George F. Kennan Quotes
We must reduce as far as possible our establishment in Germany; for the residence of large numbers of representatives of a victor nation in a devastated conquered area is never a helpful factor, particularly when their living standards are as conspicuously different as are those of Americans in Germany.
Occupation has always been a problem both for the victor and the vanquished.
George F. Kennan, 1904-2005, Historian & U.S. Ambassador to Russia and Yugoslavia, U.S. Foreign Policy: Review of Current Trends, February 24, 1948
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She was referring to the aftermath of the Iraq War.
The General had differed with the George W. Bush Administration neoconservatives over the strategy regarding the invasion and war in Iraq. He was pushed out of office as a result. Later, it was clear that he was right originally, and the press, some members of Congress and others wanted him to comment. He refused.
There were a number of world leaders who were not happy about the German Reunification. See Henry Kissinger {610355} for another.
The Germans killed 22 million Russians, most deliberate murders and not collateral damage, in WWII.
This fact was one of the reasons that McCarthyism and HUAC were able to get traction. The Red Scare paranoids found something to really worry about. They overreacted, sensing the problem not as one of a large number of misguided and naïve people trying to help America do better, but as active spies controlled by the Kremlin who wanted to destroy the American way of life. There were two basic reasons these naïve officials acted that way. Many of them had not forgotten the devastation of the American people in the Great Depression and believed that capitalism had almost failed completely and the rough edge had to be taken off American capitalism by injecting some socialist principles such as stronger labor unions, ending racial and religious discrimination, controlling monopolies, and regulating critical industries. They also were mindful of the fact that the Russians were bearing the brunt of the WWII casualties—military and civilian—while killing more of the Germans and capturing more German occupied territory than the other allies together, yet they were not receiving the same level of assistance—technical, intelligence, economic and political as the British. They saw helping the Russians as saving American lives on the battlefield by making them more effective and keeping German soldiers and weapons away from the Western front and Americans. They also remembered that many in Congress were opposed to our entering WWII in Europe until Germany declared war on America. They had in many cases been apologists for Fascism and passionate enemies of communism. Some American industrialists like Henry Ford were anti-Semitic and overt admirers of Hitler. {586985} So these officials tried to redress the imbalance that existed while at the same time little was really known about Soviet Russia and the Stalin excesses that were as bad as some of Hitler’s. {634969} The only information Americans had were the terrible casualties the Russians were taking and the in kind that they were dishing out to the Germans. The number of Soviet spies in America were few and commensurate with the number of agents we had in Russia. But few Americans realized the difficulty the U. S. and the rest of the democratic world would have with Russia after the war was won.
The Nazis occupied the cities, but the partisans survived in the mountains. The resistance was ferocious and very effective. From a German Soldier’s point of view, the Yugoslav front was the most dangerous assignment where his odds of being killed was even greater than the Russian front.
Wealthy Americans are far healthier and live longer than poor Americans.
George Frost Kennan was an American diplomat and historian. He was best known as an advocate of a policy of containment of Soviet expansion during the Cold War. He lectured widely and wrote scholarly histories of the relations between the USSR and the United States. He was also one of the group of foreign policy elders known as "The Wise Men".
