Why didnt India helped the Roma in World War 2?

[irosie91]

Yet you specifically referred to 'death camps'.

Focus.

OH??? in what context?

 

[ThirdTerm]

Why didnt the indians just said "listen if you hate the roma, and want to kill them, we will give them assylym in india"? I mean better then complete extermination in gas chambers?

India was still a British colony which could not make its own decision. Bose ran a puppet regime for Imperial Japan but he had no political power to govern India.

 

[Doug1943]

Many colonized people fought in the British military against Britain's enemies.

Others used the opportunity of Britain being distracted, to fight for their country's
independence.

An Irish slogan, "Britain's difficulty is Ireland's opportunity" sums up the attitude of people fighting to get out from under the British Empire.

The great James Connolly, one of the leaders of the Easter Rising, even deviated from his socialist-internationalist
principles a bit, and wrote some words of praise for the Kaiser's army, calling
them "gallant allies" and blaming the British for the war. [ James Connolly: War Upon The German Nation (1914) ]

But ... so what? When you're fighting for the independence of your country, you look for allies wherever you can find them. It might have been short-sided for Indian nationalists to want to help Imperial Japan replace the British , but that was a political failing, an error of judgement, not a moral one.

What should an Indian or an African care about a struggle among white men on that little peninsula of Asia called 'Europe'?

The smarter nationalists -- like Mao and Ho Chi Minh -- understood that the defeat of the USSR and of the democracies by Japanese militarism and German fascism was the Greater Evil, and so they took part in the war effort with the Lesser Evils against the Greater. But it's not a moral question.

Perhaps the nationalists that effectively allied with Britain's enemies then, were drawing a lesson from history.

A couple of centuries earlier, another group of people had waged an armed uprising against the British Empire. And even though these men admitted that Britain had liberty, and was a constitutional monarchy, not a despotism, ... they did not hesitate to ally with an abolutist Monarchy which crushed its own dissenters.

And who were they? Why, they were us! French aid was invaluable in helping the American revolutionaries in defeating the British. We would have been fools to refuse to accept it.
[ https://www.history.com/news/american-revolution-french-role-help ]

 

[cnm]

OH??? in what context?

This context.

They heard rumors, but didn't actually know the full gravity of what was going on. There was a running joke mothers would tell their children. "If you're bad, they'll take you to Dachau!". They didn't know these were death camps, as the propaganda machine branded them as political prisoner and dissident labor camps.

BS!!!! they KNEW by the mid thirties as did the US government and even my functionally illiterate maternal grandfather ( excellent baker---but fortunately smart enough to flee Poland sometime circa 1900 ) His brothers felt safe in Austria-----big mistake!!!

 

[cnm]

The smarter nationalists -- like Mao and Ho Chi Minh -- understood that the defeat of the USSR and of the democracies by Japanese militarism and German fascism was the Greater Evil, and so they took part in the war effort with the Lesser Evils against the Greater.

Now that's funny, I don't care who said it.

 

[Doug1943]

Now that's funny, I don't care who said it.

There's an even broader question involved.

After WWI, Woodrow Wilson proclaimed "the Right of Nations to Self Determination", and wanted this principle to apply when the peace treaty was being drawn up. But ... it turned out this idea only applied to white people.

During the Paris Peace Conference of 1919, while key decisions were debated by the victorious Allied powers, a multitude of smaller nations and colonies held their breath, waiting to see how their fates would be decided. President Woodrow Wilson, in his Fourteen Points, had called for “a free, open-minded, and absolutely impartial adjustment of all colonial claims,” giving equal weight to the opinions of the colonized peoples and the colonial powers. Among those nations now paying close attention to Wilson's words and actions were the budding nationalist leaders of four disparate non-Western societies—Egypt, India, China, and Korea. That spring, Wilson's words would help ignite political upheavals in all four of these countries.

This book is the first to place the 1919 Revolution in Egypt, the Rowlatt Satyagraha in India, the May Fourth movement in China, and the March First uprising in Korea in the context of a broader “Wilsonian moment” that challenged the existing international order. Using primary source material from America, Europe, and Asia, historian Erez Manela tells the story of how emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics as they launched into action on the international stage. The rapid disintegration of the Wilsonian promise left a legacy of disillusionment and facilitated the spread of revisionist ideologies and movements in these societies; future leaders of Third World liberation movements—Mao Zedong, Ho Chi Minh, and Jawaharlal Nehru, among others—were profoundly shaped by their experiences at the time.

[The Wilsonian Moment: Self Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism ]

So America disappointed the young nationalists who lived in British and French colonies.

And some of them turned to another power for support, one which was openly anti-imperialist. [The quote uses the curious word "revisionist" to describe the anti-imperialist ideologies that spread in the Third World after 1919. One of these ideologies was "communism", which appealed to the young upper-class nationalists like Mao and Ho not because of any desire to institute an equalitarian society, but because it was explicitly anti-imperialist. After countries like Vietnam and China succeeded in getting their independence under communist leadership, it didn't take them long to turn to capitalism, while retaining the one-party dictatorship.]

We missed an opportunity. We missed it again after WWII.

 

[cnm]

We missed an opportunity. We missed it again after WWII.

Lol. Through the policy of US hegemony? That was hardly 'missing', more like 'dismissing'.

 

[Doug1943]

Lol. Through the policy of US hegemony? That was hardly 'missing', more like 'dismissing'.

Not 'hegemony' Although after WWII we had to become militarists, given the Soviet expansion and transformation into a serious military power. But we could have beat Moscow at its own game in the Third World. We had no stake in preserving the British and French empires. It's a long discussion, which we ought to have, maybe in another thread.

 

[cnm]

Not 'hegemony'

Yes. Hegemony.

But this thread is finished, true. Mort's questions have been answered.