Bigotry stopped Americans from intervening before the Holocaust. Not much has changed

[Behind the Aegis]

A ruthless dictator unleashes terror on his own citizens. Those fleeing elicit sympathy — but encounter obstacles to entering the United States. Americans learn of mass killings, but their moral revulsion doesn’t easily turn into policy or military intervention. One thing remains consistent: America doesn’t want refugees, at least not of this ilk; those people aren’t welcome here.


Historians like me are wary of the adage that “history repeats itself.” But comparisons and analogies help us learn from the past, showing us how context matters and conventional wisdom deceives. To most Americans in 1945, “those people” meant “European Jews.” Today, they are Syrians, Congolese, Hondurans.


No visitor to the new exhibition “Americans and the Holocaust” at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., will walk away with conventional wisdom about World War II intact. In the 1930s, anti-Semitism rested comfortably within American ideologies of race, but this context, not widely acknowledged at the time, has now virtually disappeared from mainstream collective memory. Instead, America’s pre-Pearl Harbor isolationism is viewed as a mistaken but understandable disinclination to intervene in another European war, further tempered by the suggestion that Americans had only slight knowledge of Nazi depravity.


Museum visitors enter the new exhibit’s galleries in 1933 and walk through 12 years without the benefit of 80 years of hindsight. They see what Americans knew about events in Nazi Germany as they learned it. Public opinion (as documented by polls) and U.S. policy are revealed within that context.

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[Nitram]

1. Bigotry is one factor, and certainly played a role for the failure to act during WWII.

We've had a number of genocidal events since then, and the country has not been eager to intervene. Cambodia, Rwanda, Serbia, Burma, Syria, and probably others. Are there not other factors that play a role in this reluctance in addition to bigotry?

[SunSeeker]

2. We did intervene in Serbia. We bombed the shit out of Serbia.

We inexplicably used depleted uranium, causing an environmental disaster. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2001/01/07/world/radiation-from-balkan-bombing-alarms-europe.html.

And it certainly did not stop the ethnic cleansing, by both sides of that civil war.

But the political reverberations were the worst, and continue to this day. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/foreigners/2014/03/putin_s_crimea_revenge_ever_since_the_u_s_bombed_kosovo_in_1999_putin_has.html

I'm not saying the US should never intervene in genocides, but when both sides are committing genocide as was the case in the Balkans and we pick one side to win (e.g., the Kosovo Albanians), we are not stopping genocide, we are hastening it.

[Nitram]

4. Yes, but there was a lot of opposition to it. The fact that NATO was involved made it more

palatable for many. And many, like you, still question US involvement. My point is that bigotry is not the only factor.

[Rustyeye77]

3. Good post

Sadly..Doesn't seem anyone cares.