FredaUtley. com homepage
Links to Sites and Scholars who quote Freda Utley and/or Her Influence + Allan Brownfeld on 10th Anniversary of her Death
More quotes from Ms. Lipstadt's book-----
"Relativists and German apologists
cited the Allies' mass transfer of German citizens from Czechoslovakia and Poland in the
immediate aftermath of the war as the ultimate example of Allied brutality. Sen. William
Langer (R-ND), who had vigorously opposed Roosevelt's foreign policy, spoke of a
"savage and fanatical plot" to destroy fifteen million German women and
children. (49) Senator Langer claimed that three million of the German refugees had died
en route. (50) Freda Utley described these population transfers as "crimes against
humanity." Her choice of this particular phrase, which had already gained wide
currency as a result of the Nuremberg indictments, was telling. (Eventually Utley would
become one of the most vocal of Sen. Joseph McCarthy's supporters, branding one of those
he accused of being a Communist spy as a "Judas cow," an animal who led others
to be slaughtered). (51) Using a tactic that typified the actions of those who, in their
quest to defend Nazi Germany, stopped short of denying the atrocities, she compared these
transfers with what had been done to the Jews. According to her the expulsion of millions
of people from their homes for the sole "crime" of being part of the German
"race" was an "atrocity" equivalent to "the extermination of the
Jews and the massacres of the Poles and Russians by the Nazis." Utley continued:
"The women and children who died of hunger and cold on the long trek from Silesia and
the Sudetenland to what remained of the German Reich, may have thought that a quick
death in a gas chamber would have been comparatively merciful." (52)
"She exonerated the German war criminals who were tried at Nuremberg because what they did was "minor in extent if not in degree" compared with the postwar behavior of the Russian armies and the "genocide" committed by Poles and Czechs against Germans. (53) Taking the tactic of immoral equivalencies to its ultimate extreme, she argued that "there was no crime the Nazis had committed which we or our allies had not also committed." (54) Although Utley was an extremist who did not abandon her political beliefs even after the war, such charges were not only made by extremists. The Chicago Tribune accused the French of not permitting more than half a million German prisoners of war to return home. According to the paper they were being kept as "slaves," denied food sufficient to allow them to work, and beaten by "Moroccan savages." (55)
"Many of the critics focused on a plan proposed toward the end of the war by Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau, which would have prevented the economic rehabilitation of Germany. Though the plan was never put into effect, World War II revisionists and Holocaust deniers claim it was and cite it as an example of the Allies' diabolical attitude toward Germany and of the way Germany was to be made the victim of Allied postwar retribution. Henry Regnery, who published much of the World War II revisionist material, issued a pamphlet comparing Morgenthau's proposal with the Nazi plan to destroy millions of Jews through starvation. (56) The fact that Morgenthau was not only a member of Roosevelt's cabinet but an identifying Jew was something these critics were quick to exploit. **
"These postwar isolationists and World War II revisionists also cast Germany as the victim by stressing the "inhumanity" and "injustice" of the Allied war crimes trials and de-Nazification programs. (Lindbergh accused the Allies of imposing an "eye for an eye" punishment.) They questioned the legality of the Nuremberg trials and accused the Allies of hypocrisy in holding them, arguing that had the outcome of the war been reversed the Allied leaders would have found themselves in the docket. Beard also attacked the trials. (57) Sen. Robert Taft (R-OH) argued that the trials were marked by a "spirit of vengeance," and the Chicago Tribune declared that Russia's participation transformed them into a "kangaroo court." (58) Congressman Rankin accused the court at Nuremberg of having "perpetrated more outrages than any other organization of its kind." He found it particularly appalling that Soviet Communist Jews, who he argued, bore responsibility for the murder of tens of millions of Christians, should be able to sit in judgment of "German soldiers, civilians and doctors, five or six years after the war closed." (59) Robert McCormick, probably America's most influential isolationist, refused to have dinner with former Attorney General Francis Biddle because, as a result of his role in the Nuremberg trials, McCormick considered him a "murderer." (60) The New York Daily News declared that the defendants' "real crime was that they did not win.''
There are hundreds of other links to sources quoting from Freda Utley's books as authority on varying subjects on the internet. Lately these concern War Crimes issues, brought to the fore by the United Nations War Crimes Tribunal for Yugoslavia and counter accusations against NATO and Washington for other war crimes. Other material concerns China, the evolution of communism, the Middle East and all the subjects and people she wrote about. Following are some of the Search Engines with the largest number of link pages. If the link below no longer connects, then just type "Freda Utley" within quotes onto the Search Engine question space.
German researchers will find interesting links by searching for the High Cost of Vengeance German edition "KOSTSPIELIGE RACHE"
MSN Network http://search.msn.com/results.asp?co=20&RS=CHECKED&FORM=MSNH&ba=0&v=1&q=%22freda+utley%22
Alta Vista links http://www.altavista.com/cgi-bin/query?pg=g&user=MSN&q=%22freda+utley%22
All the Web links http://www.alltheweb.com/advsearch
Northernlight 96 links Freda Utley
also 164 links reference "The High Cost of Vengeance" http://www.northernlight.com/nlquery.fcg?ho=groucho&po=5125&qr=%22the+high+cost+of+vengeance%22&cb=0&nth=14
Freda Utley’s Odyssey to Truth – Allan Brownfeld
Washington Inquirer – October 7, 1988
Ten years ago, Freda Utley, journalist, world-traveler, author of a dozen books, died in Washington, D.C. This writer, a long time friend of Freda’s, spoke at her funeral, along with British author Malcolm Muggeridge. Recently, a reception was held in honor of the Freda Utley Memorial Collection on Freedom and Mass Communication at the Freedom Foundation at Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. This is an appropriate time to pay homage to a fearless and brave fighter for freedom – one who told the world the truth about Communism before the world was prepared to listen.
Freda was truly a wise woman, wise enough to admit that she had made calamitous intellectual errors, but wise enough to understand their nature and try to assist us in avoiding the same pitfalls. For Freda Utley was, as Whittaker Chambers wrote of those who became Communists for idealistic reasons in the twenties and thirties, hit by history as if by a freight train. She never fully recovered, but the lessons she learned have meaning and significance not only for today, but for the future. Men, after all, remain human and idealistic and gullible. Someone must provide a road-map and travel guide for intellectual as well as physical spheres.
Born in England, Freda Utley’s social conscience in the 1920s and early thirties caused her to accept the Communist answers to the social problems of that time. Later, she married a Russian and went to live in Moscow where she witnessed the realities of what Communism in practice was really like. After her husband was arrested by Stalin’s police, she returned to the West and told the world the truth about Communism in her book, The Dream We lost.
But Freda Utley discovered the evil of communism while many of the liberal intellectuals in the West were of the opinion that a workers’ paradise was being created in the Soviet Union. She became a “premature anti-Communist,” and her life was radically altered as a result. When she came to America she found that, despite her impressive academic credentials, the doors to the Academy were closed to her, as were most literary outlets.
Her father used to recount a story about his bachelor days. His “laundress,” as the Temple chairwomen were called, had come to him one day with a woebegone face and said: “Sir, you have seen my pretty daughter?” “Yes, and a nice attractive girl she is.” “Well, Sir, a terrible thing has happened; she has fallen and I don’t know what to do.” After Freda’s father had commiserated with her, she remarked with a Juliet’s nurse smirk: “She would fall again for a trifle, Sir.”
In her memoirs, Odyssey Of A Liberal, Freda points out that, “In later years, I often recalled this story because it seemed opposite to the behavior of Communist promises and of a good time to be had by all and later, disillusioned with ‘Uncle Joe Stalin’ after the war, they are still today all too ready to ‘fall for a trifle,’ whenever it suits the Kremlin’s purpose to appear conciliatory.”
The lessons which Freda Utley learned in Russia in the nineteen thirties are, she pointed out, relevant to the present period as well “…because so many of those who now control the destiny of the newly independent states of Asia and Africa harbor the same illusions about socialism as I had in the twenties. Listening to Nehru in the fifties was like an echo of my own youth when I knew and understood as little about Communism as he did until the end of his life.”
Freda Utley’s path diverged from those intellectuals who remained unaware of Communism’s true nature because she put her own beliefs to the test. She noted that, “…it was precisely because they never fully committed themselves to the Communist cause that they continued to believe in it. Those of us who fully engage ourselves in the causes we believe in submit our ideals to the hard test of personal experience. By publicly professing our opinions, we risk being proved wrong, or being defeated, and having to take our punishment. But those who refrain from risking ‘their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor’ in any cause…have no right to call themselves idealists or liberals.
Freda also presents some insight into two of the intellectual giants of this century, George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell. Shaw was blind to Communism’s real nature, while Russell understood it very clearly. She recounts that when she returned to England in 1931 for a brief visit, she stayed with the Russells in Hampshire and “…I believed that the horrible society I was living in (Russia) was Stalin’s creation and that if Lenin had lived, or if Trotsky’s policies had been followed, all would have been well. Bertie would bang his fist on the table and say, ‘No! Freda, can’t you understand even now that the conditions you describe followed naturally from Lenin’s premises and Lenin’s acts. Will you never learn and stop being romantic about politics.’”
Later on, Freda tried to enlist George Bernard Shaw’s in gaining her husband’s release from a Soviet prison. Shaw wrote, on July 8, 1937, the “…five years will not last forever, that imprisonment under the Soviet is not as bad as it is here in the West; and that when I was in Russia and inquired about certain engineers who had been sentenced to 10 years for sabotage, I learnt that they were at large and in high favor after serving two years of their sentence.” Freda Utley’s husband was not so fortunate, but was executed along with millions of others during Stalin’s bloody reign.
How reminiscent this statement of Shaw’s is to many of the things we hear today. Our so-called “revisionist” historians tell us that it was the United States which started the Cold War. We have been told that Mao and Castro and the Viet Cong and the Sandinistas were not really Communists, but “nationalists” and “reformers.” Even some who once seemed to know better now tell us that the Soviet Union no longer seeks to communize the world.
Freda Utley was one of those rare people who saw the terror of Communism first hand, tried to warn the world of its evil, and was shunned by the world for it was not ready for her story. She was, as she liked to say, “premature.”
Freda was a liberal in the 19th century sense of that word. She suffered notably at the hands of those illiberal intellectuals who improperly call themselves “liberal” today. Her life and her works are testimony to the fact that one life can make a difference. Hers surely has. It is fitting that she be memorialized at Freedom Foundation, a distinguished institution which seeks to transmit the values for a free society to students, teachers, and the larger American society. Jon Utley, Freda’s son, is carrying on her work and it was good for her old friends and colleagues to gather – a decade after her death – to remember.
Henry Regnery – Keeping an Idea Alive
James Kilpatrick
Nearly 200 American writers and teachers, all of them identified with the conservative cause, gathered here in Chicago the other night to honor a benefactor and to renew old bonds. Liberals, of course, have such occasions also; they are indispensable to the keeping of any faith; and they remind us anew of the importance of ritual in the survival of civilized man.
Our own modest consistory was summoned to pay homage to Henry Regnery, founder and new chairman of the board of the publishing house that bears his name. Henry is a diminutive fellow, maybe five-feet-six, slender as a snap bean, but he stands pencil straight and his placid face belies a stubborness within. He is 60 years old, but in the past 25 years he has not gained a pound or added a wrinkle.
* * *
These were the 25 years we recognized last week – the quarter century since Henry at 35, plunged into the perilous waters of the book publishing business. He set out in Chicago, of all places, to publish books by conservatives of all people; and for nearly two decades, until Arlington House and the Conservative Book Club came along. Henry and Devin Adair Garrity in New York were the only two such lunatics in the land. Bless them. O Lord!
You have to be a professional writer, perhaps, to understand that invocation fully. The act of writing, in itself, is among the most agonizing occupations ever contrived by man; but to write futilely – to write and not get published – is to know the tortures of the damned. It is like the tree that falls in the desert: Does anyone hear? Without a publisher, a writer is an unstrung fiddle; other instruments are playing. He is mute.
Henry Regnery made it his mission to string us up. He challenged the orchestrated liberalism of the whole book publishing world – not merely the houses themselves, but also the book reviewers, the periodicals, the critics who can make or break a title in the market. Then, as now, the media were dominated by intellectuals hostile to conservative thought. Henry took on the whole crew.
Thus, when it was highly fashionable to praise the Chinese Communists, those agrarian reformers, he published Freda Utley’s “The China Story,” one of the most powerful anti-Communist works of our time. When progressive education was all the rage, he sought out Mortimer Smith, and thereby introduced in the groves of academe a cool Establishment with Bill Buckley’s “God and Man at Yale.” In 1957, when liberals ruled the Southern roost, he sought a conservative in Richmond and let the young cock grow.
* * *
Most significantly, he discovered in Mecosta, Mich., up in the burnt-woods country, a ruddy little Scot whose pedantic image concealed a quick and lively passion. This was Russell Kirk, teacher and philosopher. His seminal work, “The Conservative Mind,” remains after nearly 20 years the one best starting point for an understanding of contemporary conservative thought.
What did Henry glean from his labors? Personal satisfaction, little more. Relatively speaking, he rarely made a dime. In the whole of the 25 years, only a handful of his titles, by the most generous accounting, ever ranked as best-sellers. But he had a wonderful time.
So the clan gathered to pay him honor, and as such ritual proceedings go, this one went very nicely. The preliminary speakers rambled on too long, but Bill Buckley, as principal orator of the evening, was exactly right. He recalled Whitaker Chambers’ vivid description of the typical tiny shop on a side street of a great city. Here no customer is ever seen. A curious visitor, wondering what the shop conceals, finds at a dimly lit desk in the rear an old man who lovingly offers a few bolts of hand-crafted cloth – fabric not meant to sell, but merely to endure. So, too, with Henry, keeper of the conservative store.
* * *
Every faith must have its Henry. The liberals have theirs, and I would pay them homage also. Someone has to keep the tablets, if only to preserve the possibility of enduring truth against the casual destruction of the passing hour.
Sokolsky’s THESE DAYS: 400,000,000 Lost Allies
By George E. Sokolsky
This is a good time to read Freda Utley’s “The China Story,” a new book which sets out to establish by facts how the United States lost 400,000,000 allies. Freda Utley knows the Far East and has written competently concerning it. She states her conclusions:
“One thing is certain, Communist conquest of a large part of the world since the defeat of Germany and Japan, and the threat of even greater conquests, was not unavoidable. In the first part of this book, I shall show how what we did – and what we failed to do – in the Far East led us straight down the path to war in Korea.”
This is a bare-to-the-bone, fact upon fact account of how the United States, by error and lack of understanding, not only gave China to Soviet Russia, but brought the Korean War upon us.
In view of the increasing velocity of the quarrel over facts between General Douglas MacArthur and President Truman, it will be advantageous to check what appears among the controversial writers on the subject against Miss Utley’s summary of events.
Any understanding of the Far Eastern situation, no matter where one’s partisanship lies, must go back to Yalta, the Far Eastern terms of which Miss Utley summarizes as follows:
“1. The ‘lease’ of Port Arthur to Russia as a naval base;
“2. The ‘internationalization’ of Dairen with ‘preeminent rights’ for the Soviet Union in this largest of China’s Northeastern ports;
“3. The ‘joint operation’ of the Manchurian Railways by China and Russia, with the ‘preeminent interests’ of the Soviet Union safeguarded.”
* * *
It was in pursuit of the Yalta terms that General Marshall was sent to China to manage, cajole, arrange or force Chiang Kai-shek to conform to this agreement, to which neither he nor China was a party. A memorandum by Secretary of State James Byrnes (1945) on this subject stated:
“Pending the outcome of General Marshall’s discussions with Chinese leaders in Chungking . . . further transportation of Chinese troops to North China, except as North China ports may be necessary for the movement of troops and supplies into Manchuria, will be held in abeyance.”
In other words, sanctions were imposed upon our Ally and friend, Nationalist China, in the interest of Soviet Russia. This appeasement has already resulted in the death of more than 10,500 Americans and more than 62,000 casualties.
General Marshall has never understood either China or communism. Apparently he could not, even in 1947, grasp the nature of Russian imperialism nor the extent of international Marxism.
He seemed to be astonished that Chiang Kai-shek would not form an alliance with the Communists and, as Miss Utley says, he accepted the Marxist definition of a reactionary.
* * *
This is what General Marshall declared on January 7, 1947:
“On the side of the National Government, which …. Effect the Kuomintang, there is a dominant group of …actionaries who have been opposed, in my opinion, …. Every effort I have made to influence the form…… genuine coalition Government … they were quite frank in publicly stating that their belief that cooperation by the Chinese Communist Party in the Government was inconceivable and that only a policy of force could settle the issue.”
Miss Utley is a former Communist who has devoted much of her life, at great….. office, to undo the ….. party. She says of ….
“I FIRST MET o … IN April 1936 in . I had been living …… years as the wife (a Soviet citizen …… member of the Communist Party. I was employed as a research worker in the Pacific Ocean section of the Institute of World Economy and Politics.
“This institute had become the Russian branch of the Institute of Pacific Relations a year or so earlier when the Kremlin switched over to the ‘popular front’ policy, and the Communist Academy (of which the institute formed a part) was rechristened Academy of Sciences.
“for the benefit of the visiting Americans, a room had been taken in another part of town and a notice put up saying ‘Soviet Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.
“It was here that E. C. C…. president of the American Institute, and Owen Lattimore were first received by the Communists at the Institute. As I had left the Communist Party years earlier, I could not attend their private meetings . . .”