Killed perhaps by their proxies, tribal warfare?
No, they were actually killed as the Belgians were trying to get the rubber plantations going. The way they treated them, the way they showed King Leopold how many people they’d killed, is all documented. They cut off their hands, or their thumbs, and sent them back in parcels to Belgium.
So the greatest enemy of the Soviet Union was perhaps England, would you say, in the postrevolutionary years?
I think England was probably the most intelligent and conscious enemy of the Russian Revolution, seeing it for the threat that it was. But the Germans weren’t too far behind. I think because England was never really threatened by a revolution, the impact of the Russian Revolution in Britain was not as great as it was on the European continent. It was significant, but the reason Britain hated the Russians primarily was because the British Empire was threatened, not because they were threatened internally. Because colonized people in Africa and Asia especially saw the Russian Revolution as a gleam of hope. And the British were very panicked by that.
In 1919, in Afghanistan, a king called Amanullah, whose queen was called Soraya, was very impressed by the Russian Revolution, and opened up negotiations with Lenin asking for help against the British. Queen Soraya said we have to follow the path of Russia and Turkey, and liberate our women. So the proposed constitution of Afghanistan from this period, which was drafted in 1919, would have given women the right to vote. If that constitution had been implemented, women would have had the right to vote in Afghanistan before they did in the United States, and certainly in Europe. And then the British said that this is leading in a very bad direction, and organized a tribal revolt to get rid of that particular king and queen in Afghanistan.
The British who invaded Baku, protecting the oil fields there, were they a ferocious army? Who was responsible for the greatest amount of killing of the Russian revolutionaries?
I think it was a combination, but the British were strongly involved in killing—especially during the civil war, the early period of the revolution. The British had lost an entire generation of young men in the First World War, but that never stopped them, because they felt the stakes were very high, and that if there was a revolutionary state established there, this was going to wreck the British Empire. And the British Empire had to be preserved at all costs. What they didn’t see was that the entry of the United States into the First World War was actually, if you think about it now, a very serious death blow against the British Empire. because it showed that the British on their own couldn’t get their way in the world anymore. They needed the United States. They used to think: we will manipulate the United States. It’s a young power, we created them, they speak our own language. We are the experienced people. We will bring them around to our way of thinking. Well, of course, the Americans privately used to laugh at that. They knew that was never going to happen.
Can you describe Woodrow Wilson’s involvement in sending troops to Russia?
The United States, certainly the corporations there, saw the very existence of the Soviet Union after 1917 as a threat. Not that they feared its impact on the United States so greatly, though even there, there was an impact. Remember that it was Wilson’s FBI director and attorney general who expelled large numbers of Italians from the United States, citing the supposed anarchist threat or the Bolshevik threat. People used to go knocking on doors of working-class homes of European migrants who were active in trade unions in US cities, dragging them out in the night, and expelling them. It was a panic, because there was no real threat of a massive Bolshevik party building itself in the United States. But they didn’t want to take the risk. And of course, when you’re panicked like that, a state panics, its leaders panic, its corporate class panics. Then they think, what can we do? Why don’t we destroy the head of this serpent whose tentacles are everywhere? Go and put something in its eye, and that was Russia. So Wilson was very determined to defeat the Russian Revolution in its infancy, but he couldn’t do it. And of course, the Russian Revolution then tragically defeated itself in the 1930s. But that didn’t become obvious to people until the 1950s or the 1960s. So this idea that this was a real threat to the West persisted, and was, of course, the central mythology during the Cold War period—that the Russians had revolutionary aims for Europe, which is why NATO was created, which is why we had to build a massive military-industrial complex to guard and defend the United States against Russia. Well, we now know because of all the documentation that’s now a matter of public record that this was nonsense.
Did the Americans achieve any destruction in Russia that you know of?
Very little. They backed the armies that went into Russia. They helped the counterrevolutionary armies during the civil war. But actually in terms of real destruction, it was minimal compared to what happened later during the Cold War. I mean, there’s nothing on the level of what happened in Vietnam, or Korea, not to mention Japan right at the end of the Second World War. But also, it’s important to remember that the war in the early 1920s was not what it is today. Basically, the machine gun, the Gatling gun, these were the guns which they were using, which seemed very frightening, and they were, but the weaponry was not as advanced as it is today. So those wars, though they took lives, and many people died in hospital beds because there wasn’t enough medical treatment, which is why casualties were so high. Air power, for instance, was barely ever used in that period.
In Baghdad, I think in 1924, “Bomber” Harris—
“Bomber” Harris experimented in Baghdad throwing fire bombs on the Kurdish tribes. Certainly.
Can we talk about the causes of World War II overall, and the US entry into the war? You’ve said some interesting things about Pearl Harbor.
I think that what happened during the Second World War was, one, you had the rise of Germany as an expansionist power determined to revenge itself for the punishments of the First World War. And when Hitler occupied France, he made that explicit. The famous archive footage of the Germans insisting that the French general surrender in the same railway coach in which the Germans had surrendered at the time of the First World War was intended to show the Germans, “We are back.” This is what they did to us during the First World War. Now we have done it to them. But behind all the demagoguery, there was a fairly straightforward imperialist concern on the part of the Germans. Study the speeches of the leaders of the Third Reich closely, Hitler himself, but not just Hitler; go read Goebbels in particular, and study them seriously as political speeches without demonizing them. Just stand apart for a minute. What they are saying is this: Britain is a much smaller country than Germany, but they occupy so much of the world, as Hitler said in one of his speeches. The French, who are the French? They’re much, much, much smaller than us. And look at the countries they occupy. Look at what Belgium occupies. So they should share. We’ve been asking them nicely to share the world with us, to share their colonies, but these guys refuse, so we’re going to go in and teach them, and Germany will become a world power. So that side of the Second World War was a very traditional war between competing empires. Germany, which wanted to be an empire, and the French and the British—and the Belgians—who were empires. So that side of it was very strong. The big question was why the Germans didn’t do more to keep the United States out.