WWI: What if the U.S. stayed neutral?

[Ned]

IIRC, the detente really began after the Korean truce deal was signed, not before.

[Ned]

molly, FDR confined the Japanese on Hawaii and the West for reasons connected with security. The US Supreme Court agreed that these security concerns were real and trumped the allegations of unequal treatment due to race or religion.

But, you still insist in the case of Jews in Germany that the German government was solely motivated by racism in confining the German Jews?

I think the Final Solution, that began in 1942 IIRC, was, however, motivated by racism.

Referencing a similar situation in Israel, does Israel treat the Arabs inside its borders with special security restrictions because of racism or because of necessity?

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned
IIRC, the detente really began after the Korean truce deal was signed, not before.

Yeah right.


Does this 'detente' extend to the subversion of the governments of Guatemala and Iran, the sale of arms to Laos and Viet Nam ?

Sending U.S. forces to intervene in Lebanon ?

It's difficult to take anyone seriously who proposes that the Eisenhower years were full of peace and harmony and who has chosen to blank out those little interventions and ignored the presence of sabre rattling Richard Nixon.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned
molly, FDR confined the Japanese on Hawaii and the West for reasons connected with security. The US Supreme Court agreed that these security concerns were real and trumped the allegations of unequal treatment due to race or religion.

Did that have anything to do with a surprise attack by the forces of the Japanese Empire on an American military installation in somewhere called Pearl Harbour ?

Yes or no ?

But, you still insist in the case of Jews in Germany that the German government was solely motivated by racism in confining the German Jews?

Your 'theory' is that a parallel exists between the Nazi regime's treatment of its Jewish citizens both before and after the beginning of World War II, and with the American detention of Japanese Americans after Pearl Harbour.

What attack by a Jewish state prompted Hitler to be obsessed by the Jews in 'Mein Kampf' ?

What prompted his first written antisemitic statement in 1919 ?

No Jewish state existed then.

When the Nazis introduced the Nuremberg Race Laws, no Jewish state existed.

No Jewish state attacked Germany.

No guerilla or independent Jewish forces attacked Germany.

I've demonstrated by referring to antisemitic attacks in Wilhelmine Germany (and with reference to an openly antisemitic politician who was Mayor of Vienna when Hitler lived there, and whom Hitler referred to as someone he admired) to pogroms in Tsarist Russia and the Dreyfus Case in France that antisemitism, both the old Christian religious based variety and the 'new' race based Nineteenth Century variety, were alive and active, before there was even a Jewish state.

Before even the Nazi German government was in power.

I've shown that an essential part of the N.S.D.A.P. programme was the disenfranchisement of German Jewish citizens- who like Rathenau, Ballin and Haber had fought for their country, either in the Kaiser's government or in the German army at the front.

But you persist in ignoring all this, and harping on about some supposed 'security risk' to Nazi Germany.

I notice you ignored the information about the reasons for the euthanasia programme, and ElTigre's question about the Nazi extermination of the Roma in Germany and elsewhere.

Both race-based, by the way.

I think the Final Solution, that began in 1942 IIRC, was, however, motivated by racism.

No, really ?

Did it ever occur to you why it was called 'the Final Solution' ?


Does it not occur to you that eventually putting extermination of Jews on an industrial, assembly line basis, implies that the earlier haphazard methods (mass shooting, gassing in trucks, having civilians hack them to death in public, starvation, working them to death) were eventually deemed unsatisfactory- they weren't getting the job done ?

Still, you carry on ignoring the Nuremberg Race Laws (the name kinda gives it away, don't you think ?) Kristallnacht and the instructions to the Einsatzgruppen in Poland.

We all need our illusions...

[Ned]

Originally posted by molly bloom


Yeah right.


Does this 'detente' extend to the subversion of the governments of Guatemala and Iran, the sale of arms to Laos and Viet Nam ?

Sending U.S. forces to intervene in Lebanon ?

It's difficult to take anyone seriously who proposes that the Eisenhower years were full of peace and harmony and who has chosen to blank out those little interventions and ignored the presence of sabre rattling Richard Nixon.

Without checking, I do believe detente began after the truce. The timing of the authorization of the other actions you mention, such as the overthrown of the Iranian usurper, occured prior to the Korean truce.

Lebanon, I believe, was a reaction to the Soviets breaking the "truce" in the ME and threatening US access to ME oil.

As to the Americas, long, long ago America warned European powers to stay out of our back yard. No Soviet advancements of its interests in the Americas would ever be tolerated by any American president and would be resisted.

[Ned]

molly, Hitler viewed the Jews of Germany both as an inferior race but also as a source, in his view, of cultural decline and the primary backers of socialism. He wanted them out of Germany for any number of reasons prior to the war, agreed.

Roma?

Correct me, but weren't they included in the Final Solution for the same reason as the Jews? Out and out racism at that point.

Now your turn.

Admit that he warned Britain and France that should they insist on pursuing the war, he would take revenge on the Jews whom he saw as behind the allies' hostility to Germany?

I know the Brits and the French were problably laughing at this part of Hitler's speech and proceeded to decide the issue of war or peace entirely with a view to their own interests, it remains a fact that they continued the war knowing that Hitler was going to escallate his progroms against the Jewish race. Most Jews I have ever discussed this with are very sure the allies cared not one whit about the fate of the Jews and used the extermination camps post-war only to defame the Nazi's even more and to provide a basis to successfully try them for war crimes.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned


Lebanon, I believe, was a reaction to the Soviets breaking the "truce" in the ME and threatening US access to ME oil.

Snore.

So Eisenhower is justified in not engaging in detente if Lebanon has an Arab nationalist uprising, if an Iranian nationalist is elected, or if shareholders and board members of United Fruit want a new government in Guatemala ?


Yes, I think we see the picture now. The Eisenhower Doctrine is all about peace and detente, unless it's not in American interests (especially business interests) to actually have a 'detente'.

Then one can ship arms to Laos and Viet Nam, send marines and ships to the Mediterranean, and employ force to overthrow Mossadegh and Arbenz.

It's all so much clearer, Ned, thanks.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by Ned
molly, Hitler viewed the Jews of Germany both as an inferior race but also as a source, in his view, of cultural decline and the primary backers of socialism.

He called them 'bacilli' and 'a racial tuberculosis'.

I'm rather more familiar with Hitler's antisemitic sentiments than you, as is startlingly obvious. I just choose not to excuse them by referring to some bogus 'Jewish security risk' which did not exist.

Roma? Correct me,

Oh the temptation. But life is too short, even for me, to have to continuously correct your misapprehensions.

Under the July 1933 "Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Defects," physicians sterilized against their will an unknown number of Gypsies, part-Gypsies, and Gypsies in mixed marriages. Similarly, under the "Law against Dangerous Habitual Criminals" of November 1933, the police arrested many Gypsies along with others the Nazis viewed as "asocials" - prostitutes, beggars, chronic alcoholics, and homeless vagrants - and imprisoned them in concentration camps.

http://www.holocaust-trc.org/sinti.htm

So the Nazi regime imprisoned Roma as criminals, simply because of their ethnicity.

Clear Ned ?

The Nuremberg racial laws of September 15, 1935, ("Law for the Protection of German Blood and Honor" and "Reich Citizenship Law") did not explicitly mention Gypsies, but in commentaries interpreting these laws, Gypsies were included, along with Jews and "Negroes," as "racially distinctive" minorities with "alien blood." As such, their marriage to "Aryans" was prohibited. Like Jews, Gypsies were also deprived of their civil rights.

Nuremberg racial laws- 1935.

With whom was Nazi Germany at war then Ned, to justify this 'security measure', as you'd no doubt see it ?

Admit that he warned Britain and France that should they insist on pursuing the war, he would take revenge on the Jews whom he saw as behind the allies' hostility to Germany?

Why don't you Hitler's words ?

What Hitler actually said about a general European war, and who would be to blame ?

I've quoted Hitler himself Ned. Why don't you give it a try ?

Are you scared to address what he said ?

'In the course of my life I have very often been a prophet, and have usually been ridiculed for it. During the time of my struggle for power, it was in the first instance the Jewish race that received my prophecies with laughter - when I said that I would one day take over the leadership of the State, and with it that of the whole nation, and that I would then, among many other things, settle the Jewish problem.

I think that for some time now they have been laughing on the other side of their face (laughter). Today I will once more be a prophet. If the international Jewish financiers, inside and outside Europe, succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, then the result will not be the Bolshevisation of the earth, and thus the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!'

Hitler's 'prophecy' speech to the Reichstag, 30th January 1939

Note- Nazi Germany had yet to invade Poland, but Hitler was here preparing the ground for who would be blamed yet again, for 'involving' Europe and Germany in a war- not his racist, criminal regime, but the people he was so antagonistic towards, and who would be the victims of his extermination camps.

I know the Brits and the French were problably laughing at this part of Hitler's speech

Medium again Ned ? Or is this oneiromancy, or reading a sheep's liver ?

it remains a fact that they continued the war knowing that Hitler was going to escallate his progroms against the Jewish race.

So you admit that Hitler was in fact killing Jews even before the war broke out ?

How should the British and French have found out about the instructions to the Einsatzgruppen in Poland ?

And what do you suggest, realistically, they could have done to prevent the mass slaughter ?

Asked politely for it to stop ?

Most Jews I have ever discussed this with are very sure the allies cared not one whit about the fate of the Jews

How fascinating. Almost as interesting as the 'evidence' of your Ukrainian informant.

Are 'most Jews' you discuss this with aware of yoru penchant for uncritical posting of Holocaust denial drivel and antisemitic websites ?

How does one introduce that politely into conversation with a Jewish companion ?

I must try springing that on my friends' parents- perhaps around the time of Yom Kippur. See if I can raise a smile, eh ?

used the extermination camps post-war only to defame the Nazi's even more and to provide a basis to successfully try them for war crimes.

What complete and utter bull****. You've obviously never paid any attention to the testimony of Allied soldiers who discovered the concentration and extermination camps.

They weren't used as a pretext for anything, and for you to suggest it is simply par for the course unfortunately, and testimony to your inability to read criitcally that antisemitic garbage you surf with such ease.

I hear you loud and clear Ned- don't blame Hitler, don't blame the Nazis, don't blame the keepers of the death camps.

The Jews were a security risk, the Allies didn't care about them, Hitler wasn't really that much of a racist, there's a rational underpinning behind Nazi ideology...

You make me feel I need to take a bath.

[Ned]

molly, your summary of what I said is beyond trash. I never said that Hitler was not a racist and that his motivations for what he did were not, in part, based on racism. What I contend is that it got a lot worse after the war started and that the allies were warned that it would. Your speech quote confirms that Hitler said that he would exterminated the Jews from Europe should the allies provoke another European war.

Your quote on the Roma does not show the Nazi's made any mass arrests of them prior to the start of the war, let alone mass executions. But what you did quote shows the Nazi's racism was on the march from an early stage and the allies could expect that it would get a lot worse from the Nazi's during a war.

On the soldier's reactions to the death camps in 1945: Don't you find it amazing that that was the first they or most civilians heard about them? The Catholic Church and the allied high commands knew all about the death camps long prior and said and did nothing (meaningful -- that is). Prior to the end of the war, the racism of the Nazis was well known, but not the death camps. It seems to me the allies made a deliberate decision to keep this information confidential, which is consistent with their not really caring about what was happening.

[ElTigre]

Originally posted by Ned
molly, your summary of what I said is beyond trash. I never said that Hitler was not a racist and that his motivations for what he did were not, in part, based on racism. What I contend is that it got a lot worse after the war started and that the allies were warned that it would. Your speech quote confirms that Hitler said that he would exterminated the Jews from Europe should the allies provoke another European war.

Ned, imagine the following situation: a heavily armed gunman has taken dozens of hostages in a building. Every hour he shoots another hostage for no reason. After several hours (a couple of hostages are already dead) the police/national guard/army arrives and surrounds the building. All negotiations fail. The gunman threatens to kill all hostages should the armed forces attack.

You're in command of the armed forces. What do you do?

Your quote on the Roma does not show the Nazi's made any mass arrests of them prior to the start of the war, let alone mass executions.

Here you go:

From Gypsies: A persecuted race, by William A. Duna:
-----------------------------------
"APPENDIX: "Gypsies in Nazi Germany"

[...] During the first months of Nazi rule, an SS study group proposed that all Gypsies then in Germany should be killed by drowning them in ships taken out into mid ocean and sunk. Instead, the authorities began a lengthy process of codifying persons of Romani origin. Criteria for inclusion were much stricter than those applied to Jews: it was sufficient to have just one grandparent who himself or herself had a Gypsy or part-Gypsy grandparent among his ancestors to be classified as a "Rassenverfolgter Zigeuner" (racially-persecuted Gypsy), and later to qualify for the death-ovens.

[...] Some Gypsies were sterilized as early as 1933, though no Jews yet were; beginning in the same year, camps were being established by the Nazis to contain Gypsies at Vennhausen, Dieseistrasse, Mahrzan and Dachau, although at so early a date Jewish victims were not being sent en masse to any camps. It is a matter of singular disgrace that in 1936 the anti-Gypsy campaign became globalized, through the establishment of the international Centre for the Fight against the Gypsy Menace by Interpol in Vienna. Again, this did not happen for the Jews. In effect, the Nazi Party sought, and was given, the cooperation of other Euopean governments in its campaign to locate and identify Gypsies throughout Europe for its later plans for extermination.

In 1936, a Nazi Party proclamation stated that the Gypsy problem was categorically a matter of race and should be dealt with in that light; a year later Johannes Behrendt, speaking for the Party, declared that "elimination without hesitation" of the entire Gypsy population had to be instigated immediately. Among the many categories of victims in Hitler's Germany, only the Gypsies and the Jews were singled out for annihilation on racial grounds.

[...] Elie Wiesel claimed in his Report for the Holocaust Memorial Commission to the President of the United States that Jaws were "certainly the first" victims of the Holocaust (p. 3), and that the Holocaust was an "essentially Jewish event," and further that "the Jewish people ...alone were destined to be totally annihillated, they alone were totally alone-although Jews were the first to be killed, they were not the only ones; others followed. The murder of one group inevitably provokes more murder" (p.34). But it was in fact the Gypsies, not dealt with in that Report, who were first victimized in an act of genocide which led to the fuss of over a half a million Romani lives."
-------------------------------------------
Another source:

http://www.jpr.org.uk/Reports/CS_Reports/PP_3_1996/index.htm

"Persecution during the 1930s
From 1934 onwards some German Gypsies were forced into policed settlements. In 1936 400 were sent to Dachau. In June 1936 a decree naming nomadic Gypsies 'a plague' required the compulsory expulsion of foreign Gypsies and intense controls over those with German citizenship. Late in 1938 the first racial law against Roma and Sinti, 'Fight against the Gypsy Menace', was enacted and in March 1939 passes were issued. These were grey for non-Gypsies, brown for pure Roma, brown with blue stripes for part-Roma (those with two or more Rom or Sinti great-great- grandparents—a stricter classification than for part- Jews). The 1938 law aimed explicitly at the 'racial separation' of Roma and Sinti from Germans, the prevention of miscegenation and tight control of all pure- and part-Roma and Sinti.

Measures in the early 1940s
In 1940, 3,000 German and Austrian Roma and Sinti were deported to Polish camps or ghettos; the remaining 27,000 continued to be forced into holding camps. Following the German occupation of Austria in 1938, Austrian Roma were sent to work camps, concentration camps (e.g. Ravensbruck, Mauthausen and Buchenwald) or to a special Roma camp in Lackenbach. Roma in territories annexed or conquered by Germany were subject to similar treatment. Some fascist governments allied to Germany (particularly Croatia, Slovakia and Romania) initiated persecution of Roma without apparent pressure from Germany.(24)

Roma in concentration camps and death camps
The decision to annihilate all Roma was probably taken in mid-1942, after the Wannsee conference. But already by January 1942 several thousand Roma had been gassed in closed vans at Chelmno.(25) Because records are incomplete and the statistics disputed, estimates of the total number of Sinti, Roma and part-Sinti murdered in the Holocaust vary from 200,000-500,000. Auschwitz-Birkenau contained a special Roma camp, where families were kept together, probably in order to forestall revolt. At least 19,000 were murdered or died there.(26) Many Roma not allocated to the special camp also died in Auschwitz. Thousands of Romanies were killed in Belscn and Buchenwald and in extermination camps, including Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek and Treblinka. Many were subjected to inhumane experimentation at Dachau (salt injections), Natzweiler (typhus injections), Sachsenhausen (mustard gas) and elsewhere. In Auschwitz Dr Mengele selected many Romanies, including children, for experimentation. Many Rom men, women and teenagers underwent forced sterilization.

While over half of all German, Czech, Austrian, Latvian and Polish Roma died, some communities suffered even heavier losses. Virtually all Roma in Belgium, Holland, Estonia and Lithuania were annihilated, as were those in Croatia, where the Catholic-supported fascist Ustasa perpetrated mass atrocities against the Roma. Rom communities in the USSR, Romania, Serbia and Hungary each lost thousands, massacred by the Nazis. Donald Kenrick and other scholars point to documentation showing that the ultimate aim of the Nazis was the '"complete extermination" of the Roma people'.(27)"
------------------------------------

Where the Roma (Romani) a threat to the Nazi regime or not, Ned? If so, how did they threaten the Nazi regime?

On the soldier's reactions to the death camps in 1945: Don't you find it amazing that that was the first they or most civilians heard about them? The Catholic Church and the allied high commands knew all about the death camps long prior and said and did nothing (meaningful -- that is). Prior to the end of the war, the racism of the Nazis was well known, but not the death camps. It seems to me the allies made a deliberate decision to keep this information confidential, which is consistent with their not really caring about what was happening.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Refugee_Board

"War Refugee Board

The War Refugee Board, established by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in January of 1944, was a U.S. executive agency created to aid civilian victims of the Nazi and Axis powers.[1] Created largely at the behest of Roosevelt's Secretary of Treasury Henry Morgenthau, Jr., Roosevelt "stressed that it was urgent that action be taken at once to forestall the plan of the Nazis to exterminate all the Jews and other persecuted minorities in Europe." Subsequently credited with rescuing as many as 200,000 Jews from Nazi occupied countries, through the efforts of Raoul Wallenberg and others, the commission has nevertheless received mixed praise because of the failure of the United States to act sooner despite clear evidence of ongoing attrocities in Nazi-occupied Europe.[2]"

Contrary to your claim the Allies made the Holocaust public well before the war ended. But in general I agree, the Allies should have done so earlier, and with more vehemence.

[Ned]

ElTigre, you post shows that the Roma were the first people to be forced into concentration camps.

We did the same thing to the American Indians. We called them "reservations."

But your post also shows the decision to exterminate them came at the same time as the Final Solution, 1942. During the war, which is my point.

Re: FDR, I am still puzzled why the death camps we such a shock if the information about the Final Solution was known at least as of early 1944. Isn't this evidence that the allies really didn't care that much and what was happening was not published in the newspapers for all to see?

Not only were our soldiers shocked, but most Germans themselves were "shocked." Information in the Reich was highly censored, but they still had access to allied radio. If allied radio were broadcasting information about the Holocaust, surely the German people (as well as the allied soldiers) would certainly have known what was happening.

It doesn't add up. 1 + 1 does not make 2 in this instance.

[Ned]

On your hostage analogy, try this:

A judge in a divorce case awards the wife the man's prized sports car. He goes out and takes hostages, per your example, and demands the return of the sports car and says, if you storm the building, I will kill all the hostages.

What do you do?

Storm the building.

Talk to the Judge or the wife about returning the sports car to at least free the hostages?

Your answer, of course, would be to storm the building as you cannot negotiate with terrorists. They only come back again and ask for more.

I suggest the opposite approach should be tried first.

[ElTigre]

Huh? I said that all negotiations had failed.

You realize that in my example the hostages are the Jews, and that they had never 'taken away a sport car' from the Germans?

[Ned]

ElTigre, I know what you said in your example. But it is not apt.

[ElTigre]

Originally posted by Ned
ElTigre, you post shows that the Roma were the first people to be forced into concentration camps.

We did the same thing to the American Indians. We called them "reservations."

But your post also shows the decision to exterminate them came at the same time as the Final Solution, 1942. During the war, which is my point.

They died like flies in the concentration even before 1942. And you missed the part about the sterilizations.

Of course you also missed, like always, my question if the Roma were a threat to the Nazi regime.

Re: FDR, I am still puzzled why the death camps we such a shock if the information about the Final Solution was known at least as of early 1944. Isn't this evidence that the allies really didn't care that much and what was happening was not published in the newspapers for all to see?

Not only were our soldiers shocked, but most Germans themselves were "shocked." Information in the Reich was highly censored, but they still had access to allied radio. If allied radio were broadcasting information about the Holocaust, surely the German people (as well as the allied soldiers) would certainly have known what was happening.

Listening to Allied radio would have got you shot during WW2. And walls had ears in Nazi Germany. Besides, too many Germans simply could not fathom that something like a Genocide was be possible. It's hard to explain, but I think the average German knew very well what was happening to the Jews, and at the same time didn't believe it. There's a German saying that might explain it: "It cannot be true, because it shouldn't be true". Basically it describes a state of denial.

It doesn't add up. 1 + 1 does not make 2 in this instance.

Does it have to add up? The Germans tried to exterminate Jews, Gypsies and other minorities solely for racial issues, and the Allies failed to broadcast the Holocaust as much as they should have. These two wrongs don't negate each other.