One of Carl Jung’s wild analogies is an exaggeration: He used to say that all wars are results of undue generalizations. All combative and contentious behaviors arise because of half-truths, and all unjustifiable statements of universality would not only make someone desperate but at the same time angry and violent. You can guess the rest.
Having conveyed this cautionary note to myself, I am not going to mince my words: Should President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who won the election a third time in 1940, set his isolationist policy aside, heeded the cries that “something terrible was going to happen in Europe” and joined World War II in the European theater, it is highly likely that Europeans could not have handed over more than 3 millions of their citizens of the Jewish faith to Germany. Likewise, Germans could not have killed them and their own quarter of a million Jews. Out of the total, there were 1.5 million Eastern European Jews that the occupying German soldiers killed point-blank.
As Frederick Deknatel writes in a recent article on the DAWN website, founded by Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi and devoted to the promotion of democracy and human rights in the Arab World, “No one goes to work for the U.S. government in order to be complicit in a genocide,” not in the 1930s nor 2020s. But Roosevelt sought and won an unprecedented fourth term in office in 1944. He was at the zenith of his political power since November 1932 and could have easily prevented that disaster. However, he elected to implement his own concentration camps for Asian Americans.
Some people say it would not have made any difference at all if the United States had joined World War II in 1939. They would say the U.S. Army was smaller than that of Switzerland at that time and the U.S. was not the “world power” we think of it today.
One could believe this line of argument if that “small” country had not built the largest army and armada in the world two years later. So big and invincible force it created, not one, or two, but three fascist empires that had occupied all of Europe, all of North Africa and the Middle East, and half of Asia crumbled in front of it.
In my opinion, President Roosevelt could have saved millions of Jews, Romani and Russian people, and many disabled people who could not work in German and concentration camps. His secretary of the treasury and ambassador to the Ottoman Empire, Henry Morgenthau Jr., knew it. He begged, he cajoled, and he threatened the president, but to no avail – four times.
Ambassador Morgenthau’s book, “Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story,” was analyzed by professor Heath Lowry in his book “The Story Behind Ambassador Morgenthau’s Story.” He became involved in the debate over the United States government’s response to the Holocaust.
Morgenthau’s story regarding the Holocaust in Europe is also very well told on the internet.
Treasury staff members presented Morgenthau with a memorandum entitled “Report to the Secretary on the Acquiescence of this Government in the Murder of Jews.” Three days later, Morgenthau met with Roosevelt; he urged the president to rescue Jews and non-Jews threatened with death in German-occupied and German-influenced Europe. Nothing happened! But Morgenthau was forced to resign from the Treasury in July 1945. He spent much of the rest of his life working for Jewish philanthropies, including the United Jewish Appeal, and became a strong supporter of the state of Israel.
It is not only the writer of these lines who is accusing FDR of being an accomplice to the Nazi genocide; but in a disturbing film, aired in 1994, producer Marty Ostrow argued that FDR knew that the Nazis were systematically slaughtering Jews and followed a policy of not rescuing them. The critics’ complaint, in the words of William Vanden Heuvel, president of the Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt Institute, was that the film was “one-sided and grossly unfair, indifferent to the truth and deceitful in concept.”
However, A. Dirk Moses, a genocide researcher and professor of political science at the City College of New York, recently pointed out “the tectonic shift taking place in this moment, namely erasing the strict distinction that international law drew between genocidal and military conduct.” FDR and his advisors could defend themselves until Jan. 26, 2024, claiming that what Adolf Hitler was doing was “military conduct.” Not anymore: Even if you are in a war, or following terrorists and suppressing rioters who are killing innocent people, you, your government or any government that you know of, might be engaging in genocide or acting with genocidal intent. U.S. President Joe Biden and his administration cannot claim that they did not know.
The Jan. 26 decision by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) to order provisional measures in response to South Africa’s genocide case against Israel also covers the U.S. government; it calls on President Biden to stop helping Israel, which is committing war crimes and perhaps the crime of all crimes: a genocide.
Biden is morally and legally obliged to block all military exports to Israel over the concerns they were being used to violate international law during the war in Gaza. It is perhaps the only way to clean the Palestinian blood from his hands. So far, he made the U.S. an accomplice in Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s crimes against humanity.
This is not an undue generalization that Dr. Jung would object to.
