When I ask why the nations of the world refused Jewish refugees, the blank stares continue. I have to actually explain that they refused to accept them for openly racist, anti-Semitic reasons expressed without shame or embarrassment, that no World War II posters read "Uncle Sam Wants You to Save the Jews!" If there had been a day on which the U.S. government decided to save the Jews it would be one of the biggest holidays on the calendar. But it never happened. Preventing the horror of the camps did not become a justification for the war until after the war. The U.S. and British governments right through the war refused all demands to evacuate those threatened on the grounds that they were too busy fighting the war a war that killed many more people than were killed in the camps.
There are, of course, more fact-based defenses of World War II, and I could do my best to reply to each one if I had another several weeks and didn't need to wrap this up. But isn't it odd that one of the main public projects of the U.S. government is almost always defended by reference to an example of its use 75 years ago in a world with radically different systems of law, with no nuclear weapons, with brutal colonization by European powers, and with little understanding of the techniques of nonviolent action? Is there anything else we do that we justify by reference to the 1940s? If we modeled our high schools on those of the 1940s we'd be considered backward indeed. Why should our foreign policy not have the same standards?
In 1973 Congress created a means for any Congress Member to force a vote on ending a war. Last December, the Senate used it for the first time to vote to end U.S. participation in the war on Yemen. Earlier this year, the House did the same, but added in some unrelated language that the Senate refused to vote on. So, now both houses have to vote again. If they do and we should all insist that they do what's to stop them from ending another war and another and another? That's something to work for.
Thank you.
Peace.
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