Posted on 04/27/2017 4:41:12 AM PDT by SJackson
Typically, when one asks a Democrat about FDR they immediately develop a sense of awe that reminds me of those little green aliens (undocumented space men?) in Toy Story every time they see Buzz Lightyear.” AHHHHH!”
I’ve never understood the reverence for Franklin Delano Roosevelt. He gets points for picking great Generals and led this country to victory in WWII. But he totally mismanaged the economy, making the great depression longer…in 1937 unemployment spiked again reaching 19% (the previous high was 25%), his freedom-sapping policies never did get this country out of the Great Depression, and don’t forget that he tried to circumvent constitutional separation of powers (now who does that remind me of?). And then there is the issue never discussed, he was a bigot, his hatred of Jews caused hundreds thousands to be added to the ranks of Hitler’s victims.
Winston Churchill’s appeasement of the Palestinian Arabs doomed tens of thousands more.
Some point to the fact he didn’t he bomb and destroy the train tracks that were shipping Jews to the concentration camps? But my opinion sides with the people who say that wouldn’t have worked. The real question to be explored was why didn’t allow more Jews into the country and why didn’t he pressure Britain to allow Jews to move from Nazi controlled areas into what was then called Palestine?
In the book “FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith,” historian Rafael Medoff suggests that Roosevelt failed to take relatively simple measures that would have saved significant numbers of Jews during the Holocaust, because his vision for America was one that had a small number of Jews. In other words, FDR doomed many Jew to suffer not because he wanted them to die, but because he didn’t want a lot of them living in his neighborhood.
In a piece for the Brandies Center, Medoff shared some of the hateful/public anti-Semitic statements Roosevelt made when he let his guard down:
In 1923, as a member of the Harvard board of directors, Roosevelt decided there were too many Jewish students at the college and helped institute a quota to limit the number admitted. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
In 1938, he privately suggested that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were therefore to blame for provoking anti-Semitism there. In 1941, he remarked at a Cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon. In 1943, he told government officials in Allied-liberated North Africa that the number of local Jews in various professions “should be definitely limited” so as to “eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany.”
In 1936, he characterized a tax maneuver by the publisher of the New York Times as “a dirty Jewish trick.” In 1938, FDR privately suggested to Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the era’s most prominent American Jewish leader, that Jews in Poland were dominating the economy and were to blame for provoking antisemitism there. In 1939, Roosevelt expressed (to a U.S. senator) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins.” In 1940, he dismissed pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff.” In 1941, President Roosevelt remarked at a cabinet meeting that there were too many Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
The most detailed of FDR’s statements about Jews was made during his meeting on January 17, 1943, in Casablanca, with leaders of the new local regime in Allied-liberated North Africa. U.S. ambassador Robert Murphy remarked that the 330,000 Jews in North Africa were “very much disappointed that ‘the war for liberation’ had not immediately resulted in their being given their complete freedom.”
(Before the war, when the Jews lived under the colonial French regime, they enjoyed rights similar to French citizens. But when the pro-Nazi Vichy French took over the French colonies in 1940, they stripped Jews of those rights. In 1943, upon the defeat of the Vichyites, the Jews had expected their rights would be restored.)
According to the official record of the conversation (later published by the U.S. government in its ‘Foreign Relations of the United States’ series), the president replied that “the number of Jews engaged in the practice of the professions (law, medicine, etc) should be definitely limited to the percentage that the Jewish population in North Africa bears to the whole of the North African population,” which “would not permit them to overcrowd the professions.”
FDR explained that his plan “would further eliminate the specific and understandable complaints which the Germans bore towards the Jews in Germany, namely, that while they represented a small part of the population, over fifty percent of the lawyers, doctors, school teachers, college professors, etc, in Germany, were Jews.” (It is not clear where FDR obtained those wildly inflated statistics.)
Perhaps his distaste for Jews was the reason, that while there were many actions FDR could have taken to stop or slow down the Holocaust, he didn’t. “He could have quietly permitted the immigration quotas to be filled to their legal limit — that alone would have saved 190,000 lives,” Medoff said.
“He could have pressed the British to open Palestine’s doors to Jewish refugees. He could have authorized the use of empty troop-supply ships to bring refugees to stay in the U.S. temporarily, until the end of the war. He could have permitted refugees to stay as tourists in a U.S. territory, such as the Virgin Islands, until it was safe for them to return to Europe. He could have authorized the bombing of Auschwitz or the railway lines leading to it, which would have interrupted the mass-murder process.”
Asked to respond to the argument that it was better for Roosevelt to focus on winning the war than divert resources to bomb Auschwitz, Medoff said “[b]ombing Auschwitz would not have required any diversion of resources, because U.S. planes were already bombing targets that were less than five miles from the gas chambers, during the summer and autumn of 1944.”
It really goes beyond that. FDR was reluctant to speak out against the impending genocide
On August 25, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt brought her friend Alice Hamilton, who had recently spent three months in Germany, to Hyde Park to give FDR a detailed eyewitness account of German brutality against the Jews. He still refused to publicly criticize Hitler.
On Roosevelt’s most blatant acts of bigotry involved the St. Louis whose story was recently explained at Constitution.com
On May 13, 1939, the St. Louis set sail from Hamburg, Germany, to Cuba with 937 Jewish refugees on board. Captain Gustav Schroder, a non-Jewish German, was determined to rescue these men, women and children from Nazi Germany. To his dismay, he was forced to return 907 passengers to Europe, landing in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17, 1939.
Four months before Hitler invaded Poland, officially starting World War II, Jews were fleeing Germany by the thousands. Captain Schroder agreed to take a shipload on his luxury cruise liner to Cuba. Shortly before leaving, he was informed Cuba rejected most of the visas issued to his passengers. He left with them anyway, praying for a miracle.
(…) Upon arrival at Cuba, the St. Louis was not allowed to dock. Captain Schroder worked for a week in vain to allow his passengers to disembark. He was denied. Only 22 Jewish refugees were allowed entry as they did have acceptable passage, along with four Spanish citizens and two Cuban nationals. One gentleman, so distraught over returning to Nazi Germany, attempted suicide. He was taken to a hospital in Havana for treatment for his wounds.
Captain Schroder turned to America, pleading to President Franklin D. Roosevelt for help. Claims of improper paperwork, German Jewish immigration quotas and national security were given as excuses for rejecting the passengers. Afraid Schroder would run his ship ashore in Florida, forcing America to accept the refugees, the Coast Guard was sent to watch the St. Louis as it sailed close to our shores.
Finding no help anywhere in North America, Schroder was forced to return to Europe. Determined to be the liberator of his remaining 907 passengers (as one person died during the voyage), Schroder refused to return his ship to Germany until all the refugees were given protection in other countries. The United States finally stepped in and helped secure those arrangements in European countries.
Once those agreements for asylum were made, Captain Schroder docked his boat in Antwerp, Belgium, on June 17th. The United Kingdom accepted 288 passengers while France welcomed 224, Belgium accepted 214, and the Netherlands received 181. In less than a year, Hitler invaded Belgium and France in May of 1940, again threatening those refugees who for a moment had a taste of true freedom. It is estimated that 254 of the 907 returned to Europe were victims of the Holocaust, loosing their lives in concentration or internment camps.
When Hitler came into power in Germany there was a large increase in the demand for Jewish immigration to Palestine as Jews tried to escape. The British allowed around 50,000 Jews to immigrate from 1934-1936 but it infuriated the Arab population.Based on the higher immigration levels the Arabs started the an intifada against the Palestinian Jews. The Arab attacks continued for three years (1936-1939). Britain did take a stab at limiting the Arab attacks, but it was more important to keep the Arabs from jumping to the German side. So they began the British tradition of appeasing Palestinian terrorists, that exists even today. Their solution was the White Paper of 1939.
The White Paper limited the immigration of Jews to Palestine which resulted in the death sentence. A limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the five-year period 1940-1944, consisting of a regular yearly quota of 10,000, and a supplementary quota of 25,000, spread out over the same period, to cover refugee emergencies. After this cut-off date, further immigration would depend on the permission of the Arabs . Restrictions were also placed on the rights of Jews to buy land from Arabs—a restriction that President Obama tried to duplicate.
Today, Yom HaShoah we remember the horror of the Holocaust. It is sad to consider that partly because of Franklin Delano Roosevelt Antisemitism, and Winston Churchill’s appeasement, innocent people who could have been saved were instead abandoned.
I suggest more research. To call one factor, usury, the sole cause of a complex and recurring phenomenon is simplistic and requires one to ignore the numerous instances where the correlation doesn’t work.
The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism
https://www.amazon.com/Devil-Jews-Medieval-Conception-Anti-Semitism/dp/0827602278
And the direct quotes from FDR in the article are therefore also irrelevant?
The article's primary charges against FDR relate to his personal antisemitism. I don't see what that has to do with US war aims in Europe. Particularly since most of the examples occur at a time when the US was not at war. The criticism that FDR could have pressured Churchill to allow Jews to settle in Israel as required by the Mandate is legitimate. But too much trouble for FDR. The article does mention FDR's support of antisemitic Vichy policies in Morocco, policies rejected by the Sultan. But that's not Europe,
If you wanted to discuss wartime Europe I could bring up brave Poles like Jan Karski and the Polish government in London who warned FDR and numerous US officials about the concentration and death camps. To no avail. That was wartime Europe. But not purely antisemitism. They were killing Christians too. And though Karski's warnings related primarily to Jews, his and the Polish government's appeal rested on their status as Polish citizens.
Your rejection of FDR's antisemitism fails.
I don't think it would have been particularly effective. The author presents a brief quote from Madoff who I believe has suggested it would have been a legitimate secondary target. If the primary, in Auschwitz's case I believe tire factories a few miles away, were clouded in, bombing the camps might have been better than dumping bombs into the sea. I can't disagree with that. But neither the author nor I believe Madoff has suggested they should have been primary targets. Some have, and interestingly they usually don't blame FDR. Rather the US for the decision.
Not relevant to the thread, you're speaking of Jews already here.
But it's important, what do you plan on doing with them? They're here, have been for years. Not 90%, but many, vote for Dems. What should "liberty lovers" do with them?
Voting Republican is not an acceptable answer, posting on what I think it's fair to say is a conservative, pro-Trump forum, you're a classic example of why they shouldn't vote conservative.
Well said. Furthermore, the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, once it reached its second month, causing major loss of face for the Germans and emboldening the Poles to join in, would have been a perfect time for the US and Russia to put the screws on from both fronts, but the opportunity passed, and was studiously ignored by both FDR and Stalin. What war aim did that serve?
And Irish Catholics never voted Dem in droves, of course./s
Mein Kampf makes no mention of Usury as a cause for Hitler’s development as an anti-Semite. Although it is a recurring theme in Pound’s Cantos, it is more aimed at Britain than the Jews.
Not so much an open rift. More the case of officialdom keeping Churchill in the dark. (eg Makovsky: Churchill’s promised land: Zionism and statecraft.)
One should also remember that at this time, late 1941, early 1942, Churchill’s political position was not strong. In January 29 1942 he had to survive a motion of no-confidence in Parliament regarding the prosecution of the war.
I didn’t know that (no-confidence vote). It would seem, however, very difficult for him to be ignorant of the very public matter of the Struma (the Jewish Agency in Palestine raised a yuge stink), and probably would have been a good opportunity for a showdown with the Opposition. They were trying to call a shipful of starving refugees, including children, possible German spies, pressure Turkey into keeping the refugees under quarantine, and then used Yank lend-lease equipment to tow the poor unfortunates out into the middle of the Black Sea and arranging for an unidentified sub to sink them. All and all, pretty heinous and indefensible.
I definitely agree with your last sentence.
However, do not think it would have been an opportune moment to attack the “opposition” which of course to a large extent consisted of the establishment, the bureaucracy, and large parts of Churchill’s own party, the Tories. (”The Swamp” was very deep and murky in those days in the UK.) However, definitely and interesting idea for some “alternative history”. What if...
PS: The Soviet submarines really managed to cause some of the largest civilian ship wrecks. The Baltic Sea is littered with old wrecks, ships that carried (mostly, but not only) civilians escaping from Germany’s eastern provinces at the end of the war.
I think you have to go back to the Roman Empire era, and look at the arrival of Jews into the Empire and how things developed over the next 500 years within the heart of Europe.
After the fact, with 800 innocents dead, including the crew, he could have had a flash election on his own terms, I think.
While the Lawrentine cabal was in control of much of the media and government, Englishmen didn’t like injustice committed in their name any more than than they do now. Otherwise, somebody would have simply thrown a grenade at Mr. Ghandi to top off the massacre at Amritzar, and had done with it and him.
On the other hand, I am not Sir Winston, and I’m sure he was no coward, and if he had thought it would have worked, he’d have tried it.
It probably was a Soviet sub, though the captain never bothered to brag about it at a saloon.
I’ve always felt that there was residual resentment of the Jews for their several cataclysmic revolts, last in 120 c.e. by Bar Kochba, long before Constantine took the big dip and adopted Christianity as the imperial religion. Possibly the corresponding Muslim anti-Semitism was bequeathed on them from the pre-Christian Byzantine empire as well. There was one ugly pogrom in Alexandria under Calligula’s rule.
Not really. About 70-75% of Jews vote Democrat on a presidential level, if you trust exit polling. I don't. They tend to ignore Russian and Orthodox Jews, who tend to vote Republican. Also, Jews not living in urban settings tend to be ignored in exit polling.
In the last mayoral electionin NYC, where the Working Families party candidate Comrade Wilhelm Wilhelm (aka Bill De Blasio) won city wide with a 50 point margin, he "won" the Jewish vote by 1%.
When Jews turns it around and 3/4 vote pro liberty, then bring them in. But liberty lovers do need some place on this Earth free of socialists.
No one was calling for immigration. This was about refugees, who could have been repatriated.
You are under the misconception that air missions over the Reich were easy video games, like Desert Storm.
In actuality, with a 10% loss rate per mission, a crew had a 7% chance of surviving the standard assignment of 25 missions.
Unfortunately, loss rates at times exceeded 20% on single missions, and the bombers that made it back to friendly territory sometimes had every man aboard either wounded or dead.
In an environment like that, there were no spare resources at all for anything that didn’t directly damage the heart of the Reich.
“No one was calling for immigration. This was about refugees, who could have been repatriated.”
To be fair, the members of the Frankfurt School who proceeded to poison American culture via the university system and the Gleichschaltung/March through the Insitutions had been refugees from Germany, fleeing the minute Adolf Hitler took power. In other words, we saved their hides by allowing them access to our country, and they repaid us by deciding to poison our cultural well and essentially bring about essentially the same thing that caused them to flee Germany. Personally, if I were alive back then and they tried to flee Germany, I’d probably ship them straight back to Germany the very second they tried their crap here. I do not tolerate Marxists, period.
Most members of the Frankfurt School came to Columbia. The OSS funded them to damage the Nazis and the CIA funded them against the USSR. Meanwhile, they were destroying America and the West.
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