Max: >The simple rejoinder is: why the U.S. entered WWII is not as important as >the fact that entry contributed to preventing a greater Holocaust >victimizing even more Jews, Slavs, gypsies, etc. I suppose Max has not read "Why Six Million Died". It lays out the deep antisemitism in the Roosevelt administration that prevented Jews from being allowed into the US. It also explains why the death camps were not bombed. The real issue for political economists is why the Nazis persecuted the Jews, however. If we are interested in preventing exterminations of entire races in the future, it is important to understand the cause and possible solutions. In Germany the Jews were scapegoated because the economy had collapsed. We are now facing a similar global economic crisis in which a whole number of racial or religious minorities can become scapegoats. There are pogroms directed against the Chinese in Indonesia and skinheads are killing gypsies and African immigrants in Europe. Max, a capitalist ideologist, takes note of one form of persecution in Kosovo and urges military action from the very powers who are responsible for the global economic crisis. This reveals an inability to think systematically, which is what happens when you are part of the legitimizing machinery of the bourgeois state (what people often call an "inside-the-beltway" mentality.) It is the same laughable inability to connect the dots that most of us saw on television last night, when commentators were groping for an explanation why the "trenchcoat mafia" students in Colorado killed 25 of their fellow students. One of the survivors tried to explain the mentality of the killers: "they were into war and stuff." Nobody on the television stations elaborated. Louis Proyect (http://www.panix.com/~lnp3/marxism.html)
