America Last by Jacob Heilbrunn

Author:Jacob Heilbrunn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Liveright
Published: 2024-01-12T00:00:00+00:00

Utley offered what was likely the locus classicus of revisionism about Nazi Germany. Her intellectual journey from socialism to anti-communism turned Utley into an anti-communist heroine to American conservatives, including Russell Kirk and Ronald Reagan. In the New York Times, Kirk called her a “keen polemicist, a gadfly (or perhaps a wasp), and a woman of principle.”32

Utley, who was born on January 23, 1898, in London, grew up in a socialist milieu. Her father, Willie Herbert Utley, was a journalist and the acting secretary of the Fabian Society. She graduated from the London School of Economics, where she became friends with the philosopher Bertrand Russell. As a member of the “ 1917 Club” in London, she became acquainted with leading left-wing intellectuals, poets, artists, and academics, traveling to the Soviet Union in 1927 in the conviction that “the Communists were in the process of creating the best economic and social system which the world had ever known.”33 After marrying a Russian economist named Arcadi Berdichevsky in 1928, she lived in Moscow and grew increasingly disillusioned with real, existing socialism. Her husband was arrested and exiled to Siberia by Stalin’s secret police in 1936, and Utley never saw him again, only learning in 1963 that he had perished at Komi in the Arctic North in March 1938, one of Stalin’s countless victims. Utley flew to England in July 1936 with her son Jon Basil (who became publisher of The American Conservative toward the end of his career).

In December 1939 they boarded a Dutch ship together with Jewish refugees from Austria and Germany bound for America. Utley dedicated herself, as she put it, to “alerting America to the Communist menace.”34 Warning America about communism meant questioning the need to confront Nazism. Utley became a member of the America First movement and published a memoir in September 1940 called The Dream We Lost, which explained that Stalin’s Soviet Union was more evil than Hitler’s Germany.35 She also wrote for an isolationist publication called Common Sense, which displayed little of it. She admired the fact that, far from endorsing Roosevelt and Churchill’s Atlantic Charter of 1941, the magazine recognized that “the Roosevelt-Churchill commitment to the total defeat and disarmament of Germany must lead to a second Versailles with even worse consequences.”

After the Second World War, Reader’s Digest and the isolationist Foundation for Foreign Affairs sent Utley to Germany. The result was The High Cost of Vengeance, which Harry Elmer Barnes helped her to draft. She assailed the Western allies for replicating the mistakes that they had committed after World War I. History, she said, was repeating itself. It wasn’t that the Germans were incapable of democracy. Instead, the victorious armies of the West were blighting Germany’s prospects. While Stalin’s Russia had gobbled up Eastern Europe with the connivance of Roosevelt, the Western allies’ benighted occupation policies had “reduced the defeated enemy country to the status of an African colony.”36 Utley dismissed the idea that Nazi Germany was guilty of unique crimes. “Were the German

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