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In 1941, the worth of this much-touted regime became apparent to the world: from the Baltic to the Black Sea the Red Army retreated as if swept away by the wind, in spite of its numerical superiority and its excellent artillery. There was no precedent for such a rout in a thousand years of Russian history and, indeed, in all military history. In the first few months of the war, some 3 million soldiers had fallen into enemy hands! Here was a clear statement of our people's desire to be rid of Communism. The West could not have failed to understand if only it had wanted to see. But in its nearsightedness, the West held that the sole threat to the world resided in Hitler and that his overthrow would end all danger. The West did what it could to help Stalin forcibly harness Russian nationalism for the Communist cause. And so, in World War II, the West defended not freedom in general but merely freedom for itself.
In order to buy Stalin's friendship at the end of the war, the West turned over 1.5 million people who were then in Allied hands and who did not wish to return to Stalin's tyranny. Among them were entire Russian divisions, Tartar and Caucasian battalions, as well as P.O.W.s and forced laborers numbering in the hundreds of thousands, including old men, women and children. Stalin manipulated Roosevelt with ease, effortlessly assuring himself of control over Eastern Europe: Yalta marked the beginning of a 35-year streak of American defeats, only briefly interrupted in Berlin and Korea. (When there was the will to resist, victory followed.) As I have written on earlier occasions [in 1975 in an article entitled "The Big Losers in the Third World War" and in the book Warning to the West], the entire period from 1945 to 1975 can be viewed as another world war that was lost by the West without a battle and in which some two dozen countries were abandoned to Communism.
There are two reasons for this string of capitulations. First is the spiritual impotence that comes from living a life of ease; people are unwilling to risk their comforts.
Second, and just as important, is the prevailing, total incomprehension of the malevolent and unyielding nature of Communism, which is equally dangerous to every country. The West often seeks an explanation for the phenomenon of 20th century Communism in some supposed defects of the Russian nation. This is ultimately a racist view. (How then can China be explained? Viet Nam? Cuba? Ethiopia? Or the likes of Georges Marchais?) Flaws are sought everywhere but in Communism itself. Its aggressiveness is explained by, for example, Averell Harriman, in terms of a national dread of foreign aggression; this is said to account for the building of a vast arsenal and the seizing of new countries.