Said on American Zionism

[/ dave /]

brettk at unicacorp.com wrote:

> Why should people in the US feel responsible for the holocaust?  The
> Nazi's, not the Americans, were exterminating Jews.  I've never understood
> this position.

Many Americans may as well have been. When Senator Claude Pepper agreed to speak before a
gathering of Hollywood luminaries - David O. Selznick, Jack Warner, Charlie Chaplin, Hedda
Hopper, hundreds more - during the war to raise money for various Jewish causes, his
contacts with the group organizing the event who were to take him to the venue had to wait
outside the country club dining room where he was having dinner because Jews weren't allowed
inside. Strictly speaking, I fail to see much difference between killing someone for their
skin color, heritage, religious affiliation, etc. and refusing them entry to a dining room.
It's the same thinking at work.

So this isn't an example of the relative intellectual/emotional isolation from the world
which is and long has been fundamental to the American way of life (and explains a lot of
things), but instead highlights the more insidious nature of the prejudice ingrained in the
popular consciousness of the time.

I realize that may not seem to directly address your question, but as with most instances of
evil and depravity run amuck in the world, it's always prudent to look to home first before
we go pointing fingers elsewhere.

In any case, isn't it true that the US (primarily govt. and corporate interests, not
citizenry per se) and Western Europe actively, if somewhat surreptitiously, encouraged the
militarization and re-industrialisation of post-WW1 Germany, and along with it all the
little Hitlers, in the interest of fending off a bogus communist 'menace' (sic) that
supposedly threatened to overtake the minds of the war-weakened and demoralized German
populace? Weren't there (mostly) trumped-up allegations of reds marching into the Rhineland?

--

/  dave  /