Leave it to the gals on The View to make another silly comment. The latest is Whoopie Goldberg, who along with Joy Behar, makes The View the most ridiculous show on TV. And that's saying something.
So now Whoopie has made a comment and when challenged, doubled down on it, that the Holocaust was not about race. It was just one group of whites hating another group of whites. This was not just someone's dopey opinion; it was historically false.
Leaving aside the fact that Jews are not all white; they come in all colors, Goldberg obviously has no understanding of what really happened to the Jews in Hitlerian Germany, or at least, why. Yes, historically, Jews have gotten it from all directions and for different reasons over time. The fact of the matter is that Hitler and his followers, considered Jews to be a different race, and an inferior one at that. They believed that Jews were polluting the Aryan race through marriage and/or sexual relations with "real" German women. Hitler never cared about the tenets of Judaism. For him, it was not a Christian vs. Jewish issue. It was race. It made no difference that many Jews in Germany had inter-married and converted to Christianity. To him, they were still Jews.
There is a video of Hitler speaking before the Reichstag in January 1939 as World War 2 was approaching. He said:
"If international finance Jewry inside and outside Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will be not the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe."
If you read Mein Kampf, which I did many years ago (It's not exactly a page-turner), he lays out what he thought about the Jews. He considered Jews to be a race separate and apart from Germans and other pure white Aryans (for example, Dutch or Scandinavians). Hitler also considered Slavs to be racially inferior to Aryans.
At this point, I feel I should stop with the history lesson because I am sure this comes as no surprise to you, the reader. You've probably known all this ever since you were in grade school, right?
But Whoopie Goldberg doesn't know.
To be fair, there are a lot of things out there that I should know but don't. Things I should have known a long time ago. So maybe I should give Whoopie a pass. At the same time, I ask myself, "How many times has this woman stormed off the set because she found herself in sharp disagreement with a guest or co-hostess over some issue and she couldn't win the debate? You put that together with her latest comments about the Holocaust, and what you have is the very definition of an ignorant person.
*Update: Goldberg has issued an apology which reads:
"On today's show, I said the Holocaust ‘is not about race, but about man’s inhumanity to man.' I should have said it is about both," As Jonathan Greenblatt from the Anti-Defamation League shared, ‘The Holocaust was about the Nazi's systematic annihilation of the Jewish people - who they deemed to be an inferior race.' I stand corrected."
Well-stated. Yeah, a lot of Jewish people are white and can blend in with white majorities without standing out like a person of color would.
ReplyDeleteBut still, even a tiny bit of knowledge on Hitler lets us know that it was indeed a racial/ethnic thing.