On History: Tariq Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation

by Ali, Tariq;Stone, Oliver

  Was not Hitler, to some degree, popular in England? And was not Mussolini popular in the United States? And the Bank of England and the Bank of International Settlements seemed to support Hitler.

  Absolutely. I was looking the other day at the first biography of Mussolini, published in Britain in 1926. The introduction was by the US ambassador to Italy, who wrote that Mussolini is one of the greatest leaders that Europe has thrown up, and this is the way to the future—largely because he was seen as a bastion against Bolshevism and revolution, much like Hitler. Winston Churchill adored Mussolini. And in that biography you’ll find quotes from Churchill saying that Mussolini is a very important figure, we support him, and he’s necessary. Churchill always used to spell things out. If the Bolshevik hordes are going to be held at bay, we need people like Benito Mussolini. And later during the Second World War, Mussolini threw these quotes back at Churchill, saying there was a time when the leader of the British people used to like me. What’s happened? And the same with Hitler. There was a very strong element within the British ruling class that wanted to do a deal with Hitler. The British king before he abdicated, Edward VIII, was an open admirer of the Nazis, and after he abdicated, he went and called on Hitler. There are photographs of him and his wife seeing Hitler, being photographed with him. And the reason for that was the same. They said the main enemy we all confront is Bolshevism and the Russian Revolution. So anything that keeps that at bay is helpful.

  The British appeasers, as they came to be known, they were extremely right-wing politicians, but they were not irrational. They said if Hitler can be turned against the Russians, that would be tremendous. Let’s use him to wipe out the Soviet Union, and then we can talk. I mean, what they didn’t realize is that if that had happened, the Soviet Union might well have fallen, but it would have made Hitler so powerful he would’ve taken Europe overnight.

  If you look at France, when the Nazis marched in—the archive footage of when Hitler went to France after it had been occupied is available—you see cheering crowds greeting him in parts of France. It took some years for de Gaulle and the communists to get their act together and for the resistance to begin. But the traditional anti-Semitism of the French—and their nationalism—was the basis for the Vichy regime, and the collaboration, which most of France quite happily carried through with Hitler. This is something that is not talked about too much but is very important to understand.

  You have written about the defeat of the Russian Revolution, and you not only talk about the fifteen or sixteen armies that invaded, but about the change when Stalin took over, and what that did to the working class.

  What happened in the Soviet Union was that the revolution was isolated. And it’s the history of all revolutions that when they happen, there is a concert of powers that develops against them. The French found the same thing. The American Revolution had similar problems with the British. After the French Revolution toppled the monarchy and the French Republic was established, every single monarch in Europe saw this as a threat. They were trembling with fear. So you have Germans, the Russians, the English, the Austro-Hungarians trying to establish a reactionary coalition to surround and defeat the French Revolution. And at the head of it was the Prussian aristocracy, the Junkers, always there when needed. And after the Russian Revolution, the same thing happened. All the European powers tried to defeat this revolution, even though they’d just lost millions of lives fighting a crazy war, the First World War. Millions died in that war so that the European colonial powers could have more colonies or maintain their colonies. But that didn’t stop them from trying to defeat the Russian Revolution at its birth. So when you had a civil war started in Russia by the supporters of the tsar, you immediately had sixteen or seventeen armies sent in by the Europeans and other foreign powers to back these people. And that civil war consumed a lot of the energy of the revolution. A lot of the best people who had made the revolution died. Less experienced people, largely rural recruits from the peasantry, were brought up, put into places of power, lacking some of the old traditions of the Russian working class. And historically, the fact is that a lot of the workers of Petrograd, who made the revolution, I think the figures are between 30 and 40 percent of them, died during the civil war, which is a very high figure indeed. And on this basis of new recruits from the countryside grew the power of the Soviet bureaucracy typified by Stalin.

  There were two currents within Bolshevism. One was to say there is no way we can make socialism on our own, and so we shouldn’t try it in that sense until we have support from Germany, or France, until the revolution spreads. We need that because we’re a backward country. We need German industry in order to move forward. But with the defeat of the German Revolution in the 1920s, that policy was no longer active, and another current emerged that insisted you could build “socialism in one country.” That was the current of Stalinism.

  What year would be the defeat of the Russian Revolution?

  I would say that the defeat of the hopes of the Russian Revolution was probably 1929 or 1930, when the big collectivization programs started. Collectivization was essentially an admission of defeat. And the brutality with which that collectivization was imposed on the Russian peasantry left a very deep mark in parts of the countryside, which is why when the Germans entered Ukraine, they were greeted as liberators by many Ukrainians. And if the Germans hadn’t been so reactionary and so deadly, they might have had more impact, but because they regarded all Slavs as lesser peoples, they wiped them out.

  Did some of these views come from King Leopold’s campaign in the Belgian Congo?

  The European colonial mind saw people as inferior. King Leopold, unlike other colonial leaders, actually had the Congo registered in his own name. So it wasn’t Belgium that owned the Congo, it was King Leopold. It was the Belgian royal family. People talk about the six million Jews who died in the twentieth century. They never talk about the Congolese, and the figures given by Adam Hochschild in his book King Leopold’s Ghost are that at least eleven to twelve million Congolese people were killed by the Belgians in the Congo. There was a massive genocide in that country.

  Killed perhaps by their proxies, tribal warfare?

  No, they were actually killed as the Belgians were trying to get the rubber plantations going. The way they treated them, the way they showed King Leopold how many people they’d killed, is all documented. They cut off their hands, or their thumbs, and sent them back in parcels to Belgium.

  So the greatest enemy of the Soviet Union was perhaps England, would you say, in the postrevolutionary years?

  I think England was probably the most intelligent and conscious enemy of the Russian Revolution, seeing it for the threat that it was. But the Germans weren’t too far behind. I think because England was never really threatened by a revolution, the impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain was not as great as it was on the European continent. It was significant, but the reason Britain hated the Russians primarily was because the British Empire was threatened, not because they were threatened internally. Because colonized people in Africa and Asia especially saw the Russian Revolution as a gleam of hope. And the British were very panicked by that.

  In 1919, in Afghanistan, a king called Amanullah, whose queen was called Soraya, was very impressed by the Russian Revolution, and opened up negotiations with Lenin asking for help against the British. Queen Soraya said we have to follow the path of Russia and Turkey, and liberate our women. So the proposed constitution of Afghanistan from this period, which was drafted in 1919, would have given women the right to vote. If that constitution had been implemented, women would have had the right to vote in Afghanistan before they did in the United States, and certainly in Europe. And then the British said that this is leading in a very bad direction, and organized a tribal revolt to get rid of that particular king and queen in Afghanistan.

  The British who invaded Baku, protecting the oil fields there, were they a ferocious army? Who was responsible for the greate
st amount of killing of the Russian revolutionaries?

  I think it was a combination, but the British were strongly involved in killing—especially during the civil war, the early period of the revolution. The British had lost an entire generation of young men in the First World War, but that never stopped them, because they felt the stakes were very high, and that if there was a revolutionary state established there, this was going to wreck the British Empire. And the British Empire had to be preserved at all costs. What they didn’t see was that the entry of the United States into the First World War was actually, if you think about it now, a very serious death blow against the British Empire. because it showed that the British on their own couldn’t get their way in the world anymore. They needed the United States. They used to think: we will manipulate the United States. It’s a young power, we created them, they speak our own language. We are the experienced people. We will bring them around to our way of thinking. Well, of course, the Americans privately used to laugh at that. They knew that was never going to happen.

  Can you describe Woodrow Wilson’s involvement in sending troops to Russia?

  The United States, certainly the corporations there, saw the very existence of the Soviet Union after 1917 as a threat. Not that they feared its impact on the United States so greatly, though even there, there was an impact. Remember that it was Wilson’s FBI director and attorney general who expelled large numbers of Italians from the United States, citing the supposed anarchist threat or the Bolshevik threat. People used to go knocking on doors of working-class homes of European migrants who were active in trade unions in US cities, dragging them out in the night, and expelling them. It was a panic, because there was no real threat of a massive Bolshevik party building itself in the United States. But they didn’t want to take the risk. And of course, when you’re panicked like that, a state panics, its leaders panic, its corporate class panics. Then they think, what can we do? Why don’t we destroy the head of this serpent whose tentacles are everywhere? Go and put something in its eye, and that was Russia. So Wilson was very determined to defeat the Russian Revolution in its infancy, but he couldn’t do it. And of course, the Russian Revolution then tragically defeated itself in the 1930s. But that didn’t become obvious to people until the 1950s or the 1960s. So this idea that this was a real threat to the West persisted, and was, of course, the central mythology during the Cold War period—that the Russians had revolutionary aims for Europe, which is why NATO was created, which is why we had to build a massive military-industrial complex to guard and defend the United States against Russia. Well, we now know because of all the documentation that’s now a matter of public record that this was nonsense.

  Did the Americans achieve any destruction in Russia that you know of?

  Very little. They backed the armies that went into Russia. They helped the counterrevolutionary armies during the civil war. But actually in terms of real destruction, it was minimal compared to what happened later during the Cold War. I mean, there’s nothing on the level of what happened in Vietnam, or Korea, not to mention Japan right at the end of the Second World War. But also, it’s important to remember that the war in the early 1920s was not what it is today. Basically, the machine gun, the Gatling gun, these were the guns which they were using, which seemed very frightening, and they were, but the weaponry was not as advanced as it is today. So those wars, though they took lives, and many people died in hospital beds because there wasn’t enough medical treatment, which is why casualties were so high. Air power, for instance, was barely ever used in that period.

  In Baghdad, I think in 1924, “Bomber” Harris—

  “Bomber” Harris experimented in Baghdad throwing fire bombs on the Kurdish tribes. Certainly.

  Can we talk about the causes of World War II overall, and the US entry into the war? You’ve said some interesting things about Pearl Harbor.

  I think that what happened during the Second World War was, one, you had the rise of Germany as an expansionist power determined to revenge itself for the punishments of the First World War. And when Hitler occupied France, he made that explicit. The famous archive footage of the Germans insisting that the French general surrender in the same railway coach in which the Germans had surrendered at the time of the First World War was intended to show the Germans, “We are back.” This is what they did to us during the First World War. Now we have done it to them. But behind all the demagoguery, there was a fairly straightforward imperialist concern on the part of the Germans. Study the speeches of the leaders of the Third Reich closely, Hitler himself, but not just Hitler; go read Goebbels in particular, and study them seriously as political speeches without demonizing them. Just stand apart for a minute. What they are saying is this: Britain is a much smaller country than Germany, but they occupy so much of the world, as Hitler said in one of his speeches. The French, who are the French? They’re much, much, much smaller than us. And look at the countries they occupy. Look at what Belgium occupies. So they should share. We’ve been asking them nicely to share the world with us, to share their colonies, but these guys refuse, so we’re going to go in and teach them, and Germany will become a world power. So that side of the Second World War was a very traditional war between competing empires. Germany, which wanted to be an empire, and the French and the British—and the Belgians—who were empires. So that side of it was very strong. The big question was why the Germans didn’t do more to keep the United States out.

  So, let’s talk about Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor, I think, had to happen sooner or later, because the Japanese felt that the United States was putting embargos on them, pressuring them, that they had to hit back. And, you know, whether the exact details of it were known in the United States, I don’t know, but I think there must’ve been a sigh of relief among certain sectors who wanted to break the country from isolationism. Because the isolationist current in the United States is always very strong, and was even more so after the First World War. And there is an honorable side to that, too, saying it’s not our business to go and interfere in other parts of the world. Why should we? But against that, you had people who felt that US interests could only be defended by going abroad. They couldn’t keep out of this. And I think there’s no doubt that Roosevelt and some of the people close to him wanted to enter that war. It’s sort of public knowledge now.

  So the point I make about Pearl Harbor was that it was very convenient. After it happened, the whole of the United States was committed to war. And a lot of things were done in the United States that really should never have been done, like the internment of the Japanese American population, that as a result of Pearl Harbor were accepted by the population as a whole. I always wondered, you know, just as a little footnote here, if the United States had decided in the weeks that followed 9/11 that every American Muslim should be put in a camp indefinitely what the reaction would have been. I fear there would not have been much reaction. I fear that. I mean, a good few people would have raised their voices, but in any case, to return to the Second World War, they did that, and Pearl Harbor became, I mean not surprisingly, then the cause of the United States going into battle. The point is this: after the United States declared war on the kingdom of Japan, the other Axis powers, Italy and Germany, declared war on the United States. Now they needn’t have done. Hitler was not told about the attack on Pearl Harbor. He could have said we were not part of this, we are not declaring war on the United States. Yet he did. And I think it was a rash move, because some people in the United States would’ve argued, let’s concentrate now on wiping out Japan, let’s go straight into the Pacific, let’s not deal with the Germans.

  Isn’t it remarkable that, in November 1940, Roosevelt is elected on a platform of not going into the war? This is after England is under serious attack and is in jeopardy of falling. Many people have suggested that Roosevelt felt that England would fall.

  Yes.

  So he would be willing to give away—

  England.

  E
urope?

  I think so. And I think it was not only him. To be fair to Roosevelt, most people thought England wouldn’t survive.

  If that’s the case, then I would think Roosevelt is thinking about a future world without England as controlling all these colonies. Would these colonies perhaps become available to Roosevelt?

  Absolutely. I think that this was a big point of discussion within the United States ruling elite: the British Empire is collapsing, and we will have to take it over, as much as we can, in order to preserve and protect our own global interests. In one message to Churchill, Roosevelt said it would be a big tragedy if the British Navy fell into the hands of the Germans, so I suggest you send your entire navy to US ports so we can look after it for you. And Churchill was horrified, because the idea of defeat didn’t enter into the equation for him.

  So the Atlantic Charter, the meeting in Newfoundland, plays a serious role here because Churchill comes over in early 1941, and makes a deal, so to speak, with Roosevelt, to defend what they called the Four Freedoms?

  I think by that time the British had survived. It became clearer in 1941 that they were going to fight on. The Battle of Britain had taken place in the air, and hadn’t been followed by a German invasion of Britain. That’s the other interesting thing. The Germans stepped back when England was ready actually for the plucking.

  And go instead to Russia.

  Hitler decided that he had to go against Russia, and they began to plan Operation Barbarossa, another big strategic error made by the Germans. Just thinking from their point of view, either you go for Russia in the beginning and deal with it, and that’s what some of their generals were advising; or, if you’ve started to pulverize Britain, because you want the British Empire, then go for it. But at the last minute they changed their mind. So there was a lot of irrationality there.