The Muddy War – Marie Louise Berneri (1948)

From ‘Freedom: Anarchist Fortnightly’, February 21, 1948, London, UK

Whether or not it is a cold war, it is certainly a muddy one. Washington State Department has not been able to resist the temptation of having a good smack at Russia, and has published a number of German State documents concerning the relations between the Soviet Union and Germany in the period 1939-1941. These documents were seized by the American forces when they marched into Germany and have been kept on ice for nearly three years before being made public. Nor are all the documents being published now; we are given a selection, an hors d’oeuvre so to speak, and the rest are probably kept in reserve for even more propitious times.

We would like to avoid noticing this dirty business; we would rather deal with beautiful and inspiring examples of international solidarity but the task of a paper is to look at facts, however unpleasant and however much one despises the way in which they are presented. And indeed it is difficult to imagine anything more revolting than the use governments make of secret documents.

When a private individual holds a document which might compromise a person and he tries to use it for his own advantage, it is called blackmail and it is punished by law. But when a Government uses documents obtained by their informers, spies, and diplomats or by war and plunder and uses them to blackmail or blacken another government, it is called international politics.

We are not opposed to the publication of these documents, which are of great historical value, but we strongly condemn the use which is made of them. We also condemn all secret treaties, protocols and negotiations. It is ridiculous to talk of a democratic government when that same government, which is supposed to represent the wishes of the people, is able to take momentous steps in its foreign policy with the knowledge of only a selected few. The chief lesson to be learned by the publication of these documents is that nations are committed to alliances defensive or offensive of which they are completely ignorant.

But this is not the conclusion governments want people to reach by the publication of these secret documents. They are used either to blackmail the governments, in whose interest it is that they should remain secret, or to blacken these same governments and create a feeling of hostility among nations.

It is doubtful whether this is in fact a very effective method because, for each document in the hands of the Americans and detrimental to Russia, Moscow will probably bring out one which will smear either Washington or London. Mr. Bevin’s wisdom in not allowing himself to be rushed into the publication of documents is probably dictated more by self-interest than by any feeling of discretion or magnanimity.

Already Moscow has hit back by stating that Britain and France did not wish to come to an arrangement with the Soviet Union in the negotiations which began in March 1939 and that their aim was to “get Germany and the Soviet Union to come to grips as soon as possible”. Moscow also threatens to publish documents seized in Germany by the Red Army concerning the relations between Hitler’s Germany and the Government of Britain, France and the U.S.

If we consider the documents published in Washington, as we shall consider those which Moscow intends to publish, it is not to wax indignant at the behaviour of any particular government. None of them has a record to be proud of. If Stalin made a pact with Hitler, Britain helped Nazism to get into power, and neither Russia nor America, neither France nor Britain, was in the least concerned with crushing Nazism but merely played the game they thought more suitable for their imperialist interests.

We said all this long before these documents were published, not because we were better informed, but because we had no reasons for concealing facts. Mr. Churchill, who is now so anxious that the documents should receive wide publicity, knew of them when he lavished his praises on Stalin. To describe the records as “an appalling story of cynical diplomatic duplicity such as few people in this country would have deemed possible,” as Cummings does in the News Chronicle, is a gross exaggeration.

In fact these documents prove little that has not already been made public through other sources. They prove that the Soviet-German pact was an active alliance, i.e., that, while it lasted, these two countries helped one another by exchanging goods and by encouraging their respective territorial aggrandisements. This had already been revealed, in particular by Kravchenko, in his book I Chose Freedom (see Freedom, 15/11/47).

They show that Soviet and German leaders and diplomats exchanged congratulations, compliments and toasts. But didn’t we have photographs of them shaking hands and smiling at one another? One could readily imagine that the usual compliments had been exchanged.

They show further that Litvinov was sacked and replaced by Molotov because the former was in favour of an anti-fascist alliance and a Jew, not a very suitable envoy to send to Germany. This also had been pointed out long ago.

The Soviet Government tried its best to make the pact palatable to the Russian people because, in the words of the German Ambassador in Moscow; in his report of Sept. 6th,

“The sudden alteration in the policy of the Soviet Government, after years of propaganda directed expressly against German aggressors, is still not very well understood by the population. Especially the statements of official agitators to the effect that Germany is no longer an aggressor run up against considerable doubt. The Soviet Government is doing everything to change the attitude of the population here towards Germany. The press is as though it had been transformed . . . In a judgment of conditions here the Soviet Government has always previously been able in a masterly fashion to influence the attitude of the population in the direction which it has desired, and it is not being sparing this time either of the necessary propaganda.”

This also is no “revelation”. The Russian Press and the testimony of several Russian exiles are there to prove that there was an immediate and thorough change of line.

The documents also give some in formation which is not of the kind to hit the headlines but which is perhaps more important than the more publicised one. In December, 1939, for example, when Hitler gave the order to expel thousands of Jews from German-occupied Poland into the Soviet sphere, the Russians sent the Jews back to German-held territory.

This will seem an incredible story to those who see in Stalin the defender of the persecuted Jewish people but some of these Jews have survived and they could have told their tragic experience if anybody had been ready to listen to them. But nowadays human suffering does not count unless it is related in secret documents. The victims of Russia’s senseless act whose sufferings make such good propaganda material for the U.S. are now in D.P. [displaced persons] camps in Germany. They can die of starvation and despair; the world does not care, but they have achieved immortality in the published records and, supreme irony, they are used as fodder in the propaganda for another war.

M.L.B.