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‘The Monuments Men’ shows how America saved paintings while letting Jews die

by Mojambo ( 190 Comments › )
Filed under History, Holocaust, World War II at February 12th, 2014 - 12:00 pm

As an art lover and a Renaissance man  I am glad that paintings were saved by American troops during World War II, I only wish the government was equally concerned about saving Jewish lives.

by Rafael Medoff

The story behind the creation of the “monuments men” team, depicted in George Clooney’s new feature film by the same name, begins in the spring of 1943, after the Allies had confirmed that Hitler was carrying out what they called “his oft-repeated intention to exterminate the Jewish people in Europe”—while looting priceless works of art from their victims. Jewish leaders and members of Congress asked Allied leaders to take steps to aid the refugees. Roosevelt Administration officials replied that they could not divert military resources for nonmilitary purposes; the only way to rescue the Jews, they claimed, was to win the war. But to head off growing calls for rescue, the U.S. and British governments announced they would hold a conference in Bermuda to discuss the refugee problem. The talks had been “shunted off to an inaccessible corner so that the world would not be able to listen in,” American Zionist leader Abba Hillel Silver charged.

Assembling the American delegation to Bermuda proved to be no simple task. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s first two choices to chair the U.S. delegation, veteran diplomat Myron Taylor and Yale President Charles Seymour, turned him down.

So did Supreme Court Justice Owen Roberts, who said “the business of the court is in such shape” that he could not spare the time for the refugee conference. FDR expressed disappointment that Roberts would not be able to enjoy the lush beauty of the island, “especially at the time of the Easter lillies!” […..]

The conference was doomed before it started—because, as Synagogue Council of America President Dr. Israel Goldstein pointed out, its real purpose was “not to rescue victims of Nazi terror, but rescue our State Department and the British foreign office from possible embarrassment.” The American delegates (led by last-minute choice Harold W. Dodds, president of Princeton University) arrived with strict instructions: no focus on Jews as the primary victims of the Nazis; no increase in the number of refugees admitted to the United States, even though immigration quotas were not even close to full; and no use of American ships to transport refugees—not even troop supply ships that were returning from Europe empty.

The conferees also rejected the idea of food shipments to starving European Jews. That would violate the Allied blockade of Axis Europe, and no exceptions could be made, they declared. (Just a year earlier, however, the Allied leaders had yielded to public pressure and made an exception for the starving population of Nazi-occupied Greece.) Closing off the last remaining options, the British delegates at Bermuda refused to discuss opening Palestine to refugees and scotched the idea of negotiating with the Nazis for the release of Jews. The release of large numbers of Jews “would be relieving Hitler of an obligation to take care of these useless people,” one British official asserted.

[…….]As Congressman Andrew Somers (D-NY) put it in a radio broadcast, Bermuda proved that “the Jews have not only faced the unbelievable cruelty of the distorted minds bent upon annihilating them, but they have to face the betrayal of those whom they called ‘friends’.”

It was becoming painfully obvious that when it came to saving European Jews, nobody had much interest. When it came to saving European paintings, however, the response was very different. Which is where the story behind Clooney’s The Monuments Men came in.

***

Shortly after the Bermuda meetings ended, the New York Times published an editorial titled “Europe’s Imperiled Art.” The newspaper, which showed little interest in the fate of Europe’s imperiled Jews, urged strong government action to rescue “cultural treasures” from the battle zones. The White House agreed: Here was something that did merit the diversion of American military resources. In June 1943, the Roosevelt Administration announced the establishment of a U.S. government commission “for the protection and salvage of artistic and historic monuments in Europe.”

Finding a chairman for the new rescue agency was not too difficult: FDR turned to Justice Roberts, who may not have had time for the task of rescuing Jews but quickly found the time to chair a commission to rescue paintings and statues.  [……]

Some refugee advocates openly questioned the administration’s priorities. In full-page advertisements in the New York Times and elsewhere, the activists known as the Bergson Group said the establishment of the monuments group was “commendable. … It shows the deep concern of the [Allies] toward the problems of culture and civilization. But should [they] not at least show equal concern for an old and ancient people who gave to the world the fundamentals of its Christian civilization, the Magna Carta of Justice—the Bible—and to every generation some of its most outstanding thinkers, writers, scholars and artists? A governmental agency with the task of … saving the Jewish people of Europe is the least the [Allies] can do.”

In the autumn of 1943, the Bergson Group’s allies in Congress introduced a resolution urging the president to create a commission to rescue Jews. At a hearing on the resolution, New York City Mayor Fiorello La Guardia pointed to the creation of the monuments commission: […….]

The Roosevelt Administration dispatched Assistant Secretary of State Breckinridge Long to Capitol Hill to testify against Bergson’s rescue resolution. Long declared that the United States was deeply concerned about the Jewish refugees, but after all, “you cannot send a regiment in there to pull people out.” Paintings presented no such difficulties, apparently.

Historians have noted that the work of the Monuments Men was not the only instance in which the Roosevelt Administration diverted military resources, or altered military plans, because of nonmilitary considerations. A U.S. Air Force plan to bomb the Japanese city of Kyoto was blocked by Secretary of War Henry Stimson because of the city’s artistic treasures. Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy intervened to divert U.S. bombers from striking the German city of Rothenburg because he feared for the safety of its famous medieval architecture: That was the same McCloy who rebuffed requests to bomb Auschwitz, on the grounds that such air strikes would require “diverting” planes from battle zones. In fact, throughout mid- and late 1944, U.S. bombers—including one piloted by future U.S. Sen. George McGovern—repeatedly struck German oil factories adjacent to Auschwitz, some of them less than five miles from the gas chambers.

No doubt part of the problem was human psychology. When tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions of people are murdered, they become a kind of faceless blur, a numbing statistic in the public’s mind. By contrast, the specific images of famous Rembrandt or Picasso paintings were personally familiar to many Americans—and that familiarity engendered the sympathy needed to bring about intervention.

Perhaps there is also something to be learned from the mass outpouring of sympathy for endangered animals. In a biting essay at the peak of the Darfur genocide, New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof complained that Americans would care more about Darfur if the victims were puppies.  […….]

During the 1940s, some refugee advocates noted the same phenomenon. Meeting with a U.S. senator in 1943, Rabbi Meyer Berlin (namesake of the future Bar-Ilan University) remarked: “If horses were being slaughtered as are the Jews of Poland, there would by now be a loud demand for organized action against such cruelty to animals. Somehow, when it concerns Jews, everybody remains silent, including the intellectuals and humanitarians of free and enlightened America.” Two years later, in a sad fulfillment of Rabbi Berlin’s dire prediction, U.S. Gen. George Patton diverted U.S. troops to rescue 150 prized Lipizzaner dancing horses, which were caught between Allied and Axis forces along the German-Czech border.

None of this detracts from what the Monuments Men accomplished, of course. Their rescue of precious artwork and other historical treasures is deserving of praise. “The story of the Monuments Men is one that has to be told,” Texas Congresswoman Kay Granger said recently, explaining her proposal to give the surviving Monuments Men a Congressional Gold Medal. But it’s also story that has to be told within its historical context: the failure of the Roosevelt Administration to accord the rescue of human beings the same level of concern it accorded the rescue of cultural treasures.

As an outspoken advocate of international intervention against the genocide in Darfur, George Clooney should understand this equation better than most people: He even got himself arrested two years ago by chaining himself to the front of the Sudanese embassy in Washington. Now imagine for a moment that the U.S. had sent military personnel into Darfur to rescue ancient African cultural heirlooms while refusing to lift a finger to aid victims of mass murder. Would Clooney make a movie about that rescue effort?  [……]The contrast between America’s rescue of paintings from the Nazis and the American refusal to rescue Jews from the Nazis deserves the same consideration.

Read the rest – ‘The Monuments Men’ Shows How America Saved Paintings While Letting Jews Die

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Posted in History, Holocaust, World War II | 190 Comments »

The pajama game; and what poltical ignorance brings us

by Mojambo ( 144 Comments › )
Filed under Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Health Care, Politics, Progressives, Socialism at January 3rd, 2014 - 4:00 pm

When your opponent is in the process of destroying himself, do not interfere is Sun Tzu’s famous maxim. Republicans should not bail Obama out by changing the subject which in my opinion was what the shut down did. Mr.Will is correct, John Roberts (naturally  appointed by a Republican president) would have done Obama a huge favor by overturning the misnamed “Affordable Care Act”.

by George F. Will

Washington — This report on the State of Conservatism comes at the end of an annus mirabilis for conservatives. In 2013, they learned that they may have been wasting much time and effort.

Hitherto, they have thought that the most efficient way to evangelize unconverted was to write and speak, exhorting those still shrouded in darkness to read conservatism’s most light-shedding texts. Now they know that a quicker, surer method is to have progressives wield power for a few years. This will validate the core conservative insight about the mischiefs that ensue when governments demonstrate their incapacity for supplanting with fiats the spontaneous order of a market society.

It is difficult to recall and hard to believe that just three months ago some American conservatives, mirroring progressives’ lack of respect for the public, considered it imperative to shut down the government in order to stop Obamacare in its tracks. They feared that once Americans got a glimpse of the health law’s proffered subsidies, they would embrace it. Actually, once they glimpsed the law’s details, they recoiled.

Counterfactual history can illuminate the present, so: Suppose in 2012, Barack Obama had told the truth about the ability of people to keep their health plans. Would he have been re-elected? Unlikely. Suppose in 2012, U.S. Chief Justice John Roberts, instead of rewriting the health care law to save it, had been the fifth vote for overturning it. Would Obama be better off today? Probably.

Franklin Roosevelt, emboldened by winning a second term in 1936, attempted to pack, by expanding, the Supreme Court, to make it even more compliant toward his statism. He failed to win congressional compliance, and in 1938 he failed to purge Democrats who had opposed him. The voters’ backlash against him was so powerful that there was no liberal legislating majority in Congress until after the 1964 election.

That year’s landslide win by President Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater, less than 12 months after a presidential assassination, left Democrats with 295 House and 68 Senate seats. Convinced that a merely sensible society would be a paltry aspiration, they vowed to build a Great Society by expanding legislation and regulation into every crevice of Americans’ lives. They lost five of the next six and seven of the next 10 presidential elections. In three years we shall see if progressive overreaching earns such a rebuke.

In 2013, the face of U.S. progressivism became Pajama Boy, the supercilious, semi-smirking, hot-chocolate-sipping faux-adult who embodies progressives’ belief that life should be all politics, all the time — come on, everybody, spend your holidays talking about health care. He is who progressives are.

They are tone-deaf in expressing bottomless condescension toward the public and limitless faith in their own cleverness. Both attributes convinced them that Pajama Boy would be a potent persuader, getting young people to sign up for the hash that progressives are making of health care. As millions find themselves ending the year without insurance protection and/or experiencing sticker shock about the cost of policies the president tells them they ought to want, a question occurs: Have events ever so thoroughly and swiftly refuted a law’s title? Remember, it is the “Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.”

From Detroit’s debris has come a judicial ruling that the pensions that government employees unions, in collaboration with the political class, extort from taxpayers are not beyond the reach of what they bring about — bankruptcy proceedings. In Wisconsin, as a result of Gov. Scott Walker’s emancipation legislation requiring annual recertification votes for government workers’ unions and ending government collection of union dues, more than 70 of 408 school district unions were rejected.

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Read the rest – The best argument for conservatism – real life

by George F. Will

It was naughty of Winston Churchill to say (if he really did) that “the best argument against democracy is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Nevertheless, many voters’ paucity of information about politics and government, although arguably rational, raises awkward questions about concepts central to democratic theory, including consent, representation, public opinion, electoral mandates and officials’ accountability.

[……]

Somin says that in Cold War 1964, two years after the Cuban missile crisis, only 38 percent of Americans knew the Soviet Union wasn’t a member of NATO. In a 2006 Zogby poll, only 42 percent could name the three branches of the federal government.

Voters can’t hold officials responsible if they don’t know what government is doing, or which parts of government are doing what. Given that 20 percent think the sun revolves around the Earth, it is unsurprising that a majority are unable to locate major states such as New York on a map.

The average American expends more time becoming informed about choosing a car than choosing a candidate. But, then, the consequences of the former choice are immediate and discernible.

Many people, says Somin, acquire political knowledge for the reason people acquire sports knowledge — because it interests them. And with “confirmation bias,” many use political information to reinforce their pre-existing views. Committed partisans are generally the most knowledgeable voters, independents the least. And the more political knowledge people have, the more apt they are to discuss politics with people who agree with, and reinforce, them.

The problem of ignorance is unlikely to be ameliorated by increasing voter knowledge because demand for information, not the supply of it, is the major constraint on political knowledge. Despite dramatic expansions of education and information sources, abundant evidence shows the scope of political ignorance is remarkably persistent over time. And if political knowledge is measured relative to government’s expanding scope, ignorance is increasing rapidly: There is so much more to be uninformed about.

[……]

Political ignorance helps explain Americans’ perpetual disappointment with politicians generally, and presidents especially, to whom voters unrealistically attribute abilities to control events. The elections of 1932 and 1980 illustrated how voters mainly control politicians — by refusing to re-elect them.

Some people vote because it gives them pleasure and because they feel duty-bound to cast a ballot that, by itself, makes virtually no difference, but affirms a process that does. And although many people deplore the fact that US parties have grown more ideologically homogenous, they now confer more informative “brands” on their candidates.

Political ignorance, Somin argues, strengthens the case for judicial review by weakening the supposed “countermajoritarian difficulty” with it. If much of the electorate is unaware of the substance or even existence of policies adopted by the sprawling regulatory state, the policies’ democratic pedigrees are weak. Hence Somin’s suggestion that the extension of government’s reach “undercuts democracy more than it furthers it.”

An engaged judiciary that enforced the Framers’ idea of government’s “few and defined” enumerated powers (Madison, Federalist 45), leaving decisions to markets and civil society, would, Somin thinks, make the “will of the people” more meaningful by reducing voters’ knowledge burdens. Somin’s evidence and arguments usefully dilute the unwholesome romanticism that encourage government’s pretensions, ambitions and failures.

Read the rest– What political ignorance delivers

 

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Posted in Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Health Care, Politics, Progressives, Socialism | 144 Comments »

What FDR privately thought about Jews and Asians

by Mojambo ( 132 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, History, Holocaust, World War II at April 9th, 2013 - 2:00 pm
Despite being the patron saint of liberalism, in private FDR exhibited many racial biases, biases which he quietly put into effect as U.S. Government policy. Given FDR’s stereotyped views on Asians, we can now better understand his decision to intern Japanese-Americans.
by Rafael Medoff

In May 1943, President Franklin Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill at the White House. It was 17 months after Pearl Harbor and a little more than a year before D-Day. The two Allied leaders reviewed the war effort to date and exchanged thoughts on their plans for the postwar era. At one point in the discussion, FDR offered what he called “the best way to settle the Jewish question.”

Vice President Henry Wallace, who noted the conversation in his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan (recommended by geographer and Johns Hopkins University President Isaiah Bowman) “to spread the Jews thin all over the world.” The diary entry adds: “The president said he had tried this out in [Meriwether] County, Georgia [where Roosevelt lived in the 1920s] and at Hyde Park on the basis of adding four or five Jewish families at each place. […….]

Roosevelt’s “best way” remark is condescending and distasteful, and coming from anyone else it would probably be regarded as anti-Semitism. But more than that, FDR’s support for “spreading the Jews thin” may hold the key to understanding a subject that has been at the center of controversy for decades: the American government’s tepid response to the Holocaust.

Here’s the paradox. The U.S. immigration system severely limited the number of German Jews admitted during the Nazi years to about 26,000 annually — but even that quota was less than 25% filled during most of the Hitler era, because the Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be immigrants. For example, starting in 1941, merely leaving behind a close relative in Europe would be enough to disqualify an applicant — on the absurd assumption that the Nazis could threaten the relative and thereby force the immigrant into spying for Hitler.

[…….] Why didn’t the president quietly tell his State Department (which administered the immigration system) to fill the quotas for Germany and Axis-occupied countries to the legal limit? That alone could have saved 190,000 lives. It would not have required a fight with Congress or the anti-immigration forces; it would have involved minimal political risk to the president.

Every president’s policy decisions are shaped by a variety of factors, some political, some personal. In Roosevelt’s case, a pattern of private remarks about Jews, some of which I recently discovered at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem and from other sources, may be significant.

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 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.”

There is evidence of other troubling private remarks by FDR too, including dismissing pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff”; expressing (to a senator ) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins”; and characterizing a tax maneuver by a Jewish newspaper publisher as “a dirty Jewish trick.” But the most common theme in Roosevelt’s private statements about Jews has to do with his perception that they were “overcrowding” many professions and exercising undue influence.

This attitude dovetails with what is known about FDR’s views regarding immigrants in general and Asian immigrants in particular. In one 1920 interview, he complained about immigrants “crowding” into the cities and said “the remedy for this should be the distribution of aliens in various parts of the country.” In a series of articles for the Macon (Ga.) Daily Telegraph and for Asia magazine in the 1920s, he warned against granting citizenship to “non-assimilable immigrants” and opposed Japanese immigration on the grounds that “mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results.” […….]

FDR’s decision to imprison thousands of Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II was consistent with his perception of Asians as having innate racial characteristics that made them untrustworthy. [……]Admitting significant numbers of Jewish or Asian immigrants did not fit comfortably in FDR’s vision of America.

Other U.S. presidents have made their share of unfriendly remarks about Jews. A diary kept by Harry Truman included statements such as “The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish.” Richard Nixon‘s denunciations of Jews as “very aggressive and obnoxious” were belatedly revealed in tapes of Oval Office conversations.

But the revelation of Franklin Roosevelt’s sentiments will probably shock many people. After all, he led America in the war against Hitler. Moreover, Roosevelt’s public persona is anchored in his image as a liberal humanitarian, his claim to care about “the forgotten man,” the downtrodden, the mistreated. But none of that can change the record of his response to the Holocaust.

The observance of Holocaust Memorial Day begins Sunday night. It is the annual occasion to reflect on the Nazi genocide and the world’s response to it. In the case of the United States, it is sobering to consider that partly because of Roosevelt’s private prejudices, innocent people who could have been saved were instead abandoned.

Read the rest – What FDR said about Jews in private

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Posted in Anti-semitism, History, Holocaust, World War II | 132 Comments »

Obama, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and Zionism

by Mojambo ( 54 Comments › )
Filed under Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, History, Holocaust, Israel, Judaism, World War II at March 19th, 2013 - 9:59 am

How ironic that for so many elderly Jews from FDR’s times, he is viewed as their patron saint. Given FDR’s tepid response to the Holocaust and to any rescue plans, there should be little doubt that FDR far from being a friend of the Jews, actually had a touch of the anti-Semite in him.

by Rafael Medoff

President Barack Obama has spoken of his deep admiration for Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his desire to emulate FDR’s leadership style. But in the wake of the discovery of new documents detailing FDR’s behind-the-scenes coldness regarding the creation of a Jewish state, many Israelis will be hoping that sentiment does not extend to Roosevelt’s views on Zionism.

[…..]

In private, however, FDR expressed very different views on the subject, according to the documents I found recently at the Central Zionist Archives in Jerusalem.

The first is an account by American Jewish leader Stephen S. Wise of a private meeting he had with the president in January 1938. Wise was dismayed to hear FDR assert, “You know there is not room in Palestine for many more people – perhaps another hundred or hundred and fifty thousand.”  […….]

Rabbi Wise insisted there was room for at least another 1.5 million Jews in the Holy Land, but FDR would not budge. He urged Wise to come up with “a second choice for the Jews… Palestine possibilities are going to be exhausted.  [……….].” Wise left the meeting “surprised and shocked” by the president’s position.

Once World War Two began, President Roosevelt’s attitude toward Zionism grew even chillier.

British officials claimed any wartime expression of support for Zionism by the Allies would drive the Arab world into the arms of the Nazis. Rabbi Wise countered that the Arabs already supported the Nazis anyway.

“The [pro-Nazi] rebellion in Iraq, the presence of the Mufti in Berlin and Rome, [and] the failure of Egypt to live up to her treaty of alliance [with England]” show that “the sacrifice of friends in the interest of appeasing the unfriendly has repeatedly been proven to be in vain,” Wise argued. Nonetheless, FDR sided with the British view, as another newly discovered document makes plain.

The second document, from October 1941, records Nahum Goldmann, co-chairman of the World Jewish Congress, briefing American Zionist leaders on worrisome rumors that the British were holding secret negotiations with the Arabs over the future of Palestine.

Goldmann said his request to the State Department for information about the talks had been ignored because State “is very much influenced by the British Colonial Office.”

To make matters worse (Goldmann continued), “There are reasons also to believe that even in higher quarters” – a reference to the Roosevelt White House – “there are certain prejudices that have to be overcome in order to get effective support from the administration for a Jewish Palestine.” (In a similar vein, Rabbi Wise wrote to a colleague that FDR was “hopelessly and completely under the domination of the English Foreign Office [and] the Colonial Office.”)

By 1942, FDR was so averse to being seen as pro- Zionist that he rejected even a request to permit the Palestine (Jewish) Symphony Orchestra to name one of its theaters the “Roosevelt Amphitheatre.”

A third new document concerns an April 1943 meeting between FDR and a delegation of seven Jewish congressmen. They urged the president to press the British to cancel the White Paper policy of closing off Palestine to all but a handful of Jewish refugees.

“It was a very unsatisfactory interview,”Congressman Daniel Ellison (R-Maryland) reported to Jewish leaders. “[We] asked the President about refugees, the White Paper, etc. What he proposed to do about these things. [We] made a number of suggestions to him as to what [we] thought he ought to do and the answer to all of these suggestions was ‘No.’”

The fourth document is a transcript of Nahum Goldmann briefing David Ben-Gurion and other Jewish Agency leaders, in 1944, about the political situation in Washington. According to Goldmann, FDR’s support for Zionism was “tentative.”

He added: “It is impossible to educate [President Roosevelt], because you get to see him only once every six months, for thirty minutes, ten of which are spent by him telling anecdotes, after which he expects to hear you tell him anecdotes, and then there are only ten minutes left for a serious conversation – what can one accomplish like this?”

Goldmann’s description dovetails with Chaim Weizmann’s bitter experience when he met with FDR at the White House in July 1942. The Zionist leader wanted to speak about the Allies’ policy on Palestine, but the president diverted the conversation into a long discussion about the production of synthetic rubber. Roosevelt pushed aside Weizmann’s request to mobilize a Jewish army to defend Palestine against a German invasion; FDR supported the British view that such a move would antagonize the Egyptian Army. Weizmann argued that the US-British position was like “trying to appease a rattlesnake,” but once again, Roosevelt would not budge.

David Niles, a close adviser to FDR, once remarked that if Roosevelt had lived (and thus Harry Truman remained vice president), he probably would not have supported the creation of Israel, and as a result the Jewish state might never have been established. Today it is more clear than ever why Niles doubted FDR genuinely supported Zionism.

Read the rest – Obama, FDR, and Zionism

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Posted in Anti-semitism, Barack Obama, History, Holocaust, Israel, Judaism, World War II | 54 Comments »