I’m just answering the bit I could clear up, regarding Lemkin’s involvement. As I never said “[the] US actively suppressed stories of it because anti-Semitism was so ingrained in American culture that publicizing it would have been detrimental to the war effort”, I’ll leave that for TSS to answer.
How about, “As reports of Nazi eliminationist policies came in, the US policy makers passed them over as they were afraid that war opponents would characterize the fight as a war for jews.” Does that strike you as inaccurate?
A human lifetime, the end of WWII, or the rise of the civil rights movement.
I’d still like a cite.
My understanding of the situation is that the New York Times ran at least one story during the war. I don’t think it was front page. Certainly Roosevelt would have had the intelligence information to know what was going on. And enough of his inner circle were Jewish that it might have been brought to his attention. Roosevelt played his cards very close to his vest, but I think I am fair in speculating that he was well aware of anti-Semitic sentiment in the US and that if he made a big deal out of it for propaganda purposes, that it would not have furthered the US’ war aims and whipped up anti-Semitism as an opponent to the war. While I am among Roosevelt’s admirers, I am fully aware that he did everything he could to get the US into the war in order to help the UK and put a check on the Japanese short of giving causes belli. (I am not among those who think he knew about the Dec 7 1941 attacks other than that he risked that kind of attack by embargoing the Japanese for their aggressive wars. Roosevelt considered the European war far more important to the US’ long term interests. I think he was mistaken in that, but forgivably so. The US gained an enormous amount of good will in Asia by fighting that war. So much so that even the debacle in Vietnam did not erase it, even in Vietnam.
While Roosevelt is beloved among minority Americans for the great efforts he made on their behalf, the Japanese Americans don’t see it that way, as they were unfairly interred with Roosevelt’s tacit blessing. The only Washington insider on that issue who opposed it was J. Edgar Hoover who said he had no evidence of Japanese Americans spying, not an iota. I think that both men should be judged by the standards of their times.
That strikes me as how the historians have summarized the situation, and I think it is probably fair. Roosevelt strongly wanted into the war, especially in Europe. The US was filled with anti-Semitism at the time. Not to the extent Europe was, but no Jews policies in hiring and joining clubs was the rule, not the exception.
Okay, so your original statement was speculation, and not based on hard evidence. All right then.
I’ll agree with you about Roosevelt, but even in Hoover’s time, he was seen as a fucknugget.
Yes, Roosevelt had no confidants at all. Zero, none. Not even family. Like Don Corleone, he never let anyone know what he was thinking on all matters outside speeches. So I speculate on what he thought based on the events around him. That is the very essence of speculation.
As for Hoover, yes, he was a piece of work. But even a stopped watch is right twice a day. And remember about Hoover, he did not become powerful until the end of the 20s and solidified his reputation and power after the end of the hero criminals like Dillinger and Bonnie and Clyde. I’ve got axes to grind about Hoover and the FBI in general, but they are based on their excesses and tempered by their successes.
Most Iranians are Persians, but not a huge majority. The two other largest ethnic groups are Azeris and Kurds, neither of which are Arab, Jewish or Turkic.
Digging up cites is hard. Let me start with a little background. Anti-semitism was well established in the US during the 1930s: as a matter of course top Universities put caps on the number of jews that they would admit. (Those that did not, suffered a short term loss in reputation and a long term attainment of excellence: I’m thinking of NYU). No cite.
In 1943 the allies established a War Crimes Commission to investigate Nazi atrocities; Herbert Pell was the US representative. He would experience great difficulty getting senior officials to even return his calls and his office was closed in the following years for budgetary reasons. His son (Clairborne Pell, US Senator) later became convinced that there was a gentleman’s agreement to ignore the “Jewish problem in Germany”. (Powers, p. 81).
The CBS journalist Marvin Kalb addressed the issue head on in 1996: The Journalism of The Holocaust. Now part of the motivation was simply to sweep divisive issues under the carpet and stay focused on the demand for unconditional surrender. But antisemitism also played a role:
Another reason is endemic to the phenomenon of genocide: people simply have difficulty getting their heads around it as it is happening. We saw that in Rwanda.
Public attitudes towards the holocaust only started to gel in the 1970s. Earlier, there was an element of whitewash as seen for example in the Broadway production of Anne Frank’s diaries.
Those are on page 27-29 of the book.
The US was uninterested in investigating allegations of Nazi atrocities, per the Gentleman’s Agreement as discussed by Pell. (I had a bad typo in the previous post, btw: to be clear, the US office of the War Crimes Commission was closed in 1944.) Antisemitism was ingrained in US culture as demonstrated by the polling cited by Marvin Kalb. And, as always, there were other factors involved.
I hope that was helpful. My contention is that the fog of war is not a sufficient explanation for why the US didn’t denounce Nazi atrocities against the Jews: it’s not like wartime propaganda is known for its reticence or meticulous adherence to the facts.
You’re right. I almost mentioned the Azeris and then for some reason decided they were Turkic. The Kurds I didn’t know about at all. Excellent, learned something new today. Thanks!
Azeris are Turkic. The Oghuz Turks came into Azerbaijan in the 11th century and Turcofied it.
This is an interesting topic and I wish I had the time to read more about it. (I’m avoiding writing a paper on, ironically enough, UN interventions into human rights crises at the moment. But I really should get back to it in a minute.) I don’t think that Rwanda is a really good example, though; it’s clear that quite a few people could see that there was a genocide going on. The problem lay not in people’s comprehension, but in the political will to do something. The Genocide Convention requires international action, so acknowledging what was happening would have meant mandatory intervention, and I don’t think the UN was willing to do so at the time. The US certainly was not. If you go back and read Power’s Rwanda chapter, the evidence is very compelling that some high level US officials (ie, Madeleine Albright, who was the US Ambassador to the UN at the time) wanted to take action and declare it a genocide, but were overruled by the White House. This was only a year after the Somalia misadventure and Clinton administration officials thought that there would not be a high level of public support for more African hijinks.
And you know what? I bet they were right. If the US had sent in troops and stopped the genocide but say, 150 American soldiers were killed in the process, people would have been calling for Clinton’s head. They wouldn’t be going “yay, we stopped a genocide!!!” I mean, it’s possible that NATO prevented genocide when they bombed the shit out of Belgrade to stop the Serbs from ethnically cleansing Kosovo, but who knows? From our perspective in 2009, a lot of people think that the most important thing that resulted in that campaign was that it directly led to the invasion of Iraq, because it set a precedent of intervention without the approval of the UN.
You also have to consider that the Rwandan genocide took place over a very short period of time - just 100 days. So there was a very small window during which people could make those decisions.
Okay, wow, it’s paper-writin’ time.
Ooooh, go me then! I was right!
Still didn’t know about the Kurds, though.
It is? Who exactly is giving me my marching orders? Is it the “agency” that Sevastopol has darkly referred to as feeding info to people who disagree with him?
It’s weird (not to mention reprehensible) that people who express passionate support for an issue are so ready to accuse opponents of not developing legitimate views of their own, but being directed by some unseen entity. I get this not infrequently in speaking out against health fraud on other boards (I must be getting payoffs from the A.M.A. and Big Pharma, doncha know).
I’m glad you recognize that. It’s a short step from there to acknowledging that bigotry (or freely using the tools employed by acknowledged Jew-haters, a distinction that is meaningless) does considerable harm to the cause you espouse.
His “policy criticisms” have been addressed and demolished in numerous similar discussions, including the one alluded to in the OP. Nothing wrong with calling out his bigotry as well.
Indo-Iranian, like the Persians. Iranian peoples - Wikipedia
They speak a Turkic language, but they are genetically more related to Persians.
But they’re culturally more Turkish.