Holocaust and the United States

Matt McKeon

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The thesis of the series was that the United States, for all its basis in immigration, had become quite anti-immigrant in the 1920s, fueled by bigotry against Jews and southern and eastern europeans as too "foreign" and carriers of disease and political radicalism. Gripped by the Great Depression in the 1930s, the USA was even less inclined to open its doors.

When Hitler targeted Jews and at first tried to expel them, most countries were indifferent, and political leaders like FDR who wanted to open quotas faced a backlash from the voters, and resistance, some quite disgusting from the bluebloods in the State Department.

The US let in more Jews than any other country(although Palestine, a British Mandate, wavered from accepting fugitives and slamming the door, ended up accepting many), but as Ken Burns as stated in interviews, the US could have let in 10x as many and it still would have been not enough.

After the war started, the ability of the US to influence the unfolding of the Holocaust was limited, everything was focused on winning the war as the means to stop Hitler.
 

Nitti

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part of the turning away of the jews was shown in the movie "Ship of Fools".IIRC it was about a cruise ship that left Hamburg with a load of jews looking to escape Germany and they were turned away at every port.I believe they last waited at Havana waiting on the U.S. to accept them which they didn't and returned to Hamburg.
 

Matt McKeon

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part of the turning away of the jews was shown in the movie "Ship of Fools".IIRC it was about a cruise ship that left Hamburg with a load of jews looking to escape Germany and they were turned away at every port.I believe they last waited at Havana waiting on the U.S. to accept them which they didn't and returned to Hamburg.
The actual case was the SS Louis, the Jewish refugees had visas for Cuba, but weren't allowed to land. Another Latin American states and the US then refused entry. On the voyage back to Europe, four European nations did end up accepting the passengers, although some ended up being rounded up by the Nazis when Germany occupied their countries, and died in the camps.
 

5fish

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Most of these people were murdered in the killing centers of Auschwitz and Sobibór; the rest died in internment camps, in hiding or attempting to evade the Nazis. Three hundred sixty-five of the 620 passengers who returned to continental Europe survived the war.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org › wiki
MS St. Louis - Wikipedia
 

jgoodguy

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The thesis of the series was that the United States, for all its basis in immigration, had become quite anti-immigrant in the 1920s, fueled by bigotry against Jews and southern and eastern europeans as too "foreign" and carriers of disease and political radicalism. Gripped by the Great Depression in the 1930s, the USA was even less inclined to open its doors.

When Hitler targeted Jews and at first tried to expel them, most countries were indifferent, and political leaders like FDR who wanted to open quotas faced a backlash from the voters, and resistance, some quite disgusting from the bluebloods in the State Department.

The US let in more Jews than any other country(although Palestine, a British Mandate, wavered from accepting fugitives and slamming the door, ended up accepting many), but as Ken Burns as stated in interviews, the US could have let in 10x as many and it still would have been not enough.

After the war started, the ability of the US to influence the unfolding of the Holocaust was limited, everything was focused on winning the war as the means to stop Hitler.
Matches what I know without looking at the series. I would characterize it as white Anglo-Saxon supremacy, as Irish and Chinese were treated badly too.
 

Matt McKeon

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An informative, if depressing companion to the Holocaust is PBS's The Eugenics Crusade. Some of the same swine show up, like Madison Grant.

The documentary details the movement to breed a better American, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation and Mrs. Harriman, the widow of a railroad tycoon. While everybody loves "healthy babies and happy families" as the slogan went, if you're going to improve the race, then what to do about the defectives?
 

Matt McKeon

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Joseph Conrad coined the phrase "pitiless folly" to describe imperialism, and boy does it apply to the industrious researchers of the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Springs, Long Island, as they clumsily misapply Mendel's recently discovered heredity experiments to a vicious campaign to sterilize thousands and write an immigration policy that closed the door to the populations targeted by the Nazis.

Nazis, you say? The eugenists inspired and supported German attempts to achieve "racial hygiene," an association that ultimately brought the evil enterprise crashing down as their appalled corporate sponsors withdrew their cash.

Real scientists had criticized the eugenicists for years by that time(the 1940s) as anti-semites and bigots scouring incompetently gathered information to fufill their darkest desires. Their terrible influence and the human cost of their delusions, their combination of cluelessness and certainity make them an object lesson.
 

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Spartans practiced Eugenics. Infanticide was common in ancient cultures to dispose of newborns with apparent defects.
 

5fish

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PBS's The Eugenics Crusade
Here is an old thread that shows how many famous Americans Black and White supported eugenics movement...

 

O' Be Joyful

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"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." -- Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr

"Three generations of imbeciles are enough." Few lines from U.S. Supreme Court opinions are as memorable as this declaration by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. in the landmark 1927 case Buck v. Bell. The ruling allowed states to forcibly sterilize residents in order to prevent "feebleminded and socially inadequate" people from having children. It is the only time the Supreme Court endorsed surgery as a tool of government policy.
Though Buck set the stage for more than sixty thousand involuntary sterilizations in the United States and was cited at the Nuremberg trials in defense of Nazi sterilization experiments, it has never been overturned.

 

Joshism

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if you're going to improve the race, then what to do about the defectives?
Something needs to be done. Too many people have children that shouldn't - be it for physical or mental issues that will be passed on, or simply their own personal shortcomings render them an unfit parent.

It certainly influences my views on abortion. People have the right not to have children; some have the responsibility. No child should be knowingly born with a serious defect, like deformed limbs or retardation.

I don't know if we have to go as far as forced sterilization. Banning fertility drugs would be a start.

Anecdotes involving different people I have know:

1. Got pregnant several times, each one ending in a miscarriage. I know miscarriages can happen to healthy people, but after enough of them a woman is clearly incapable of carrying a healthy baby to term.

2. Three sons. She had trouble getting pregnant with her husband so she went on fertility medicine. First son is autistic. Her other two sons were twins, because of fertility medicine. Also autistic. I don't think the meds caused that, but rather the same faulty combination of parental DNA that made it difficult to conceive in the first place.

3. Another couple that struggled to conceive. Fertility medicine gave her triplets. One was healthy, one was born with several health issues including complete deafness in one ear, one was stillborn.

4. I've never wanted children. As in have always been actively repulsed by the thought. I struggled to deal with children when I was one, much less as an adult. I had no father figure in my life to set an example. I'm not qualified to be a parent. As I learned about my family I realized there's something...odd about several generations of my family tree. Maybe it's just neurodivergence, but I feel I am doing society a favor by doing my part to end my line of DNA. (My only sibling, who was always much more normal than I am, has one child, who so far seems fairly normal.)
 

Matt McKeon

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Something needs to be done. Too many people have children that shouldn't - be it for physical or mental issues that will be passed on, or simply their own personal shortcomings render them an unfit parent.

It certainly influences my views on abortion. People have the right not to have children; some have the responsibility. No child should be knowingly born with a serious defect, like deformed limbs or retardation.

I don't know if we have to go as far as forced sterilization. Banning fertility drugs would be a start.

Anecdotes involving different people I have know:

1. Got pregnant several times, each one ending in a miscarriage. I know miscarriages can happen to healthy people, but after enough of them a woman is clearly incapable of carrying a healthy baby to term.

2. Three sons. She had trouble getting pregnant with her husband so she went on fertility medicine. First son is autistic. Her other two sons were twins, because of fertility medicine. Also autistic. I don't think the meds caused that, but rather the same faulty combination of parental DNA that made it difficult to conceive in the first place.

3. Another couple that struggled to conceive. Fertility medicine gave her triplets. One was healthy, one was born with several health issues including complete deafness in one ear, one was stillborn.

4. I've never wanted children. As in have always been actively repulsed by the thought. I struggled to deal with children when I was one, much less as an adult. I had no father figure in my life to set an example. I'm not qualified to be a parent. As I learned about my family I realized there's something...odd about several generations of my family tree. Maybe it's just neurodivergence, but I feel I am doing society a favor by doing my part to end my line of DNA. (My only sibling, who was always much more normal than I am, has one child, who so far seems fairly normal.)
Something doesn't need to be done. Certainly not by the state.
 

Joshism

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Something doesn't need to be done.
This is why every two years I have to ask myself if I really should bother voting. It's not that I doubt voting is important, but rather that the one thing both Republicans and Democrats agree on is that almost none of the things I care about matter. I probably would have stopped entirely post-Obama, if not for the rise of the Orange Anti-Christ.
 

5fish

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I have to ask myself if I really should bother voting.
Voting may not get you what you want but it keeps you freer than many other peoples in this world... All nations are police states but the ones, where you get to vote on your oppressors, seem to be better placed to live... that is why you vote...
 
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