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To: george76
FDR and his record are vulnerable to many valid criticisms, but sweeping too broadly is foolish because it offers easily discredited arguments.

In fairness to FDR, the supposed "concentration camps" for Japanese Americans were spare but humane and solved a major US security problem in the form of about a dozen Japanese spy and sabotage rings that operated on the US West Coast. With internment, the transmitters for those spy rings went permanently dark.

As for giving East Europe away to the Soviets, they took it by defeating the German Army in WW II and would not have relinquished it due to pressure from FDR. It took the collapse of the Warsaw Pact and its communist governments at the end of the Cold War for East Europe to regain its freedom.

Finally, many conservatives have a fundamentalist belief in the gold standard and revile FDR for taking the US off of it. I too thought so for a long time, but eventually concluded that it was correct to go off the gold standard as a response to the deflationary pressures generated by the Depression. Indeed, in accumulating gold during the 1920s and 30s, the US and France helped to provoke the Depression by diminishing the stock of gold available as backing for the currencies of other nations.

72 posted on 01/31/2015 3:46:31 PM PST by Rockingham
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To: Rockingham
You make this sound so reasonable: Finally, many conservatives have a fundamentalist belief in the gold standard and revile FDR for taking the US off of it.

He didn't "taking the US off of it". He confiscated the gold of American citizens, and did so by executive order. US dollars continued to be exchangeable for Gold -- to foreign central banks. NIXON, ended that, not FDR.

FDR appeased Stalin and allowed him to seize Eastern Europe. Just as Neville Chamberlain thought it was OK for Hitler to seize Poland, so too did FDR think it was OK for Stalin to seize it. Poland was not FDR's to give away. Nor were any of the other nations.

The Polish Free Army fought Hitler until Warsaw was reduced to utter rubble, then they fought the Soviets. The Poles were not incidental to WW2, they were allies of the first order.

And they were betrayed by FDR.

In Poland, and many of the other "captive nations" you will find statues of Ronald Reagan for a reason. There are no statues of FDR.

It is difficult to "sweep too broadly" in condemnation of FDR, he was a fascist loving creep who did more to set us on our present course than any other single individual.

May he rot in hell.

75 posted on 02/01/2015 12:59:58 PM PST by Jack Black ( Disarmament of a targeted group is one of the surest early warning signs of future genocide.)
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