Transcript
Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News
Episode 6: ‘Hello America, this is Addis Ababa.’
An authoritarian ruler moves to invade a smaller country and take it for himself. People around the world rally to that country’s defense. European and American leaders grapple with how to stop the invasion and prevent a wider war. But this isn’t Russia and Ukraine in 2022. It’s Italy and Ethiopia in 1935. Rachel Maddow and Isaac-Davy Aronson explore what we can learn from the very different choices made decades ago, when the world faced a similar challenge.
Recruiter: What is your address, Mr. Anderson?
Anderson: 225 East 149th Street.
Recruiter: 225 East 129th Street.
Anderson: 149th Street.
Recruiter: Uh-huh. What’s your age, Mr. Anderson?
Anderson: Thirty-seven.
Recruiter: Thirty-seven. What is your weight?
Anderson: A hundred and fifty pounds.
Recruiter: Height?
Rachel Maddow: In the neighborhood of Harlem, in New York City, men are lining up to enlist. They’re volunteering to go to war.
Recruiter: That’s fine. Sign right here on the dotted line.
Maddow: This war is oceans away. And it’s not a war that the United States is even a party to. The U.S. is studiously staying neutral, staying out of the whole thing entirely. But still, a not inconsiderable number of New Yorkers, particularly Black New Yorkers, are lining up to join this fight.
And even though this war is unfolding halfway across the world, and it doesn’t technically involve the United States, a kind of mirror image of the conflict has also started up here, on the streets of New York City.
One headline in The New York Times says 1,200 extra police on war duty here. All those extra New York police officers have been called out because of tension in the streets, because of fighting between African Americans and Italian Americans in New York.
At the King Julius General Market in Harlem, which was home to an Italian butcher and some other Italian shops, Black local residents had started picketing in front of the market. And that led to really aggressive shouting matches between Italian and African American residents. Police were worried enough about it that they stepped in and separated the two sides before things could get violent.
Out at one big public school in Brooklyn, Italian and Black students had beaten each other up after school in a big fight. The next morning, the kids on both sides came back to school with weapons. School officials called in police after they confiscated ice picks and sawed-off pool cues and broom handles and lead pipes.
So, that’s the kind of thing that The New York Times was reporting on. This call-up of more police, a lot more police, was to try to interrupt this pattern, to try to head off this escalating, increasingly hot conflict in the streets. Because who knew how much worse it might get?
The war that was sparking all these fires here at home, it was far away, that was an overseas conflict, and America, as a country, was staying out of it. But a lot of Americans were very deeply invested in it. To them, it was a deeply personal thing.
The year was 1935. It was October 1935, and the nation of Italy was about to invade Ethiopia, the African Kingdom of Abyssinia.
Announcer: American volunteers for service in Ethiopia flocked to sign up. More than 500 have enlisted. Listen to ‘em.
Recruiter: What is your age, Mr. Anderson?
Anderson: Thirty-seven.
Recruiter: Thirty-seven. What is your weight?
Anderson: A hundred and fifty pounds.
Recruiter: Height?
Anderson: Five-foot-three.
Recruiter: Recruiter: Just what is your profession?
Man 1: I’m a physician.
Recruiter: Physician. And then why would you want to go in Ethiopia?
Man 1: Well, I feel it’s my duty to give my profession and, if necessary, my life in the cause of Ethiopia.
Man 2: And I decidedly happy to die to for the defense of entire Africa including Abyssinia.
Recruiter: That’s fine. Sign right here on the dotted line.
Maddow: In 1935, there were only two countries in Africa that were not considered colonies by one European power or another. Only two. And Ethiopia was one of them. So, when Italy moved to attack Ethiopia, to try to turn Ethiopia into an Italian colony, a fascist colony, no less, under dictator Benito Mussolini, many African Americans felt that it was not just this one Black nation under assault. What was under assault was the very notion that a free, independent Black state could exist at all.
And so, they came to its defense. Now, technically, it was illegal for an American to sign up to fight on behalf of any other country when the United States itself wasn’t involved in the fight. But hundreds of African American men, nevertheless, signed up.
Archival Recording: I believe that Abyssinia has a right to exist upon the face of God’s earth like any other nation.
Maddow: One Black American pilot, trained aviator, volunteered his services and was ultimately named commander of the small Ethiopian Air Force. One nurse at Harlem Hospital collected two tons of medical supplies to send to support the war effort. Black New Yorkers formed a coalition with white anti-fascists who were opposed to the Mussolini dictatorship in Italy. They marched 25,000 strong through Harlem to protest Italy’s imminent invasion.
Another 10,000 New Yorkers packed into a rally at Madison Square Garden to hear civil rights leaders speak against fascist aggression and to watch as a 20-foot effigy of Mussolini got destroyed on stage. Now, that opinion was not universal. You could tell by the clashes that were breaking out across the city. Lots of Italian Americans did oppose Mussolini and his invasion, but many others, including New York’s mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, actually supported him.
One Italian New Yorker told reporters that since other European powers had carved up the rest of Africa, why should Italy be any different? Why shouldn’t Italy take what they wanted too?
Archival Recording: I’m an Italian, born in Italy. I served in the World War. As much as a war concerned, I’m very against it. But if Italy wants to expand himself in Abyssinia, for that purpose of taking land to cultivate, I think it’s very much right, because other nations have got their eyes over there. If he don’t go now, other nations will go there later. So, I don’t see any wrong in that.
Maddow: Italian Americans and African Americans were coming down pretty sharply on opposite sides of this question. But broadly speaking, the sentiment most widespread among Americans at this moment, and also among a lot of Europeans, was probably best summed up by this man-on-the-street interview.
Reporter: What is your opinion?
Man: I think that the United States has been in one big brawl, and my advice is, let the other countries fight it out amongst themselves. This country here has seen enough in the last world’s war.
Maddow: This country here has seen enough. That sentiment, that this isn’t our fight, that the other countries of the world should fight it out amongst themselves, that was a sentiment very widely shared in the United States, including by the President of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt.
Franklin D. Roosevelt: The United States of America shall and must remain, as long ago the father of our country prayed that it might remain, unentangled and free.
Maddow: In 1935, it had been less than 20 years since the end of World War I, since the United States and Europe had been embroiled in that cataclysmic global fight that everyone wanted to be the war to end all wars. In 1935, the desperation to avoid more war was palpable, and there was supposed to be a new system in place to stop it from happening again. New rules of the road internationally that were supposed to protect independent countries from being invaded by some aggressor out there.
There was a new international forum where nations could meet as equals and hash out their differences by talking. If talking failed, yes, force was an option, but it wouldn’t just be small or weak countries being victimized by big and strong ones. This was a mutual defense organization, and if one member nation, however small, was threatened, the other member nations were pledged to come to its aid. It was called the League of Nations.
Archival Recording: Serene beneath the snow-capped Alps at Geneva rises the new home of the League of Nations. Europe’s hopes were high that this would be civilization’s finest monument, that through the League, the world would forever rid itself of war.
Maddow: Now, the United States was not a member of the League of Nations, but Ethiopia was, and so was Italy. So, this really should not have been happening, but it was. And as the Italian dictator Mussolini kept threatening that he was going to go invade this other country, Ethiopia had pleaded for the League of Nations to do what it was supposed to do.
They had pleaded for the League of Nations to intervene, but the League had done virtually nothing. So, now, in the fall of 1935, Ethiopia was gearing up to defend itself, basically alone. And of course, it was hoping for help from other countries, but it didn’t look like that was coming. And everyone knew that without that help, Ethiopia’s prospects were dire.
Italy was on the verge of steaming into that country with a giant, modern, mechanized military. And Ethiopia had nothing of the sort with which to defend itself.
So, two huge questions loomed. First of all, and most pressingly, what would happen to Ethiopia itself, to the Abyssinian kingdom and its people? And second, if the world allowed this to happen, what would Mussolini’s Italy, or Hitler’s Germany for that matter, do next?
Crowd: Stand with Ukraine! Stand with Ukraine! Stand with Ukraine!
Maddow: Today, in our own time, people are, once again, pouring into the streets of New York City and cities around the world to say they stand with a country that is facing invasion by an aggressive, larger power. People are standing up in our country and around the world to say they stand with Ukraine,
Crowd: Stop Russia now!
Maddow: against a Russian invasion that has upended years of peace in Europe and the system that has kept that peace. But this time, far from doing nothing, Europe and its allies have come to Ukraine’s defense. Their response has been fairly robust and mostly unified.
It seems to have surprised no one more than the Russians themselves. If this is a similar test to what the world faced in 1935, what can we learn from that time, when the world blinked?
I’m Rachel Maddow, and I’m joined once again by Isaac-Davy Aronson. Hi, Isaac.
Isaac-Davy Aronson: Hi, Rachel.
Maddow: I’m so glad we saved this one for last. I gotta say, this story is part of the whole reason I liked the idea of this podcast at all. This is kind of the whole reason for Déjà News. This is just, to me, an absolutely fascinating case.
Aronson: Well, it’s the story of a dictator invading a smaller, weaker country because he says it’s, by rights, part of his empire. It’s the story of that smaller country calling on Europe and America for help and the choices Europe and America made in response.
And it’s the story of the courage and commitment required in moments like these, even if your goal, maybe especially if your goal, is to avoid the worst of harm and bloodshed.
Maddow: If the world is facing a similar set of choices today, but is making the opposite decision now from what we did decades ago, well, what can that tell us about the stakes of our decisions now and how this might all go?
So, once more with feeling. Let’s do this. This is “Rachel Maddow Presents: Déjà News.”
Archival Recording: In late 1935, all England heard that Italy was embarking her fascist army, sending ships and men through Suez. Their destination: Ethiopia.
Maddow: It was not a secret that Italy’s fascist leader, Benito Mussolini, was preparing to start a war. He was preparing to invade Ethiopia, the Kingdom of Abyssinia, to turn that sovereign country into a colony of Italy.
The Italian military was loading up boats with troops, staking out positions along Ethiopia’s borders. Mussolini had been openly saying for years that Ethiopia really ought to be part of a new Italian empire. Almost all of Africa was under colonial rule by various European powers. So, why shouldn’t Italy be allowed to take what it wanted? And even if Italy shouldn’t be allowed to do that, well, who was going to stop them?
That was the very pressing, very practical question in the summer of 1935. And that’s where Isaac picks up the story. I’ll be back with you on the other side.
Aronson: By 1935, there had been peace in Europe for over a decade and a half, since the end of World War I. And even though people obviously did not call it World War I yet, they weren’t terribly confident that it was the last big war they were going to see.
Deborah Cohen: People were thinking, when does the next war start?
Aronson: This is Northwestern University history professor, Deborah Cohen.
Cohen: And they would describe each other as, oh, him, he’s an end of ‘36er, or her, she’s a beginning of ‘37er. Meaning that they all understood that a war was imminent, that it wasn’t a question of whether it was going to come, but when it would come.
Aronson: When it would come, and how it would come. What would be the crisis that set it off? And could that crisis be avoided?
Cohen: The Italians were moving troops. They were stationing them on the border of Abyssinia. They were bringing hundreds of thousands of troops through the Suez Canal, of course controlled by the British at that time. All of these ships coming were full of munitions and supplies.
So, there was the sense that an invasion was going to come really any day. And in fact, the British prime minister interrupts his vacation in the summer of 1935 to come back to London early. And as the reporters say to each other, this is the worst crisis for the British since the start of the First World War.
Aronson: Abyssinia was a member of the League of Nations. Members were supposed to come to each other’s defense in the face of aggression. Britain and France, Europe’s two major powers and the de facto leaders of the League, were faced with two questions. Should Mussolini be stopped? And if so, what should be done to stop him? Britain prepared its armed forces for the possibility of war.
Archival Recording: At the Suez Canal, England’s warships prepare for action. In Little Malta on the Mediterranean, the British men of war lie grimly in the harbor, ready to strike for king and country.
Aronson: Britain’s leaders believed in the mutual defense principles of the League of Nations. They said — they pledged — they would not allow a fellow League of Nations member to be invaded. And Britain had a unique lever of power to stop the invasion. Britain controlled the Suez Canal, which Italy needed to move its troops and supplies into position.
So, Britain had the means and the motive to stop Mussolini’s invasion. But the cost of doing it would be high. Britain believed that if it blocked access to the Suez Canal, Italy would see that as an act of war. It would mean that Britain and Italy were at war with each other. And Britain just desperately did not want that.
Susan Pedersen: The British public assumes that under no circumstances will Britain go to war over this question. They assume that. And when there are public opinion soundings, everyone is both anti-Italian aggression and anti-war. And that’s the problem.
Aronson: This is Columbia University history professor and expert on the League of Nations, Susan Pedersen. She says it’s impossible to overstate the lasting, ongoing trauma Europe was still experiencing from World War I.
Pedersen: The reaction against the war in Britain was so powerful. There’s this culture of kind of not quite pacifism, but they look back at the war and it seems like it was so much suffering and they can’t think of what the point was. These countries are living with huge numbers of everywhere you turn, you’ll see disabled soldiers. Everyone has lost friends and relatives. And so, of course, they can’t believe they’re facing another possible war.
Aronson: As people in Europe and all over the world worried about where that war might come from, Italy wasn’t necessarily top of the list of countries everyone was worried about. At the time, Italy was ostensibly allied with Britain and France. They were all in the League of Nations together.
Germany seemed more worrying. Germany under Adolf Hitler had left the League, saying that Germany needed freedom to build up its military without answering to anyone else about it.
Pedersen: The French are so anxious about the Germans, they’re perfectly willing to give Italy anything it wants to keep Italy in an alliance with Britain and France against Germany.
Aronson: So, France would do anything to keep Italy happy to avoid war. Britain also would do almost anything to avoid war. The United States was an ocean away practicing studious neutrality. But this crisis was real and needed a response.
From the Abyssinian capital of Addis Ababa, that country’s leader was in the midst of basically a worldwide public relations campaign to try to save his country. His name was Emperor Haile Selassie.
Archival Recording: The emperor broadcasts an impassioned plea to the outside world to save Ethiopia from Italian conquest. And an American radio man introduces the emperor especially to America.
Reporter: Hello, America, this is Addis Ababa.
Haile Selassie: (Foreign language).
Archival Recording: He defends his country’s cause, calls upon the world to stop the war, and declares that Ethiopia is firmly for peace.
Selassie: (Foreign language).
Archival Recording: A nation praying for peace but ready to fight to the last. Rome deciding war. The League of Nations preparing to impose penalties. The clash of arms, the thunders of battle seem more terrifying. As at the radio station of Addis Ababa, the emperor Haile Selassie pleads for peace.
Aronson: A number of things made Haile Selassie an incredibly compelling figure far beyond his country’s borders. For one, he was the leader of the last independent kingdom in Africa, a kingdom that claimed never to have been conquered in the several millennia of its existence. This made him a hero and an icon for Pan-African movements and for Black populations around the world. There were rallies supporting the Abyssinian cause not just in Harlem but in South Africa and in the Caribbean.
Abyssinia had even defeated Italy during an attempted invasion a few decades earlier. The decisive battle of that conflict achieved mythic status in both countries. Mussolini now saw himself as avenging a humiliating defeat, while Abyssinia’s previous victory allowed for the hope that they might repel Italy once more.
That said, everyone knew that really, there was no such hope this time. Italy, this time, would be bearing down on Abyssinia with a fully modern armored mechanized military. Abyssinia had almost nothing but rusty old rifles and a handful of tiny planes. Haile Selassie’s only hope was to convince other countries to come to his aid. And so, he appealed to the League of Nations.
Archival Recording: The only means of communication with the outside world is this radio. Strike it down and Addis Ababa is isolated. And the Italians will try to strike it down at once. An instant target for the bombing planes will be this radio station. Here is where they radio the emperor’s protests to the League of Nations, and right now they’re flashing Ethiopia’s case to the powers of the world.
Aronson: Selassie didn’t just appeal to the League of Nations and other world leaders. He also appealed directly to the world public. Here’s Deborah Cohen again.
Cohen: In this battle for public opinion, he understands that that international press is going to carry the story of his people and his war. And so, the correspondents get there to Addis.
Archival Recording: As the Ethiopian war seems more and more certain, into Addis Ababa flock newspapermen from all over the world.
Cohen: They’re bored.
Archival Recording: As interminable reign postpones the actual fighting, the newsmen at Addis have little to do but read reports of attempts to stop the threatening war.
Cohen: Haile Selassie puts on a big banquet for them, a lavish banquet with fricassee chicken and ice cream, which you can imagine is difficult to keep in good shape amidst rain and extreme heat. And the reason Selassie is doing that is because he wants to show just how modern and modernizing his kingdom is. He’s making a bid for Western civilization to actually sit up and pay attention to the plight of his kingdom.
Aronson: The League of Nations was bound to protect Ethiopia. It was under pressure from this very effective leader, Haile Selassie. It was also under pressure from a largely sympathetic press corps and public. And so, the League reached into its toolbox to try and find some way to help that wouldn’t put all of Europe back at war again. The League decided it would hit Italy with limited economic sanctions.
Here’s Susan Pedersen again.
Pedersen: They agree to impose sanctions and 51 states impose sanctions. The problem is those sanctions don’t include oil.
Aronson: 1935 headline in the New York Times said, quote, “Italy dreads blow of an oil embargo. Cutting off of supplies would bring Ethiopian campaign to a standstill and cripple all life at home.” An oil embargo against Italy would probably have worked, just like blocking them from the Suez Canal probably would have worked.
But in both cases, the European powers worried that these measures were too strong, that Italy would be too upset, that exerting this kind of force against Italy would be enough to set off another huge war between the countries of Europe. In a smaller headline further down the same page of that day’s paper, there it was. “Powers hesitate to hurt Mussolini, delay in cutting off oil supply for fear of goading him into a European war.”
Pedersen: Certainly, within France and pretty much within Britain at the level of government, the service chiefs and the Foreign Office advisors, for instance, don’t want oil to be embargoed precisely because they think it will hit Italy very hard and thus will escalate matters. And they don’t see much reason to go to war with Italy over a territory in East Africa. That’s the bottom line there.
Aronson: It almost goes without saying that race and colonialism played a decisive role in determining which people European leaders felt were, quote unquote, “worth” going to war for. But there was a fundamental principle of the post-World War I order at stake here. All members of the League of Nations were supposed to have equal rights.
Pedersen: Those rights are supposed to be defended by the League. And the Italo-Abyssinian conflict is the test case for that. It’s the case where Ethiopia does appeal to the League. Sanctions are imposed. And then everybody kind of says, huh, you know, what next?
In the end, they basically decide they cannot do anything. They will not do anything to defend Ethiopia. And that means you have this very sad story of them scheming to come up with an agreement that Italy might accept.
Aronson: That sad story about that scheming, it gets told in Deborah Cohen’s book, “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial.” It’s about American foreign correspondents reporting on the rise of fascism in Europe in the 1930s. Cohen tells the story through the experience of one of those correspondents, John Gunther.
John Gunther was a really well-known, really influential foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News. He had heard the British foreign minister guaranteeing the sovereignty of Abyssinia at the League of Nations.
Cohen: Gunther has heard that. He assumes that the British, with their ideas of fair play and honor, are going to do what they said that they were going to do.
Aronson: But then the British and the French got together and came up with a very different plan.
Cohen: In December 1935, British papers break a story that they’ve made a secret deal. And that deal is going to give the Italians, Mussolini, half of Haile Selassie’s territory. And then the war will be over.
Gunther, like many other people, is horrified. His friends say to Gunther, you know, why are you so surprised by this? This is just the way that diplomacy happens. Of course, did you actually think that the British are going to fight for the Abyssinians? Come on, you know, get real. What Gunther believes is that people are going to be so shocked and so outraged that it’s actually going to force the League to act.
Aronson: And people are shocked and outraged. So much so that not only do the British and French abandon their secret plan, the whole thing is such a scandal, leading politicians in both countries are forced to resign. The leaders are embarrassed about the fact that they’re not standing up for Ethiopia, their ally, particularly after pledging that they would.
But they can’t come up with a way to defend Ethiopia that doesn’t risk a full-blown European war. And while the public does want Ethiopia defended, they also don’t want to send their sons and brothers and husbands and fathers off to fight again.
Cohen: Fundamentally, however sympathetic public opinion is, and it is very sympathetic, that’s very different from people wanting to send their own sons to die in Abyssinia.
Aronson: Britain and other European nations were still reeling from the last great war. They could feel the next one brewing, and they were desperately trying to figure out a path to avoid it. Going to war with Italy to stop them from launching this faraway invasion, that was one option. Another option was just letting Italy do it, letting Italy devour Abyssinia, an African country, a non-white country, a country that many Europeans felt shouldn’t even be in the League of Nations to begin with.
If an illegal, unjustified, aggressive invasion there would forestall the war in Europe, that was not a hard choice for most European leaders. Even if, according to Susan Pedersen, it was a choice some of them weren’t proud to make.
Pedersen: I think this is the episode where people start realizing you can’t make Africa pay the price for peace in Europe over and over an d over and over, right? I mean, that’s the old way to solve great power conflict. They solve their disputes by handing territories which will then be full of British subjects but not citizens, or French subjects but not citizens. And I think this is a moment where there’s a great deal of shame about having bought peace at this price.
Aronson: And the price was high.
Archival Recording: The Italian airplanes, completely unopposed, flitted through the skies over Abyssinia and dropped their bombs. Seventeen hundred people were reported killed in the war’s first air raid.
Haile Selassie, through his official spokesman, protested to the League of Nations over the bombing of helpless noncombatants. The League nodded in agreement and did nothing.
Aronson: Another of the American correspondents that Deborah Cohen writes about, H.R. Knickerbocker, was there when the first bombs fell.
Cohen: Knickerbocker and the other foreign correspondents are camping out on the grounds of an American hospital. He hears the noise of the bombers and he comes out and an incendiary bomb explodes about 10 feet away from him. Now it’s a small incendiary bomb, so he is not injured, but the wounds that he sees are unfathomable to him.
Women clutching limbs that have basically been severed, waiting all night for surgery. The houses bombed to smithereens, all the buildings. So, this is a devastating set of bombing raids. The Italians are running around talking about civilization and the fact that they’re upholding civilization, even as they’re bombing civilians and using poison gas on civilians.
And Knickerbocker says for his readers in the newspapers, this is the gift that Italian “civilization,” quote-unquote, brings to these “barbarous lands,” and again, quote unquote.
Aronson: Here’s Susan Pedersen again.
Pedersen: It was brutal and people could see that. They are fighting a in some ways dirtier war, partly because they feel time isn’t on their side. The League might actually get its act together. Oil sanctions might come in. They want to move fast.
And so, they do move fast. It’s a modern war with bombardment. The Ethiopians don’t have the capacity to really defend themselves against that.
Archival Recording: Rifle pits and riflemen against an onrush of bombing planes, tanks, machine guns, flamethrowers, and modern infantry. Cavalry with tribal spears and modern rifles ready to face machine guns and heavy artillery. A nation deprived of modern war equipment, preparing to meet the latest machinery of death, the ultra-modern legions of Rome.
Aronson: Some estimates put civilian deaths from the Italian onslaught in the hundreds of thousands, from aerial bombardment of villages and hospitals, and mustard gas dropped from planes. While his country was reeling from the assault, Abyssinian Emperor Haile Selassie told a correspondent that his country’s resistance was not just about their own survival.
Cohen: He says something very striking. I copied it out because I think it’s worth saying. Selassie says, in fighting on until the bitter end, I am not only performing my sacred duty to my people, but standing guard in the last citadel of collective security.
Aronson: Despite dogged resistance from the outmanned and under-equipped Ethiopians, Italy conquered Abyssinia in about seven months. Forced to flee his country in May 1936, Emperor Haile Selassie made one final appearance at the League of Nations.
Archival Recording: When Ethiopia’s fugitive emperor comes to plead for his conquered people, Italian enemies jeer him down.
Aronson: At the League, Italy’s foreign minister, Mussolini’s son-in-law, handed out whistles to Italian journalists in the hall. When Haile Selassie rose to speak, they used the whistles to drown him out. You can hear that remarkable moment in newsreel tape. Haile Selassie starts his remarks by greeting the presiding officer of the League of Nations. You’ll hear him say, Mr. President, in French, and then the whistles and jeers begin.
Selassie: (Foreign language).
Archival Recording: (Whistles and jeers).
Aronson: Eventually the Italians were removed from the hall and Selassie was able to speak. He described the suffering inflicted on his people by the Italians’ poison gas. He rebuked the League for failing to come to their aid. Prophetically, Selassie warned the League not just of the cost to his nation, but also of the, quote, doom that impends from giving in to fascist aggression.
Archival Recording: Doom that impends if it bows before fascist aggression. The League of Nations is on trial. God and History will be your judge. His plea ignored, Haile Selassie becomes a lonely exile.
Maddow: Haile Selassie’s warning was indeed prophetic. Within a few years, all of Europe and much of the world would be engulfed in war against Italy and Germany and Japan. With British help, Haile Selassie was returned to power in Ethiopia during World War II, the very war Europe had hoped to avoid by letting Selassie fall, by sacrificing his country.
And so, on one level, the story is a pretty clear cautionary tale. If you give aggressors an inch, they’ll take a mile. If you make a threat or a promise that you don’t back up, expect no one to ever trust you again.
This whole debacle was certainly the end of the League of Nations. Once the League showed with such humiliating clarity that it couldn’t or wouldn’t do what it promised to do, it never recovered its legitimacy. So, there is a lot here that’s just a straight up morality tale.
But beyond that very stark truth of it, the complexities of the story are just as illuminating. Europe, of course, now is facing its first war of aggression since World War II. An expansionist Russia under a fascist authoritarian leader has invaded Ukraine. And Ukraine has turned to its allies for help.
Ukraine’s leader says he’ll fight to the very, very end, not just for his own people, but for civilization and for collective security. And even as Ukraine’s allies have offered far, far more help than Ethiopia ever got all those decades ago, Europe and America remain consumed now by questions of how much and what kind of help to give, how to defend this country that’s been attacked while also avoiding a broader conflict. What status should Ukraine have in the modern global order? And what happens next if Russia isn’t stopped from invading and taking over this sovereign country?
Also, once again, for lots of people around the world, even people far from Ukraine with no direct connection to the fight, this conflict feels raw and personal. It is a faraway battle, a faraway fight, but it also lives here at home. And that’s ahead when Déjà News continues.
Joe Biden: The people of Ukraine remain unbroken, unbroken. Ukraine remains independent. It remains free. And the United States has built a coalition of more than 50 nations to make sure Ukraine defends itself both now and is able to do it in the future as well.
We will not waver. We will not waver. I mean that. Our commitment to Ukraine will not weaken. We will stand for liberty and freedom today, tomorrow, and for as long as it takes.
Maddow: President Biden speaking in Lithuania on July 12th. He was there for a NATO summit where the guest of honor was the president of Ukraine, Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The big question at this year’s NATO summit was of course whether and when Ukraine might become the newest member of NATO. Ukraine wants to do that. They want a clear path to join NATO for obvious reasons. The whole point of the NATO alliance is that you can’t attack a single member of NATO without incurring the wrath of all of them.
Within NATO, an attack on one is treated as an attack on all. And of course, Ukraine is very much under attack by Russia. President Biden and other NATO members say they don’t want Ukraine joining NATO right now while that war is going on because that would mean world war with Russia, effectively. It would oblige the United States and all the other NATO nations to go to war with Russia in order to defend Ukraine.
And as much as the U.S. and the rest of our NATO allies stand against Russia and are critical of Russia and are opposing Russia for their invasion of Ukraine, nobody wants to go to war with Russia unless they absolutely have to. So, this year’s NATO summit ended with an agreement that Ukraine will join NATO someday, eventually, but there is no clear timeline. And that means the tension over Ukraine’s international status remains.
That said, the unwavering commitment that President Biden spoke about, so far that has been real. Through 18 months of Russia’s assault, the U.S. and its allies have remained strikingly unified in their support of Ukraine. It’s a degree of unity that has been a surprise to a lot of people, including, apparently, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin. He clearly was not counting on Ukraine having quite this much international support.
So, we’re feeling our way along a different path now, with an international response now to the crisis in Ukraine that’s very different than the international response when Italy invaded Ethiopia all those decades ago. It’s a similar kind of test for the world, but the response this time is different. We are traveling a different course now.
Here’s Isaac with that part of the story.
Aronson: When Italy invaded Ethiopia in 1935, European and American empathy was limited by, among other things, racism. This was something happening in an African country, to African people. Bluntly, it was also just happening far away. If sacrificing a far-away African country would head off a second world war, then America and the major European powers decided, so be it.
But of course, it didn’t work. It didn’t head off a new world war. And so, in our time, when Russia rolled its tanks into Ukraine, the images that came to mind were from the catastrophic global conflict which powerful countries had tried to prevent by sacrificing a far-away nation that they could have saved.
Anne Applebaum: All of the pictures looked like September 1939. It looked like the outbreak of World War II. The women at the train stations, the tanks rolling across the fields. It was very, very familiar.
Aronson: This is journalist Anne Applebaum, who was in Ukraine earlier this year.
Applebaum: I think the sight of tanks fighting in a European war had a galvanizing effect everywhere. Certainly in Germany, you know, certainly in Poland, certainly the Baltic states, certainly among many in France and Britain. It immediately looked to people like something they hadn’t seen in 60 years, 70 years, and it was immediately understood by most of the current European leadership, actually, as posing a direct security threat in the future.
So, that explains the reaction. It wasn’t just a moral reaction. It wasn’t posturing. It was, oh, this is a real threat to all of the peace and stability of all of our countries.
Aronson: Even so, feeling threatened doesn’t automatically suggest the same course of action to everyone. In the mid-1930s, people in Europe were terrified of a land war breaking out in Europe, like the one we’re seeing now. But people differed on how best to prevent it.
You remember John Gunther and H.R. Knickerbocker, the two American foreign correspondents Deborah Cohen wrote about. As she told us, John Gunther was disgusted that Britain wasn’t going to defend Abyssinia. And not just because it was morally wrong. He thought Mussolini needed to be stopped to show that aggression from fascist dictators wouldn’t be tolerated.
H.R. Knickerbocker was appalled by Italy’s invasion as well, by the carnage and terror as the first bombs fell. But he came home believing Europe should not be helping the Abyssinians.
Cohen: He’s horrified by a lot of what he sees there, and yet he comes home saying, essentially, this war is over. And really, says Knickerbocker, all that’s important is for the British and the French to keep Mussolini on their side. What he wants is for the Italians to not be pushed into the arms of the Germans.
Aronson: Faced with only bad options, where the choices seem to be not war or no war, but this war or that war, big war or small war, people who want peace can arrive at very different conclusions. Even John Gunther and his wife, also a journalist, had deep disagreements over this.
Cohen: John Gunther’s wife, Frances, says to him, he says, you know, well, we have to stop Mussolini. We have to teach him a lesson. And she says back, you think Mussolini, Hitler actually learn lessons? No, they don’t.
These are the lines in the sand that are being drawn through the ‘30s. The idea is, can you stop the dictators? And if you can stop them, should you? Are you obliged? Are they actually going to be stoppable?
Aronson: It was precisely this kind of earnest but paralyzing disagreement between husbands and wives, between friends and colleagues, between political leaders and nations, that Vladimir Putin may have counted on when he marched into Ukraine.
Applebaum: The expectation that America and Europe wouldn’t care or would be divided or wouldn’t defend Ukraine were wrong. And that was Putin’s expectation, and many people in the West had that expectation.
Aronson: Anne Applebaum again. She says Putin didn’t need to go back to the 1930s for examples of Europe and America failing to respond to aggression. He just needed to look to his own experience in Ukraine over the previous few years.
Applebaum: When Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, and when it invaded Eastern Ukraine, the Donbas, soon afterwards, there was some Western support for Ukraine. There were some sanctions on Russia. Russia was kicked out of the G8, which is once again now the G7. But there was not a full halt in trade with Russia.
The pipelines that were being constructed from Russia to Germany continued. Russia remained a part of the international system. While there were some weapons that went to Ukraine, it wasn’t anything like the scale of what we’re seeing now. So, Putin’s experience with the West was that the West isn’t going to defend Ukraine.
Aronson: Applebaum says the response this time around has been different not just because European countries fear they could be next. It’s because Vladimir Putin says they could be next.
Applebaum: Putin himself uses the language of autocracy against democracy. Putin is the one who talks about the liberal degenerate West that needs to be dismantled. In his alliance with China, with Iran, with Venezuela, with Belarus, with Cuba, he has created the idea that there’s a kind of loose sort of trade union of autocracies that work together to push back, firstly, against their own democratic oppositions. That’s of course their main goal.
But in addition to that, against the democratic world. Although, for many years, for the last couple of decades, we didn’t really see that as a threat. We didn’t see the rise of autocracy as something that threatened us personally.
Aronson: And you don’t necessarily have to feel threatened physically to feel threatened personally. People in Europe, particularly in Eastern Europe, may look at Putin’s invasion and worry about tanks rolling over their borders. But like the rallies in New York City, like the rallies across the globe for Abyssinia in 1935, there are Ukrainian flags waving in solidarity in just about every corner of the United States, just about every corner of the world.
People all over the place are taking this conflict personally. Here’s Deborah Cohen again.
Cohen: Our moment is a super emotional moment like the 1930s in terms of the emotionalism of public life. And that’s true of the emotionalism of right-wing movements, but it’s also true about the kind of hue and cry for people who are trying to defend democracy.
And one of the things that happened in the 1930s that’s very much happened today is that the boundaries between what we think about as geopolitics and what we think about as our own inner lives, our relationships, our families, have really crumbled. You see how kind of intimately people are affected by these things.
So, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, it’s not just a story about international relations, it’s also a story about the ways in which people think it’s proper to conduct your relationships and how you should live. It’s a story about bullies and it’s a story about aggression.
Aronson: Which may go some way toward explaining why President Biden is so confident that support for Ukraine will not waver, even as Republicans in Congress are divided over the flow of military aid.
Cohen: There’re constant, in a way, sort of Cassandra-like statements about, you know, soon the German public will get tired, or soon the Americans will have had enough. And that may well happen, but I think people would probably find it surprising how much resolve there is.
And I think part of the reason there is that kind of resolve is precisely because people have taken this conflict personally, literally personally. This is about bullies. This is about my safety. This is about the way to conduct a world, which is much like the way that I want to conduct the world in which I live.
Maddow: This is about our world and how we live in it and what we do to protect it against bullies, against tyranny. Dictators force you into positions that you do not want to take. They force you to consider your own interests against the interests of the world. Do you take a self-interested, isolationist approach, or do you take a generous, globally-minded position that might put you at risk now, even if it does pay off and seem correct in the long run?
Aronson: There’s this moment during the Abyssinian crisis that I keep coming back to. And it’s when British diplomat Anthony Eden, he gives this speech at the League of Nations about how they have to find a way to stop this invasion of Ethiopia. In the speech, he calls war a callous anachronism.
Anthony Eden: The maintenance of peace is the first objective of British foreign policy and the constant ideal of the British people. War is a callous anachronism, and mankind will never taste of lasting happiness until it has finally renounced its delusive appeal. If civilization is to survive, we must abolish in practice that which we have condemned in principle.
Aronson: We must abolish in practice that which we have condemned in principle. Meaning, we can’t just say war is bad. We have to practice what we preach. We have to stop going to war, which is this fantastically noble sentiment. And after the trauma of World War I, who wouldn’t want to avoid war at all costs? But you can also see clearly, especially in retrospect, how tricky this is.
This is how Susan Pedersen puts it.
Pedersen: You know, it’s one of those questions: if you have a state that is willing to go to war, and it’s countered by an alliance that is not willing to go to war and is pretty clearly saying that, right, what is to be done?
Aronson: It’s a question that kind of looms over the whole conflict with Russia. It’s the source of some of the fiercest debates over the right way forward. If NATO makes clear it will never go to war for Ukraine, Russia may see that as a green light to take what it wants by force. But NATO doesn’t want to go to war with Russia over Ukraine or over anything else. How does NATO defend Ukraine and push Russia back while avoiding escalating into a broader conflict?
Here’s Deborah Cohen once more.
Cohen: Something that is so resonant to me about the 1930s, these are genuinely difficult, handicapping, you know, future predicting games. One of the things that’s really, in a sense, sobering about looking at the 1930s is how easy it was to be wrong. Even very, very, very well-informed people, they make the wrong call. They think stuff is going to happen that doesn’t bear out. And then they’re surprised by what does happen.
Maddow: Isaac, this actually puts me right back in the feeling that I had in our first episode of Déjà News, which also took place in the 1930s. It was about that mob attack on the French parliament in Paris. It’s that same feeling, you know, there’s no crystal ball. We can never really know exactly what the future holds.
But there is some kind of strange comfort in knowing that other generations, other humans who were just as smart as us or smarter, just as clever and funny and resourceful and well informed, other, you know, admirable, earnest people have gone through similar uncertainty before.
So, as bad and as uncertain as everything may feel now, we don’t have to feel like we’re the first people to grapple with this stuff. Other folks have done it before. And they don’t always make the right decision and they don’t always know what’s coming and they don’t always have perfect clarity either. But they have grappled with it before and we can learn from them.
And if they’ve been able to grapple with it before and we have the advantage of learning from them, maybe we can do better? Maybe?
Aronson: Rachel, would you say that it all gives you a feeling of Déjà News?
Maddow: Isaac. Isaac, you’ve been waiting six episodes to say that to me, dad.
Aronson: It’s possible. I can neither confirm nor deny.
Maddow: All right, my fine-feathered friend. Well done. Thank you for all of this, Isaac.
One last time, again, with feeling. Let’s do the credits
Aronson: Let’s do it. Déjà News is a production of MSNBC and NBC News.
Maddow: It’s executive produced and written by Isaac and me.
Aronson: Our associate producer is Janmaris Perez.
Maddow: Our audio producer is Tim Einenkel with additional mixing by Bob Mallory.
Aronson: Our technical director is Bryson Barnes.
Maddow: Our senior executive producers are Cory Gnazzo and Laura Conaway.
Aronson: Our web producer is Will Femia.
Maddow: Our booking producer is Valerie Champagne.
Aronson: Archival tape wrangling by Holly Klopchin and Johanna Cerutti.
Maddow: Our thanks to Deborah Cohen, who’s the Richard W. Leopold Professor of History at Northwestern University. Her fantastic, very readable, very interesting book is called, “Last Call at the Hotel Imperial: The Reporters Who Took on a World at War.”
Aronson: Thanks also to Susan Pedersen, the Morris Professor of British History at Columbia University. Her book, “The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire,” will tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the League of Nations.
Maddow: Thanks also to Anne Applebaum, whose latest book is “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism.”
Aronson: And I want to give a special shout out to the entire staff of “The Rachel Maddow Show” on MSNBC.
Maddow: Woohoo!
Aronson: This podcast grows out of all the work we’ve done together. You guys are just the best in the business. Thanks.
Maddow: And finally, thanks to you guys. Thanks to all of our listeners, especially folks who have emailed us and contacted us with stories and ideas. We really, really, really appreciate you.
Aronson: You can find out more about this series and see remarkable photos and newsreel footage of people in Harlem rallying for Ethiopia in 1935 at our website, msnbc.com/dejanews.
Archival Recording: Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia at the Abyssinian Baptist Church in New York’s famed Harlem. Touring the big town for five days, the emperor receives a jubilant reception. A crowded itinerary leaves few hours for relaxation, but the conquering Lion of the tribe of Judah finds time to visit the ballpark. Using the dugout for his entrance, he gets a souvenir from manager Casey Stengel of the Yankees.
Reporters write that the emperor hits a homer with the fans, and the enthusiasm carries over into the reception up lower Broadway. The ruler who stood majestic and alone in defiance of dictatorship 18 years ago gets his share of the welcoming thunder New Yorkers reserve for heroes.
