ללא מחבר No Author

Di Velt, Yene Velt, Und Roosevelt

America’s World War II Prison Camps

By 

December 11, 2001

Most Americans have never heard of the prisoner of war camps in the United States during World War II. Hans Sennholz, a Luftwaffe pilot and later a Misesian economist, worked on a prisoner-run farm in Arkansas after he had been shot down by British anti-aircraft fire in North Africa. They sent him from Britain through Canada to the West Coast and then to Arkansas.

Most estimates that I have seen place the number of prisoners of war in the U.S. in the range of 50,000 to 70,000, but one reputable and detailed Website says it was 425,000.

More than 150,000 men arrived after the surrender of Gen. Erwin Rommel’s Afrika Korps in April 1943, followed by an average of 20,000 new POWs a month. From the Normandy invasion in June 1944 through December 30,000 prisoners a month arrived; for the last few months of the war 60,000 were arriving each month. When the war was over, there were 425,000 enemy prisoners in 511 main and branch camps throughout the United States.

This is a good example of history that never gets to the general public. This is a little-known and long-forgotten story, but it is not shocking.

What follows is shocking. I begin with low-level shock.

The Japanese Camps

Most Americans know about the concentration camp system that the United States created for Japanese residents of the West Coast. There were 120,000 of these internees in a dozen camps, mostly in the mountain states, but with two camps in eastern Arkansas. A few Americans know that the FBI’s J. Edgar Hoover had opposed these mass arrests. Fewer still know of the forced sale of everything these people owned at substantial discounts. They were only allowed to bring into the camps what they could carry in their arms in one trip. But until this year, only a handful of Japanese-Americans knew that in 1944, the U.S. government drafted the young men housed in these camps, and about 300 refused to be inducted. They said they were prisoners who were not being treated as citizens, which they were. So, some of them were put in jail for draft resistance, and the others became pariahs in the camps. The other Japanese internees regarded them as traitors. This story became public knowledge only this year, in law professor Eric Muller’s book, Free to Die for Their Country (University of Chicago Press, 2001). You can get chapter one on the Web.

The Western Hemisphere Kidnap Camps

The following story would be a great case study for Memory Hole 101 (second semester). I stumbled onto it about three years ago. It was on the Website of a local affiliate of NBC television. That Web page is long gone, but because of www.google.com, I was able to track down other pages in a few minutes. I used these search terms: Japanese, Germans, Peru, World War II, Texas, camps. Of course, had I not found that NBC affiliate site three years ago, I never would have known which search terms to use. I never would have known about this story. Prepare yourself for a shock. This is from the Handbook of Texas Website. Its title is “World War II Internment Camps.” And what remarkable camps they were! You will find no reference to these camps in any textbook on U.S. history, I guarantee you.

Although many Americans are aware of the World War II imprisonment of West Coast Japanese Americans in relocation centers, few know of the smaller internment camps operated by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Under the authority of the Department of Justice, the INS directed about twenty such facilities. Texas had three of them, located at Seagoville, Kenedy, and Crystal City. Prisoners included Japanese Americans arrested by the FBI, members of Axis nationalities residing in Latin-American countries, and Axis sailors arrested in American ports after the attack on Pearl Harbor. About 3,000 Japanese, Germans, and Italians from Latin America were deported to the United States, and most of them were placed in the Texas internment camps. Twelve Latin-American countries gave the United States Department of State custody of the Axis nationals. Eighty percent of the prisoners were from Peru, and about 70 percent were Japanese. The official reasons for the deportations were to secure the Western Hemisphere from internal sabotage and to provide bartering pawns for exchange of American citizens captured by Japan. However, the Axis nationals were often deported arbitrarily as a result of racial prejudice and because they provided economic competition for the other Latin Americans, not because they were a security threat. Eventually, very few Japanese ever saw Latin America again, although some Germans and Italians were returned to their Latin American homes. The majority of Texas internment-camp prisoners were Axis nationals from Latin America. . . .

In addition, prisoners were taken to Crystal City from other INS internment camps in Hawaii and Alaska (not states at the time), the United States, Puerto Rico, the West Indies, and South and Central American countries. . . .

As we shall see, there is some debate about the numbers of these victims of American-supervised international kidnapping. Was it 3,000, total? Or were there more? I think there were far more, for reasons that you will soon see. In any case, what you have read so far is a whitewashed version of the story. It gets worse — much, much worse.

Add one word to the Google search list: “exchanged.” Again, had I not found that NBC affiliate site, I would not have known to use this term. This brought me to a site run by the Freedom of Information Times. This revealing site specializes in World War II internment of German American civilians.

Here, we read the grim reality regarding what other use these kidnapped Latin Americans had for the American government. I will bet that nothing that you have ever read mentioned this legacy of Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Facts: During the hearings before the U.S. Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, Edward J. Ennis, the Director of the Alien Enemy Control during World War II, on November 3, 1981 testified:

Mr. Macbeth [a member of the Commission]: Did you have any experience with the internment of enemy aliens who were outside of the United States.

Mr. Ennis: Oh yes, we had two programs…Now the other program was taking alien enemies from other countries in South America…If we couldn’t get the [Latin American] countries to intern them we had to transmit them to the United States for internment…It was an aborted program, I don’t think it accomplished anything. It had a security purpose to do in these countries [Latin America] what we were doing in the United States, about 5,000 German aliens were interned, and a few hundred German aliens in Cuba and in other countries in South America. But it didn’t work very well. [Source: pp.157-159, Testimony of Edward J. Ennis before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians on November 3, 1981, R.G. 220. . . .

The Latin Americans of German ancestry who [about 5,000] were brought to this country by the United States were incarcerated in several camps, most were in either of the following camps: Crystal City, Texas; Seagoville, Texas; Camp Kenedy, Texas; Fort Lincoln, Bismarck, North Dakota; and Ellis Island, New York Harbor, New York.

Hundreds of the interned Latin Americans, many of whom were, by birthright, citizens of one of the republics, were exchanged for persons of the Americas held by the Third Reich, i.e., they were deported to Germany.

Stephen Fox, “The Deportation of Latin American Germans, 1941-47: Fresh Legs for Mr. Monroe’s Doctrine,” Yearbook of German-American Studies 32 (1997): 117-42.

Prior to the exchange, lists of internees in the U.S., including the names of German-Jews, were provided to the authorities of the Third Reich.

The State Department citations herein are included in their entirety in Volume IV, The World War Two Experience of German-Americans of German-Americans in the World Wars, Edited by: Don Heinrich Tolzmann, K.G. Saur, Munich, 1995, pp. 1671-1674.

Got that, folks? The U.S. government went to the trouble of identifying the kidnapped victims of Jewish German background, sent their names to Hitler’s bureaucrats, knowing that these were “high priority items,” and then shipped them off to Germany in exchange for Americans who had been inside the Third Reich when Hitler declared War on December 11.

The only other explanation is that American bureaucrats deliberately identified the captive Jews in order that the Germans might be able to keep out those Germans whom they really didn’t want. That’s the “favorable interpretation.”

“My country tis of thee, sweet land of liberty,” etc., etc.

Franklin Roosevelt’s Administration did many horrible things. This is just one more example. Most of these things were covered up then, and professional historians still do their best to cover them up today, 56 years after FDR’s death.

For the New Deal-justifying liberals who write all of the American history textbooks, seeing just isn’t believing. Facts like these are dropped down the memory hole, where they are thought to belong.

Why don’t Jews know about this neglected aspect of American history? Because they haven’t been told. Why not? Because most academic Jews are political liberals, and their commitment to the Roosevelt Administration has been greater than their commitment to historical accuracy. So, politically conservative Jews don’t know the story.

Conclusion

Anyone who points out this sort of thing is dismissed by the Establishment press and the Establishment academic community (guild) as a “conspiracy nut.” I confess: guilty as charged.

December 11, 2001

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Why Would Anyone Listen to “Experts” Funded by War Contractors?

Who’s Afraid of the Trump/Putin Summit?

By 

Ron Paul Institute

July 3, 2018

President Trump’s National Security Advisor John Bolton was in Moscow last week organizing what promises to be an historic summit meeting between his boss and Russian President Vladimir Putin. Bolton, who has for years demanded that the US inflict “pain” on Russia and on Putin specifically, was tasked by Trump to change his tune. He was forced to shed some of his neoconservative skin and get involved in peacemaking. Trump surely deserves some credit for that!

As could be expected given the current political climate in the US, the neoconservatives have joined up with the anti-Trump forces on the Left — and US client states overseas — to vigorously oppose any movement toward peace with Russia. The mainstream media is, as also to be expected, amplifying every objection to any step away from a confrontation with Russia.

Bolton had hardly left Moscow when the media began its attacks. US allies are “nervous” over the planned summit, reported Reuters. They did not quote any US ally claiming to be nervous, but they did speculate that both the UK and Ukraine would not be happy were the US and Russia to improve relations. But why is that? The current Ukrainian government is only in power because the Obama Administration launched a coup against its democratically-elected president to put US puppets in charge. They’re right to be nervous. And the British government is also right to be worried. They swore that Russia was behind the “poisoning” of the Skripals without providing any evidence to back up their claims. Hundreds of Russian diplomats were expelled from Western countries on their word alone. And over the past couple of months, each of their claims has fallen short.

At the extreme of the reaction to Bolton’s Russia trip was the US-funded think tank, the Atlantic Council, which is stuck in a 1950s time warp. Its resident Russia “expert,” Anders Åslund, Tweeted that long-time Russia hawk Bolton had been “captured by the Kremlin” and must now be considered a Russian agent for having helped set up a meeting between Trump and Putin. Do they really prefer nuclear war?

The “experts” are usually wrong when it comes to peacemaking. They rely on having “official enemies” for their very livelihood. In 1985, national security “expert” Zbigniew Brzezinski attacked the idea of a summit between President Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev. It was “demeaning” and “tactically unwise,” he said as reported at the time by the Washington Times. Such a meeting would only “elevate” Gorbachev and make him “first among equals,” he said. Thankfully, Reagan did engage Gorbachev in several summits and the rest is history. Brzezinski was wrong and peacemakers were right.

President Trump should understand that any move toward better relations with Russia has been already pre-approved by the American people. His position on Russia was well known. He campaigned very clearly on the idea that the US should end the hostility toward Russia that characterized the Obama Administration and find a way to work together. Voters knew his position and they chose him over Hillary Clinton, who was also very clear on Russia: more confrontation and more aggression.

President Trump would be wise to ignore the neocon talking heads and think tank “experts” paid by defense contractors. He should ignore the “never Trumpers” who have yet to make a coherent policy argument opposing the president. The extent of their opposition to Trump seems to be “he’s mean and rude.” Let us hope that a Trump/Putin meeting begins a move toward real reconciliation and away from the threat of nuclear war.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.

Hashem Keeps Improving the World!

Is the Cost of Living Really Rising?

Published on Aug 17, 2011

According to Prof. Steve Horwitz, one contemporary economic myth is that the cost of living has consistently risen for Americans over the past century. In fact, prices are higher today than they were 100 years ago. However, prices today have been heavily influenced by inflation. One way of avoiding inflationary distortions is to look at amount of labor hours required to make a purchase. Using this analysis, Prof. Horwitz finds that most goods and services have never been cheaper.

Watch more videos:http://lrnlbty.co/y5tTcY

From YouTube, here.

Menachem Begin on Brit Hakana’im and Administrative Detention

Did Menachem Begin Call Israeli Laws Nazi Laws?

By  Tzvi Yaakovson  –  

About a month ago, I was walking along the perimeter of the Knesset during an ordinary sitting, when I suddenly froze in my tracks. Ayman Oudeh, the chairman of the Joint Arab List, was speaking at the Knesset podium, and he had made an impossible statement. Actually, he had cited a quote that could not possibly be accurate.

It was a Wednesday afternoon at the beginning of Teves and January. The topic under discussion was the UN Security Council resolution concerning Yerushalayim. It didn’t seem likely that anything of note could be said in the course of the discussion. Yaakov Margi of the Shas party delivered an address that was entirely predictable, and Ayman Oudeh then went to the podium. The content of his speech should have been equally predictable – but it wasn’t.

Oudeh decided to speak about a different topic, which is also not unusual for the Knesset. “Mr. Speaker and my colleague, Yaakov Margi,” he began. “Mohammed Khaled Ibrahim – has anyone heard that name? Mohammed Khaled Ibrahim is a twenty-year-old young man from the village of Kabul, a citizen of the State of Israel. He was arrested last year on May 11, and was placed in administrative detention. But I understand why you have never heard his name: He is an Arab. Even though he is a citizen of the State of Israel, you have never heard his name.

“What is administrative detention?” Oudeh continued. “It is when a person is not brought to court and doesn’t know what he has done wrong. His parents don’t know what he has done wrong, and even we do not know what the charges against him are, but he has been in jail for six months already.”

All of that was predictable and even boring. These are routine matters. The right-wing activists who are known as the “hilltop youth” suffer from the same phenomenon; they can be placed in “administrative detention” without anyone explaining the reason, and without being given the right to consult with a lawyer. This has been the law since the state was first founded. Dr. Anat Barko (who wrote her doctoral thesis on the subject of Palestinian women committing suicide bombings) interjected, “It is a groundless arrest.”

Oudeh then hinted at the bombshell he was preparing to drop. He had simply been waiting for the interjection. “You say that the arrest is groundless,” he said. “Let us listen to the words of your famous leader, Menachem Begin, according to the Knesset protocols from May 21, 1951. I would never have had the audacity to say this, but these were his words, spoken in this very Knesset, about the law of administrative detention. ‘There are laws that are tyrannical, there are laws that are unethical, and there are Nazi laws.’ Menachem Begin himself said that this law is ‘tyrannical,’ ‘unethical,’ and a ‘Nazi law.’ This illegal imprisonment and administrative order is an act of audacity, and according to the legendary leader of the Cherut party – which is known as the Likud in its current incarnation – you have no right to do it.”

I listened as Oudeh spoke, and I could not believe that he was telling the truth. I was certain that the quote had been falsified. It was unthinkable that Menachem Begin could have uttered the word “Nazi” while referring to a law of the State of Israel. After all, it was Begin himself who organized massive protests against the acceptance of reparations from Germany. The horrors of the Holocaust were ingrained in his consciousness; how could he have said such a thing?

It seemed to me that the members of the Knesset were not listening, or perhaps they simply didn’t grasp the significance of Oudeh’s words. Yehuda Glick of the Likud party called out, “Would you say the same thing if a Jew was detained?”

“I am against any administrative detention,” Oudeh replied, “whether it is an Arab or a Jew.”

None of the few people present in the plenum challenged the veracity of the quote from Menachem Begin. No one demanded a clarification about the circumstances in which he had said those words – if he had actually said them at all.

Though it was clear to me that the quote was false, I made my way to the archives where the protocols of every Knesset sitting are kept. When I found the transcript in question, I received a double shock. First, I discovered that the quote came from a discussion in the Knesset about us – the chareidim. Menachem Begin was speaking about chareidim who had been placed in administrative detention. This took place at the very beginning of the history of the state, three years after its founding, and concerned an underground group known as the Brit HaKanoim. That episode led to another scandal, when it was revealed that the chareidi detainees at the Jalmi detention camp had been abused and tortured. Most of the speakers in the Knesset on that occasion attacked Moshe Sharett, the deputy prime minister at the time, for supporting their arrest. Menachem Begin, the leader of Etzel and head of the opposition, was undoubtedly the most outspoken of them all.

My second surprise came from Begin’s words themselves. Whoever it was who found the quote that Oudeh cited in the Knesset could have added many more choice excerpts of his speech on that day. Evidently, Oudeh’s researcher was too lazy to look further, or perhaps he did not imagine that anything more caustic could have been said. Nevertheless, I read Begin’s entire address, and I found that he attacked the law of administrative detention, and the arrests of yeshiva bochurim, with no less virulence than Oudeh himself displayed in the Knesset.

•••

First, a little background. The Brit HaKanoim was a group of young Yerushalmi chareidim who were outraged at the scourge of public chillul Shabbos and the sale of nonkosher food in the holy city. They were not like the kanoim of Mea Shearim with whom we are familiar today; rather, they were bochurim from respected families who were part of mainstream chareidi society. In later years, one of those bochurim, Shlomo Lorintz, became a member of the Knesset from Agudas Yisroel. Another, Rav Mordechai Eliyahu, went on to become the chief rabbi of Israel. That should give you an idea of who the group’s members were….

They called themselves an “underground,” and according to police investigators and the Shin Bet, the group had about 35 members. They were active from 1949 through 1951, and they employed tactics that drew the criticism of the gedolim, although it was clear that their intentions were noble. The bochurim claimed that they had the backing of Rav Tzvi Pesach Frank, the rov of Yerushalayim. They began their work by sending threatening letters to the owners of stores that sold treif meat, and to the managers of taxi companies that operated on Shabbos. In January 1951, they torched about 15 cars that had been seen driving in the vicinity of Geulah on Shabbos, and they also set fire to a butcher shop.

Continue reading…

From Yated Ne’eman, here.

The Evil Man Hamodia Idolized Is Finally Dead

Charles Krauthammer: The Ultimate Armchair Warrior

By Martin Sieff
Strategic Culture

July 2, 2018

Charles Krauthammer, the eminent US media pundit died in June 2018 at the age of 68, reportedly of cancer of the small intestine.

Krauthammer was the loudest and leading public voice of the neoconservative movement in the United States. He was a lifelong warmonger and proud of it. Needless to say he never donned the uniform of his country when he had the chance and made sure his son never went to serve in the conflicts he so tirelessly demanded either.

Krauthammer championed the relentless and unending expansion of NATO into Eastern Europe and the efforts to recruit countries across Eurasia into the Atlantic Alliance. He demanded the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and the toppling of previously stable governments in Ukraine and Libya. He urged the toppling of the government of Syria, demanding the policies that have so far killed at least 600,000 people and unleashed more than 5 million refugees. He demanded the 1998 bombing of Serbia. He sneered at the very idea of international law.

Krauthammer applauded the toppling of established governments including democratically elected ones across Europe, Asia, Africa, Latin America and the Middle East in the name of human rights. He relentlessly advocated the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and the ludicrous attempt to set up a US-designed, Shiite-dominated so-called democracy there. He sneered at and denied in the face of all the evidence the formidable anti-American popular rebellion in Iraq that started in May 2003. For months afterward, Krauthammer claimed there was nothing to worry about. Later, he claimed that General David Petraeus had brought lasting peace to Iraq with his “Surge” Strategy.

Krauthammer hated and sought to destroy every attempt to bring a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians. He championed the Free Trade policies that gutted the US industrial base and brought poverty and despair to hundreds of millions of Americans. He fanatically opposed the Six-Plus-One nuclear agreement with Iran.

None of his “solutions” worked. He was oblivious to all consequences in the real world. He never changed. He was incapable of learning anything or ever admitting he had been wrong. He had practiced as a psychiatrist, but no one in the public domain was more in need of sustained therapy himself.

In his last message on June 8, Krauthammer wrote, “I believe that the pursuit of truth and right ideas through honest debate and rigorous argument is a noble undertaking.” It was another lie. No one did more to suppress free, balanced and open debate in the US media over four decades. He poured endless hatred and ridicule on everyone who disagreed with him. He was never even an independent voice. Every public position he took was carefully decided and coordinated in advance by the exceptionally close knit coterie of neoconservatives for whom he was the voice.

He appeared endlessly on Fox News and numerous other US media outlets. But no one was ever allowed to seriously criticize him or challenge his assertions in any of those forums. He applauded the passing of the 2001 Patriot Act with its outrageous extension of the already huge power of the US security services and Deep State.

While still in his mid-20s, Krauthammer suffered a bizarre accident that ironically left him immune from criticism for the rest of his life. He shattered his spine diving into a swimming pool which had far too little water in it, leaving him a quadriplegic for life.

He certainly showed an indomitable will and ingenuity in maintaining a full career. However, this personal catastrophe had two other crucial effects never publicly acknowledged: It left him immune to the kind of virulent ad hominem personal abuse and contempt he freely showered on everyone else. He claimed to live in defiance of his physical affliction: Another lie. Any vitriol he poured on others was indulgently permitted. No legitimate criticism was allowed against him.

Second, as a cripple, Krauthammer was incapable of actually ever visiting Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine or the American heartland where the policies he demanded inflicted so much suffering. He did not want to know any such inconvenient facts. He did not just suffer from paradigm blindness all his life, he embraced it.

Although a successful psychiatric resident, he was extraordinarily arrogant and narcissistic and treated most people outside his family and closest colleagues with withering contempt. An informal poll carried out among Washington Post op-ed page editors in the 1990s overwhelmingly chose him as the most obnoxious and hated columnist they had to deal with. (Liberal columnist Richard Cohen easily was voted the most popular and the nicest guy.)

Krauthammer was abysmally ignorant of economics, business, practicalities of government, diplomacy, global history, war and strategy. He had never studied or practiced any of them. This ignorance generated the boundless confidence that was the secret of his success.

Krauthammer was never a reporter. He was physically incapable of visiting any country to see things himself and he was manifestly uninterested in anything that ordinary people anywhere had to say. He knew that he and his friends had all the answers. Nothing else was needed. He was convinced he was one of Plato‘s philosopher-kings, the inner elite that should guide the human race for its own good.

In his very last public statement, he said, “I leave this life with no regrets.”

It was an unintentionally revealing admission: Charles Krauthammer led his own country down the road to waste, endless suffering, unending wars, misery, drug addiction epidemics and economic ruin and helped put the whole world on a helter-skelter slide towards nuclear Armageddon.

But he had no regrets.

From Lewrockwell.com, here.