Around world, Obama's presidency a disappointment

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Ridgerunner said:
It may be noted, too, that even in Germany many Jews did not get out when they could have because they just assumed (convinced themselves) that Hitler’s anti-semitic rhetoric was mostly just talk.
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Hindsight is just great, ain’t it?

Why not believe that it was the usual rhetoric? There was anti-semitism during WWI and many Jews shrugged off Hitler as “same-old, same-old.”

Keep in mind that the “final solution” wasn’t decided on until the Wannsee Conference in 1942.
 
manualman said:
And things got worse, didn’t they? THIS is why people really ought to ask “WHAT sort of change? WHAT sort of hope?” Details are why people shoud support or oppose policies, not personalities and frustrations with the status quo. Things CAN get worse. That’s why proposals for change need to be scrutinized first.
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Who knew? Besides, do you think that Jews back then read CAF for our learned opinions? I think not.

Poor farmers had more to do than scrupulously scrutinize proposals from this politician and that, from this faction and that.
 
Rich_Olszewski said:
Hindsight is just great, ain’t it?

Why not believe that it was the usual rhetoric? There was anti-semitism during WWI and many Jews shrugged off Hitler as “same-old, same-old.”

Keep in mind that the “final solution” wasn’t decided on until the Wannsee Conference in 1942.
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I don’t believe this is good enough, Rich. Does anybody really believe the “final solution” was really decided at Wannsee, and wasn’t the intention before then?

And during WWI, there was no “Kristallnach” or anything resembling it. There were, in fact, major Jewish figures in the German military and government then, and there was never anything remotely resembling Hitler’s very clear, and early, threats then.

And there were a lot of Jews who did leave in the early days of the Hitler regime. Unfortunately, there is something in human nature that prevents a lot of us from seeing things as they really are. We often resist believing in threats, and the worse the threat, the greater is the temptation to disbelieve it. Many Jews boarded the trains for Auschwitz and other places expecting “resettlement” even though the truth had already been told to them.

When leaders promise “fundamental changing” our society, we are fools not to believe they intend it.
 
Ridgerunner said:
I don’t believe this is good enough, Rich. Does anybody really believe the “final solution” was really decided at Wannsee, and wasn’t the intention before then?
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As I understand it, that was when everyone “signed on” to the policy. Some participants favored resettlement east, particularly for German Jews, who were not the Untermenschen the other Jews were considered to be.
And there were a lot of Jews who did leave in the early days of the Hitler regime. Unfortunately, there is something in human nature that prevents a lot of us from seeing things as they really are. We often resist believing in threats, and the worse the threat, the greater is the temptation to disbelieve it. Many Jews boarded the trains for Auschwitz and other places expecting “resettlement” even though the truth had already been told to them.
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What could those Jews have done, even those who clearly saw the threat? Leave Germany? A mass exodus to North America or Great Britain? It costs money to do so, and poor Jews wouldn’t have been able to afford to leave in any case. And, most importantly, who would have taken them? Not the U.S. or Canada.
When leaders promise “fundamental changing” our society, we are fools not to believe they intend it.
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Not a fool myself, at least by my own reckoning, but there is such a thing as campaign rhetoric and I try to see the difference between actual intentions and flatulence.
 
Rich_Olszewski said:
Hindsight is just great, ain’t it?

Why not believe that it was the usual rhetoric? There was anti-semitism during WWI and many Jews shrugged off Hitler as “same-old, same-old.”

Keep in mind that the “final solution” wasn’t decided on until the Wannsee Conference in 1942.
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they were rounding up the Jewish people into ghettos and killing them long before 1942 and that should have alarmed the German people as well as the rest of Europe and the world.
 
7_Sorrows said:
they were rounding up the Jewish people into ghettos and killing them long before 1942 and that should have alarmed the German people as well as the rest of Europe and the world.
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Jews in Germany were more assimilated and didn’t live in ghettoes.

There was no mass deportations to concentration camps before the war started. Why should Germans non-Jews have been alarmed? There was a great deal of anti-semitism everywhere in that country. The rest of Europe didn’t care to interfere in Germany’s internal problems.

What would you have them do? Go to war over the Jews? Even after the war started, the stated aim was to defeat Germany, not to save the Jews, who were a minor concern of the Allies.
 
Rich_Olszewski said:
Consider the wreck the Italian economy was in back then. Why not Mussolini? A man promises hope and people naturally gravitate to him. And, for a good while, il Duce delivered on his promises.
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wish the same could be said for Obama. my quality of life and standard of living has definitely dropped the past 4 years.
 
Ridgerunner said:
And there were a lot of Jews who did leave in the early days of the Hitler regime. Unfortunately, there is something in human nature that prevents a lot of us from seeing things as they really are. We often resist believing in threats, and the worse the threat, the greater is the temptation to disbelieve it. Many Jews boarded the trains for Auschwitz and other places expecting “resettlement” even though the truth had already been told to them.

When leaders promise “fundamental changing” our society, we are fools not to believe they intend it.
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Many of the Jewish faithful could not believe those threats would be carried out in a modern society like Germany - things like that happened in backwater nations like Bulgaria or Croatia. They also knew that their contributions would be needed if Germany went to war - no reasonable leader would harm his own war effort - no one knew that Hitler would be so unreasonable.
 
Nec5 said:
We’ve had disappointing presidents for a long time. And as far as I can tell, other world leaders haven’t exactly set the world on fire with their ideas or leadership.
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It’s not what the other leaders have delivered or not, it’s what this one has promised to do and has been promoted as capable and willing of delivery. Besides that, there really is only one superpower these days.
 
Rich_Olszewski said:
As I understand it, that was when everyone “signed on” to the policy. Some participants favored resettlement east, particularly for German Jews, who were not the Untermenschen the other Jews were considered to be.

What could those Jews have done, even those who clearly saw the threat? Leave Germany? A mass exodus to North America or Great Britain? It costs money to do so, and poor Jews wouldn’t have been able to afford to leave in any case. And, most importantly, who would have taken them? Not the U.S. or Canada.

Not a fool myself, at least by my own reckoning, but there is such a thing as campaign rhetoric and I try to see the difference between actual intentions and flatulence.
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Kristallnacht was in 1938, and the destruction of Jewish property, the beating and even outright killing of Jews happened all over Germany during it. The anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws were passed in 1935. Nazi brutality against Jews did not start with the war, and certainly not with the Wannsee conference.

Some Jews did leave. Unfortunately for some, the accepting countries, like Hungary and France, later came under the Nazi heel, so their flight did them no good. But it was not only poor Jews who got caught up in the holocaust.

I will grant that there is a lot of speculation about what Obama means by “fundamentally transforming” the U.S. Nobody can know for sure what he or his minders, perhaps, intend by that. But we do know a few things:
-It means greatly increasing utility bills.
-It means “breaking the coal industry”. None can be started up now at all.
-It means requiring many Catholic institutions to fund contraceptives, sterilizations and abortifacients.
-It means suing the Lutheran Church and asserting that the government, not the Lutheran Church, can determine who are and are not Lutheran ministers.
-it means forcing Kenya to allow abortion in its constitution as a condition of American aid, when kenya didn’t want to do that.
-It means official governmental promotion of homosexual marriage.

What else, then, does it mean? Well, probably a lot. If Obama and his people do those things when facing re-election, what will they be like when they aren’t?
 
Ridgerunner said:
Except, of course, that Mussolini was strongly anti-Semitic and made no secret of it. Jews, particularly middle-class Jews, assumed he was just doing that in order to appeal to the unlettered and unwashed and didn’t mean it.
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That is not correct. Mussolini became anti-Semitic when it became convenient to him (1938). He was the one going around with his Jewish girlfriend Margerita Sarfatti.
 
Ridgerunner said:
Kristallnacht was in 1938, and the destruction of Jewish property, the beating and even outright killing of Jews happened all over Germany during it. The anti-Semitic Nuremberg laws were passed in 1935. Nazi brutality against Jews did not start with the war, and certainly not with the Wannsee conference.
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Nor the brutality, yes, but the mass deportations to the death camps.
Some Jews did leave. Unfortunately for some, the accepting countries, like Hungary and France, later came under the Nazi heel, so their flight did them no good. But it was not only poor Jews who got caught up in the holocaust.
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Italian Jews fared better under Mussolini. Italians were not the brutes Germans are.
 
Rich_Olszewski said:
Nor the brutality, yes, but the mass deportations to the death camps.

Italian Jews fared better under Mussolini. Italians were not the brutes Germans are.
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Rich, you’re a libertarian. A libertarian like Pat Buchanan says that the US should never have gotten involved in WW2, you know, Hitler should have slaughtered all the Jews and then after that all the Poles, Roma and Russians (thankfully Hitler never targeted the Irish). How do you reconcile your empathy for the Jews’ suffering at the hands of the German Nazis with the notion that perhaps the US should never have gotten involved in that war?
 
Rich_Olszewski said:
…Italian Jews fared better under Mussolini. Italians were not the brutes Germans are.
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I would not go too far with that statement. Italy allowed the roundup and shipment of Jews to the German concentration camps, and it also allowed a Nazi extermination camp to operate near Trieste.
 
Tenofovir said:
Rich, you’re a libertarian…How do you reconcile your empathy for the Jews’ suffering at the hands of the German Nazis with the notion that perhaps the US should never have gotten involved in that war?
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When did he make that statement? :confused:
 
Cristiano said:
That is a statement made by Buchanan but in your post you are attributing the same line of thinking to Rich. My question is where did Rich affirm such a thought?
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I never attributed that line of thought to Rich. I said that Rich is a libertarian, I think, and so he would probably be all for staying out of what was happening in Europe, for the sake of that ideology. Mind you, staying out of all other conflicts too, which did not directly threaten the security of the US. Hitler was not interested in fighting a war with America or even the UK. Of course, perhaps (some) libertarians believe that influence in wars where self interest is not paramount is possible, for example to save millions of non-own citizens from extermination. This is a general question about libertarianism and war, or just war.
 
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