign support—south across the Yangtze River.

At this point, the Communist bandits had turned danger into safety and weakness into strength. The civilized nations, especially the world’s leading power, the United States, watched helplessly as a bandit-born, fascist-style Chinese Communist Party seized power in the most populous country with limitless potential. This was a colossal postwar blunder and defeat for the civilized world. It not only brought disaster to China, but also shook the normal course of human civilization. The scale of the calamity and the depth of the historical resentment it produced are incalculable.

Zhong Wen concludes: Hoover was a fierce anti-communist and deserves a perfect score of 100. His understanding of communism did not come from books, but from personal experience. In his early years, Hoover had co-founded a mining company in Russia with British partners. When the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, the mining company was nationalized by the Russian Communists, and Hoover suffered enormous losses. Hoover spoke bluntly: “The Bolsheviks are a gang of murderers, and communism is an abyss.” The Soviet Union continuously used the Communist International to conduct espionage infiltration and propaganda aimed at overthrowing the capitalist system in the United States. Many American intellectuals, lacking firsthand experience of communism, saw it through a fog and were misled by Soviet propaganda. When such people became government advisers, they often made disastrous miscalculations. This situation still exists today. Some so-called American “China experts” neither understand China nor truly know the Chinese Communist Party. Others, tempted by CCP interests, become honored guests of the CCP’s united front, traveling back and forth between China and the United States multiple times a year. Policies formulated by such people for U.S. foreign affairs are like “a blind man riding a blind horse, approaching a deep abyss at midnight.” They harm American interests and benefit China’s communists—something obvious to any observer.