A perfect Zionist utopia ---- that most European Jews would never get to live in, with or without Hitler

There were to be no Fiddlers on no Roofs in the original Zionist paradise.

That is what I take away from David S Wyman and Rafael Medoff's book "A Race Against Death".

It is a collection of postwar interviews with key members of the still unknown Peter Bergson group (a medium sized organization run by Jews but including many Non-Jewish Americans) ---- and the only Jewish-run organization in North America who did anything effective to help, not hurt, the wartime Jews of Europe.

The reason you likely don't know any of this is because, the old adage to the contrary, until very recently the moral losers among North America's Jews wrote all the history books.

These moral losers were gradualist Zionists, Jews who believed that the solution to all the slights Jews got in the western European world and all the deadly pogroms that received in the eastern European world was a particular form of an sovereign Jewish nation in Palestine.

They did not believe in bold dramatic public actions to win Palestine by military force or by swaying world public opinion.

Instead as the Bergson Group's second in command, Samuel Merlin explains in the book, they thought a slow but steady stream of elite Jews --- young, fit, healthy, courageous, dedicated, entrepreneurial, socialist --- would gradually build up an economical vibrant Jewish community in British run but Arab majority populated Palestine and so control it in de facto fashion.

Chaim Weizmann, the head of the worldwide Zionists, told the British Peel commission in 1936 that he certainly didn't want six million Jews coming to Palestine all at once.

No, 'the old ones will pass, dust in a cruel world ---- only a branch will survive'.

This echoed Weizmann's earlier view of 1918 that if war forced all the miserable refugee Jews out of Eastern Europe and into Palestine,the Zion would be paradise will be swamped and the gradualist reformists could never set up a community worth having.

Eugenics , here code-named "selective immigration" by the socialist gradualist Zionists, was the key to understanding the minds of Weizmann and his American counterpart Samuel Wise and all of their generation born circa 1885.

They were well-off, westernized, secularized, Germany-oriented Jews.

The rural small town Jews of Eastern Europe, all those beards and Orthodox rituals, their determinedly backward ways, their poverty - they repulsed these gradualist Zionists, not as intensely as it did most Gentiles (let alone most anti-semites) but certainly a great deal.

Rescuing only 'the best' of them was always the gradualist Zionists' pre-war and wartimeaim.

Bergson and his crew were Zionists too, but willing to put that dream on the far far backburner when it became clear that Hitler was determined to kill all the Jews in Europe - starting with those backward East Europeans.

Bergson saw them all as individuals, as fellow humans, all worth saving, a concern to all humanity - Christian, agnostic and Jewish alike.

Bergson didn't want to rescue any of these Jews "to" (Zion or the West) he wanted to rescue them "from" Nazi death, leaving them to remain in situ in Eastern Europe.

He wanted the Allies to publicly warn the German public they'd mass gas bomb Germany if it didn't immediately stop mass gassing the Jews.

Berg pointedly asked why focus wartime Jewish efforts on a wonderful future postwar Zion when the Jews in the 1940s most interested in living there (the Jews of Eastern Europe) would all be dead ?

For me, Bergson's heroic motives and fevered actions were the actions of a man who grasped the full moral dimensions of all the pious western liberal democracy talk of "winning the war first".

Recall the western liberal democracies were - in the same breath - also refusing to put in a Second Front, at least not until the Nazis and Communists had warred each other to a pulp and the Nazis had solved the West's Eastern European Jewish Problem.

The mainstream Jewish organizations, led by Weizmann and Samuel Wise, bought into this scam - that was their number one sin.

But their number two sin was forgetting the millions dying overseas in their petty jealous anger over the (new) (poor) (small) foreign-led Bergson Group besting the moral worth of the rich big and well established American led Zionist organizations.

In all of this, Peter Bergson reminds me so much of Henry Dawson.

Dawson had never been involved in the researching the cure for invariably fatal SBE, the disease that made Rheumatic Fever the deadliest disease for school age kids in those days.

He had 'no skins in the game'.

But when he saw that penicillin had two unique attributes that made it likely to finally defeat SBE and suddenly leaped in with both feet, his early successes made the oldtimers in the SBE research field (Chester Keefer above all others) insanely jealous.

The response of Dr Keefer (the Samuel Wise of wartime penicillin) and others was to say that SBE was not a war priority and the penicillin for its patients would have to await the perfect world coming after the war was won first.

Knowing full well - just like Samuel Wise, FDR and Churchill had known about Europe's Jews - that the SBEs (like American Jew Charles Aronson) would be long dead before that wonderful day.

Jam Tomorrow for the dead Jews but never Jam Today for living Jews.

Bergson bucked them with all his might for three years - Dawson ditto for four years  until he died worn out by his efforts.

Bergson lived  a long filling life but the East European Jews died despite his all out efforts - Dawson died young but the SBEs lived thanks to his all out efforts.

I don't doubt Bergson would have readily exchanged his long life for Dawson's shorter life - if only he could see some of Dawson's success....

"All Quiet on the Home Front, WWII" --- Why?

Historians, as a group, are beginning to reverse themselves over their earlier contention that the postwar civil rights, feminism, gay rights movements (et al) were born during the social protests and social advances of WWII.

They did so because a closer look at the hard evidence for this earlier claim reveals the actual reverse : the war period, as a time for civil protest, was as deathly quiet as the early Cold War period of roughly 1946-1956  ----- and far quieter than the activist years of the Great Depression and of course during the civil rights era of 1956 -1966.

Why this Wartime Quietism ?

One doesn't need only to think of the many, many protests that occurred in parallel to the Vietnam War.

For in 1917-1918, Alice Pal and her tiny band of determined supporters successfully kept the issue of votes for women alive - she and her followers willingly enduring repeated jail time, for daring to continue civil protests during a war crisis, to forward that cause.

Alice Paul proclaimed, in a sense, a need for a Double V victory over Kaiserism - at home as well as abroad.

Fumbling the Shoah response

A pity then that no single individual with a handful of dedicated followers like Alice Paul emerged among American Jewry to lead as prolonged and as determined a protest on behalf of Europe's Jews.

The efforts of Peter Bergson come closest - including a mass march on the White House.

But no arrests for Bergson and his band for repeatedly silently picketing the White House as Paul did in another war situation - certainly no chaining for self to the fence to awake America to six million Jews being killed.

Black organized protests : where ?

Similarly, the famous plan to march on Washington on behalf of fair job opportunities for black Americans never went ahead as much because there were no sign the promised numbers were actually going to come as because of the sop FDR promised if the march was stopped.

And the only civil protests I could find over women's rights and black rights during WWII that I could find were made by white men, desperate that if women and blacks got jobs in factories they would lose their occupational deferment and actually have to fight Hitler with their bodies --- and not just win their mouths.

For once, no need to 'round up the usual suspects'

Peaceful civil protests are usually led by people on the left or progressive side.

And they were decidedly cross-pressured during the war against Hitler.

Yes, they saw that the unfairnesses they had protested during peacetime only worsened in WWII, but they knew if Hitler's Germany won, they and the people they hoped to help would be the first on his list to face the bullet or the gas.

It is too hard for us young ones today to understand the exalted amounts of faith in Germany's technological superiority held by the middle-aged  to old people of the 1940s.

For seventy five years, Germany had seemed to be on a roll - though in fact it was being increasingly challenged, from the 1920s onwards, by America, Russia, Japan and even Britain.

Many people during WWII - right up to the bitter end, thought Germany could actually pull off a belated victory, based solely upon some fabulous war-winning weapon.

'Nazis ruling the Americas' did not seem far fetched to them --- though it always was so, based on the current actual facts, not upon half remembered news stories from the past half century about Germany's technological triumphs.

So they met this apparently serious existential challenge to their own lives, by putting domestic inequality on the back burner to become hyper loyal to the Allied war cause : Jews, blacks and other visible minorities, feminists, gays, socialists and communists, unionists -- even the handicapped, knowing their eugenic fate if Hitler won.

Dr Dawson bucks the trend to Quietism

A bit of a low keyed Alice Paul himself, Dr Martin Henry Dawson led a rare individual wartime protest on behalf of those handicapped.

In that process, he successfully gave us a rare bit of good news from WWII's bad news war :  for his desire to see wartime penicillin available to all in need actually became a reality - just months before he died in April 1945.

Himself dying throughout the war, Dawson was much too sick to once again pick up a gun to help defeat the Kaiser  abroad,  so he sought to defeat Hitler's American eugenic mentors at home instead - and succeeded, at least on this issue.

An early and crucial, if quiet, victory for post-modernity's science.

But we all know : from acorns, oaks grow....

Pity Peter Bergson wasn't ALICE PAUL & LUCY BURNS : then some more Jews might have been saved....

    I would be truly horrified if I left the impression that the infamous Peter Bergson was a fiery troublemaker among WWII's American Jewry.
    He wasn't - not by a long shot - he was merely the least limp dick among a legion of limp dicks, when it came to saving Europe's Jews.

   Pity he didn't have the estrogen levels of those "iron-jawed angels" of peaceful civil disobedience, Alice Paul and Lucy Burns, who did chain themselves to the White House and only escaped 'torture-death by force-feeding' by accident.
   If Alice and Lucy had been Jewish militants during WWII, they might have done as well by their acts of civil disobedience for the Holocaust victims as they had earlier done for the 'votes for women' campaign.
    Pity.......

"Three Generations of JEWISH Cowards Is Enough"

            Part Two of Two Posts on this issue

       Since 1945 (and the revelations about the Holocaust and what Jews in the free world failed to do to stop it) a disproportional percentage of every country's well known controversial columnists have been of Jewish descent.
   At first glance, it may appear that the children and grandchildren of that generation of free world Jews who failed to ACT UP or OCCUPY WALL STREET during WWII, are simply being very confrontational and controversial now, in a catch-up effort to negate the meek and mildness of their forefathers' generation.
   I argue this is simply not so.

   While the voters are usually pretty evenly divided between voting for parties of the left/green or the right/libertarians ,well known Jewish controversial columnists are not evenly divided left and right in their viewpoints.
    Most of them, by far, are very right wing and write for very right wing media.
    In doing so, they are merely carrying on an old family tradition: being as cowardly today, as their forefathers were during WWII.
   The WWII generation of free world Jews was determined not to undermine what little they had already achieved in the anti-Semitic democracies of the Allies, by being seen as loud ,public, pushy and 'Jewish' in expressing their concerns over the fate of Europe's Jews.
    "The way to get ahead is to get along" (work quietly,politely) was their motto.
    This even when it was well known, by ordinary members of the Gentile community, that millions of Jews, polish and russian, were already dead at Nazi hands by the Spring of 1942 ----- before the infamous mass gassings began.
    Brown-nosers, Jewish brown-nosers.
    And their hard-hitting, opinionated, controversial children and grandchildren ?
  Still Jewish brown-nosers: like grandfather, like grandson.
   Courage then is what it would have taken to get yourself arrested by chaining yourself to the White House walls protesting inaction on the fate of Europe's Jews.
   Courage today, for a columnist, might simply consist of writing in a trade union newspaper while defending the rich and assailing the poor - or by assailing the rich and defending the poor in a rich man's newspaper.
   But defending the rich and assailing the poor and minorities in the rich man's media isn't brave or even controversial - it is called brown-nosing, or if you wish to go upmarket, being a 'HO' for Pay.
    Doubt me ? Ask yourself how many of the well known controversial columnists of Jewish origin airily dismissed ACT UP ("homos") or OCCUPY WALL STREET("eco-criminals") calls for acts of civil disobedience ?
    Grandpa did not approve of PETER BERGSON's calls for acts of civil disobedience during WWII and his gutless grandchildren are just carrying on his tradition.
    When  Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr ruled that "three generations of imbeciles is enough" in the case of  BUCK versus BELL, legitimizing eugenics in America and in Nazi Germany ,he was wrong on both the facts of the case and on its morality.
   I am not wrong on either in this case: "three generations of Jewish cowards is more than enough".
   Civilian courage in non-combat zones during WWII might consist of stealing government-issue penicillin in an effort to save the lives of the poor, deliberately sentenced to death by neglect by that same government. The courageous Dr Martin Henry Dawson did just that - I know the courageous --- and Jewish brown-nosers you ain't it.
  So - please ! - bugger off the pages of our newspapers and screens of our TV  and do something truly courageous before you dare to show your brown-nosed faces around here again.....