Nick Kristof, Monday Morning Quarterback

(AKA  The Historian's Fallacy)

Another anti-American edition of the Historian’s Fallacy by Nick Kristof (8/25/2016), claiming that the US didn't admit any immigrants before and during WW2 and the US is to blame for Holocaust deaths, including Anne Frank. 

1) America admitted tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of German refugees during the 1930s and 1940s, including the Marxist Herbert Marcuse who participated in the violent Spartacist rebellion, which attempted to overthrow the German government after WWI.  During WW2 Marcuse worked for the OWI/OSS as analysts and afterwards became of prominent advocate for Marxist revolutionary politics at the University of California. 

2)  In the 1930s and early 1940s no one in America including its leaders had any idea what the Germans planned to do to the Jews.  Blaming someone for a decision they made long before events allegedly resulting from the decision is known as the Historian’s Fallacy.  In the 1930s and 1940, China was the country where mass murder was a reality.  It was American attempts to stop mass murder in China that brought the US into WW2.

3) Blaming Roosevelt for not being more aggressive on the refugee issue is simplistic and ignores the structure of American government.   A few Southern senators, notably Robert Reynolds, blocked Senator Wagner’s refugee initiative to admit German children in the late 1930s.  Roosevelt needed the Southerners’ support for the American rearmament program, which was well underway in the 1930s.  Roosevelt did not make a bad choice: US factories came within a few months of delivering the P-40 aircraft to France in 1940 that would have prevented Hitler's victory in the Battle of France.  Roosevelt’s rearmament program saved the Soviet Union and England.  The aircraft carriers Roosevelt built in the 1930s defeated the Japanese at Midway in June of 1942.

4)  Operation Market Garden was launched only days after the Franks were transported to Auschwitz. 17,000 American and British soldiers were killed or wounded in the attempt to liberate the Netherlands.  Show some respect for all the Allied soldiers who lost their lives fighting Hitler, Nick.

Why Didn't the Allies Bomb the Concentration Camps

No one thought of asking the allies to do this until July of 1944. The request was rejected by the Americans as militarily impractical, if not impossible, due to accuracy and the extreme distances involved. What the Americans wouldn’t say at the time was that all available resources were dedicated to Operation Cobra, the breakout from Normandy, which began in late July 1944 and culminated in an allied victory by late August.

The last train for Auschwitz, carrying Anne Frank and other Dutch Jews, departed the Netherlands in September of 1944.  The train left only days before the allies' Operation Market Garden failed to capture the bridges across the Rhine, which would have captured the Netherlands and cleared the way for an invasion of the German heartland in 1944.  The attempt resulted in 17,000+ British and American casualties.

It’s surprising, but predictable, that no one asks why the Russians didn’t bomb the camps or rail lines. By April of 1944, the Russians were at the Polish border, by August they had overrun Treblinka and were outside Krakow, near Auschwitz. During most of 1944 Auschwitz was well within range of Russia’s Tu-2 bomber, which could carry a heavier bomb load than American B-17s and B-24s operating at extreme range. The Russian response to this question would likely be, after muttering a curse about your stupidity: We were engaged in horrific battles where the outcome was never certain. We threw everything we had into those fights. We captured Treblinka as soon as we could and we were so close to Auschwitz by August of 1944.  The Germans started evacuating the camp in October, stopped gassing people in November and started covering up evidence of their war crimes. What makes you think we didn’t do everything we could to destroy the rail lines in Poland. When they emptied the camp of its last prisoner just before we captured it in January of 1945, the Germans had to march the prisoners back to Germany.  

You say we should have tried harder to rescue the prisoners in Auschwitz?  When we finally got men across the Vistula River outside Krakow after ferocious fighting, the Germans immediately counterattacked with five army divisions, 100,000 soldiers.  They were quickly reinforced by another eight German and Hungarian divisions.  We held on to the west bank of the Vistula until August 16th when the exhausted Germans gave up.  We could not resume the offensive until our own battered divisions and exhausted soldiers had been rearmed or replaced.  136,000 of our boys were killed or gravely wounded in the fight to get from the Polish border to the suburbs of Krakow.

*   *   *   *  *   *   *   *

Marshal Zhukov, the valor of the Red Army is beyond reproach, but the alliance between Stalin and Hitler to divide Poland in 1939 opened the door to all the horror that followed?

"If the nation only knew their hands dripped with innocent blood, it would have met them not with applause but with stones."  Marshal Zhukov

As you know, I was in Mongolia in 1939 leading the armies of the Soviet Union in the fight against the fascist Japanese.   After Stalin died, I personally arrested the rapist Lavrentiy Beria, Stalin's Himmler, the criminal who had so much blood on his hands including the murder of the Polish officers in the Katyn Forest, and ordered his execution.  There was no Nuremberg charade about how to deal with the guilty.

NY Times Bloody Sunday Cover-up

In a story about the future of the border between Ireland and the UK after Brexit (8/7/2016), Stephen Castle claims that the "years of  strife and violence in Northern Ireland between some Protestants who wanted to remain part of Britain and some Roman Catholics who favored unification with Ireland."

In fact the Northern Irelands Troubles of the 1960s and 70s were about civil rights, not the partition of Ireland into North and South.  The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association led the civil rights movement beginning in 1967 using civil rights marches to lobby for an "end to discrimination in areas such as elections... discrimination in employment, in public housing and alleged abuses of the Special Powers Act [including extra legal internment of dissidents]."  The increasingly repressive reaction to these protests culminated in the 1972 "Bloody Sunday" massacres, where British soldiers shot 26 unarmed civilians.

The question concerning Brexit is not really the border.  The question is whether conservatives, who never approved of the settlement of Northern Ireland's civil rights issues,  will return Northern Ireland to it's bad old days of civil rights abuses. 

**************

To this day The Times has failed to address its bias and continues to feature Simon Winchester, the Guardian reporter who helped England's Parachute Regiment cover up its role in the Bloody Sunday massacre.