President Joe Biden delivers remarks at the dedication of the Dodd Center for Human Rights at UConn

[George II]

One of the better speeches I've seen in quite some time.

[Budi]

1. K & R Yes. THiS is the speech . One of the best he's ever given in his long career

Anyone who hasn't heard it, you should.


Bravo President Biden.
This is one for the history books. 👍💙

[ancianita]

2. A bit casual in the first 9 mins, but indeed righteous thereafter. Biden's was the kind of speech

that I remember the world hearing from our presidents in my youth.

Righteous policy = preserving the truth so that no one could diminish or deny it for all of history.

Righteous parenting: having children travel to see both the greatness and horrors of humanity.

Righteous history: Countries must face their war crimes and inhumanity and acknowledge the truth so that humanity sets a marker for the future of human rights and the justice to be meted out in international tribunals.

Righteous action: Human rights policy begins at home; when we rest, our influence diminishes, and our silence is complicity.

Righteous recognition = recording that criminal governments feigned ignorance. Reminding ourselves of our mistakes, cowardice and inadequate action.
That we have fewer democracies in the world today.
That we recognize the U.S.'s uniqueness in defining ourselves by accepting all humans, though we haven't lived up to that.
That universal human rights is fragile and needs constant defense and work to keep peace and prosperity.

President Biden's laying out of our historical commitment to "rights" might seem all too familiar to us, but we can never underestimate how newer generations still need help in remembering that we are with them, and
that we know why they should struggle for democracy as a self correcting, strengthening and dynamic system;
that yes, they can, because democracy is an idea that is lived through each generation's righteous efforts.

Thanks for this.

[George II]

3. On the performance side, I liked that it was delivered in a hall with a bit of an echo, it took on..

....the tone of a sermon.

[ancianita]

4. Very true! Other network videos filtered out that classic acoustic, though.

His is a reminder to other nations that democracy strengthens them internally, and he rededicates us to be in solidarity with them.

Its arguable sermon quality reminds me that what he is doing as president, with all his heart, mind and spirit, is done with the urgent knowledge that this work is the last thing he does for this nation.

[George II]

5. I was lucky, I live in CT and got to hear it live on local television (all 4 channels carried it!)..

...and that echo struck me right away.

On a side note, I moved up here years after Thomas Dodd's was Senator, Chris was already in office. I had no idea he was one of the prosecutors for the Nuremberg Trials.

[ancianita]

6. Wow. Thanks for the info.

Last edited Sun Oct 17, 2021, 11:35 AM - Edit history (1)

I recall spending a pleasant summer in East Hampton and visits to my cousins several times in East Windsor.
No one in my family ever told me any of this cool stuff about the Dodds.

Holy crap. Now I see why Biden put so much weight on the importance of the Dodds in U.S. and world history.

As a special agent for the Attorney General, Dodd was basically a trial-level federal prosecutor. He worked primarily on criminal and civil liberties cases, including the prosecution of the Ku Klux Klan in the 1930s.[5] In 1942, he was sent to Hartford to prosecute a major spy ring case in which five men (Anastasy Vonsiatsky, Wilhelm Kunze, and others) were accused of violating the Espionage Act of 1917 by conspiring to gather and deliver US Army, Navy, and defense information to Germany or Japan. Four of the five pleaded guilty; Dodd tried and won the conviction of the fifth man, Reverend Kurt Emil Bruno Molzahn.[6]

Dodd became vice chairman of the Board of Review and later executive trial counsel for the Office of the United States Chief of Counsel for the Prosecution of Axis Criminality at Nuremberg, Germany, in 1945 and 1946. He practiced law privately in Hartford, Connecticut, from 1947 to 1953...

He described the delegation as "an autopsy on history's most horrible catalogue of human crime."[8]

Dodd cross-examined defendants Wilhelm Keitel, Alfred Rosenberg, Hans Frank, Walther Funk, Baldur von Schirach, Fritz Sauckel and Arthur Seyss-Inquart. In addition to cross-examining, Dodd drafted indictments against the defendants, showed films of concentration camps, provided evidence of slave labor programs, and presented evidence of economic preparations by the Nazis for an aggressive war.[5]

Dodd showed through his evidence that Erich Koch, the Reichkommissioner for the Ukraine and defendant Hans Frank, the Governor-General of Poland were responsible for the plan to deport one million Poles for slave labor.[9]

Dodd also showed evidence that defendant Walther Funk turned the Reichsbank into a depository for gold teeth and other valuables seized from the concentration camp victims. Dodd showed a motion picture of the vaults in Frankfurt where Allied troops found cases of these valuables, containing dentures, earrings, silverware and candelabra.[10] Dodd showed many items of evidence, such as a shrunken, stuffed and preserved human head of one of the concentration camp victims that had been used as a paperweight by the commandant of Buchenwald Concentration Camp.[11]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Dodd

[George II]

7. Amazing the things one learns by simply looking into history. I had no idea that....

....Chris Dodd's father was such a relentless prosecutor of war time Nazis.

I've never been up to the Dodd Center, but now I'm going to have to get there soon.

[ancianita]

8. Very true. And we usually don't learn the obvious:

that if we ignore totalitarianism, or lazily let our capitalists, through their bag men, dictate whom we support in foreign governments, then the murderous mafia rackets we've supported abroad will come to our door.

Now they have. They're here. We have to wipe them out, with their mercenary, militarized "law enforcers," and take down the wealthy (and not just their 'tax havens' which they can set up anywhere) who fund them. There's a reason it's called "dark" money, and we're living its consequences.