GLEN COVE, NY — Historians like to give names to periods like the “Age of Faith” or the “Age of Reason.” The twentieth century should be known as the “Age of Evil.” What made this century unique was the mass-produced nature of its evil history.
Between 1915 and 1917, the Turks killed more than a half million, and possibly more than a million, Armenians. Between 1932 and 1933, the Soviets deliberately starved to death about 10 million Ukrainian farmers, despite the fact that these farmers were actually producing food. The Germans and their East European collaborators killed 10 to 15 million people during the Nazi regime; the majority of the 6 million Jews who were killed died in death camps. In the late 1930s, the Japanese murdered over 1 million Chinese people. The Chinese communists killed over 70 million people, especially in the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. More recently, genocides have occurred in Cambodia, Rwanda, and Sudan.
The overwhelming majority of victims were killed by communists — over 100 million people in all. Included in this number are the Chinese, the Poles and Ukrainians killed by the Soviets, and the victims of Pol Pot in Cambodia.
The most important figures of the twentieth century were Josef Stalin and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. There can be no serious doubt about Stalin’s guilt; this column will explore Roosevelt’s role.
In 1934, almost immediately after the communist genocide of 10 million Ukrainians, Roosevelt established diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and continued to favor the Soviet regime for the remaining 10 years of his life.
During World War II, Roosevelt never spoke out against the Holocaust. The Venerable Pius XII, who has been criticized for not denouncing the Holocaust, presided over the rescue of over 750,000 Jews; this rescue would have been jeopardized if he had spoken out too forcefully. Roosevelt had no such excuse. He never even bombed the rail lines to the death camps. No one knows why Roosevelt never took any steps to save Europe’s Jews. Although sophisticated Americans in some of our big cities were aware of the Holocaust, this horror was never given a place in our war propaganda, and small town America did not hear about it until the liberation of the death camps.
Roosevelt favored communism in other ways as well. He supported the forced incorporation of the three Baltic states into the Soviet Union and the communist domination of Bulgaria, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and arguably other countries. He also presided over the placement of at least 80 people in important positions in the State Department who were communists, Soviet Spies, or dedicated supporters of communism.
When Roosevelt died, he left behind dozens of high State Department officials dedicated to communist victory in the Chinese civil war. These people spread the lies that the Chinese communists were not real communists and were not allies of Stalin. They helped to create a communist victory in China that resulted in more than 70 million murders in China and Cambodia.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt deserves a large part of the blame for the horrors of the twentieth century even though he did not personally order them, as did Stalin, Hitler, Mao, or Pol Pot.
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The Confederate Lawyer is copyright (c) 2010 by Charles Mills and the Fitzgerald Griffin Foundation, http://www.fgfbooks.com. All rights reserved.
Charles G. Mills is the Judge Advocate or general counsel for the New York State American Legion. He has 40 years of experience in many trial and appellate courts and has published several articles about the law.
Charles Mills photo and biographical sketch.
