Muchas de sus ideas no son diferentes por las cuales Hitler es un condenado a "maldito" eterno.
Este artículo de PRENSA JUDÍA echa fuego:
FDR’s Jewish Problem – And Its Japanese Link
A pattern of private remarks about Jews made by
Roosevelt may explain why 190,000 immigration spots were left unfilled despite
the plight of European Jury.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt
It was an uneventful day at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library in
Hyde Park, New York, in the autumn of 1996. Greg Robinson, a graduate student at
New York University, was researching racial issues during the Roosevelt era.
While skimming an index to the former president’s papers, Robinson’s eye chanced
upon an entry for FDR’s “pre-presidential writings.” Out of curiosity, Robinson
ordered the file on his next visit to the library. What he found would change
his entire professional life.
It turned out that when Roosevelt was spending time in Georgia in the
mid-1920s, he wrote a number of articles about the hot-button topic of the day,
Japanese immigration. Robinson was shocked to read these words of FDR in a 1925
column for the Macon Daily Telegraph:
“Anyone who has traveled in the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic
blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the
most unfortunate results.”
The future president warned that “Japanese immigrants are not capable of
assimilation into the American population.”
Not that FDR opposed all immigration; he favored the admission of some
Europeans, so long as they had what he called “blood of the right sort.” In his
articles, Roosevelt emphasized the need to disperse European immigrants around
the country in order to speed up their assimilation – something he had proposed
in a 1920 interview with the Brooklyn Eagle: “If we had the greater part of the
foreign population of the City of New York distributed to different localities
upstate we should have a far better condition.”
FDR’s pre-presidential writings about Japanese immigrants became the
centerpiece of Robinson’s critically acclaimed 2001 book, By Order of the
President. Historians have hailed Robinson, today a professor of American
history at the University of Quebec at Montreal, for showing the connection
between Roosevelt’s views about Asians and his otherwise inexplicable decision
to intern thousands of Japanese-Americans in detention camps during World War
II, even though none of them had been engaged in espionage.
But the significance of the 1920s articles does not end there. It turns out
that Roosevelt’s attitude toward Asians also helps explain another inexplicable
policy of his: keeping the level of Jewish immigration far below the legal
limits.
Why a Ketubah Was Not
Enough
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 percent filled during most of the Hitler era, because the
Roosevelt administration piled on so many extra requirements for would-be
immigrants.
For example, there were instances in which an applicant showed the U.S.
Consulate in Berlin a copy of his Jewish marriage certificate (ketubah)
but was unable to secure his civil marriage certificate from an uncooperative
Nazi bureaucrat. The Consulate refused to recognize the validity of the Jewish
certificate and therefore considered the applicant’s children to be
illegitimate. Having illegitimate children disqualified the applicant on the
grounds of “moral character.”
Another example: as of 1941, merely having a close relative in Europe was
enough to disqualify an applicant. That was because Roosevelt administration
officials concocted a theory that the Nazis could threaten the relative and
thereby force the immigrant to become a spy for Hitler.
Why did the administration actively seek to discourage and disqualify Jewish
refugees from coming to the United States? 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?
Some 190,000 quota places from Germany and its Axis partners were left unused
during the Hitler years. That means merely permitting the existing quotas to be
filled would have saved an additional 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. Yet the president did not do so.
Why?
‘Too Many Jews’ at Harvard
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 other sources, are revealing – and they paint a very different
picture from the one presented in the new book FDR and the Jews, by
Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman, recently reviewed by Gregory Wallance in
The Jewish Press (front-page essay, April 12).
In 1923, for example, as a member of Harvard’s Board of Overseers, Roosevelt
became concerned that, as he put it, “a third of the entering class at Harvard
were Jews.” He helped institute a quota to limit the number of Jews admitted to
15 percent of each class. Even many years later, FDR was still proud of doing
that – and said so to Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau Jr. in 1941.
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 anti-Semitism there.
In 1941, Roosevelt remarked at a cabinet meeting that there were too many
Jews among federal employees in Oregon.
In May 1943, President Roosevelt met with British Prime Minister Winston
Churchill at the White House to discuss the war effort and 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 recorded portions of the conversation in
his diary, said Roosevelt spoke approvingly of a plan “to spread the Jews thin
all over the world.”
Wallace added: “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. He claimed that the
local population would have no objection if there were no more than that.”
Limiting the Jews
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 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.)
There is evidence of other troubling private remarks by FDR. He dismissed
pleas for Jewish refugees as “Jewish wailing” and “sob stuff.” He expressed (to
a U.S. senator) his pride that “there is no Jewish blood in our veins.” He
characterized a tax maneuver by the publisher of The New York Times 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,
exercising undue influence, and needed to be “spread out thin” so as to keep
them in check.
FDR regarded Asians as having innate racial characteristics that made them
untrustworthy. Likewise, he apparently viewed with disdain what he saw as the
innate characteristics of Jews. Admitting significant numbers of
“non-assimilable” Jewish or Asian immigrants did not fit comfortably in FDR’s
vision of America.
FDR’s Other Motives
President Roosevelt’s unflattering private opinions about Jews do not explain
everything about his response to the Holocaust. Certainly some of his decisions
were motivated by other factors:
• Angering the Arabs – FDR refused to pressure the British to open Palestine
to refugees because he was concerned about angering the Arab world. He told his
cabinet in 1944 that he opposed a pro-Zionist resolution in Congress because it
might provoke Arab terrorist attacks on Allied positions in the Mideast, leading
to “the death of a hundred thousand men.” (The resolution eventually passed; it
did not provoke any attacks.)
In fact, 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.” No wonder Rabbi Wise privately believed
FDR was “hopelessly and completely under the domination of the English Foreign
Office [and] the Colonial Office.”
• Election-Year Politics: Although President Roosevelt quickly approved a
1943 proposal to create a government agency to rescue medieval art and
architecture in war-torn Europe, he fought tooth and nail against creating a
refugee rescue agency. Presumably the main reason was fear that helping refugees
would be unpopular. In the end, though, pressure from Congress, Jewish
activists, and the Treasury Department was about to explode into an
election-year scandal over his administration’s sabotage of rescue
opportunities. FDR pre-empted his critics by establishing the War Refugee Board
in early 1944.
• Indifference: The Roosevelt administration’s rejection of requests to bomb
Auschwitz seems to have stemmed primarily from a mindset that not even minimal
resources should be expended on helping the Jews.
That said, the revelations about FDR’s personal prejudices do help explain
key questions such as why he suppressed immigration far below its legal limits;
why he turned away the refugee ship St. Louis; and why he created only one token
haven, for just 982 refugees (in Oswego, NY) when there was plenty of room where
refugees could have stayed temporarily until the end of the war.
Of course Roosevelt is not the only American president to have been revealed
to have made 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, “ among other
anti-Jewish statements, were belatedly revealed in tapes of Oval Office
conversations.
But the revelation of Franklin Roosevelt’s sentiments will shock some people.
After all, he led America in the war against Hitler. Moreover, FDR’s entire
public persona was anchored in his image as a liberal humanitarian, his claim to
care about “the forgotten man,” the downtrodden, the mistreated. All of which
compounds the tragic irony of his woefully inadequate response to the
Holocaust.
About the Author: Dr. Rafael Medoff is founding director
of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, in Washington, D.C., and
author of 14 books about the Holocaust, Zionism, and American Jewish history.
His latest book is 'FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith,' available from
Amazon.
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario