Anti-Semitism then and now

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at a ceremony where he was presented with a Congressional gold medal.

Wiesel said, "We are grateful to this country, the greatest democracy in the world, the freest nation in the world, the moral nation, the authority in the world, and we are grateful especially to this country for having offered us haven and refuge."

He called Mr. Reagan a "friend of the Jewish people."

Friend of Zionist Israel, not Jews Though the U.S. government is truly Zionist Israel's greatest friend and ally—with South Africa a close second-this is an entirely opposite policy than one of friendship or goodwill toward Jews.

What, for instance, was the real response of the U.S. government, with Roosevelt at the helm, when Nazism's "How many know that the U.S. never altered its immigration quotas for Jews during WWII?"

aim of destroying all of European Jewry came to light in the 1930s?

Germany, it will be remembered, began passing harsh anti-Jewish legislation as early as April 1933. It denied German citizenship to Jews in September of 1935. Soon after followed further decrees, orders, and laws expropriating Jewish property and placing Jews under police surveillance.

Germany began carrying out the policy of mass murders by 1941, including the full operation of the death camps.

Yet despite all this, the U.S. government consciously refused to aid the Jews or even to speak out forcefully until well after the facts were widely known-and it was too late!

Refusal to give sanctuary How many people who today believe the existing quotas!-during the extermination of European Jewry?

How many are aware that Jews desperately seeking entry to the United States (perhaps believing the words imprinted on the Statue of Liberty, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free") were turned away from our shores?

This little known history is fully documented in journalist Arthur D. Morse's "While 6 Million Died, among other publications.

"Open the Doors!"

The Fourth International in Europe and the Socialist Workers Party in the United States adopted an aggressive defense of the Jews. The SWP campaigned for the United States to "Open the Doors"! to all refugees of Nazism.

The SWP carried out an aggressive campaign to aid fascism's victims through the American Fund for Political Prisoners and Refugees. It organized petitions to Congress to admit the Jewish refugees. It also mounted mass demonstrations and actions against American fascists and used its newspaper to educate workers against racism and anti-Semitism.

A manifesto adopted by the SWP National Committee in 1938 stated in its conclusion:

"Show the Hitlerite assassins and pogromists the real position of American labor by yor ir protest meetings! Show them that the American working class means it seriously when it says that it detests anti-Semitism and the antiSemites like the plague!

"Show the victims of the fascist terror that you mean it seriously, by stretching out to them the hand of fraternal solidarity, by demanding of the American government the free and unrestricted right of asylum for the Jewish scapegoats of fascist barbarism"!

A 1973 SWP pamphlet in stated:

•The efforts of the SWP during the 1930s flowed from a revolutionary socialist analysis of opposition to capitalism, the source of both anti-Semitism and fascism in today's world. In Europe, cothinkers of the SWP in the Fourth International, who shared these views, fought bravely against the fascists. Many of them sacrificed their lives in the struggle."

Sanctuary yesterday and today Though the 1930s were a long time ago, American anti-Semitism is far from dead. The Reagan administration is full of racists and anti-Semites.

The most hopeful sign that history won't repeat itself is the growing movements against U.S. intervention in Central America and racist apartheid. Active protest movements force the government to come under close scrutiny and make it more difficult for it to harbor such racists as those who constructed the U.S. policy of acquiescence to the Holocaust. in September 1938, Leon Trotsky spelled out the tasks of revolutionists in their fight against imperialism and war. In it Trotsky wrote the following:

"Before exhausting or drowning mankind in blood, capitalism befouls the world atmosphere with the poisonous vapors of national and race hatred. Anti-Semitism today is one of the more malignant convulsions of capitalism's death agony.

"An uncompromising disclosure of the roots of race prejudice and all forms and shades of national arrogance and chauvinism, particularly anti-Semitism, should become part of the daily work of all sections of the Fourth International, as the most important part of the struggle against imperialism and war. Our basic slogan remains: Workers of the World Unite!"

Indeed, as Trotsky wrote, the only insurance that history will not be repeated is the replacement of the capitalist system itself, which depends on racism and anti-Semitism to provide ready scapegoats for its endemic and ever-worsening crises.

Edith lackson Mize German civilians forced to view Buchenwald after liberation