To this day I am dumbfounded that Roosevelt is still as revered as he is. He had other problems like poor economic policy that probably prolonged the Great Depression, but you don't even need to look at any of that - the dude implemented an executive order which put American citizens into effective prisons with no due process, based only on their ethnicity. Trump, who I'm told is a racist and a fascist and so forth, never even tried to do anything close to that.
You want to start toppling statues and changing street names of dead white guys? Start with that one. What a creep.
> "Mr. McCloy, one of the key Government officials who oversaw the relocation program, said he might again support the wartime resettlement of United States citizens because of their national heritage. The 87-year-old retired diplomat testified before the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, which was charted by Congress last year to determine whether the 120,000 Japanese-Americans who were uprooted from their homes on the West Coast and relocated in camps in the East and Middle West in 1942 were entitled to compensation."
McCloy has an interestingly creepy history - head of the World Bank post WWII (1947-1949), High Commissioner of Occupied Germany (1949-1952) (where he released a lot of Nazi industrialists from prison, claiming they were just good anti-communists), Chair of the Council on Foreign Relations (1954-1969), member of the Warren Commission, which buried any real investigation into the Kennedy Assassination in 1963), Board Member of the Ford Foundation (which served in part as cover for CIA activities) then back to a Rockefeller-linked law firm for the rest of his career.
Most historical accounts show him pressing hard for internment, and FDR basically went along, not willing to fight about it. He defended the program up to his dying day:
> "''I don't like the word 'incarcerated,' '' Mr. McCloy replied. ''Well, all right, behind barbed wire fences,'' Mr. Marutani snapped. Mr. McCloy cautioned the commission, which is to report the findings of its inquiry to Congress next year, not to advocate policies that might someday prevent the forcible relocation of other American citizens because of ethnic background."
And the people that funded the "anthropology" research of the nazis were... Americans.
The "Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Anthropology, Human Heredity, and Eugenics" (KWIA for short) was funded by the Rockefeller Foundation. Without that funding, it would have closed during the Great Depression.
The eugenics programs of the nazis were inspired by American eugenics programs. The segregationism of the nazis was inspired by Jim Crow. Concentration camps were inspired by Indian reservations. And the list goes on and on.
And among all this shit you have "The blood of the nation, a study of the decay of races through the survival of the unfit" by David Starr Jordan, founding president of Stanford University: https://archive.org/details/bloodofnationstu00jorduoft
What do you think that happened after that book was published? was he criticized? No, the guy was honored by multiple universities in the US.
IBM and other American companies also had their part in facilitating the atrocities of WW2.
America was in many ways a disgusting place in the early 20th century. Especially California, where most of the eugenicists came from, and where at least 20,000 forced sterilizations took place between 1909 and 1979. That's right, fucking 1979.
The war. He won the war, or is perceived to have. Simple as that. Churchill gets the same treatment in the UK despite, in my view, being far worse than FDR, both as a man, and in government policy. De Gaulle got it as well, practically apotheosized while still alive. Stalin too; in Russia he is still ranked as one of their greatest leaders. It would seem that being in power while prevailing in a total war translates automatically into sainthood.
If we are to have a strong federal government and borders, then we will have a distinction between non-citizen illegal immigrants and citizens, and people in each group will be held to different standards. I'm not saying it's right, but those families made a conscious choice to illegally cross a national border before they ended up in that situation. The Japanese internees were just living their lives.
Instead of starting with FDR, why not first cancel the US Presidents who literally owned slaves or who literally engaged in genocide against the natives? Just a thought.
I mean, imprisoning people for just minding their own business, based mainly on skin color, is something that every president has done since the laws against marijuana were passed. Not sure why you’d single out FDR.
You want to start toppling statues and changing street names of dead white guys? Start with that one. What a creep.