Letters Letters
People’s pope? Well, half of them… going hungry in America… atom death toll numbers: too low… Thou swell, thou witty…
Oct 22, 2013 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Horror in Afghanistan… the great Charlie Mingus… field trip to the South Bronx
Oct 16, 2013 / Our Readers and Barry Schwabsky
Letters Letters
Stop the rot!… run over on the runway… diapers: the new luxury… students always come last… ditch the bells & whistles
Oct 8, 2013 / Our Readers
FDR and the Holocaust FDR and the Holocaust
Washington, D.C. In early 1943, at the height of the Holocaust, a prominent journalist denounced President Franklin Roosevelt’s response to the Nazi genocide in harsh terms: “You and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt,” she wrote. “If we had behaved like humane and generous people instead of complacent, cowardly ones, the two million Jews lying today in the earth of Poland and Hitler’s other crowded graveyards would be alive and safe…. We had it in our power to rescue this doomed people and we did not lift a hand to do it—or perhaps it would be fairer to say that we lifted just one cautious hand, encased in a tight-fitting glove of quotas and visas and affidavits, and a thick layer of prejudice.” This stunning critique of FDR’s Jewish refugee policy was written by none other than Freda Kirchwey, staunch New Dealer, Roosevelt supporter and editor in chief of The Nation. Evidently journalist Laurence Zuckerman was not aware of the Holocaust record of the magazine for which he was writing when he wrote “FDR’s Jewish Problem” [Aug. 5/12]. It completely refutes Zuckerman’s thesis that criticism of FDR’s Holocaust record is all the handiwork of conservatives and right-wing Zionists to drum up support for Israel. The Nation spoke out early and vociferously for US action to rescue Europe’s Jews. After the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom, it called for admission to the United States of at least 15,000 German Jewish refugee children. (The administration declined to endorse the proposal.) The Roosevelt administration’s refugee policy “is one which must sicken any person of ordinarily humane instinct,” Kirchwey wrote in 1940. “It is as if we were to examine laboriously the curriculum vitae of flood victims clinging to a piece of floating wreckage and finally to decide that no matter what their virtues, all but a few had better be allowed to drown.” In 1941, FDR’s administration devised a harsh new immigration regulation that barred admission to anyone with close relatives in Europe, on the grounds that the Nazis might compel them to spy for Hitler by threatening their relatives. The Nation denounced that as “reckless and ridiculous.” Numerous prominent progressives have followed in The Nation’s and Kirchwey’s footsteps by frankly acknowledging FDR’s failings in this regard. Walter Mondale called President Roosevelt’s 1938 refugee conference in Evian, France, a “legacy of shame” and said the participants “failed the test of civilization.” At the opening of the US Holocaust Museum in 1993, President Clinton pointed out that under the Roosevelt administration, “doors to liberty were shut and…rail lines to the camps within miles of militarily significant targets were left undisturbed.” Nancy Pelosi, in her autobiography, recalled with pride how her father, Congressman Thomas D’Alesandro, broke with FDR over the Holocaust and supported the Bergson Group, which challenged FDR’s refugee policy. George McGovern, in a 2004 interview about the missions he flew near Auschwitz as a young bomber pilot, said: “Franklin Roosevelt was a great man and he was my political hero. But I think he made two great mistakes”: the internment of Japanese-Americans, and the decision “not to go after Auschwitz…. God forgive us…. There was a pretty good chance we could have blasted those rail lines off the face of the earth [and] interrupted the flow of people to those death chambers, and we had a pretty good chance of knocking out those gas ovens.” Progressives have a long and admirable record of honestly acknowledging FDR’s failings alongside his achievements. Roosevelt’s response to the Holocaust is no more defensible than his internment of Japanese-Americans or his troubling record on the rights of African-Americans. Recognizing that fact does not endanger the legacy of the New Deal or diminish FDR’s accomplishments in bringing America out of the Depression or his leadership in World War II. It merely acknowledges his flaws as well. RAFAEL MEDOFF, founding director, The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies Northampton, Mass. Laurence Zuckerman suggests that Roosevelt’s critics are judging him harshly with the advantage of hindsight. He writes that “when he did learn about the murder of millions of Jews, he had no understanding of ‘the Holocaust,’ which came later and is now so embedded in our consciousness that it is hard to imagine what it was like to live without such knowledge.” But this does not accurately reflect public awareness at the time. One needs only to read Freda Kirchwey: “Jews in Europe are being killed because they are Jews. Hitler has promised their total liquidation. The ways…these slaughters are conducted have been reported. The numbers have been verified…. You and I and the President and the Congress and the State Department are accessories to the crime and share Hitler’s guilt.” Zuckerman also belittles the contributions of the Bergson Group in the formation of the War Refugee Board, saying that the group’s “biggest feat is something that Roosevelt created.” The Bergson Group sponsored legislation in Congress to establish a rescue agency. It is probable that at hearings on the bill, the State Department’s obstruction of efforts by US Jewish groups to rescue their European brethren would become public. Faced with a scandal, Roosevelt got ahead of the situation by creating the WRB—this was not a moral awakening but a political calculation. Regarding the bombing of Auschwitz: the WRB investigated bombing the rail lines, gas chambers and crematoriums, but officials claimed that bombing Auschwitz would use air power needed elsewhere. However, US planes were bombing the I.G. Farben complex at nearby Monowitz. Between July and November 1944, more than 2,800 US planes bombed the oil factories, sometimes flying right over the Birkenau death camp. Military experts and historians continue to debate the issue. Could precision bombing have been done without loss of prisoners’ lives? And would bombing the gas chambers actually have impeded the extermination? Historian Richard Breitman points out: “the historians’ debate…misses the main problem…: [the War Department] was opposed to the whole idea of a military mission for humanitarian purposes…and stopped the [WRB] from pursuing it.” Of course, one cannot ever know if bombing Auschwitz would have had the desired results. But as Breitman concludes: “bombing the gas chambers would have been a potent symbol of American concern for European Jews.” MARK GERSTEIN, former instructor in Holocaust Studies, University of Massachusetts Washington, D.C. In response to Laurence Zuckerman’s fine article, we might explain the thinking behind our book FDR and the Jews. We wrote the book because, first, scholarship is typically polarized between lauding FDR as the savior of the Jews and condemning him as a bystander or worse to the Holocaust. Second, we sought to analyze FDR’s approach to Jewish issues from the perspective of his entire life and career. Third, we tried to avoid writing history backward and making unverifiable counterfactual assumptions. The real story of FDR and the Jews is how a humane but pragmatic president navigated competing priorities during the Great Depression, foreign policy crises and World War II. We do not whitewash FDR. “For most of his presidency Roosevelt did little to aid the imperiled Jews of Germany and Europe,” we wrote. Still, FDR was not monolithic in his policies and “at times acted decisively to rescue Jews, often withstanding contrary pressures from the American public, Congress, and his own State Department.” Overall, FDR was far better for the Jews than his political opposition at home or any other world leader of his time. Our loudest critic has been Rafael Medoff, a longstanding FDR critic who assails all those who do not follow his party line. Political decisions during the Holocaust had a moral dimension that still elicits an emotional response. But some judgments—that FDR blithely sent passengers on the St. Louis to their death in the gas chambers, or that he refused to order the bombing of Auschwitz out of indifference or anti-Semitism—are historical distortions. We hope our readers will be able to judge with more and better information than they had. RICHARD BREITMAN, ALLAN J. LICHTMAN, Distinguished Professors, American University Zuckerman Replies New York City I am familiar with Freda Kirchwey and the articles from which Rafael Medoff quotes. But is he aware of this quote: “President Roosevelt has been a man whose greatness shines brightly in times of crisis. He is the only possible leader for the next four years.” It is from Kirchwey’s endorsement of Roosevelt’s historic bid for a fourth term, in The Nation of July 22, 1944, long after the condemnations of FDR’s refugee policies that Medoff cites—showing that the picture of FDR is more complex than Medoff would have us believe. It is disturbing that in his latest book, FDR and the Holocaust: A Breach of Faith, Medoff quotes Kirchwey’s criticisms of FDR at length while failing to mention that she still supported him. Emphasizing the former while ignoring the latter illustrates his flawed approach to writing history. Neither my article nor the book FDR and the Jews, as its authors Richard Breitman and Allan Lichtman point out, portrayed FDR as beyond criticism for his handling of the Holocaust. But neither was he a total villain. Medoff’s articles and latest book contain a litany of criticisms of Roosevelt but virtually nothing about his achievements. One can read Medoff and forget that during FDR’s presidency the country was suffering through the worst economic catastrophe in its history, that the fates of Great Britain and the Soviet Union were hanging by a thread, and that America had suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Japanese in Asia. In his letter, Medoff writes approvingly that “progressives have a long and admirable record of honestly acknowledging FDR’s failings alongside his achievements.” If only Medoff were equally fair-minded. As I wrote in my article, over the last thirty years a group of ideologically driven activists, of whom Medoff is the most energetic, have made it their business to cast Roosevelt’s handling of the Holocaust in the harshest possible light. These activists have largely had the field to themselves, and so a distorted image of FDR has become widely accepted. It is easy for politicians of all stripes to go along. Their homilies curry favor with Jewish supporters at little or no political cost. One of my goals for the article was to re-balance the scales and expose the agenda of FDR’s most vociferous critics. Medoff does not address the central question of my piece: What contemporary purpose does it serve to portray Roosevelt as complicit in the Holocaust? Why do so many of Medoff’s articles link Roosevelt to current events in Israel, a country that didn’t exist during FDR’s lifetime? At a time when our country’s leaders and many of its citizens are agonizing over how to respond to the use of chemical weapons in Syria, we might all agree that figuring out the best way to stop mass murder overseas has never been an easy task. LAURENCE ZUCKERMAN
Sep 24, 2013 / Our Readers and Laurence Zuckerman
Letters Letters
The March on Washington at 50… tip in cash—please… education “reform” is a scam… monetize this!
Sep 17, 2013 / Our Readers
Letters Letters
Pot Calls Kettle Pervert New York City JoAnn Wypijewski accurately portrays Christine Quinn as a tool for the real estate lobby and a shameless opportunist [“Carnal Knowledge,” Aug. 19/26], but to suggest that Anthony Weiner’s pathological behavior is akin to a sexual preference that will one day be tolerated is ludicrous. It is OK for a woman to prefer to have sex with another woman, so long as she does not post her genitalia on Twitter for women half her age while in a committed relationship, then lie about it for a week, do it again right before deciding to run for mayor and finally compare herself to Nelson Mandela, as Weiner did. A candidate being criticized for untrustworthy behavior by a rival who happens to be a lesbian is not the pot calling the kettle black. Weiner deserves condemnation. JONATHAN BEATRICE Wypijewski Replies New York City Willy-nilly, Jonathan Beatrice and other readers whose knees snapped in synchronous reflex illustrate my point, which is that a sex scandal says more about the social order than about the wretched sod making headlines. A person may be stupid or reckless or simply following a call of nature which that social order has deemed twisted (as in the case of homosexuals when Quinn was born, though not as much today), but the particular act is less interesting than the web of rules, assumptions, official lies and mores that declare some acts disgusting and others wholesome. We are all caught in that web—Weiner, Quinn, Beatrice, me—simply by existing here, today. We can reinforce it, conform to it, work to dismantle it, but as thinking people rather than mankurts we have to recognize it and our own relation to its power. Beatrice et al. have no time for thought; every question is reduced to opinion: for or against. So it is OK for women to have sex together (what a relief!), though with provisos. Why OK or not OK? Why the provisos? Why must Huma Abedin be a martyr, and the women in receipt of Weiner’s silly tweets victims? There is nothing intrinsically good or right about a culture’s web of assumptions. Questioning it is a starting point for ethics and politics. Everything else is a cut-price TMZ. JoANN WYPIJEWSKI Bradley/Chelsea Manning’s Trials After seeing Chase Madar’s “The Trials of Bradley Manning” [Aug. 19/26], I can only second the question by letter writer Jerry Mobley in the same issue: “Are all the adults [at The Nation] on vacation?” DONALD J. DUPIER Cleveland Chase Madar’s analysis of the Bradley Manning prosecution is a compelling and persuasive defense not only of Manning but of the terrifying growth of suppression of free speech and information in America. Madar’s article was brilliant, worthy of Manning’s act of patriotism. GORDON FRIEDMAN Washington, D.C. Chase Madar wrote a great article on Chelsea Manning. Madar may have a point about how the human rights community did not do enough to support Manning, but we find the sweeping generalization quite surprising, given that from the beginning, the Center for Constitutional Rights has worked extensively on TV, radio and print to shed light on the importance of Manning’s actions and her outrageous fate, while the people responsible for the war crimes she exposed go free. Moreover, the CCR represented Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman, The Nation and Jeremy Scahill, Julian Assange, Kevin Gosztola and Madar himself in a lawsuit challenging government secrecy about the trial. In the Court of Appeals for the Armed Forces and then in federal district court, we fought tooth and nail until the government agreed to provide ongoing press access to documents in the court-martial. The Manning case is a defining issue of our time. We admire Manning’s courage and will continue working to honor her patriotism and achieve her freedom. VINCENT WARREN, executive director Center for Constitutional Rights Madar Replies Brooklyn, N.Y. Vincent Warren is correct—the CCR has stood apart from other rights groups in its strong and unequivocal advocacy for Chelsea Manning from the very start. All the same, the mostly timid response of other human rights groups to Manning and the contents of her leaks is instructive and extends beyond the whistleblower’s case to the shocking contents of her disclosures. For example, the aerial slaughter filmed from the gunsight camera of a US Apache helicopter gunship of roughly a dozen civilians on a Baghdad street, including two Reuters employees: this is the most widely viewed wartime atrocity in history. Yet neither Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch or Human Rights First issued a condemnation or comment on this massacre, even after the video went viral. Staff of the latter two told me the reason for their groups’ silence is that the laws of armed conflict—as they actually exist—are at best muddy regarding this act of slaughter, serving more to authorize the helicopter crew’s lethal assault than to restrain it. Manning’s leaked video (see collateralmurder.com) reveals something far more chilling than a war crime; it shows the grotesque reality of “international humanitarian law” as applied to a real-life massacre—failing utterly to protect civilians while providing legal cover to the heavily armed perpetrators. It is a backhanded tribute to the power of law just how many atrocities are not illegal. CHASE MADAR Trayvon: Getting It Right Brooklyn, N.Y. Many fine journalists have tried to solve the Trayvon Martin puzzle—how a young fellow walking with sweets and ice tea could be viewed as a horrifying killer—but only Patricia Williams has the intelligence, compassion and insight to put the pieces together [“The Monsterization of Trayvon Martin,” Aug. 19/26]. Her skilled writing clearly illuminated the weaknesses of the prosecution and the insidious, overwrought racist (thereby successful) approach of the defense. Particularly moving is Williams’s portrayal of Don West’s vile bullying of Rachel Jeantel. BETH PACHECO Correction & Clarification In William Greider’s “Fed Up With Summers” [Aug. 19/26], Robert Rubin was mistakenly referred to as Bill Clinton’s first treasury secretary. Lloyd Bentsen was Clinton’s first treasury secretary (1993–94). Rubin served from 1995 to 1999. In Jon Wiener’s “Inside the Coursera Hype Machine” [Sept. 23] it was stated that neither iTunes U nor YouTube offers anything like the Coursera system, “in which a particular course starts on a specific date, with video lectures uploaded every week.” The iTunes U iPad app, however, offers some “in-session” classes with a start date.
Sep 10, 2013 / Our Readers, JoAnn Wypijewski, and Chase Madar
Letters Letters
Water Theft Pie Town, N.M. I live sixty miles west of Magdalena, New Mexico, mentioned in Sasha Abramsky’s “Dust Bowl Blues” [Aug. 5/12] as being out of water. To some, scarcity translates as dollar signs. One such water-grab attempt is an application to the state by an Italian-owned corporation for a permit to pump 17 billion gallons of water a year from the aquifer between here and Magdalena. That aquifer does not recharge at anything remotely resembling such a rate. Corporate bafflegab notwithstanding, what this would do is enable corporate owners to usurp a scarce public resource and sell it to upscale developers and water-intensive industries in the Albuquerque area. The state could thus release more Rio Grande water downstream to satisfy New Mexico’s legal obligation to Texas. One of the bases of New Mexico water law is beneficial use. The question currently in a battle of words and law is what “beneficial use” means. Does a viable local economy and ecology have value? Or is whatever use generates the most near-term “economic growth,” as corporate profit and tax base, the sole criterion? This issue has people politically opposed to each other fighting on the same side against the corporate plunder of our homes (see sanaugustinwatercoalition.org). UNCLE RIVER Roberts Court: “Crimes & Misdemeanors” Canonsburg, Pa. Michael O’Donnell, in “Roberts’s Rules of Order” [July 8/15], concludes by saying it is better to abide by the horrible rulings of the Roberts Court than to mess with settled law. But there are times when precedents need to be broken lest horribly unjust decisions are allowed to impose injustice on millions of oppressed Americans. One thinks of the Dred Scott case, Plessy v. Ferguson, Bush v. Gore, Citizens United and other sordid Court opinions— many already in this new century—that have had a disastrous impact on blacks, women, Asians and the working class. DAVID W. SOUTHERN Newton, Mass. I take issue with Michael O’Donnell’s bizarre conclusion, after his perceptive summary of the Roberts Court’s crimes and misdemeanors, that liberals have to accept the subversive undoing of our Constitution in the name of precedent! Is he serious when he admonishes us that “the tougher but better path is to accept the bad decisions as the law of the land” because, if a hypothetical liberal majority reverses them in the future, the Court will appear political? Hasn’t he read his own indictment of the Court as the enforcer of a far-right agenda? I’m disappointed that The Nation would run so important a critique, but with so defeatist and resigned a punch line. MARK S. BRODIN, professor and Lee Distinguished Scholar, Boston College Law School O’Donnell Replies Evanston, Ill. I agree with David W. Southern that the Supreme Court has an obligation to correct an egregious misinterpretation of the Constitution. I disagree, however, with Professor Brodin—a respected and beloved figure at my law school alma mater. He suggests that I am resigned to a Court that issues right-wing opinions. But he seems resigned to a Court filled with political stooges. He is free to join the likes of Justices Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas and Alito, who swing the wrecking ball at disfavored decisions as soon as they have five votes. For my part, I find the Roberts Court’s disregard for precedent immensely troubling and a poor example to follow. I would prefer a Court that respects the rule of law, even if that means accepting wrongheaded judgments from time to time. If I err in my thinking, it is because I am idealistic about the Court—not defeatist. MICHAEL O’DONNELL
Sep 4, 2013 / Our Readers and Michael O’Donnell
Letters Letters
Big Brother: watching, listening and…; nukes on our mind
Aug 13, 2013 / Our Readers, Mark Hertsgaard, and Terry Tempest Williams