THE WORLD COULD BE PERFECT, IF IT WEREN'T FOR PEOPLE

Harry Truman's Forgotten Diary (Rebecca Dana and Peter Carlson, Washington Post, 7/11/03)

[M]ost surprising . . . were Truman's remarks on Jews, written on July 21, 1947, after the president had a conversation with Henry Morgenthau, the Jewish former treasury secretary. Morgenthau called to talk about a Jewish ship in Palestine -- possibly the Exodus, the legendary ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees who were refused entry into Palestine by the British, then rulers of that land.

"He'd no business, whatever to call me," Truman wrote. "The Jews have no sense of proportion nor do they have any judgement [sic] on world affairs. Henry brought a thousand Jews to New York on a supposedly temporary basis and they stayed."

Truman then went into a rant about Jews: "The Jews, I find, are very, very selfish. They care not how many Estonians, Latvians, Finns, Poles, Yugoslavs or Greeks get murdered or mistreated as D[isplaced] P[ersons] as long as the Jews get special treatment. Yet when they have power, physical, financial or political neither Hitler nor Stalin has anything on them for cruelty or mistreatment to the under dog. Put an underdog on top and it makes no difference whether his name is Russian, Jewish, Negro, Management, Labor, Mormon, Baptist he goes haywire. I've found very, very few who remember their past condition when prosperity comes."

These passages from Harry Truman's diaries raise lots of interesting questions, but I think I'll focus on making fun of the left.

First, let's make the cheap point that, by the standards applied by the left to Richard Nixon or Billy Graham, these are blatantly anti-semitic comments proving that Truman was a degenerate bigot. By the standards applied by the left to Jesse Jackson (ok, "standards" is the wrong word, but what else fits?), this is simply an uncharacteristic slip by an otherwise admirable man. What a shock, there's a double standard.

More subtly, this is yet another example of the left's infatuation with the billiard-ball theory of human character. For the left, if we oversimplify, the world breaks down into good (largely poor, minority or enlightened) and bad (white and unenlightened). It always confuses them to find evidence of complexity or mixed motives.

It's also tempting to be amused by the attempt to rehabilitate Truman by noting that he had a Jewish business partner (who they apparently can't even characterise as one of his best friends) or that he supported Israel. This last is again an excuse not extended to President Nixon, who was also a strong supporter of Israel. (Come to think of it, Nixon was also a member in a New York law firm. He, too, must have had Jewish partners.) The only thing that stops me short of amusement is the chance that this is an accurate model of how Washington works: that Presidents don't make decisions about, for example, supporting Israel based upon the best interests of the United States, but based upon how they feel about Jews. I know that the left can't distinguish between the personal and the official act, but I've always hoped that they were wrong.

Is what Truman wrote anti-semitic? It certainly isn't philosemitic, but I have to say that I agree with the last part of his comment. None are as cruel as the ridden become the rider. For the left, with their love of motive, this quickly becomes an argument for self-sustained government by an elite. For the right, it leads to skepticism about revolution. Truman's prejudice -- of a sort with which the right, frankly, is also comfortable -- comes into play in lumping all Jews together. This is not so much anti-semitism as it is a group based view of the world that, albeit somewhat more antisepticaly, is now the bedrock of leftist thought.

Although I don't think that this proves Truman to have been, in any sensible way, antisemitic, his comments will, in some small way, increase the left's anti-semitism. If you believe in group-based rights and group-based guilt, and if you believe that the Israeli's are kin to the Nazi's, then Truman's comments are not only true but predictive. What do we call a model of the world that can accurately predict the future? Science. And what does the left worship? Posted by David Cohen at July 12, 2003 11:16 AM