The Cold War and Its Origins

D. F. Fleming, Research Professor of International Relations at Vanderbilt University, has spent fourteen years and filled 1,115 pages in producing what may be the most harmful book of our time. Ever since the great Leopold von Ranke, serious historians have sought to write history “as it actually happened” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen war”) regardless of the writer’s personal opinions. This Ranke accomplished by sticking closely to the “narratives of eye-witnesses and genuine immediate documents.” Now Fleming has demonstrated that by interpolating a flood of personal interpretations and omitting key facts, it is possible both to follow Ranke and to turn out what amounts to a caricature of events since 1917.

One reason is that, unlike Aristide Briand who “knew nothing and understood everything,” Fleming resembles Poincaré, who “knew everything and understood nothing”—or, shall we say, very little. Another is that our professor looks upon the Cold War less as an American scholar than as a pacifist, pro-Russian, reforming revivalist whose purpose it is to call the unrighteous (on our side only, of course) to repentance and to avoid nuclear hell by making peace at almost any price with Red Russia and Red China.

EM

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Edgar Ansel Mowrer

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Franklin Delano Roosevelt

D. F. Fleming, Research Professor of International Relations at Vanderbilt University, has spent fourteen years and filled 1,115 pages in producing what may be the most harmful book of our time. Ever since the great Leopold von Ranke, serious historians have sought to write history “as it actually happened” (“wie es eigentlich gewesen war”) regardless of the writer’s personal opinions. This Ranke accomplished by sticking closely to the “narratives of eye-witnesses and genuine immediate documents.” Now Fleming has demonstrated that by interpolating a flood of personal interpretations and omitting key facts, it is possible both to follow Ranke and to turn out what amounts to a caricature of events since 1917.

One reason is that, unlike Aristide Briand who “knew nothing and understood everything,” Fleming resembles Poincaré, who “knew everything and understood nothing”—or, shall we say, very little. Another is that our professor looks upon the Cold War less as an American scholar than as a pacifist, pro-Russian, reforming revivalist whose purpose it is to call the unrighteous (on our side only, of course) to repentance and to avoid nuclear hell by making peace at almost any price with Red Russia and Red China.