FDR the great hero. - Politics Forum.org | PoFo

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Inter-war period (1919-1938), Russian civil war (1917–1921) and other non World War topics (1914-1945).
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By Kman
#14210138
In his new book, FDR and the Holocaust, author Rafael Medoff reveals the real FDR as a bigoted, buffoonish, elitist windbag. Here are a few quotes:

"The best way to settle the Jewish question," FDR once said, "is to spread the Jews thin all over the world." It worked for him in Hyde Park, NY, he said.

Complaints about the plight of European Jews fleeing the Nazis were dismissed by FDR as "sob stuff."

German complaints about Jews were "understandable," said FDR.

"Jews in various professions should be definitely limited."

The cause of anti-Semitism in Poland, FDR announced, was the economic success of Jewish businessmen there.

FDR boasted to a U.S. senator that "there is no Jewish blood in our [the Roosevelts'] veins."

Efforts to minimize one's income taxes was "a dirty Jewish trick" to Roosevelt.

"Mingling Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, unfortunate results," said FDR.

"Immigration should be limited to those with blood of the right sort," he said.

In 1923 FDR decided that there were too many Jews at Harvard so, as a member of the board of trustees, he imposed a quota.

Rafael Medoff surmises that such views can explain the FDR regime's tepid response to the reality of the Holocaust.


Funny how this sort of info is never taught in the brainwashing schools (government schools) eh?
User avatar
By Godstud
#14210142
It is taught in schools, if students are actually interested in learning about FDR. Your assumption is absurd.

Brainwashing? Maybe this should be in Conspiracy Theories.

The information is available to all. if a student wishes to learn about what sort of MAN FDR was, then he can, but most schools teach about what sort of President, he was. There's a difference.
By Kman
#14210148
Godstud wrote:It is taught in schools, if students are actually interested in learning about FDR. Your assumption is absurd.


If this is taught in schools then why is he such a revered president?

From wikipedia on rankings of presidents:

George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt are consistently ranked at the top of the lists.


Also I am aware that students can learn this if they spend many hours per week scouring through his biographies, what I am referring to however is the TLDR version most schoolkids get of FDR.

Godstud wrote:Brainwashing? Maybe this should be in Conspiracy Theories.


They do brainwash, why else do you think students leaving the government schools love government so much?

Godstud wrote:The information is available to all. if a student wishes to learn about what sort of MAN FDR was, then he can, but most schools teach about what sort of President, he was. There's a difference.


No there isnt, his Hitler-esque type of thinking is revealing of his character and intellect (or lack of it). What he did as a president also was heavily influenced by his jew hatred, like his barring of jewish immigration when they were trying to get away from FDR's ideological amigo and his creation of Fascist like business cartels during the great depression, FDR was pretty much a Nazi.
Last edited by Kman on 08 Apr 2013 10:09, edited 2 times in total.
By Kman
#14210153
layman wrote:Pretty much everyone was incredibly racist back then. There are some really shocking quotes from General Patton too.


No they werent, there were plenty of tolerant liberals back then, people who didnt believe jews should be "spread thin around the globe". Acting like nobody were sane during that era is just a bad excuse.
User avatar
By ThirdTerm
#14210154
FDR's anti-Semitism was previously known before the publication of the new book and he and Eleanor did not allow any Jewish person to their inner circles and he had made some incriminating remarks about the Jews but the new Harvard book has some new revelations about his dark side. In his era, it was the Democratic Party which was the party of racism and FDR vetoed the bombing of Auschwitz when requested by Churchill to end the Holocaust in 1943 because he thought that the war against Nazi Germany should not be fought to save the Jews.

Churchill's meeting of July 7th gave Eden the full authority of the Prime Minister to follow up the request to bomb the railway lines to Auschwitz. As you know from the exhibition upstairs, two days later the deportations on the railway lines from Hungary to Auschwitz ceased, and the priority of the surviving Jews of Hungary, and of all those concerned with them in the West, Jews and governments alike, was the issue of protective documents to enable them to find some place where they might have a safe haven. I suppose it is a great tragedy that all this had not taken place on 7 July 1943 or on 7 October 1942. For when all is said and done, by 7 July 1944 it was too late to save all but a final 100,000. It is interesting, however, to note that when the request was put to the American Air Force Commander, General R. Eaker, when he visited the Air Ministry a few days later, he gave it his full support. He regarded it as something that the American daylight bombers could and should do. But as you also know, from the letter which is put up in the Museum, when the request reached Washington - indeed, on the five separate occasions when the request reached Washington - it was turned down. On the second occasion that it reached the Undersecretary for War, John J. McCloy, he told his assistant to kill it; and it was then effectively killed. The debate about bombing those particular lines continued for more than a month after the lines were no longer in use.
https://www.winstonchurchill.org/support/the-churchill-centre/publications/churchill-proceedings/596-churchill-and-the-holocaust-the-possible-and-impossible
By Kman
#14210158
^Wow, I didnt know about that. Seems like FDR liked the Endlösung. No headaches about spreading jews around the world if you can just get Hitler to gas them to death.
#14210164
Ahaha. FDR was simply being a politician, he said those things in order to play to what he thought was an Anti-Semitic America. In actual fact, FDR surrounded himself with Jews.

To wit:
New York Times, 'FDR and the Jews', 05 Apr 2013 wrote:Franklin Roosevelt enjoyed the overwhelming support of American Jews during his presidency, and the reasons are clear. In his three-plus terms from 1933 to 1945, he led the war against Hitler, supported a Jewish homeland in Palestine, appointed a Jew to the Supreme Court, chose another to be his secretary of the Treasury and surrounded himself with Jewish advisers who helped shape the laws that revolutionized the role of government in American life — what some critics sneeringly called the “Jew Deal.” Then, of course, there was Eleanor Roosevelt, whose concern for minorities fused the bond even tighter. When Roosevelt died in 1945, the Rabbinical Assembly of America described him, almost supernaturally, as an “immortal leader of humanity and a peerless servant of God.”

[...]

The answer rests on how one measures the president’s gestures and accomplishments against the pressures he faced to do even less. In 1938, for example, Roosevelt recalled his ambassador to Germany to protest Kristallnacht, the Nazi pogrom. It was little more than a symbolic act, but he was the only head of state to do so. Over protests from his notoriously anti-Semitic State Department, moreover, Roosevelt encouraged efforts to settle European Jews in Latin America — about 40,000 of them made it there from 1938 to 1941 — and pressed the British to keep Palestine open to Jewish refugees. Most important, perhaps, was his approval of the War Refugee Board in 1943, which, while often ignored and always underfunded, worked with heroes like Raoul Wallenberg throughout Nazi-occupied Europe to save untold thousands of Jews.

As to the most contentious revisionist claim — that Roosevelt could have blunted Hitler’s killing machine by ordering the rail lines to Auschwitz destroyed — Breitman and Lichtman provide a measured response. There is little doubt, they write, that Allied planes were capable of reaching this destination by mid-1944. Industrial complexes in the area were already being bombed. The problem was that the War Department viewed the project as a diversion from more important military targets. Opposition was such that the matter never appears to have reached the president’s desk. How successful the precision bombing of Auschwitz would have been, given the mixed results elsewhere, is a matter of debate.
By Quantum
#14210500
A man born in 1882 has un-PC views on the Jews. Colour me surprised. I'm not sure how these views affect his statesmanship or should cloud his legacy.
#14210531
For someone who was so anti-jews, he sure did a lot to surround himself with them and get them on the supreme court. Not to mention that his efforts were instrumental in ending the holocaust. He had the overwhelming support of jews during his presidency.

We all say horrible things in private on occasion. Big deal.
#14210704
Everything I've read has stated that FDR was pretty supportive of Jews.

HistoryNet wrote:To his critics, Franklin Roosevelt's response to the Holocaust was epitomized by his June 1939 decision to refuse political asylum to more than 900 passengers aboard the German ocean liner St. Louis. The passengers, nearly all of them Jewish refugees, had the lights of Miami in sight when the United States government refused them permission to disembark. Roosevelt did not respond to pleas for help. The ship returned to Europe, and the Holocaust claimed more than a third of those who returned to the Continent.

...A year before the St. Louis affair, FDR prodded the State Department to allow tens of thousands of Jews to immigrate from Germany and Austria, and developed plans to turn the Western democracies into a huge safety net. "Roosevelt was a man of grand vision who wanted to resettle a much larger number of refugees," writes Richard Breitman, an American University historian who helped edit the volume. "[But] his willingness to take action varied sharply according to political and military circumstances."

As early as the spring of 1938, according to McDonald's papers, Roosevelt began talking about a plan to rescue millions of Jews from Nazi Germany and divide them between a group of 10 democratic countries. Later that year, Roosevelt promised McDonald that he would ask Congress to appropriate $150 million to help resettle refugees around the world. In May 1939, only a month before the St. Louis incident, McDonald was present when FDR warned his advisors that the situation of the Jews in Germany was growing critical. "It was not so much a question of money," McDonald recorded the president saying, "as it was of actual lives."

McDonald, the high commissioner for refugees for the League of Nations in the 1930s, had no tolerance for foot-dragging bureaucrats or timid world leaders. He had resigned from his post in 1935 over the organization's unwillingness to help Jews in Nazi Germany. And he had no reason to make excuses for Roosevelt. Which, historians say, is what makes his decision to join the president's advisory committee on refugees in 1938—and his impressions of a president he believed was quite concerned about the fate of European Jews—so important.

So why didn't Roosevelt act? McDonald blamed the intractable politics of the time. In early 1939, with the St. Louis about to set sail, FDR refused to endorse a bill that would have brought 20,000 German Jewish children into the United States outside the immigration quota. From McDonald's perspective, FDR saw the bill as a mere gesture—not a solution. In the face of strong public opposition and an intransigent State Department, both Roosevelt and McDonald also recognized that the bill was doomed to fail. "The problem was that most of the initiatives to resettle refugees…proved impossible, met substantial resistance abroad, or developed very slowly," Breitman and his coeditors write. "The outbreak of war destroyed most of what opportunities remained."

By 1940, Roosevelt abandoned his major resettlement efforts when he was forced to change his focus from humanitarian action to national security. That transition disappointed McDonald so much that he voted for Wendell Willkie in that year's presidential election.

Nonetheless, after FDR won, McDonald stayed on as the president's adviser, doing what he could to help Europe's Jews. "We definitely have a sense that McDonald felt he and Roosevelt were, if not on the same page, at least in the same chapter," Breitman told World War II. "He eventually realized that no one had the power to stop the Holocaust." Sadly, that included the president.


But hey...why should we listen to the commissioner for refugees in the League of Nations at the time, when Kman can cite Lew Rockwell's website?

I mean, look how rock solid some of this testimony Lew Rockwell puts up:

The OP wrote:German complaints about Jews were "understandable," said FDR.


Man. Can you see that one word that's quoted in that sentence written by a completely biased source?

OP wrote:The cause of anti-Semitism in Poland, FDR announced, was the economic success of Jewish businessmen there.


No quotes. No sources. No citations. This is some profound stuff!

And really, no example is better than those two. I haven't read the book, but come on...

I looked into the author who, himself, is frequently attacked by historians for being a partisan hack. An example all over the internet is a reader response to him:

Ficklstein wrote:Mr. Koch states that he is relying on Dr. Rafael Medoff of the David S, Wyman Institute for Holocaust studies for his almost total source of information. Yet it has been shown that the Wyman Institute's almost sole reason for existence is to discredit the Roosevelt Administration. For years it's only focus was to try and prove that FDR deliberately let Jewish concentration camp internees die when they could have been saved. The fact that Mr. Koch did not repeat this charge shows how little we can trust Dr. Medoff, since that accusation has been successfully challenged on numerous occasions.

If this transcript actually exits, I would like Midstream to print it in it's entirety (showing the actual quotation marks) so that its readers can see actually what President Roosevelt said.


The good doctor responds:

Ficklstein wrote:"The President stated that he felt the whole Jewish problem should be studied very carefully and that progress should definitely be planned. In other words, the number of Jews engaged ha 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... The President stated 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." (p.608) At a second meeting that day, Cape McCrea reported, FDR repeated his views "as to the Jewish situation."


You'll not he cut a portion out, which reads:

Casablanca correspondence wrote:Such a plan would therefore permit the Jews to engage in the professions, at the same time would not permit them to overcrowd the professions, and would present an unanswerable argument that they were being given their full rights. To the foregoing, General Nogues agreed generally, stating at the same time that it would be a sad thing for the French to win the war merely to open the way for the Jews to control the professions and the business world of North Africa.


Which is pretty important context, as the French wanted to keep North Africa and a bone to throw at the French colonial system (do remember this is a generation that grew up with the Drefus Affair) was hardly good to Jews anyway. So the Americans throw the French a bone and guarantee the rights of Jews. Yes, it's not perfect, but with the context still in—I think it's rather clear that it was supposed to offer protection, not restriction, for Jews.

Anyway, Haakon Out!
By Beal
#14210717
The Immortal Goon wrote:(a bunch of stuff)


I understand your skepticism, but you may not want to disregard these allegations as conspiracy theory nuttery or partisan half-truths so quickly. I did some quick searches. Similar articles were also published by the LA Times and Washington Post.
By Kman
#14210895
The Immortal Goon wrote:But hey...why should we listen to the commissioner for refugees in the League of Nations at the time, when Kman can cite Lew Rockwell's website?


Lew Rockwell is a great intellectual and he is more trustworthy than any university professor, despite his bias, bias doesnt make one a liar, a fact that most of you university people seem incapable to comprehend. Your also forgetting that it is impossible to be unbiased when it comes to history, everyone have an opinion on economics and history, they might be centrist, left-wing or right-wing but everyone is biased some way or the other, that is just how humans work.

The Immortal Goon wrote:Man. Can you see that one word that's quoted in that sentence written by a completely biased source?


No matter what source you use it will be "completely biased", there are no historians devoid of bias.

The Immortal Goon wrote:No quotes. No sources. No citations. This is some profound stuff!

And really, no example is better than those two. I haven't read the book, but come on...


Download the book and do a word search, I am sure the line is in there somewhere, Thomas Dilorenzo is not a known liar.

The Immortal Goon wrote:I looked into the author who, himself, is frequently attacked by historians for being a partisan hack.


And your not a partisan hack mister flaming commie history professor? Tell me more about your superhuman abilities please.

The Immortal Goon wrote:Such a plan would therefore permit the Jews to engage in the professions, at the same time would not permit them to overcrowd the professions, and would present an unanswerable argument that they were being given their full rights.


Jews were being given their full rights while a quota was imposed on how many of them could work as doctors? That is twisted and distorted logic being used there, if they were given full rights they would have been able to work in whatever profession they wanted to work in and not have a certain percentage imposed on them (Hitler imposed a percentage of 0% unlike the % that Roosevelt preferred).
#14210964
Kman wrote:Lew Rockwell is a great intellectual and he is more trustworthy than any university professor, despite his bias, bias doesnt make one a liar, a fact that most of you university people seem incapable to comprehend.


Kman wrote:No matter what source you use it will be "completely biased", there are no historians devoid of bias.


So you're discounting university professors because they're all biased, but Rockwell is fine because "being biased doesn't make him a liar"?

Kman wrote:(Hitler imposed a percentage of 0% unlike the % that Roosevelt preferred)


I don't recall Hitler putting a Jew in charge of the nation's financial business or appointing one to Germany's highest court.
By Kman
#14210974
Genghis Khan wrote:So you're discounting university professors because they're all biased


I just trust Lew Rockwell far more based on my intimite knowledge of his incorruptable character, he was a man of firm conviction during the darkest days of the libertarian movement. My past experiences with history books also helps undermine my trust in the honesty of many history professors, I think many of them deliberately leave out very interesting facts that make their target of historical inquiry look bad or good depending on their personal goals, for circumstantial evidence of this just look at how ill informed people are about the character of people like Abraham Lincoln and FDR for example. Both of these men were tyrants and yet they are revered by the general population because of all the shitty and biased history professors who suck at analyzing society because of their total lack of economic education.

Genghis Khan wrote:I don't recall Hitler putting a Jew in charge of the nation's financial business or appointing one to Germany's highest court.


FDR probably had a machiavellian calculating streak about him, he probably understood that the jew hatred was not nearly as strong in the United States as it was in Hitler's Germany so despite his strong personal hatred of jews he tried to kiss the ass of the jewish community by doing this in order to gain political capital.
#14210986
Kman wrote:I just trust Lew Rockwell far more based on my intimite knowledge of his incorruptable character, he was a man of firm conviction during the darkest days of the libertarian movement.


Trust whoever you want, but by lumping all "university professors" together, as if it's one big "legion of doom", you're no better than what you accuse FDR of being towards Jews.

Kman wrote:despite his strong personal hatred of jews he tried to kiss the ass of the jewish community by doing this in order to gain political capital.


So now not only did he hate Jews, they're were also too stupid to see it because of all the ass kissing?
By Kman
#14210988
Genghis Khan wrote:Trust whoever you want, but by lumping all "university professors" together, as if it's one big "legion of doom", you're no better than what you accuse FDR of being towards Jews.



Yeah I want professors to be "spread thin around the world" in order to limit their damaging influence and I would deny helping professors if they were being persecuted in their homelands because I am a professorphobe who believes in actively oppressing professors, JUST LIKE FDR WAS WITH THE JEWS.

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