Friday, July 11, 2003

From Harry Truman's recently discovered diary:
Truman then went into a rant about Jews: "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."

Are Truman's comments against Jews that much different than liberal criticisms of Christians?
"Truman was often critical, sometimes hypercritical, of Jews in his diary entries and in his correspondences, but this doesn't make him an anti-Semite," says John Lewis Gaddis, a professor of history at Yale University and a prominent Cold War scholar. "Anyone who played the role he did in creating the state of Israel can hardly be regarded in that way."

I would surely accept this as a standard in politics if it worked both ways. I wonder if Gaddis, the Cold War Scholar, thinks it acceptable that Reagan visited the cemetery in Bitburg to strengthen his alliance with the Germans who were allies in the Cold War fight. Since Reagan also supported Israel, does that make his action benign?

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