Suchergebnisse

In A television interview not long after the Cuban missile crisis of October 1962, President Kennedy observed that both the United States and the Soviet Union had made serious miscalculations in the Cuban affair. "I don't think we expected that he [Khrushchev] would put the missiles in Cuba," he said, "because it would have seemed such an imprudent action for him to take He obviously thought he could do it in secret and that the United States would accept it."

Just as the Russo-Yugoslav dispute was reaching its climax, and before the meeting of the Cominform, which issued a detailed condemnation of the Yugoslav Party, a plenum of the Central Committee of the Polish Workers' Party took place. What happened at this plenum of June 3, 1948 is known to us, not directly but from many accounts given at the August 31—September 3 plenum. At the June meeting Secretary General of the Party and Deputy Prime Minister of Poland Gomulka-Wieslaw, (Wieslaw was the party name of Gomulka during the war and it is used throughout the debate), delivered the main report, ostensibly an "historical analysis" of the character of the Polish working class movement. In his speech Gomulka took as the basis of Polish Socialism the tradition of the fervently nationalistic Polish Socialist Party, and condemned the internationalist and Pro-Russian Social Democratic Party of Poland, and by implication as well the pre-1938 Polish Communist Party of which the Workers' Party was supposed to be a continuation in everything but name.

In 1934 Waldemar Gurian had the wriest of pleasures, when he was forced to recognize that his very pessimistic analysis of the National-Socialist movement was correct. He fled from Germany to Switzerland where he was soon joined by his wife and daughter. In the extremely straitened circumstances of an emigré, soon to receive official notification that he was a stateless person, he had to face simultaneously the tasks of earning a living and of carrying on his work as a Catholic writer who combined scholarship and publicism. He was a profound student of Bolshevism. But his study, personal experience and the progress of events emphasized that Europe then faced a more dangerous threat than Russian Bolshevism. The threat stemmed from the control of Germany by the National-Socialists, who skilfully exploited a moral crisis in Germany and all of Europe, to gain and, then systematically and totally, to consolidate power in Germany. The menace to Europe was all the more dire, because the Nazis had disguised their totalitarian movement in the mask of anti-Bolshevism and so the danger went unrecognized.