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.