The U.S. and the Holocaust

 

A new documentary by Ken Burns, Lynn Novick, and Sarah Botstein

Underwritten by the Public Broadcasting Service, 2022

A critical review by Steven Halpern

I have seen several so-called documentaries organized by Ken Burns. On the one hand, these documentaries introduce viewers to aspects of our history that few people are aware of. This is important since the American History courses in high schools expose us to a version of history that was summarized in James Loewen’s book Lies My Teacher Told Me. So, if we are to have a meaningful future, we need to have a clear view of what happened in the past. 

However, there is a striking flaw to literally all of Burns’ so-called documentaries. Clearly if Burns reported on our history in a way that was rational, he would never have received funding for his projects. This flaw consists of the fact that Burns never asked the basic question: What are the forces that drive the political economic system of capitalism?

The capitalist system consists of a social relationship between workers and capitalists. The working class of the world has produced literally every commodity that was ever sold on the market. Yet for each of those commodities, capitalists have the power to control the work environment, and they profit from the sale of each and every commodity. Saying this, we can conclude that the working class has interests that are antagonistic to the interests of capitalists. 

So, what does all of this have to do with the so-called documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust? To answer that question, first we need to look at the political orientation of this work.

The U.S. and the Holocaust

The information in this documentary is not new. David S. Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews – America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 was published in 1984. That book covers the same ideas as Burns’ documentary and even goes into more details. 

Then, in the year 1998, a book was published by the news reporter Tom Brokaw titled The Greatest Generation. That book argued that the generation of those who experienced the depression and participated in the defeat of the Nazis in Germany was the “greatest generation.”

Clearly there are outstanding individuals as well as criminals in every generation. However, Ken Burns’ documentary is a clear polemic against Tom Brokaw’s argument.

The Burns’ documentary reported on how the persecution of Jews in Germany was known in the United States even in the early years of the Nazi regime.  In spite of this knowledge, the United States government made a concerted effort to keep Jews out of this country who were attempting to flee from that persecution.

Burns also reported that these were the years of the economic depression. Many people in this country opposed allowing Jews to enter this country for fear that they would take the few jobs that were available. Even after the war, when the full horror of the holocaust became common knowledge, the U.S. government opposed allowing increased numbers of Jews to enter this country. 

Burns also documented how racist attitudes also contributed to the refusal of the government to allow Jews to escape the holocaust. In fact, Adolf Hitler made it clear that he was not the only one who believed in the insane idea of a “superior race.” He argued that just as the United States went to war against Native Americans in the western part of this country, he was going to go to war against the Slavic people who lived to the east of Germany. 

When Hitler came to power in Germany Jim Crow segregation was the law in the United States. Black people were prohibited, by law, from using the same restaurants, hotels, bathrooms, or parks as people who considered themselves to be “white.” Hitler argued that his policies reflected the same kind of institutionalized discrimination that existed in the United States since the defeat of radical reconstruction in 1877.

The Burns’ documentary also reported that the United States government, as well as capitalists in this country like Henry Ford, worked to appease and support the Nazis. For about a year, all films in Hollywood needed to be approved by the Nazi representative in Los Angeles, California. Capitalists in this country also liked the fact that the Nazis effectively destroyed the German labor movement.

Understanding these facts, we can clearly say that Tom Brokaw’s argument of The Greatest Generation was absurd.

What are the facts?

In order to put this history in perspective, we can start with the question: Why is there anti-Semitism in the world? Abram Leon’s book The Jewish Question – A Marxist Interpretation gives a clear answer to this question.

Leon was born in 1918 in Warsaw, Poland. In Poland Leon experienced routine discrimination because he was Jewish. Initially he and his family were attracted to the Zionist movement that advocated for a Jewish homeland in Palestine. His family briefly visited Palestine, but then returned to Poland and eventually settled in Belgium. The Nazi regime murdered Abram Leon at Auschwitz when he was twenty-six years old. 

In his book Leon argued that the idea of Zionism is no solution for the anti-Semitism in the world. The Israeli persecution of the Palestinian people is clear proof that Leon knew what he was talking about.

In his book The Jewish Question, Leon argued that in feudal societies the Jewish community was protected by monarchies. In those years, Jews were the merchants and money lenders, fulfilling an important role useful to the royal families.

Then, with the emergence of capitalism the royal families went into a period of decline and found it difficult to pay off their debts. The emerging capitalist class was predominantly composed of Christians. However, the royal families used the Jewish community as scapegoats for their problems. As a result, several European nations forced the Jewish communities to leave and hostile attitudes targeting Jews emerged where capitalism was taking hold.

Most of the Jews who had been expelled from Spain ended up in Turkey and were protected by the Turkish royal family. At that time, the Turkish Ottoman Empire controlled much of the Middle East as well as North Africa. 

So, these anti-Semitic attitudes spread throughout Europe and the United States. I happen to be Jewish, and a hotel manager refused to rent a room to my father because he was Jewish. This is just one example of how pervasive the anti-Semitic attitudes were in this country. 

So, when we begin to understand what the root cause of anti-Semitism was, we can understand why Abram Leon argued that the capitalist system gave birth to the hostility against Jews. 

The Great Depression

The Burns’ documentary argues that the sentiment opposing Jewish immigration to this country stemmed from the fact that in the years of the depression jobs were extremely difficult to find. However, the documentary doesn’t ask the question: Why did the Great Depression happen? 

Before answering that question, we might think about the fact that before and after the depression there was relatively full employment. So, why were millions of people thrown out of work during the depression?

Capitalists do not make investments to fulfill human needs. Capitalism effectively dictates that investments will almost always be made to generate corporate profits. Because of the natural functioning of the system there is an absolute need to sell more and more commodities. This explains why corporations invest about $200 billion in advertising every year. For them, increasing sales is more important than ensuring that everyone has enough food to eat.

The problem is that while sales are increasing, corporations are also driven to cut their costs. So, increasing sales and cutting costs eventually is the recipe for disaster. That is what happened in 1929 and this is what is beginning to happen today.

Daniel Guerin wrote a book titled Fascism and Big Business. In his book, Guerin reported on the facts of how German corporations gave massive funding to the Nazis. Without that immense financial support, it is highly unlikely that the fascists would have been able to take power. My review of Guerin’s book can be seen at Fascism and Big Business. 

Immigration

Anyone who reads the Declaration of Independence will see that one of the grievances of the colonists were the British laws that limited immigration. The colonists wanted unlimited immigration and many of the soldiers in the revolutionary army were born in other countries.

All four of my grandparents were Jewish and were born in Eastern Europe. They immigrated to this country before the depression and had no serious problem in becoming citizens.

During the 1960s the corporations of the United States and Europe went on international drives to attract workers to fill jobs. Today working in the United States means working with people who were born in nations all over the world.

Yet, the Ken Burns’ documentary argued that the United States government was adamant in their refusal to allow Jews to immigrate here. Immigrating to this country might have saved millions of Jews from the holocaust. So, why are there times when immigration has been encouraged, and other times when politicians are vehemently opposed to immigration?

The capitalist system is like a roller-coaster. The economy goes up, but then it routinely comes crashing down. When the capitalist economy is relatively strong, the government encourages immigration. When corporations eliminate jobs because their profits are low, then politicians argue against immigration and even favor deportation. This reality explains how attitudes against immigration shift with corporate profitability.

Splitting up families

The Burns’ documentary reported on several families who managed to get one family member into the United States. Other family members were murdered in the holocaust. Here we saw how Jewish immigrants to this country were obsessed with finding a way to get their families the necessary papers to come here. Those family members were met with routine indifference and hostility of government officials. 

Well, for the past few decades, democratic and republican Presidents have had a routine policy of splitting up immigrant families. Thousands of immigrants are parents of children who were born here. When the parents are deported, their children usually end up in foster care. After the deportation, these children might never see their parents again. 

We might also consider the fact that immigrant workers are an essential part of the corporate drive for profits. Immigrants are farm workers, meat packers, health care workers, housekeepers, as well as research scientists. The drive to deport immigrants is about making the day to day lives of immigrants more difficult. If the government worked to deport all of the twelve million immigrants in this country, the economy would be much worse than it already is. 

Zionism

The Burns’ documentary argued that the United States government, at one time, demanded that Jews who attempted to escape the holocaust needed $5,000 in order to be accepted here. Thinking about that horrendous policy, we might also think about the fact that since 1948, the United States government has been giving the state of Israel billions of dollars in aid literally every year. That aid has been used to militarily repress the Palestinian people and was used in wars against neighboring Arab nations. 

So, why would the United States government require $5,000 to immigrate here, and then give billions of dollars to the state of Israel every year? As I mentioned before, when there are economic downturns, capitalist governments make immigration difficult. Today, the state of Israel supports imperialist interests in the Middle East. So, both these policies support capitalist interests. 

In the year 1933, there was a massive demonstration of perhaps 50,000 people at Madison Square Garden in New York City protesting a fascist rally held inside the Garden. Then in 1936 the Cable Street demonstration took place in London, England protesting a fascist demonstration there. These and other demonstrations were clear evidence that a mass movement could have been organized demanding that large numbers of Jews be allowed to immigrate here. 

Clearly the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s effectively forced the government to do away with the Jim Crow laws that denied Black people citizenship rights. Many of the Jim Crow politicians were anti-Semitic and opposed Jewish immigration.

However, the Zionist movement and the American Jewish Congress had another priority. This is what David S. Wyman had to say about the priorities of the American Jewish Congress:

“An unavoidable conclusion is that during the Holocaust the leadership of American Zionism concentrated its major force on the drive for a future Jewish state in Palestine. It consigned rescue to a distinctly secondary position.”

Even today, government officials in Israel do not view the struggle against anti-Semitism in the world to be their priority. However, Israeli law states that any Jewish person living in the world has a right to Israeli citizenship. Clearly Palestinians, who trace their heritage to that area for thousands of years do not have that same right.

The Labor movement and the Second World War

The Burns’ documentary makes the following argument. Clearly the United States government was wrong in refusing to allow Jewish people to immigrate to this country during the years of the Holocaust. However, the film also argued that the war against Nazi Germany was necessary. 

This documentary reported on the determined effort of the Nazis to murder literally every Jewish person in Europe. While racist discrimination was and is institutionalized in the United States that was not the case here. So, the Burns’ documentary argued that the Second World War was necessary and brought peace to the world. 

The problem was that after the war, revolutions erupted in Algeria, Kenya, Korea, and Vietnam. The French, British and U.S. government ordered armed forces to murder millions of people in those wars. 

Today the United Nations reports that 30,000 children die of preventable diseases every day. Half of the human race lives on a salary of two dollars per day. So, the defeat of the Nazi regime clearly did not bring peace in the world.

Farrell Dobbs was a leader of the Teamsters Union in Minneapolis, Minnesota. He was one of the leaders that organized a strike that forced employers to recognize the union in 1933.  This strike was one of three strikes that transformed the labor movement prompting millions of workers to join unions in the 1930s.

Dobbs and his co-thinkers in the Socialist Workers Party argued that the primary opponents of the working class are the employers and the government that serves their interests. Federal troops had been used against the teamsters’ strike, as well as in several other strikes during the Roosevelt Administration.

In 1967 the National Guard came to my hometown of Newark, New Jersey and murdered 24 people. This was in response to a rebellion protesting the routine racist police brutality in the city. In all, about 180 people were murdered by National Guardsmen in Newark, Detroit, and in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles.

The U.S. armed forces also carried out genocidal wars against Native Americans for over 100 years. President Roosevelt also ordered 110,000 Japanese who lived in this country to be sent to concentration camps. 

For those reasons, Farrell Dobbs and other leaders of the Socialist Workers Party opposed U.S. participation in the Second World War. The socialist Eugene Debs opposed U.S. participation in the First World War. Debs served three years in prison because he gave a speech opposing U.S. participation in that war. Dobbs was one of eighteen members of the Socialist Workers Party who served eighteen months in prison for their opposition to the Second World War. 

Also in the year 1967, Martin Luther King gave a speech in New York City where he opposed the U.S. war against Vietnam. In that speech he argued that the United States government was the “greatest purveyor of violence” in the world. He went on to say that the Vietnamese people might see the armed forces of this country as “strange liberators.” 

Conclusion

When we look at the forces that drive the capitalist system, we see that this system will move to a complete economic collapse. Karl Marx wrote a three-volume analysis of the capitalist system titled Capital. His analysis makes it clear that for numerous reasons the system needs to go in a direction where capitalists will simply refuse to invest in the economy. 

In Germany, the Nazis dealt with the collapse of the German economy by putting in place a fascist government. That government made scapegoats out of Jews, Gypsies, as well as anyone who got in their way. The democratic rights that German people thought they had, vanished. Questioning the Nazis could have fatal consequences.

This is the election time of year. The Democrats and Republicans are begging us for our votes. None of those candidates thinks it is a problem that 42 million people in this country do not have enough food to eat, while four individuals each have over $100 billion in assets. In fact, those statistics represent the essence of what the capitalist system is. 

Clearly there is another way. A workers’ government could begin to advance a system where human needs would take priority over corporate profits. That government could work towards establishing lifetime rights for everyone. Those rights would include, food, clothing, housing, transportation, communication, health care, education, and exposure to all forms of culture.

That government could eliminate poverty, as well as discrimination in the world. A workers’ government would make it their priority to work in harmony with the environment. Imagine how transport in the cities could be transformed from the insane and dangerous traffic jams, into highly efficient mass transit systems.

The outstanding revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg argued that we will have “socialism or barbarism.” The Ken Burns’ documentary gives us a glimmer of what barbarism would look like. However, if a fascist government emerges in the world today, that government would have atomic bombs.

As Karl Marx and Frederick Engels argued in their Communist Manifesto, “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have the world to win.”