PC's sort of off the deep end here, but FDR really did fail to see the moral depravity of communism. I've never seen what seemed an adequate reason why. He certainly understood the danger of fascism, and Huey Long. A govt that guarantees a volkswagen for every family and a chicken in every pot during a recession, in exchange for civil rights, while also protecting corporate ownership ... if capital swears feality to the Reich, is still a dangerous notion.
FDR had no knowlege of either the Holocaust or really the severity of Stalin's depopulation campaigns of the 30s. In the US, capital was so antagonistic towards the New Deal, and the notion that govt could enforce a living wage and let the unions loose, there was at least thought to a coup. Practical realities, rather than the sanctity of private investment, may have kept FDR from unleashing those like William O. Douglas who thought the New Deal and SEC acts didn't go far enough in regulating corporate behavior, and they had no faith at all in shareholders to constrain predatory behavior. FDR may have at least in part chosen to not see Stalin for what he was. But, there's no doubt that FDR (and Churchill) saw the Soviets as having more lives to expend, and less political oppostition to spending them, than did the other two allies.
FDR repeatedly, with Lend Lease, and outright gifts, and then the second front, avoided any chance that Stalin would make a seperate peace, and require the US and Britian to achieve uncondidtional surrender by the fascists. That was always FDR's FIRST PRIORITY WITH RUSSIA. Without Russia, the Battle of the Bulge and Hurtgen Forest would have yielded casualties that poisoned our society like Britan was poisoned by the Somme.
As for Truman and Korea, I think we simply had belief in our leaders who'd gotten us through the depression and then WWII to be the most powerful and stable country ever, that when Truman (and Mao) basically stumbled into a war, they thought they had to back him up, because that's what we did.
A rout!
A veritable chaotic retreat!
And such a simple tactic: pretend that that you can't see the significance of the dates that I've provided in my post.
And then you double down by producing this absurdity:
"FDR had no knowlege of either the Holocaust or really the severity of Stalin's depopulation campaigns of the 30s."
English journalist Malcolm Muggeridge took the tour
in the early 30s, and wrote about how gullible these Potemkin Progressives were. They are, unquestionably, one of the wonders of the age, that I shall treasure til I die, as a blessed memory! The spectacle of them traveling, with radiant optimism through a famished countryside, wandering in happy bands about squalid overcrowded Soviet towns, listening with unshakable faith to the fatuous patter of carefully trained and indoctrinated guides, repeating like schoolchildren a multiplication table, the bogus statistics and mindless slogans endlessly intoned to them. There, I would think, an earnest office-holder in some local branch of the League of Nations Union, there a godly Quaker who once had tea with Gandhi, there an inveigher against the Means Test and the Blasphemy Laws, there a staunch upholder of free speech and human rights, there an indomitable preventer of cruelty to animals; there scarred and worthy veterans of a hundred battles for truth, freedom and justice--all, all chanting the praises of Stalin and his Dictatorship of the Proletariat. It was as though a vegetarian society had come out with a passionate plea for cannibalism, or Hitler had been nominated posthumously for the Nobel Peace Prize."
Malcolm Muggeridge Quotes (Author of Something Beautiful for God)
" Nevertheless, the new president [FDR] was
extremely well-informed about the Hitler regime and its anti-Jewish policies, and early on perceived Nazi Germany as a threat to vital US interests. As persecution of Jews in Germany intensified during the 1930s, however, Roosevelt did not include among his priorities an effort to respond to the growing refugee problem that Nazi policies created."
"... Louis Brandeis wrote to Felix Frankfurter, at that time a professor at Harvard Law School, on April 29, 1933: F.D. [Franklin Delano] has shown amply that he has no anti-Semitism
But this action, or rather determination that there shall be none [i.e., no change in the Hoover immigration policy] is
a disgrace to America and to F.D.s administration.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
".... FDR held
82 press conferences in 1933, and the subject of the persecution of the Jews arose only once, and not
because Roosevelt raised it. It would be five years and another 348 presidential press conferences
before anything about Jewish refugees would be mentioned again (then, too, it was at a reporters
initiative, not Roosevelts)."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/WhitewashingFDR.pdf
"The release of previously unknown diaries written by U.S. diplomat James McDonald has attracted national media attention, in part because they refer to McDonald's
early warning, soon after Hitler rose to power in 1933, that the Fuhrer might be planning the mass murder of German Jews. But equally significant is that the diaries reinforce the fact that when it came to aiding Hitler's Jewish victims, President Franklin D. Roosevelt was all talk and no action.
The New York Times reported last week that McDonald returned from a 1933 visit to Germany feeling extremely pessimistic about the fate of German Jewry,
"a view he apparently shared with President Roosevelt,..."
David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies: Welcome
A sartorial suggestion:
.....you are ruining your pants by dropping to your knees at the mention of FDR's name.....