As cosmic coincidences go, the deaths of Václav Havel and Kim Jong Il in the same week the U.S. pulled the last of its troops out of Iraq is hard to ignore. Havel made the exposure of tyranny the great task of his life. Kim was tyranny personified. And the war in Iraq was the bruising leap over the wall of global indifference behind which all tyrannies subsist.
The power of indifference is something I first understood from Havel himself after interviewing him, over a beer, in the gardens of Prague's Czernin Palace. The occasion was a June 2007 conference of international dissidents that he co-chaired with Israel's Natan Sharansky. I asked him about his views on the war in Iraq. He had once supported it, but now he was more tentative. The rationale, he said, had not been "well-articulated." The timing of the invasion was "questionable." As in the 1960s, the U.S. risked becoming an emblem of William Fulbright's "arrogance of power."
Then Havel stopped himself and, as he seemed wont to do, put the train of his thought in reverse. "The world," he concluded, "could not be indifferent forever to a murderer like Saddam Hussein."
Here was the nub of the matter when it came to the invasion of Iraq. Never mind the faulty human or technical intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction: The real WMD, better known as Saddam Hussein, was always hiding in plain sight. Over the course of 25 years he and his henchmen gassed, assassinated, machine-gunned and otherwise murdered somewhere between one million and two million people. That's a big number, the equivalent of a dozen or so Hiroshimas.
Yet because most of the victims were Kurds, Shiites, marsh Arabs, Iranians and Kuwaitis, the question was why it should matter to the West—anymore than, say, the butcheries in the Congo matter. Opponents of the war argued that it should not: that there was no emergency; that no supreme national interest was at stake; that humanitarian interventions needed to be carried out consistently or not at all. Failing those tests, they concluded, guaranteed that the war was folly from the start.
If Havel's now-celebrated career means anything, however, it is to beware that facile conclusion. In his great 1978 essay, "The Power of the Powerless," written just as his career as a dissident had begun in earnest with his signing of the Charter 77 manifesto, he warned against "the attractions of mass indifference" and the "general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity." Havel feared that one's indifference to the question of the freedom of others would ultimately result in a well-fed indifference to the question of one's own freedom.
"A big danger of our world today is obsession," he told the conference the day of our interview. "An even bigger danger is indifference."
All this was Havel's way of saying that political extremism—whether of the Leonid Brezhnev, Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein or Osama bin Laden variety—would flourish if free people did not actively resist the temptation to acquiesce to it in the name of "peace," or some other go-along-to-get-along slogan.
A proper attitude may not have required physical belligerency, he believed, and it could easily incorporate diplomacy. But it did require a constant posture of spiritual belligerency—a refusal to accept that a regime like Saddam's or Kim's was just a normal fact of life, beyond the reach of moral examination. In the context of Cold War Czechoslovakia, Havel called it a matter of "living in truth." In the context of countries like North Korea, Russia or Iran, Havel told me it was also a matter of truth-telling. "We can talk to every ruler," he said, "but first of all it is necessary to tell the truth."
What does it take to "tell the truth," as Havel saw it?
In his case, a great deal of courage, including a willingness to spend years of his life in prison or working the menial jobs to which the regime sentenced him. The real mystery is why, in free societies where few journalists and politicians are ever at serious risk of reprisal, truth-telling seems to be in relatively short supply. North Korea is a vast modern-day Auschwitz. Yet when George W. Bush named Pyongyang to the Axis of Evil, it was Mr. Bush who was roundly mocked. Note the balance of contempt in the New York Times' write-up of Kim's death from Sunday night:
"President George W. Bush called [Kim] a 'pygmy.' . . . Yet those who met him were surprised by his serious demeanor and his knowledge of events beyond the hermit kingdom he controlled." O, misunderstood Dear Leader, if only we had known you better.
It says something about the force of Havel's personality and ideas that his life did, in the end, have a fairy-tale ending. That is a triumph for the West. It is a triumph for the West, too, that for all the opposition to the Iraq War, a noose was put around Saddam's neck.
But it also says something that Kim died in his proverbial bed, thanks in part to global acquiescence in, and considerable tangible support for, his rule. That's a testament to what our indifference continues to achieve for tyranny, and a poor way of honoring the memory of Václav Havel
WSJ - http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204879004577108353959148734.html
Tuesday, December 27, 2011
Vaclav Havel - Foreign Policy Journal 2011
The death of Vaclav Havel on December 18, 2011, last president of Czechoslovakia and first president of the Czech Republic, has brought accolades from media pundits and political and plutocratic luminaries for the role he played in the dismantling of the Soviet bloc. Given that the Warsaw Pact was the only geopolitical entity that constrained American global hegemony Havel’s contribution to its demise is lauded as a great victory for “democracy” and “freedom.” However, those are words that are used by many regimes and systems, no matter what their character, and have been euphemisms since the time of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points for post-war international reconstruction in the image desired by the USA, for the subordination of all nations, peoples and cultures to everything that is conjured by the word “America"
Havel is said to have been an idealistic opponent of the consumerist ethic, yet what is one to think of an individual who allowed himself to be mentored and patronized by the likes of George Soros, and flitted about among the luminaries of plutocracy? His critique of “The West” was perceptive, stating:
There is no need at all for different people, religions and cultures to adapt or conform to one another…. I think we help one another best if we make no pretenses, remain ourselves, and simply respect and honor one another, just as we are.[1]
Yet such fine sentiments were antithetical to the world-view and aims of the people and organization that used him and now honor him. Like the much lauded Gorbachev, Havel became an icon of manufactured dissent in the interests of international capital that pull the strings behind the façade of “democracy.” The “velvet revolutions” that were instigated, funded and planned by the Soros network, National Endowment for Democracy, and others, were a prelude to the same types of revolt that continue to be inflicted upon the former Soviet bloc states and that are still taking place under the mantle of the “Arab Spring.”
Charter 77, Plastic People of the Universe & the Politics of “Rootless Cosmopolitanism”
The rot that was eating away within the Warsaw Pact was organizationally focused on groups such as Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity in Poland. These groups were instigated and funded by the network of currency speculator George Soros and an array of subversive, largely US-based and Government connected think tanks. When Charter 77 was co-founded by Havel in 1977, its manifesto was published by the Western media by pre-arrangement, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, The Times of London, and Le Monde.[2] Charter 77 was supported from outside Czechoslovakia by the Charter 77 Foundation based in Stockholm.
The Charter 77 manifesto was drafted and a movement formed after the imprisonment of fans of the rock band, Plastic People of the Universe. It is significant that this was catalyst for what became the “velvet revolution.” Kulturkampf is a major part of the globalist offensive to the extent that at the very beginnings of the Cold War the CIA recruited sundry disaffected anti-Soviet socialists, and in particular Trotskyites, into the Congress for Cultural Freedom to try and subvert the Soviet bloc and impose “American” values over the world in the name of “freedom of artistic expression.” Their favored mediums were Abstract Expressionism and jazz.[3] The Congress was established under the figurehead of Professor Sidney Hook, a “lifelong Menshevik” who had organized a committee for the defense of Leon Trotsky at the time of the Moscow Trials, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. Other Congress luminaries included Bertram Russell, the pacifist CND guru who had sought a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR in the interests of “peace.” The Congress promoted the type of art that had been exposed as subversive “rootless cosmopolitanism” by Stalin, et al., who correctly perceived it as part of a political offensive.[4] This globalist kulturkampf has been described by neocon military strategist Ralph Peters, who worked at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and elsewhere, stating that, “We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful.” Peters outlined a strategy for subverting nations and peoples reticent about entering the “new American century,” by way of Hollywood, the pop icon, and the dazzle of technology,[5] imposing a type of soft servitude over the world of the type described in Huxley’s Brave New World.
Just how significant this kulturkampf in the service of globalization is, and not merely as a matter of “free expression,” and individualistic “personal choice” of “taste,” etc., can be seen in the role the band Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) played in serving as a catalyst for the “velvet revolution.” The band is acknowledged as musically “unremarkable” yet its backers ensured that it became politically remarkable. Their origins go back to the orchestrated revolt in Czechoslovakia in 1968.[6] The band obtained the assistance of Canadian music teacher Paul Wilson, the resident in Czechoslovakia. They became the “fathers of the Czech musical underground.”[7]
One commentator states that “an entire community of Czech dissidents sprung up around the band.” According to bassist and founding member Milan Hlavsa:
The Plastic People emerged just as dozens and hundreds of other bands—we just loved rock’n’roll and wanted to be famous. We were too young to have a clear artistic ambition. All we did was pure intuition: no political notions or ambitions at all.[8]
Despite the quaint expressions of naiveté by Hlavsa it was precisely the type of youthful nihilism that the CIA and plutocrats had been promoting in the West in the form of the “New Left” as a means of manipulating and channeling pseudo-dissent. It followed the formulae that had been prescribed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and which is championed still by strategists such as Ralph Peters. It is precisely why Stalin and other Soviet leaders and theoreticians sought to expose the political ramifications of “rootless cosmopolitanism,” and why Trotsky had formulated the theory in his 1938 art manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.[9]
Although the band’s professional license was revoked by the Government in 1970 they hedged around the regulations, and their music was released in the West. Lyrics for the “non-political” PPU were written by “Czech dissident poet Egon Bondy.”[10] What emerged around PPU was a so-called “Second Culture” or “Other Culture” which played at Music Festivals. There were arrests, but apart from a few, due to “international protests” most were released. Canadian Paul Wilson was expelled. The official indictment accused the bands of “extreme vulgarity with an anti-socialist and an anti-social impact, most of them extolling nihilism, decadence and clericalism.”[11]
It was in support of this cultural nihilism that Charter 77 emerged as a movement, with Havel as the figurehead, Havel stating that PPU were defending “life’s intrinsic desire to express itself freely, in its own authentic and sovereign way.”[12] Havel began selecting lyrics for PPU. This supposedly “non-political,” innocent, artistic free expression has since been described by The New York Times as being “wild, angry and incendiary,” and “darkly subversive.” The Soviet authorities described them in more measured terms. The NY Times enthused that PPU “helped change the future direction of a nation.” The NY Times states:
Vaclav Havel, the music-loving former Czech president and dissident who championed the band’s cause when several members were imprisoned in 1976 for disturbing the peace, credits it with inspiring Charter 77, the manifesto demanding human rights that laid the groundwork for the 1989 revolution. “The case against a group of young people who simply wanted to live in their own way,” he recalled, “was an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom.”[13]
It was, stated Bilefsky, “the ultimate rock ’n’ roll rebellion.”[14] In other words, the Soviet authorities were right in their suspicions. It is the same cultural nihilism that is pumped out by the corporates and promoted as a control mechanism in the West under the banal guise of “freedom.”
Paul Wilson reminisced that it was through music that the puerile ideals of manipulated Western youth were introduced to their Czechoslovak counterparts:
One of the things that was very marked in the 1960s was that although intellectuals found it very hard to get a hold of books it was very easy for kids to be right on top of things because records were brought in and the music was broadcast over Voice of America and other radio stations. So, there was a very current music scene here, with a lot of knock-off bands and a lot of fans of different groups just the way you’d find them in the West. The other thing, too, is that the Prague music scene, very early, attracted the attention of the western press, because for them the existence of rock bands in a communist country was a sign of change.[15]
Note that the Voice of America and other US agencies were promoting this movement.
Charter 77 & Soros
It was against this background that the Charter 77 Foundation was established in Stockholm. Soros relates that he had funded this since 1981. The movement “sprung into operation inside Czechoslovakia armed like Pallas Athena,” in 1989. Soros hastened to the country, and with Charter founder F Janouch, set up committees in Prague, Brno and Bratislava, and “I put $1 million at their disposal.” He then began paying the staffs of the Civic Forum party and the newspaper Lidove Noviny by currency speculation. Soros states that together with Prince Kari Schwarzenberg, a supporter of the Charter 77 Foundation, and acting President Marian Calfa, “we all agreed that it was imperative to have Vaclav Havel elected president by the current rubber-stamp parliament.”[16]
Havel, like Gorbachev, was duly recognized for services rendered. An exhibition in his honor was established at Columbia University in 2006, with support from luminaries such as Soros, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton,[17] Richard Holbrooke, et al.[18] Havel served on the Board of Directors of Soros’ Drug Policy Alliance, designed to liberalize laws on narcotics, which might be viewed as part of the Soros agenda for undermining the stability of societies that are targeted for globalization, as part of a “liberal” and “progressive” agenda. One is here again reminded of the use of a narcotic, “Soma,” to keep the citizens docile in Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World; another cause that can moreover be portrayed as “radical” and “anti-Establishment,” while serving the “Establishment.” Among members on the “US Honorary Board” are such “progressives” and “humanitarians” as Former Secretary of State George P Schultz, and former Reserve Bank Chairman Paul Volcker. The “International Honorary Board” includes, apart from Havel, Richard Branson, Sting, and Ruth Dreifuss.[19]
Havel became a member of the globalist elite, in attendance at their international conclaves for reshaping the post-Soviet world. One of these is the Club of Madrid,[20] one of many globalist think tanks that are designed to arrive at consensus on global governance among the self-chosen rulers. The Club of Madrid is a grant-making foundation set up in 2004 to raise funds for causes that promote the plutocratic version of “democracy.”[21] As one would expect, the omnipresent Soros is among the Club “President’s Circle of Donors.”[22] Havel was also an “Honorary Chair” of Freedom Now, a globalist organization with a cross-over of membership with the US globalist think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.[23]
National Endowment for Democracy
Of particular interest is Havel’s association with the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 by Act of Congress. Havel is esteemed by NED, an organization intended to take over the role of the CIA in sponsoring “regime change.” NED was conceived by veteran Trotskyites whose hatred of the USSR turned many—including Trotsky’s widow Sedova—into rabid Cold Warriors, and from there into the present clique of neocons. NED was the brainchild of Tom Kahnm, International Affairs Director of the AFL-CIO. He was a veteran of the Shachtmanite faction of US Trotskyism, which pursued an avidly anti-Soviet line. He had joined the Young Socialist League, the youth wing of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League,[24] and the Young People’s Socialist League, which he continued to support until his death in 1992. Kahn was impressed by the Shachtmanite opposition to the USSR as the primary obstacle to world socialism.[25] At the outset of the Cold War Max Shachtman set his course, declaring: “In spite of all the differences that still exist among them, the capitalist world under American imperialist leadership and drive is developing an increasingly solid front against Russian imperialism.”[26]
In 2004 Havel received the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFCR) “Civil Society Vision Award,” and was on the occasion eulogized by NED’s founding President, veteran Social Democrat Carl Gershman. AFCR appears close to globalism. Its Officers include former US Government functionaries such as Thomas Dine, of Radio Free Europe. The Treasurer and co-Director, Hana Callaghan, is a former advisor to Goldman Sachs.[27] Zbigniew Brzezinski, the rabidly anti-Soviet and Russophobic former US National Security, presently with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is an AFCR “adviser,” as is fellow Russophobe, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Another is Michal Novack of the neocon American Enterprise Institute.[28] Havel is listed as a sponsor of AFCR, along with George W Bush; former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright; James D. Wolfensohn, of the World Bank; Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State. On the AFCR “Wall of Honor,” along with Havel are many corporates, including American International Group; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; Citigroup; J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; David Rockefeller…[29]
In 2007 Havel received NED’s “Democracy Service Medal.” [30]
NED, like Soros, had been a major factor in the “velvet revolutions” throughout the Warsaw Pact states. This is termed by NED as “cross-border work” and had its origins “in a conference that was sponsored by the Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity Foundation in Wroclaw in early November of 1989.” According to Gershman:
That conference was the culmination of collaborative meetings and joint activities of Solidarity and the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland and the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia that began in October 1981, shortly before the declaration of Martial Law, and continued throughout the 1980s with gatherings on the “green border” of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the Karkonosze Mountains. The purpose of the Wroclaw conference was to support from the base of the new Polish democracy the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia in the hope that a similar breakthrough could be achieved there. Vaclav Havel was later to credit the conference and the cultural festival that accompanied it with helping to inspire the Velvet Revolution that occurred less than two weeks later.[31]
Gershman alludes to NED’s role in sponsoring the subversion that spread from Poland to Czechoslovakia:
It became clear to me from the many discussions I had with Polish activists in the aftermath of 1989 that they had a very firm and clearly thought through determination to support democracy in Poland’s immediate neighborhood and in the larger geopolitical sphere that once constituted the Soviet Bloc. This determination was partly based on moral considerations, since these activists had received support in their struggle from the NED, the AFL-CIO and others in the U.S. and Europe and felt an obligation to extend similar support to those still striving for democracy.[32]
Gershman states that this “cross border work” continues, and reaches today throughout the former Soviet Union in providing training. Havel rendered invaluable services to this offensive against the Soviet bloc, and was feted by the globalist elite during his lifetime, and is now being eulogized in death. His legacy is claimed by Gershman, et al, as inspiration for a new crop of “velvet revolutions” designed to eliminate whatever resistance remains to America’s version of the “new world order.”
Notes
[1] Philip K Howard, “Vaclav Havel’s Critique of the West,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/vaclav-havels-critique-of-the-west/250277/
[2] “Charter 77 After 30 Years,” The National Security Archive, The George Washington University, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB213/index.htm
[3] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the world of arts and letters (New York: The New Press, 1999). Also see the CIA website: “Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50”; https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm#rft1
[4] F Chernov, “Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism and its reactionary role,” Bolshevik: Theoretical and Political Magazine of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ACP(B), Issue #5, 15 March 1949, pp. 30-41.
[5] Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict”, Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14. http://www.usamhi.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
[6] http://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=2800
[7] Ibid.
[8] R Unterberger, “The Plastic People of the Universe,” http://www.richieunterberger.com/ppu.html
[9] L Trotsky, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, July 25 1938.
[10] R Unterberger, op. cit.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] D Bilefsky, “Czech’s Velvet Revolution Paved by Plastic People, The NY Times, November 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/europe/16iht-czech.html
[14] Ibid.
[15] J Velinger, “The Impact of the Plastic People on a Communist Universe,” Radio Praha, May 31, 2005, http://www.radio.cz/en/section/one-on-one/paul-wilson-the-impact-of-the-plastic-people-on-a-communist-universe
[16] G Soros, Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise & Democratic Reform Among the Soviets & in Eastern Europe (Jackson, TN: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 26-27.
[17] “Havel at Columbia,” http://havel.columbia.edu/about.html
[18] http://havel.columbia.edu/hostcommittee.html
[19] Drug Policy Alliance, http://www.drugpolicy.org/about-us/leadership/board-directors
Dreifuss is a Swiss Social Democrat.
[20] Club of Madrid, Members, http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/estructura/members_1/letra:h
[21] http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/about
[22] “Partners & collaborators,” http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/partners_collaborators
[23] Freedom Now, “Honorary co-Chairs, http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/partners_collaborators
[24] Rachelle Horowitz, “Tom Kahn and the Fight for Democracy: A Political Portrait and Personal Recollection,” Dissent Magazine, pp. 238-239. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article_pdfs/d11Horowitz.pdf
[25] Ibid. p 211.
[26]Max Shachtman, “Stalinism on the Decline: Tito versus Stalin, The Beginning of the End of the Russian Empire,” New International, Vol.XIV No.6, August 1948, 172-178.
[27] AFCR, “Officers,” http://www.afocr.org/afocr-officers.html
[28] AFCR “Advisers,” http://www.afocr.org/afocr-advisors.html
[29] http://www.afocr.org/afocr-wall-of-honor.html
[30] http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-remarks-and-presentations/061704
[31] C Gershman, “Giving Solidarity to the World,” “At the symposium ‘Solidarity and the Future of Democratization’ Georgetown University – Washington, D.C.,” May 19, 2009, http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-remarks-and-presentations/051909
[32] Ibid.
Havel is said to have been an idealistic opponent of the consumerist ethic, yet what is one to think of an individual who allowed himself to be mentored and patronized by the likes of George Soros, and flitted about among the luminaries of plutocracy? His critique of “The West” was perceptive, stating:
There is no need at all for different people, religions and cultures to adapt or conform to one another…. I think we help one another best if we make no pretenses, remain ourselves, and simply respect and honor one another, just as we are.[1]
Yet such fine sentiments were antithetical to the world-view and aims of the people and organization that used him and now honor him. Like the much lauded Gorbachev, Havel became an icon of manufactured dissent in the interests of international capital that pull the strings behind the façade of “democracy.” The “velvet revolutions” that were instigated, funded and planned by the Soros network, National Endowment for Democracy, and others, were a prelude to the same types of revolt that continue to be inflicted upon the former Soviet bloc states and that are still taking place under the mantle of the “Arab Spring.”
Charter 77, Plastic People of the Universe & the Politics of “Rootless Cosmopolitanism”
The rot that was eating away within the Warsaw Pact was organizationally focused on groups such as Charter 77 in Czechoslovakia and Solidarity in Poland. These groups were instigated and funded by the network of currency speculator George Soros and an array of subversive, largely US-based and Government connected think tanks. When Charter 77 was co-founded by Havel in 1977, its manifesto was published by the Western media by pre-arrangement, in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Corriere della Sera, The Times of London, and Le Monde.[2] Charter 77 was supported from outside Czechoslovakia by the Charter 77 Foundation based in Stockholm.
The Charter 77 manifesto was drafted and a movement formed after the imprisonment of fans of the rock band, Plastic People of the Universe. It is significant that this was catalyst for what became the “velvet revolution.” Kulturkampf is a major part of the globalist offensive to the extent that at the very beginnings of the Cold War the CIA recruited sundry disaffected anti-Soviet socialists, and in particular Trotskyites, into the Congress for Cultural Freedom to try and subvert the Soviet bloc and impose “American” values over the world in the name of “freedom of artistic expression.” Their favored mediums were Abstract Expressionism and jazz.[3] The Congress was established under the figurehead of Professor Sidney Hook, a “lifelong Menshevik” who had organized a committee for the defense of Leon Trotsky at the time of the Moscow Trials, and a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Freedom from Ronald Reagan. Other Congress luminaries included Bertram Russell, the pacifist CND guru who had sought a pre-emptive nuclear strike against the USSR in the interests of “peace.” The Congress promoted the type of art that had been exposed as subversive “rootless cosmopolitanism” by Stalin, et al., who correctly perceived it as part of a political offensive.[4] This globalist kulturkampf has been described by neocon military strategist Ralph Peters, who worked at the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, and elsewhere, stating that, “We are entering a new American century, in which we will become still wealthier, culturally more lethal, and increasingly powerful.” Peters outlined a strategy for subverting nations and peoples reticent about entering the “new American century,” by way of Hollywood, the pop icon, and the dazzle of technology,[5] imposing a type of soft servitude over the world of the type described in Huxley’s Brave New World.
Just how significant this kulturkampf in the service of globalization is, and not merely as a matter of “free expression,” and individualistic “personal choice” of “taste,” etc., can be seen in the role the band Plastic People of the Universe (PPU) played in serving as a catalyst for the “velvet revolution.” The band is acknowledged as musically “unremarkable” yet its backers ensured that it became politically remarkable. Their origins go back to the orchestrated revolt in Czechoslovakia in 1968.[6] The band obtained the assistance of Canadian music teacher Paul Wilson, the resident in Czechoslovakia. They became the “fathers of the Czech musical underground.”[7]
One commentator states that “an entire community of Czech dissidents sprung up around the band.” According to bassist and founding member Milan Hlavsa:
The Plastic People emerged just as dozens and hundreds of other bands—we just loved rock’n’roll and wanted to be famous. We were too young to have a clear artistic ambition. All we did was pure intuition: no political notions or ambitions at all.[8]
Despite the quaint expressions of naiveté by Hlavsa it was precisely the type of youthful nihilism that the CIA and plutocrats had been promoting in the West in the form of the “New Left” as a means of manipulating and channeling pseudo-dissent. It followed the formulae that had been prescribed by the Congress for Cultural Freedom, and which is championed still by strategists such as Ralph Peters. It is precisely why Stalin and other Soviet leaders and theoreticians sought to expose the political ramifications of “rootless cosmopolitanism,” and why Trotsky had formulated the theory in his 1938 art manifesto, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art.[9]
Although the band’s professional license was revoked by the Government in 1970 they hedged around the regulations, and their music was released in the West. Lyrics for the “non-political” PPU were written by “Czech dissident poet Egon Bondy.”[10] What emerged around PPU was a so-called “Second Culture” or “Other Culture” which played at Music Festivals. There were arrests, but apart from a few, due to “international protests” most were released. Canadian Paul Wilson was expelled. The official indictment accused the bands of “extreme vulgarity with an anti-socialist and an anti-social impact, most of them extolling nihilism, decadence and clericalism.”[11]
It was in support of this cultural nihilism that Charter 77 emerged as a movement, with Havel as the figurehead, Havel stating that PPU were defending “life’s intrinsic desire to express itself freely, in its own authentic and sovereign way.”[12] Havel began selecting lyrics for PPU. This supposedly “non-political,” innocent, artistic free expression has since been described by The New York Times as being “wild, angry and incendiary,” and “darkly subversive.” The Soviet authorities described them in more measured terms. The NY Times enthused that PPU “helped change the future direction of a nation.” The NY Times states:
Vaclav Havel, the music-loving former Czech president and dissident who championed the band’s cause when several members were imprisoned in 1976 for disturbing the peace, credits it with inspiring Charter 77, the manifesto demanding human rights that laid the groundwork for the 1989 revolution. “The case against a group of young people who simply wanted to live in their own way,” he recalled, “was an attack by the totalitarian system on life itself, on the very essence of human freedom.”[13]
It was, stated Bilefsky, “the ultimate rock ’n’ roll rebellion.”[14] In other words, the Soviet authorities were right in their suspicions. It is the same cultural nihilism that is pumped out by the corporates and promoted as a control mechanism in the West under the banal guise of “freedom.”
Paul Wilson reminisced that it was through music that the puerile ideals of manipulated Western youth were introduced to their Czechoslovak counterparts:
One of the things that was very marked in the 1960s was that although intellectuals found it very hard to get a hold of books it was very easy for kids to be right on top of things because records were brought in and the music was broadcast over Voice of America and other radio stations. So, there was a very current music scene here, with a lot of knock-off bands and a lot of fans of different groups just the way you’d find them in the West. The other thing, too, is that the Prague music scene, very early, attracted the attention of the western press, because for them the existence of rock bands in a communist country was a sign of change.[15]
Note that the Voice of America and other US agencies were promoting this movement.
Charter 77 & Soros
It was against this background that the Charter 77 Foundation was established in Stockholm. Soros relates that he had funded this since 1981. The movement “sprung into operation inside Czechoslovakia armed like Pallas Athena,” in 1989. Soros hastened to the country, and with Charter founder F Janouch, set up committees in Prague, Brno and Bratislava, and “I put $1 million at their disposal.” He then began paying the staffs of the Civic Forum party and the newspaper Lidove Noviny by currency speculation. Soros states that together with Prince Kari Schwarzenberg, a supporter of the Charter 77 Foundation, and acting President Marian Calfa, “we all agreed that it was imperative to have Vaclav Havel elected president by the current rubber-stamp parliament.”[16]
Havel, like Gorbachev, was duly recognized for services rendered. An exhibition in his honor was established at Columbia University in 2006, with support from luminaries such as Soros, George H W Bush, Bill Clinton,[17] Richard Holbrooke, et al.[18] Havel served on the Board of Directors of Soros’ Drug Policy Alliance, designed to liberalize laws on narcotics, which might be viewed as part of the Soros agenda for undermining the stability of societies that are targeted for globalization, as part of a “liberal” and “progressive” agenda. One is here again reminded of the use of a narcotic, “Soma,” to keep the citizens docile in Huxley’s dystopian novel Brave New World; another cause that can moreover be portrayed as “radical” and “anti-Establishment,” while serving the “Establishment.” Among members on the “US Honorary Board” are such “progressives” and “humanitarians” as Former Secretary of State George P Schultz, and former Reserve Bank Chairman Paul Volcker. The “International Honorary Board” includes, apart from Havel, Richard Branson, Sting, and Ruth Dreifuss.[19]
Havel became a member of the globalist elite, in attendance at their international conclaves for reshaping the post-Soviet world. One of these is the Club of Madrid,[20] one of many globalist think tanks that are designed to arrive at consensus on global governance among the self-chosen rulers. The Club of Madrid is a grant-making foundation set up in 2004 to raise funds for causes that promote the plutocratic version of “democracy.”[21] As one would expect, the omnipresent Soros is among the Club “President’s Circle of Donors.”[22] Havel was also an “Honorary Chair” of Freedom Now, a globalist organization with a cross-over of membership with the US globalist think tank, the Council on Foreign Relations.[23]
National Endowment for Democracy
Of particular interest is Havel’s association with the Congressionally-funded National Endowment for Democracy (NED), established in 1983 by Act of Congress. Havel is esteemed by NED, an organization intended to take over the role of the CIA in sponsoring “regime change.” NED was conceived by veteran Trotskyites whose hatred of the USSR turned many—including Trotsky’s widow Sedova—into rabid Cold Warriors, and from there into the present clique of neocons. NED was the brainchild of Tom Kahnm, International Affairs Director of the AFL-CIO. He was a veteran of the Shachtmanite faction of US Trotskyism, which pursued an avidly anti-Soviet line. He had joined the Young Socialist League, the youth wing of Max Shachtman’s Independent Socialist League,[24] and the Young People’s Socialist League, which he continued to support until his death in 1992. Kahn was impressed by the Shachtmanite opposition to the USSR as the primary obstacle to world socialism.[25] At the outset of the Cold War Max Shachtman set his course, declaring: “In spite of all the differences that still exist among them, the capitalist world under American imperialist leadership and drive is developing an increasingly solid front against Russian imperialism.”[26]
In 2004 Havel received the American Friends of the Czech Republic (AFCR) “Civil Society Vision Award,” and was on the occasion eulogized by NED’s founding President, veteran Social Democrat Carl Gershman. AFCR appears close to globalism. Its Officers include former US Government functionaries such as Thomas Dine, of Radio Free Europe. The Treasurer and co-Director, Hana Callaghan, is a former advisor to Goldman Sachs.[27] Zbigniew Brzezinski, the rabidly anti-Soviet and Russophobic former US National Security, presently with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, is an AFCR “adviser,” as is fellow Russophobe, former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger. Another is Michal Novack of the neocon American Enterprise Institute.[28] Havel is listed as a sponsor of AFCR, along with George W Bush; former US Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright; James D. Wolfensohn, of the World Bank; Colin L. Powell, former U.S. Secretary of State. On the AFCR “Wall of Honor,” along with Havel are many corporates, including American International Group; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; Citigroup; J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.; David Rockefeller…[29]
In 2007 Havel received NED’s “Democracy Service Medal.” [30]
NED, like Soros, had been a major factor in the “velvet revolutions” throughout the Warsaw Pact states. This is termed by NED as “cross-border work” and had its origins “in a conference that was sponsored by the Polish-Czech-Slovak Solidarity Foundation in Wroclaw in early November of 1989.” According to Gershman:
That conference was the culmination of collaborative meetings and joint activities of Solidarity and the Workers’ Defense Committee in Poland and the Charter 77 dissidents in Czechoslovakia that began in October 1981, shortly before the declaration of Martial Law, and continued throughout the 1980s with gatherings on the “green border” of Poland and Czechoslovakia in the Karkonosze Mountains. The purpose of the Wroclaw conference was to support from the base of the new Polish democracy the dissident movement in Czechoslovakia in the hope that a similar breakthrough could be achieved there. Vaclav Havel was later to credit the conference and the cultural festival that accompanied it with helping to inspire the Velvet Revolution that occurred less than two weeks later.[31]
Gershman alludes to NED’s role in sponsoring the subversion that spread from Poland to Czechoslovakia:
It became clear to me from the many discussions I had with Polish activists in the aftermath of 1989 that they had a very firm and clearly thought through determination to support democracy in Poland’s immediate neighborhood and in the larger geopolitical sphere that once constituted the Soviet Bloc. This determination was partly based on moral considerations, since these activists had received support in their struggle from the NED, the AFL-CIO and others in the U.S. and Europe and felt an obligation to extend similar support to those still striving for democracy.[32]
Gershman states that this “cross border work” continues, and reaches today throughout the former Soviet Union in providing training. Havel rendered invaluable services to this offensive against the Soviet bloc, and was feted by the globalist elite during his lifetime, and is now being eulogized in death. His legacy is claimed by Gershman, et al, as inspiration for a new crop of “velvet revolutions” designed to eliminate whatever resistance remains to America’s version of the “new world order.”
Notes
[1] Philip K Howard, “Vaclav Havel’s Critique of the West,” The Atlantic, December 20, 2011, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/vaclav-havels-critique-of-the-west/250277/
[2] “Charter 77 After 30 Years,” The National Security Archive, The George Washington University, http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB213/index.htm
[3] Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: the CIA and the world of arts and letters (New York: The New Press, 1999). Also see the CIA website: “Cultural Cold War: Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, 1949-50”; https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/docs/v38i5a10p.htm#rft1
[4] F Chernov, “Bourgeois Cosmopolitanism and its reactionary role,” Bolshevik: Theoretical and Political Magazine of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) ACP(B), Issue #5, 15 March 1949, pp. 30-41.
[5] Ralph Peters, “Constant Conflict”, Parameters, Summer 1997, 4-14. http://www.usamhi.army.mil/USAWC/Parameters/97summer/peters.htm
[6] http://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=2800
[7] Ibid.
[8] R Unterberger, “The Plastic People of the Universe,” http://www.richieunterberger.com/ppu.html
[9] L Trotsky, Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, July 25 1938.
[10] R Unterberger, op. cit.
[11] Ibid.
[12] Ibid.
[13] D Bilefsky, “Czech’s Velvet Revolution Paved by Plastic People, The NY Times, November 15, 2009, http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/world/europe/16iht-czech.html
[14] Ibid.
[15] J Velinger, “The Impact of the Plastic People on a Communist Universe,” Radio Praha, May 31, 2005, http://www.radio.cz/en/section/one-on-one/paul-wilson-the-impact-of-the-plastic-people-on-a-communist-universe
[16] G Soros, Underwriting Democracy: Encouraging Free Enterprise & Democratic Reform Among the Soviets & in Eastern Europe (Jackson, TN: Public Affairs, 2004), pp. 26-27.
[17] “Havel at Columbia,” http://havel.columbia.edu/about.html
[18] http://havel.columbia.edu/hostcommittee.html
[19] Drug Policy Alliance, http://www.drugpolicy.org/about-us/leadership/board-directors
Dreifuss is a Swiss Social Democrat.
[20] Club of Madrid, Members, http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/estructura/members_1/letra:h
[21] http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/about
[22] “Partners & collaborators,” http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/partners_collaborators
[23] Freedom Now, “Honorary co-Chairs, http://www.clubmadrid.org/en/partners_collaborators
[24] Rachelle Horowitz, “Tom Kahn and the Fight for Democracy: A Political Portrait and Personal Recollection,” Dissent Magazine, pp. 238-239. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/democratiya/article_pdfs/d11Horowitz.pdf
[25] Ibid. p 211.
[26]Max Shachtman, “Stalinism on the Decline: Tito versus Stalin, The Beginning of the End of the Russian Empire,” New International, Vol.XIV No.6, August 1948, 172-178.
[27] AFCR, “Officers,” http://www.afocr.org/afocr-officers.html
[28] AFCR “Advisers,” http://www.afocr.org/afocr-advisors.html
[29] http://www.afocr.org/afocr-wall-of-honor.html
[30] http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-remarks-and-presentations/061704
[31] C Gershman, “Giving Solidarity to the World,” “At the symposium ‘Solidarity and the Future of Democratization’ Georgetown University – Washington, D.C.,” May 19, 2009, http://www.ned.org/about/board/meet-our-president/archived-remarks-and-presentations/051909
[32] Ibid.
Friday, December 2, 2011
The Day of Hitler's Death: Even Now, New Glimpses: NY Times
The Day of Hitler's Death: Even Now, New Glimpses
By STEPHEN KINZER
Published: May 4, 1995
BERLIN, May 3— Fifty years ago this week, with his "thousand-year Reich" in ruins, Hitler committed suicide, ending a life that may have brought more suffering to more people than any other in history.
Because no clearly identifiable corpse was known to have been found, uncertainty about Hitler's fate persisted for years. But in recent weeks, new information has emerged that not only proves conclusively that the Nazi dictator killed himself in his underground bunker, but also illuminates details of the hours immediately before and after his death as well as the way the Soviets disposed of his remains a quarter-century later.
On April 28, Hitler received news that Mussolini had been captured by Partisans, shot and hanged upside-down in a Milan plaza. Determined to cheat his enemies, Hitler resolved to commit suicide, and ordered aides to burn his body beyond recognition afterward.
"My Fuhrer, why don't you go to the troops as a soldier?" his secretary, Traudl Junge, asked him.
"I can't do that," Hitler replied. "None of my people are prepared to shoot me, and I won't fall into the Russians' hands alive."
Hitler awoke early on the morning of April 30 and spoke with his private pilot, Hans Baur, who reported that he had prepared a plane capable of making a long-distance flight. He suggested that Hitler flee to Argentina, Japan, Greenland, Manchuria or Jerusalem, where admirers were supposedly ready to spirit him to a hideout in the Sahara.
Hitler declined the offer, and a few hours later dictated his final testament to Miss Junge.
"During these last three decades, all my thoughts and actions, and my entire life, have been moved solely by the love and fidelity I feel for my people," he said. "This has given me the strength to make the most difficult of decisions, the like of which no mortal has ever made before."
After finishing his dictation, Hitler and his wife of two days, Eva Braun, retired to their sitting room. At 3:30, a shot rang out. Artur Axmann, a Hitler Youth leader, entered the room moments later.
"Adolf Hitler sat on the right side of the sofa," Mr. Axmann recalled in one of several interviews he has given in recent weeks. "His upper body was leaning slightly to the side, with the head slumping down. His forehead and face were very white, and a trickle of blood was flowing down.
"I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa. Her eyes were closed. There was no movement. She had poisoned herself, and appeared to be sleeping."
Aides took the two bodies outside, doused them with gasoline and burned them, continuing until they had used about 50 gallons.
In recent interviews, retired Soviet intelligence officers have confirmed what they refused to confirm for years: that they found and identified Hitler's remains. One officer, Gen. Leonid Siomonchuk, who later rose to the rank of general in the K.G.B., told German interviewers that he was present when Hitler's dentist was ordered to examine the corpse.
"At the beginning he was a bit shocked, unable to speak," General Siomonchuk recalled. "Then he said, 'Hitler is dead.' "
A document newly obtained from long-closed archives in Moscow includes an order that Hitler's remains be burned and that the ashes be dumped in the Elbe River.
A part of what may be Hitler's skull, with bullet hole, was removed before the cremation and shipped to Moscow. Before German television cameras, a Russian archivist, Alzha Borkovich, recently unwrapped it and held it in her hand.
"To tell you the truth," she said, "my hand is shaking
By STEPHEN KINZER
Published: May 4, 1995
BERLIN, May 3— Fifty years ago this week, with his "thousand-year Reich" in ruins, Hitler committed suicide, ending a life that may have brought more suffering to more people than any other in history.
Because no clearly identifiable corpse was known to have been found, uncertainty about Hitler's fate persisted for years. But in recent weeks, new information has emerged that not only proves conclusively that the Nazi dictator killed himself in his underground bunker, but also illuminates details of the hours immediately before and after his death as well as the way the Soviets disposed of his remains a quarter-century later.
On April 28, Hitler received news that Mussolini had been captured by Partisans, shot and hanged upside-down in a Milan plaza. Determined to cheat his enemies, Hitler resolved to commit suicide, and ordered aides to burn his body beyond recognition afterward.
"My Fuhrer, why don't you go to the troops as a soldier?" his secretary, Traudl Junge, asked him.
"I can't do that," Hitler replied. "None of my people are prepared to shoot me, and I won't fall into the Russians' hands alive."
Hitler awoke early on the morning of April 30 and spoke with his private pilot, Hans Baur, who reported that he had prepared a plane capable of making a long-distance flight. He suggested that Hitler flee to Argentina, Japan, Greenland, Manchuria or Jerusalem, where admirers were supposedly ready to spirit him to a hideout in the Sahara.
Hitler declined the offer, and a few hours later dictated his final testament to Miss Junge.
"During these last three decades, all my thoughts and actions, and my entire life, have been moved solely by the love and fidelity I feel for my people," he said. "This has given me the strength to make the most difficult of decisions, the like of which no mortal has ever made before."
After finishing his dictation, Hitler and his wife of two days, Eva Braun, retired to their sitting room. At 3:30, a shot rang out. Artur Axmann, a Hitler Youth leader, entered the room moments later.
"Adolf Hitler sat on the right side of the sofa," Mr. Axmann recalled in one of several interviews he has given in recent weeks. "His upper body was leaning slightly to the side, with the head slumping down. His forehead and face were very white, and a trickle of blood was flowing down.
"I saw Eva Braun next to Hitler on the sofa. Her eyes were closed. There was no movement. She had poisoned herself, and appeared to be sleeping."
Aides took the two bodies outside, doused them with gasoline and burned them, continuing until they had used about 50 gallons.
In recent interviews, retired Soviet intelligence officers have confirmed what they refused to confirm for years: that they found and identified Hitler's remains. One officer, Gen. Leonid Siomonchuk, who later rose to the rank of general in the K.G.B., told German interviewers that he was present when Hitler's dentist was ordered to examine the corpse.
"At the beginning he was a bit shocked, unable to speak," General Siomonchuk recalled. "Then he said, 'Hitler is dead.' "
A document newly obtained from long-closed archives in Moscow includes an order that Hitler's remains be burned and that the ashes be dumped in the Elbe River.
A part of what may be Hitler's skull, with bullet hole, was removed before the cremation and shipped to Moscow. Before German television cameras, a Russian archivist, Alzha Borkovich, recently unwrapped it and held it in her hand.
"To tell you the truth," she said, "my hand is shaking
The Return of Mein Kampf
The Return of Mein Kampf
By SARAH WILDMAN
VIENNA — In Vienna’s leafy Augarten Park stand two enormous flak towers — vestiges of World War II. Beige and hulking, with walls four feet thick, they are as imposing as they are ugly. Impossible to ignore, they force a conversation.
European Pressphoto Agency
The other day, at a café nearby, the historian Herwig Czech was talking about another World War II relic, much smaller but far more fearsome: “Mein Kampf.” Adolf Hitler’s personal-political 700-plus-page screed, the text that provided the opening overture and background music for the racist ideology of the Nazi period, enters the public domain in 2015. At that point, there will no longer be any legal control over its distribution.
This already scares a lot of people. “There are those who say, oh, it’s passé,” said the historian Jean-Marc Dreyfus, a colleague of Czech’s and an organizer of a conference held last month in Paris to discuss the implications of freely distributing “Mein Kampf.” “But my students tell me they find it engaging. It still ‘speaks’ in the psychoanalytic sense of the word.” And, he said, “It still sells.”
Limiting free speech is anathema to many Americans, but throughout Europe it has seemed like a proper means of shoring up democracy against the threat of fascism. In the immediate postwar period, nearly all European governments passed such restrictions on free speech. “It was believed we needed the laws to keep the lunatic fringe right at bay,” Czech explains.
In 1947, Austria adopted the Verbotsgesetz — or “Prohibition Act” — banning the Nazi Party and criminalizing the celebration, promotion, or adulation of Nazi ideology; in the 1990s, it was amended to prohibit Holocaust denial. (It was under this law that the English writer David Irving was jailed a few years ago for denying the existence of the gas chambers.) Distributing and displaying Nazi paraphernalia is forbidden here. Germany, Belgium, the Czech Republic, France, Lichtenstein, Luxembourg, Lithuania — all these countries also criminalize revisionism and restrict various forms of speech and publications about the Holocaust. And for nearly 70 years, the German state of Bavaria, which holds the copyright for “Mein Kampf,” has fought heartily against the book’s publication in any country where it is possible to fight it.
But now the rationale behind these restrictions is being questioned. While they may have helped limit the widespread distribution of “Mein Kampf” in Europe, repressive tactics of this kind have not aged well in the Internet era. (The book was never fully blocked anyway: in the 1980s, the U.S. Army sold it in some of its “Stars and Stripes” shops across Germany. And libraries often held copies.) Preventing a book’s publication today is largely a symbolic move.
“Mein Kampf” is widely available, in its entirety, across the Web. It has been a hit in Japan and Turkey in recent years; it has sold briskly in South America and the Middle East; and it has shown up, like a nefarious inspiration, in such ugly places as the rantings of the Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik. By 2008, an estimated 70,000,000 copies had been put into circulation since the book was first published in 1925, according to HatePrevention.org, a consortium of academics and activists. In other words, the restrictions on its publication may have enabled a kind of willful ignorance, a means of not recognizing the continued impact of the book’s ideas on society.
And so as Europe faces the end of the copyright on one of the most painful texts of the 20th century, some people now believe that the best course of action is not to extend the ban, but to publish “Mein Kampf” with extensive annotations that explain how the book was used and what it wrought — that recognize its continued presence. “Our idea is a zero-censorship effort,” says Philippe Coen, a French attorney at the forefront of HatePrevention.org, which organized the recent conference in Paris. He, like Dreyfus, favors the pedagogical approach to the publication of Hitler’s manifesto.
As the war’s last eyewitnesses die out, Coen warns, new ways must be learned to ward off the ideology behind the text without being afraid of the text itself.
Adolf and Eva - NY Times
Adolf and Eva
By DOROTHY GALLAGHER
Published: November 16, 2011
Hitler could not have wished for a better girlfriend. In this first full-scale biography of Eva Braun, the German historian Heike B. Görtemaker examines the known sources for Braun’s life and emerges with a highly readable and consistent portrait of an ordinary woman who loved sports, fashion and jazz; and who was, without a doubt, utterly devoted to the man history has seen as “evil incarnate.”
In “Eva Braun: Life With Hitler,” Görtemaker asks whether it is useful for a nuanced picture of Hitler to show him in his off-hours, a man like other men, putting on his trousers one leg at a time. She thinks that it is, and that the “demonization” of Hitler has been an impediment to a fuller understanding of him and of the Nazi phenomenon. Through Braun, she believes, a new perspective on Hitler will open. And she writes that Braun’s “ ‘normality’ at the center of this atmosphere of ‘evil’ is like an anachronism that brings this evil into relief and shows it in a new light.” One wonders if the quotation marks are strictly necessary.
One day in 1929, in Munich, 40-year-old Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, paid a visit to the shop of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. It was here that he first met Hoffmann’s new employee, pretty, blond, blue-eyed, 17-year-old Eva Braun. Hitler was quite taken; Eva was naturally impressed with the leader of this up-and-coming national movement.
Eva was a lower-middle-class girl, one of three sisters, of purely Aryan descent (Hitler had her family investigated for Jewish taint). Probably Eva wished for marriage, but this was not to be, at least not for 16 years. Hitler had another bride: “I am married to the German people and their fate! . . . No, I cannot marry, I must not,” he often said in one form or another. A secret girlfriend was another matter.
But what about the sex? It has been theorized that Hitler was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, impotent. A coprophilia fetish has been mentioned. In fact, no one really knows. Görtemaker believes that Hitler’s sexuality was in the conventional range. There is a 20-page diary fragment attributed to Braun, but Görtemaker, a cautious historian who never claims more for her subject than the evidence will bear, warns us that the diary may not be authentic. Still, she quotes an entry in which Braun mentions “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight.”
In those years of the Nazis’ rise to power, Hitler didn’t have much time for Eva; he had a lot on his mind. There were the Reichstag elections to win, the chancellorship to obtain, the masses to whip up, the Jews to persecute. (Just by the way, Hitler’s rise to absolute power was thanks, in part, to the Soviet Comintern policy of pitting German Communists against Social Democrats, thus splitting the vote on the left.)
While Hitler was away from Munich, Eva lived with her parents, worked at Hoffmann’s photo studio and waited for her admirer’s occasional visits. She was not always patient. There is evidence, Görtemaker says, that she tried to kill herself in 1932, and tried again three years later when she feared that Hitler’s interest was flagging. Braun’s first attempt reminded Hitler that his half-niece, Geli Raubal, who had lived with him and to whom he had been devoted in some way, actually did kill herself in 1931. He was moved to remark about Braun, “Now I must look after her” because something like this “mustn’t happen again.” Braun’s second attempt in 1935 spurred Hitler to provide her with her own apartment in Munich, and give her permission to spend more time in his presence.
Did Braun “share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover”? Görtemaker asks. The question is rhetorical. Why wouldn’t she? If only by osmosis, why wouldn’t this young, quite ordinary girl accept the opinions of her lover, of her boss and of her father, who was also a Nazi Party member? What Hitler believed, large numbers of Germans came to believe: that Germany could not live in peace unless the traitorous Jewish Bolshevik bankers were exterminated, and that Germany’s hegemony had to be extended to the west and to the east. As Rudolf Hess’s wife, Ilse, wrote in the early days of the Nazis: “To put it in the clean and plain and negative terms appropriate to the movement, we are anti-Semites. Consistently, rigorously, without exceptions!” In September 1935, Braun, who was generally left in Munich, was allowed to attend the Nazi Party convention in Nuremberg, where she witnessed the passing of the Nuremberg laws depriving Jews of German citizenship and forbidding their participation in civic life.
Görtemaker is often compelled to phrases like “we can only speculate,” “no authenticated information about,” “the final truth, however, remains unknown.” It is true that all personal letters and documents between Braun and Hitler were destroyed on Hitler’s orders in the last days of the war, and that specific information is to be found only in the memoirs and testimony of those who served him — and who, when the war was lost, served themselves. But Görtemaker shows that by early 1936 Braun’s position with Hitler was “unassailable.” At the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat in the cloud-swirled Bavarian Alps, she had her own little apartment, next to Hitler’s bedroom, and was accepted by his intimates as mistress of the house. At meals, she sat at Hitler’s left. She felt secure enough to rebuke Hitler for being late to dinner, and to indicate when she thought he had talked enough. She enjoyed swimming and skiing. She loved fashion and changed her clothes several times a day. She took photographs and home movies of Hitler and his guests (which can be seen on YouTube) and generally behaved as though she were at home.
And then, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Görtemaker is in no doubt that Braun knew of his plans. He seems to have talked freely about them at the Berghof. During the course of the conflict, at least until close to the end, she seems to have been unconcerned, taking her annual trip to Italy while Hitler was conducting the war on the Eastern Front. Even as the war turned against Germany, Hitler, according to Goebbels, was praising his companion’s “calm, intelligent and objective way of being.” Not until 1944, when the Red Army had reached Warsaw, did Braun make her will.
Eva Braun loved Hitler; of that there can be no doubt. In the spring of 1945, when the war was clearly lost, she rushed to Berlin to be with him in his bunker, to marry him, to commit suicide with him at the moment when the Red Army reached the Reichstag. But knowing that there was genuine love in Hitler’s life, even a sort of domestic existence, do we see Hitler’s “evil” in a new light, as Görtemaker suggests we will? Or do we know, as we have always known, that evil walks among us; that no monster (or his friends and lovers) thinks himself monstrous, no madman thinks himself mad; and that, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir once said: “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.”
Dorothy Gallagher’s biography of Lillian Hellman will be published next year.
A version of this review appeared in print on November 20, 2011, on page BR24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Adolf and Eva.
By DOROTHY GALLAGHER
Published: November 16, 2011
Hitler could not have wished for a better girlfriend. In this first full-scale biography of Eva Braun, the German historian Heike B. Görtemaker examines the known sources for Braun’s life and emerges with a highly readable and consistent portrait of an ordinary woman who loved sports, fashion and jazz; and who was, without a doubt, utterly devoted to the man history has seen as “evil incarnate.”
In “Eva Braun: Life With Hitler,” Görtemaker asks whether it is useful for a nuanced picture of Hitler to show him in his off-hours, a man like other men, putting on his trousers one leg at a time. She thinks that it is, and that the “demonization” of Hitler has been an impediment to a fuller understanding of him and of the Nazi phenomenon. Through Braun, she believes, a new perspective on Hitler will open. And she writes that Braun’s “ ‘normality’ at the center of this atmosphere of ‘evil’ is like an anachronism that brings this evil into relief and shows it in a new light.” One wonders if the quotation marks are strictly necessary.
One day in 1929, in Munich, 40-year-old Adolf Hitler, the leader of the National Socialist German Workers Party, paid a visit to the shop of his personal photographer, Heinrich Hoffmann. It was here that he first met Hoffmann’s new employee, pretty, blond, blue-eyed, 17-year-old Eva Braun. Hitler was quite taken; Eva was naturally impressed with the leader of this up-and-coming national movement.
Eva was a lower-middle-class girl, one of three sisters, of purely Aryan descent (Hitler had her family investigated for Jewish taint). Probably Eva wished for marriage, but this was not to be, at least not for 16 years. Hitler had another bride: “I am married to the German people and their fate! . . . No, I cannot marry, I must not,” he often said in one form or another. A secret girlfriend was another matter.
But what about the sex? It has been theorized that Hitler was heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, impotent. A coprophilia fetish has been mentioned. In fact, no one really knows. Görtemaker believes that Hitler’s sexuality was in the conventional range. There is a 20-page diary fragment attributed to Braun, but Görtemaker, a cautious historian who never claims more for her subject than the evidence will bear, warns us that the diary may not be authentic. Still, she quotes an entry in which Braun mentions “two marvelously beautiful hours with him until midnight.”
In those years of the Nazis’ rise to power, Hitler didn’t have much time for Eva; he had a lot on his mind. There were the Reichstag elections to win, the chancellorship to obtain, the masses to whip up, the Jews to persecute. (Just by the way, Hitler’s rise to absolute power was thanks, in part, to the Soviet Comintern policy of pitting German Communists against Social Democrats, thus splitting the vote on the left.)
While Hitler was away from Munich, Eva lived with her parents, worked at Hoffmann’s photo studio and waited for her admirer’s occasional visits. She was not always patient. There is evidence, Görtemaker says, that she tried to kill herself in 1932, and tried again three years later when she feared that Hitler’s interest was flagging. Braun’s first attempt reminded Hitler that his half-niece, Geli Raubal, who had lived with him and to whom he had been devoted in some way, actually did kill herself in 1931. He was moved to remark about Braun, “Now I must look after her” because something like this “mustn’t happen again.” Braun’s second attempt in 1935 spurred Hitler to provide her with her own apartment in Munich, and give her permission to spend more time in his presence.
Did Braun “share the political positions and basic worldview of her lover”? Görtemaker asks. The question is rhetorical. Why wouldn’t she? If only by osmosis, why wouldn’t this young, quite ordinary girl accept the opinions of her lover, of her boss and of her father, who was also a Nazi Party member? What Hitler believed, large numbers of Germans came to believe: that Germany could not live in peace unless the traitorous Jewish Bolshevik bankers were exterminated, and that Germany’s hegemony had to be extended to the west and to the east. As Rudolf Hess’s wife, Ilse, wrote in the early days of the Nazis: “To put it in the clean and plain and negative terms appropriate to the movement, we are anti-Semites. Consistently, rigorously, without exceptions!” In September 1935, Braun, who was generally left in Munich, was allowed to attend the Nazi Party convention in Nuremberg, where she witnessed the passing of the Nuremberg laws depriving Jews of German citizenship and forbidding their participation in civic life.
Görtemaker is often compelled to phrases like “we can only speculate,” “no authenticated information about,” “the final truth, however, remains unknown.” It is true that all personal letters and documents between Braun and Hitler were destroyed on Hitler’s orders in the last days of the war, and that specific information is to be found only in the memoirs and testimony of those who served him — and who, when the war was lost, served themselves. But Görtemaker shows that by early 1936 Braun’s position with Hitler was “unassailable.” At the Berghof, Hitler’s mountain retreat in the cloud-swirled Bavarian Alps, she had her own little apartment, next to Hitler’s bedroom, and was accepted by his intimates as mistress of the house. At meals, she sat at Hitler’s left. She felt secure enough to rebuke Hitler for being late to dinner, and to indicate when she thought he had talked enough. She enjoyed swimming and skiing. She loved fashion and changed her clothes several times a day. She took photographs and home movies of Hitler and his guests (which can be seen on YouTube) and generally behaved as though she were at home.
And then, on Sept. 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland. Görtemaker is in no doubt that Braun knew of his plans. He seems to have talked freely about them at the Berghof. During the course of the conflict, at least until close to the end, she seems to have been unconcerned, taking her annual trip to Italy while Hitler was conducting the war on the Eastern Front. Even as the war turned against Germany, Hitler, according to Goebbels, was praising his companion’s “calm, intelligent and objective way of being.” Not until 1944, when the Red Army had reached Warsaw, did Braun make her will.
Eva Braun loved Hitler; of that there can be no doubt. In the spring of 1945, when the war was clearly lost, she rushed to Berlin to be with him in his bunker, to marry him, to commit suicide with him at the moment when the Red Army reached the Reichstag. But knowing that there was genuine love in Hitler’s life, even a sort of domestic existence, do we see Hitler’s “evil” in a new light, as Görtemaker suggests we will? Or do we know, as we have always known, that evil walks among us; that no monster (or his friends and lovers) thinks himself monstrous, no madman thinks himself mad; and that, as the filmmaker Jean Renoir once said: “The really terrible thing is that everyone has his reasons.”
Dorothy Gallagher’s biography of Lillian Hellman will be published next year.
A version of this review appeared in print on November 20, 2011, on page BR24 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Adolf and Eva.
WWII Book Review - Max Hastings The World At War
World War II, From the Ground Up
By RICHARD J. EVANS
Published: November 17, 2011
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Do we really need another history of World War II? The book market is overflowing with them, and new ones seem to appear at almost weekly intervals. Vast though the conflict was, we probably know more about it than any other war in history. Sir Max Hastings, author of this latest survey, has already written no fewer than eight books about key campaigns and personalities of the war. Has he got anything new to say?
Enlarge This Image
U.S. Navy, via Associated Press
A photo taken aboard the American Aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, September 1944.
INFERNO
The World at War, 1939-1945
By Max Hastings
Illustrated. 729 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35
.
The answer is, emphatically, yes. “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945” sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflicts in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. “Inferno” offers an account of the war that concentrates on the lived experience of the men and women who took part in it. On almost every page there is memorable and arresting material from interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs and personal documents of many kinds. The huge cast of characters and witnesses gives the book an almost Tolstoyan sweep, as it ranges across the world, from Dunkirk to Iwo Jima, Stalingrad to Guadalcanal.
Hastings is at his absolute best when he is describing battle scenes, both on land and at sea. Deftly chosen quotations are effortlessly integrated into the narratives, providing color and making the action come alive. They are supplemented where appropriate with clear and informative maps and easily digestible statistics. This is at its core very much a military history, despite the space devoted to the experiences of civilians. Brisk assessments are delivered on the competence or (mostly) incompetence of leading generals and the performance of their troops; in the book’s concluding chapter, Hastings pronounces his verdicts, rather like a senior general handing out medals at the end of a campaign: Montgomery was a highly competent professional who lacked the touch of genius needed for him to be numbered among the great commanders; MacArthur was a brilliant self-publicist, but outclassed as a general by the now-forgotten Lucian Truscott; Rommel was fatally compromised by his disregard for logistics; Georgi Zhukov was a superb commander in 1944, but his storming of Berlin the following spring was brutish and clumsy.
Hastings argues that the navies of the United Kingdom and the United States were their best fighting forces; he thinks the armies of the two Allied powers were mostly no match for the ruthless fighting prowess of the Germans and Japanese, whose willingness to sacrifice themselves contrasted with the care taken by Allied generals to minimize casualties among their own men. Red Army troops behaved in a manner not unlike that of the Germans, their reckless disregard for their own safety driven on by the knowledge that the Soviet secret police would shoot them if they hesitated. What shifted the balance in favor of the Allies in the end was America’s industrial might, which by 1943 was supplying enormous quantities of munitions and equipment without which the Red Army’s victory would have taken far longer to achieve.
Germans, Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians get their say in this book as well as Americans and British. Ninety percent of German troops killed in the war died on the Eastern Front, and Hastings gives this fact appropriately expansive treatment. He is as hard on the racism, complacency and incompetence of the British in the face of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore as he is on the cruelty and brutality of the Japanese Army as it tortured, raped and massacred its way across China, Indonesia and Malaya. As the British fled, denying Asians access to evacuation ships to make room for themselves, the young Singaporean politician, Lee Kwan Yew, exclaimed: “That is the end of the British Empire.” Millions of people died of hunger, disease and mass murder under German rule in Europe, but millions died too from starvation in India under British rule
Yet Hastings is not always so evenhanded in his coverage. In describing the invasion, conquest and division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, for example, he devotes considerable space to the Soviet arrest, deportation and murder of Poles in their zone of occupation, but says little about the mass imprisonment, deportation, enslavement and murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Nazis. His brilliant and evocative account of the “winter war,” in which Finland defended itself with surprising effectiveness against Stalin’s invasion in 1939-40, outclasses his somewhat perfunctory narrative of the Polish campaign. And his skillful touch can fail him when it comes to dealing with nonmilitary aspects of the war. There are too many sweeping generalizations about national character. The Poles have a “propensity for fantasy,” for example, while “Britain’s antimilitarist tradition was a source of pride to its people.” Neither claim is true; indeed, British national culture in the 1930s was suffused with celebratory memories of national military victories in Europe and across the British Empire, while pacifism was the province of only a tiny minority.
On occasion, too, the military historian’s propensity to judge everything in terms of military effectiveness can lead Hastings astray. “One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes,” he writes, “from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology while still fighting the war.” Nazi brutality certainly alienated many Ukrainians and others whose resentment at years of murderous Soviet exploitation made them ready to welcome the Germans when they arrived in 1941; but for Hitler, of course, the exploitation and extermination of Slav “subhumans” was one of the major purposes of the war.
And the chapter on the Holocaust is among the weaker ones in the book. Hastings sees the annihilation of the Jews as a military mistake, but in fact it did not entail “diverting scarce manpower and transport to a program of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance,” at least not on any significant scale. The “euthanasia” campaign in which Hitler ordered the murder of 70,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans was not directed exclusively against “inmates of psychiatric units,” but actually began with the forcible removal of thousands of children from their parental homes. These are minor objections, however. As military history in the round, conveying to a 21st-century readership the human experience of this greatest and most savage of human conflicts in history, “Inferno” is superb.
Richard J. Evans is the Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge and the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of “The Third Reich at War
By RICHARD J. EVANS
Published: November 17, 2011
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Single Page
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.
Do we really need another history of World War II? The book market is overflowing with them, and new ones seem to appear at almost weekly intervals. Vast though the conflict was, we probably know more about it than any other war in history. Sir Max Hastings, author of this latest survey, has already written no fewer than eight books about key campaigns and personalities of the war. Has he got anything new to say?
Enlarge This Image
U.S. Navy, via Associated Press
A photo taken aboard the American Aircraft carrier Ticonderoga, September 1944.
INFERNO
The World at War, 1939-1945
By Max Hastings
Illustrated. 729 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $35
.
The answer is, emphatically, yes. “Inferno: The World at War, 1939-1945” sums up and surpasses all his previous publications: a new, original and necessary history, in many ways the crowning of a life’s work. A professional war correspondent who has personally witnessed armed conflicts in Vietnam, the Falkland Islands and other danger zones, Hastings has a sober, unromantic and realistic view of battle that puts him into a different category from the armchair generals whose gung-ho, schoolboy attitude to war fills the pages of a great majority of military histories. He writes with grace, fluency and authority. “Inferno” offers an account of the war that concentrates on the lived experience of the men and women who took part in it. On almost every page there is memorable and arresting material from interviews, diaries, letters, memoirs and personal documents of many kinds. The huge cast of characters and witnesses gives the book an almost Tolstoyan sweep, as it ranges across the world, from Dunkirk to Iwo Jima, Stalingrad to Guadalcanal.
Hastings is at his absolute best when he is describing battle scenes, both on land and at sea. Deftly chosen quotations are effortlessly integrated into the narratives, providing color and making the action come alive. They are supplemented where appropriate with clear and informative maps and easily digestible statistics. This is at its core very much a military history, despite the space devoted to the experiences of civilians. Brisk assessments are delivered on the competence or (mostly) incompetence of leading generals and the performance of their troops; in the book’s concluding chapter, Hastings pronounces his verdicts, rather like a senior general handing out medals at the end of a campaign: Montgomery was a highly competent professional who lacked the touch of genius needed for him to be numbered among the great commanders; MacArthur was a brilliant self-publicist, but outclassed as a general by the now-forgotten Lucian Truscott; Rommel was fatally compromised by his disregard for logistics; Georgi Zhukov was a superb commander in 1944, but his storming of Berlin the following spring was brutish and clumsy.
Hastings argues that the navies of the United Kingdom and the United States were their best fighting forces; he thinks the armies of the two Allied powers were mostly no match for the ruthless fighting prowess of the Germans and Japanese, whose willingness to sacrifice themselves contrasted with the care taken by Allied generals to minimize casualties among their own men. Red Army troops behaved in a manner not unlike that of the Germans, their reckless disregard for their own safety driven on by the knowledge that the Soviet secret police would shoot them if they hesitated. What shifted the balance in favor of the Allies in the end was America’s industrial might, which by 1943 was supplying enormous quantities of munitions and equipment without which the Red Army’s victory would have taken far longer to achieve.
Germans, Russians and Japanese soldiers and civilians get their say in this book as well as Americans and British. Ninety percent of German troops killed in the war died on the Eastern Front, and Hastings gives this fact appropriately expansive treatment. He is as hard on the racism, complacency and incompetence of the British in the face of the Japanese invasion of Malaya and Singapore as he is on the cruelty and brutality of the Japanese Army as it tortured, raped and massacred its way across China, Indonesia and Malaya. As the British fled, denying Asians access to evacuation ships to make room for themselves, the young Singaporean politician, Lee Kwan Yew, exclaimed: “That is the end of the British Empire.” Millions of people died of hunger, disease and mass murder under German rule in Europe, but millions died too from starvation in India under British rule
Yet Hastings is not always so evenhanded in his coverage. In describing the invasion, conquest and division of Poland by Hitler and Stalin in 1939, for example, he devotes considerable space to the Soviet arrest, deportation and murder of Poles in their zone of occupation, but says little about the mass imprisonment, deportation, enslavement and murder of hundreds of thousands of Poles by the Nazis. His brilliant and evocative account of the “winter war,” in which Finland defended itself with surprising effectiveness against Stalin’s invasion in 1939-40, outclasses his somewhat perfunctory narrative of the Polish campaign. And his skillful touch can fail him when it comes to dealing with nonmilitary aspects of the war. There are too many sweeping generalizations about national character. The Poles have a “propensity for fantasy,” for example, while “Britain’s antimilitarist tradition was a source of pride to its people.” Neither claim is true; indeed, British national culture in the 1930s was suffused with celebratory memories of national military victories in Europe and across the British Empire, while pacifism was the province of only a tiny minority.
On occasion, too, the military historian’s propensity to judge everything in terms of military effectiveness can lead Hastings astray. “One of Hitler’s greatest mistakes,” he writes, “from the viewpoint of his own interests, was that he attempted to reshape the eastern lands that fell under his suzerainty in accordance with Nazi ideology while still fighting the war.” Nazi brutality certainly alienated many Ukrainians and others whose resentment at years of murderous Soviet exploitation made them ready to welcome the Germans when they arrived in 1941; but for Hitler, of course, the exploitation and extermination of Slav “subhumans” was one of the major purposes of the war.
And the chapter on the Holocaust is among the weaker ones in the book. Hastings sees the annihilation of the Jews as a military mistake, but in fact it did not entail “diverting scarce manpower and transport to a program of mass murder while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance,” at least not on any significant scale. The “euthanasia” campaign in which Hitler ordered the murder of 70,000 mentally ill or handicapped Germans was not directed exclusively against “inmates of psychiatric units,” but actually began with the forcible removal of thousands of children from their parental homes. These are minor objections, however. As military history in the round, conveying to a 21st-century readership the human experience of this greatest and most savage of human conflicts in history, “Inferno” is superb.
Richard J. Evans is the Regius professor of history at the University of Cambridge and the president of Wolfson College, Cambridge. He is the author of “The Third Reich at War
Lana Peters, Stalin’s Daughter, Dies at 85 - NY Times
Born Svetlana Stalina, Stalin's daughter changed her name twice and lived in several countries after her famous defection.
By DOUGLAS MARTIN
Published: November 28, 2011
Her three successive names were signposts on a twisted, bewildering road that took her from Stalin’s Kremlin, where she was the “little princess,” to the West in a celebrated defection, then back to the Soviet Union in a puzzling homecoming, and finally to decades of obscurity, wandering and poverty.
At her birth, on Feb. 28, 1926, she was named Svetlana Stalina, the only daughter and last surviving child of the brutal Soviet tyrant Josef Stalin. After he died in 1953, she took her mother’s last name, Alliluyeva. In 1970, after her defection and an American marriage, she became and remained Lana Peters.
Ms. Peters died of colon cancer on Nov. 22 in Richland County, Wis., the county’s corporation counsel, Benjamin Southwick, said on Monday. She was 85.
Her death, like the last years of her life, occurred away from public view. There were hints of it online and in Richland Center, the Wisconsin town in which she lived, though a local funeral home said to be handling the burial would not confirm the death. A county official in Wisconsin thought she might have died several months ago. Phone calls seeking information from a surviving daughter, Olga Peters, who now goes by the name Chrese Evans, were rebuffed, as were efforts to speak to her in person in Portland, Ore., where she lives and works.
Ms. Peters’s initial prominence came only from being Stalin’s daughter, a distinction that fed public curiosity about her life across three continents and many decades. She said she hated her past and felt like a slave to extraordinary circumstances. Yet she drew on that past, and the infamous Stalin name, in writing two best-selling autobiographies.
Long after fleeing her homeland, she seemed to be still searching for something — sampling religions, from Hinduism to Christian Science, falling in love and constantly moving. Her defection took her from India, through Europe, to the United States. After moving back to Moscow in 1984, and from there to Soviet Georgia, friends told of her going again to America, then to England, then to France, then back to America, then to England again, and on and on. All the while she faded from the public eye.
Ms. Peters was said to have lived in a cabin with no electricity in northern Wisconsin; another time, in a Roman Catholic convent in Switzerland. In 1992, she was reported to be living in a shabby part of West London in a home for elderly people with emotional problems.
“You can’t regret your fate,” Ms. Peters once said, “although I do regret my mother didn’t marry a carpenter.”
‘Little Sparrow’
Her life was worthy of a Russian novel. It began with a loving relationship with Stalin, who had taken the name, meaning “man of steel,” as a young man. (He was born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili.) Millions died under his brutally repressive rule, but at home he called his daughter “little sparrow,” cuddled and kissed her, showered her with presents, and entertained her with American movies.
She became a celebrity in her country, compared to Shirley Temple in the United States. Thousands of babies were named Svetlana. So was a perfume.
At 18, she was setting the table in a Kremlin dining room when Churchill happened upon her. They had a spirited conversation.
But all was not perfect even then. The darkest moment of her childhood came when her mother, Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Stalin’s second wife, committed suicide in 1932. Svetlana, who was 6, was told that her mother had died of appendicitis. She did not learn the truth for a decade.
In her teenage years, her father was consumed by the war with Germany and grew distant and sometimes abusive. One of her brothers, Yakov, was captured by the Nazis, who offered to exchange him for a German general. Stalin refused, and Yakov was killed.
In her memoirs she told of how Stalin had sent her first love, a Jewish filmmaker, to Siberia for 10 years. She wanted to study literature at Moscow University, but Stalin demanded that she study history. She did. After graduation, again following her father’s wishes, she became a teacher, teaching Soviet literature and the English language. She then worked as a literary translator.
A year after her father broke up her first romance, she told him she wanted to marry another Jewish man, Grigory Morozov, a fellow student. Stalin slapped her and refused to meet him. This time, however, she had her way. She married Mr. Morozov in 1945. They had one child, Iosif, before divorcing in 1947.
Her second marriage, in 1949, was more to Stalin’s liking. The groom, Yuri Zhdanov, was the son of Stalin’s right-hand man, Andrei Zhdanov. The couple had a daughter, Yekaterina, the next year. But they, too, divorced soon afterward.
Her world grew darker in her father’s last years. Nikita S. Khrushchev, Stalin’s successor as Soviet leader, wrote in his memoirs about the New Year’s party in 1952 when Stalin grabbed Svetlana by the hair and forced her to dance.
Defection
After Stalin died in 1953, his legacy was challenged, and the new leaders were eager to put his more egregious policies behind them. Svetlana lost many of her privileges. In the 1960s, when she fell in love with Brijesh Singh, an Indian Communist who was visiting Moscow, Soviet officials refused to let her marry him. After he became ill and died, they only reluctantly gave her permission, in early 1967, to take his ashes home to India.
Once in India, Ms. Alliluyeva, as she was known now, evaded Soviet agents in the K.G.B. and showed up at the United States Embassy in New Delhi seeking political asylum. The world watched in amazement as Stalin’s daughter, granted protection, became the most high-profile Soviet exile since the ballet virtuoso Rudolf Nureyev defected in 1961. The United States quickly dispatched a C.I.A. officer to help her travel through Italy to neutral Switzerland, but American officials worried that accepting her into the United States could damage its improving relations with Moscow. Finally, President Lyndon B. Johnson, on humanitarian grounds, agreed to admit her but asked that there be as little fanfare as possible.
Unknown to Washington at the time, the K.G.B. was discussing plans to assassinate Ms. Alliluyeva, according to former agency officials who were quoted by The Washington Times in 1992. But, they said, the K.G.B. backed off for fear an assassination would be traced back to it too easily.
Her arrival in New York, in April 1967, was more triumphant than low-key. Reporters and photographers were waiting at the airport, and she held a news conference in which she denounced the Soviet regime. Her autobiography, “Twenty Letters to a Friend,” was published later that year, bringing her more than $2.5 million. In 1969 she recounted her journey from the Soviet Union in a second memoir, “Only One Year.”
Settling in Princeton, N.J., Ms. Alliluyeva made a public show of burning her Soviet passport, saying she would never return to the Soviet Union. She denounced her father as “a moral and spiritual monster,” called the Soviet system “profoundly corrupt” and likened the K.G.B. to the Gestapo.
Writing in Esquire magazine, Garry Wills and Ovid Demaris — under the headline “How the Daughter of Stalin Denounced Communism and Embraced God, America and Apple Pie” — said the Svetlana Alliluyeva saga added up to “the Reader’s Digest ultimate story.”
As the Kremlin feared, Ms. Alliluyeva became a weapon in the cold war. In 1968, she denounced the trial of four Soviet dissidents as “a mockery of justice.” On Voice of America radio, Soviet citizens heard her declare that life in the United States was “free, gay and full of bright colors.”
Another Marriage
In interviews, however, she acknowledged loneliness. She missed her son, Iosif, who was 22 when she left Russia, and her daughter, Yekaterina, who was then 17. But she seemed to find new vibrancy in 1970, when she married William Wesley Peters. Mr. Peters had been chief apprentice to the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and, for a time, the husband of Wright’s adopted daughter.
Wright’s widow, Olgivanna Wright, encouraged the Peters-Alliluyeva marriage, even though the adopted daughter was Mrs. Wright’s biological daughter from a previous marriage. That daughter was also named Svetlana, and Mrs. Wright saw mystical meaning in the match.
The couple lived with Mrs. Wright and others at Taliesin West, the architect’s famous desert compound in Scottsdale, Ariz. There, Ms. Peters began chafing at the strict communal lifestyle enforced by Mrs. Wright, finding her as authoritarian as her father. Mr. Peters, meanwhile, objected to his wife’s buying a house in a nearby resort area, declaring he didn’t want “a two-bit suburban life.”
Within two years, they separated. Ms. Peters was granted custody of their 8-month-old daughter, Olga. They divorced in 1973.
Information about the next few years is sketchier. Ms. Peters became a United States citizen in 1978 and later told The Trenton Times that she had registered as a Republican and donated $500 to the conservative magazine National Review, saying it was her favorite publication.
She and Olga moved to California, living there in several places before uprooting themselves again in 1982, this time for England so that Olga could enroll in an English boarding school. She also began to speak more favorably of her father, Time magazine reported, and perhaps felt she had betrayed him. “My father would have shot me for what I have done,” she said in 1983.
Seeking Reconciliation
At the same time, Stalin was being partly rehabilitated in the Soviet Union, and Soviet officials, after blocking Ms. Peters’s attempts to communicate with her children in Russia, relaxed their grip. Iosif, then 38 and practicing as a physician, began calling regularly. He said he would try to come to England to see her.
“For this desperate woman, seeing Iosif appeared to herald a new beginning,” Time said.
Abruptly, however, Iosif was refused permission to travel. So in November 1984, Ms. Peters and 13-year-old Olga — who was distraught because she had not been consulted about the move — went to Moscow and asked to be taken back. Lana Peters now denounced the West. She had not known “one single day” of freedom in the West, she told reporters. She was quoted as saying that she had been a pet of the C.I.A. Any conservative views she had expressed in the United States, if they still existed, went unexpressed. When an ABC correspondent in Moscow tried to question her a few days later, she exploded in anger, exclaiming: “You are savages! You are uncivilized people! Goodbye to you all.”
Ms. Peters and Olga were given Soviet citizenship, but soon their lives worsened. The son and daughter who lived in Russia began shunning her and Olga. Defying the official atheism of the state, Olga insisted on wearing a crucifix. They moved to Tbilisi, Georgia, but it was no better than Moscow.
In April 1986, they returned to the United States, with no opposition by the Soviet authorities. Settling at first in Wisconsin, Ms. Peters disavowed the anti-Western things she had said upon her arrival in Moscow, saying she had been mistranslated, particularly the statement about being a pet of the C.I.A. Olga returned to school in England.
Quiet Years
Ms. Peters said she was now impoverished. She had given much of her book profits to charity, she said, and was saddled with debt and failed investments. An odd, formless odyssey began. Friends said she appeared unable to live anywhere for more than two years.
Mr. Peters died in 1991. Ms. Peters’s son, Iosif, died in November 2008.
Besides her daughter Olga, now Ms. Evans, Ms. Peters is survived by her daughter Yekaterina Zhdanov, a scientist who goes by Katya and is living on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Eastern Siberia studying a volcano, according to The Associated Press. Reached later on Monday by e-mail, Ms. Evans told The A.P. that her mother had died in a nursing home in Richland Center, where she had lived for three years. “Please respect my privacy during this sad time,” the wire agency quoted her as saying.
Ms. Peters was said to enjoy sewing and reading, mainly nonfiction, choosing not to own a television set. In an interview with The Wisconsin State Journal in 2010, she was asked if her father had loved her. She thought he did, she said, because she had red hair and freckles, like his mother.
But she could not forgive his cruelty to her. “He broke my life,” she said. “I want to explain to you. He broke my life.”
And he left a shadow from which she could never emerge. “Wherever I go,” she said, “here, or Switzerland, or India, or wherever. Australia. Some island. I will always be a political prisoner of my father’s name.”
Elizabeth A. Harris and Lee van der Voo contributed reporting.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 29, 2011
An earlier version of this article misstated the last name of Ms. Peters’s late son, Iosif. It is Alliluyev, not Morozov.
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