Whoopi got called out after Monday January 31’s episode, when discussing Maus. While discussing the shocking decision by a Tennessee school district to ban the graphic novel about the Holocaust, Whoopi made the controversial comment. “The Holocaust isn’t about race,” she said, but co-host Joy Behar corrected her: “Well, they considered Jews a different race.” Whoopi then explained why she had said that the holocaust wasn’t about race. “It’s about man’s inhumanity to man,” she said.
After receiving tons of backlash for the comments, Whoopi issued an apology for her hurtful words. “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,” she tweeted on Monday. “I stand corrected. The Jewish people around the world have always had my support and that will never waiver. I’m sorry for the hurt I have caused.
But even if you didn’t considerJewish people as a separate race, then many black people and other racial groups were absolutely set to the concentration camps and were generally vilified (e.g. Jesse Owens) along with Jews (and of course, disabled people, leftists, LGBT people, and others). In general, I feel like there’s this weird sort of… minimization? of the Holocaust Nazi genocides (Holocaust refers specifically to the genocide of the Jewish people) as strange as that sounds, to make it almost seem like the death toll of the concentration camps under the Nazis was the famous number of 6 million Jewish people, when that number is doubled when you include everybody else who was killed. I’m not sure it’s intentional or not but it’s something I’ve noticed.
It might be partly intentional, but not in a big conspiratorial sense of it being actively suppressed by a shadowy cabal, but more in a self-regulating “I shouldn’t bring this up since it would provoke a bunch of other questions which I don’t want to answer” sense. In the liberal mind, without any material analysis, the Nazis are a unique evil… except a ton of the stuff they did was also done (perhaps in a lesser form and scale, but still) by the countries which fought them. The persecution of leftists is obviously going to be ignored, since the US and its various client states and countries they couped did a whole ton of that. The genocide of the Romani is going to be ignored by a lot of Europeans, since they’d have to face that their beliefs and rhetoric about Roma people sure don’t seem that far off from what a Nazi would say.
There’s also another aspect of this, which is with the broader slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis. In the popular consciousness, the Nazis are primarily linked with concentration camps and gas chambers, which ignores all the people who died a simpler death - just shot by the SS and dumped in a ditch, or killed by bombardment. That also has to be ignored, since acknowledging it brings up some broader questions about war - you’d start having to ask questions about how the US bombing the shit out of Korea and Vietnam is perfectly legitimate “war” and not in any way genocidal (I mean, the bombers weren’t specifically targeting Korean people… they were just bombing cities in a country which happened to be populated by Koreans), or how having US troops go village to village in Vietnam looking for Vietcong and doing a ton of massacres is different from just having Einsatzgruppen.
So, stuff gets ignored or has attention drawn away from it in popular media and propaganda, and that trickles down to the common person, who’s not going to go out and read a book on their own, and so gets a twisted, ahistorical understanding of what happened.
I’m not sure it’s intentional or not but it’s something I’ve noticed.
I don’t think everyone knowingly does it intentionally but I definitely think some people do and some ignorant people unknowingly end up parroting it.
I mean, I’ve definitely seen libs say shit like nazism was bad but communism has killed way more people. I do think there’s been an anti communist effort to minimize the holocaust and swell the perceived evil of communism during McCarthyism/red scare era forward. Especially considering how many nazis we gave jobs to and stuff. “The trains ran on time” “they dressed so snazzy” like the us does a lot to white wash nazis.
I agree. I feel like Naziism in western culture is treated as a kind of deep evil but it’s “at the heart of man’s soul” or whatever. Like, there’s a bunch of people who are like “The Nazis were evil people but deep down, if we don’t take care of our darker impulses, we too could slip into those modes of thought. They weren’t so different from us” etc which has always felt a bit… apologetic? Like, you could certainly say that and mean it in good faith but to me, it always seems to come with an unspoken statement of “If we, as Westerners, end up doing what the Nazis do, it’s not particularly the fault of capitalist propaganda or even really my personal fault, it’s because we “accidentally” let the dark part of our souls that is always there and cannot be extinguished take over and oopsie daisy, we killed a few hundred million foreign poor people in a climate catastrophe. Our human nature came out and did it.” As if these people are werewolves but rather than turning into wolves upon the full moon, they’re frantically dodging a moon that turns them into Nazis or something. It’s accepted to be part of us, even if it’s evil and parasitic, and so has some level of rehabilitation in our culture, as you say.
Whereas communism is always seen as an external, foreign threat. It’s the Borg, the zerg rush, the gray goo, that is lapping at our walls and infects the minds of people and turns them into Stalin-worshipping zombies. It’s seen as entirely opposed to human nature. And so it’s almost incapable of being rehabilitated or assimilated into current culture (which is why we must change the culture as well as obviously the fundamental political reality that governs us).
You’ve put into words what I’ve been considering for a while. Western consciousness is much better at sympathizing with Nazis than communists. Fascism can be understood as some dark internal impulse that simply exists everywhere. Like a flick of a light switch and it can happen. It’s perfectly understood by both liberals and conservatives that the US government could flip to being fascist with only the tools available to it now. There’s some sort of national soul balancing that needs to occur and that’s how fascism is defeated, some kind of common mutual belief in how precious America is or something.
Communism though is currently seen as impossible to integrate within America. It’s always an external, failing, clawing zombie like threat that was simply concocted out of thin air one day like a virus. The same people who believe American society is a precious seesaw of freedom that could instantly flip to fascism also believe communism is simply impossible. “It’ll never happen.” is the common refrain. It’ll never happen so let’s vilify this movement that’s impossible to get off the ground. Communists are only external too. The internal communists must be brainwashed high minded egg heads who just don’t realize what communism is. How can they? They’re Americans, they can’t be real communists. That stuff is from Russia or China or whatever and it’s from a long time ago. The people trying to revive it must be stupid kids or something.
It’s going to be interesting to see how leftist politics morph into an internal threat again in the western mind. I can’t even imagine it right now since communism isn’t treated seriously in any facet of American society. It’s either a failed, collapsed thing from the past or its just the scary word you use to describe your opponents.
If anyone’s wondering (link):
But even if you didn’t considerJewish people as a separate race, then many black people and other racial groups were absolutely set to the concentration camps and were generally vilified (e.g. Jesse Owens) along with Jews (and of course, disabled people, leftists, LGBT people, and others). In general, I feel like there’s this weird sort of… minimization? of the
HolocaustNazi genocides (Holocaust refers specifically to the genocide of the Jewish people) as strange as that sounds, to make it almost seem like the death toll of the concentration camps under the Nazis was the famous number of 6 million Jewish people, when that number is doubled when you include everybody else who was killed. I’m not sure it’s intentional or not but it’s something I’ve noticed.It might be partly intentional, but not in a big conspiratorial sense of it being actively suppressed by a shadowy cabal, but more in a self-regulating “I shouldn’t bring this up since it would provoke a bunch of other questions which I don’t want to answer” sense. In the liberal mind, without any material analysis, the Nazis are a unique evil… except a ton of the stuff they did was also done (perhaps in a lesser form and scale, but still) by the countries which fought them. The persecution of leftists is obviously going to be ignored, since the US and its various client states and countries they couped did a whole ton of that. The genocide of the Romani is going to be ignored by a lot of Europeans, since they’d have to face that their beliefs and rhetoric about Roma people sure don’t seem that far off from what a Nazi would say.
There’s also another aspect of this, which is with the broader slaughter perpetrated by the Nazis. In the popular consciousness, the Nazis are primarily linked with concentration camps and gas chambers, which ignores all the people who died a simpler death - just shot by the SS and dumped in a ditch, or killed by bombardment. That also has to be ignored, since acknowledging it brings up some broader questions about war - you’d start having to ask questions about how the US bombing the shit out of Korea and Vietnam is perfectly legitimate “war” and not in any way genocidal (I mean, the bombers weren’t specifically targeting Korean people… they were just bombing cities in a country which happened to be populated by Koreans), or how having US troops go village to village in Vietnam looking for Vietcong and doing a ton of massacres is different from just having Einsatzgruppen.
So, stuff gets ignored or has attention drawn away from it in popular media and propaganda, and that trickles down to the common person, who’s not going to go out and read a book on their own, and so gets a twisted, ahistorical understanding of what happened.
I don’t think everyone knowingly does it intentionally but I definitely think some people do and some ignorant people unknowingly end up parroting it.
I mean, I’ve definitely seen libs say shit like nazism was bad but communism has killed way more people. I do think there’s been an anti communist effort to minimize the holocaust and swell the perceived evil of communism during McCarthyism/red scare era forward. Especially considering how many nazis we gave jobs to and stuff. “The trains ran on time” “they dressed so snazzy” like the us does a lot to white wash nazis.
I agree. I feel like Naziism in western culture is treated as a kind of deep evil but it’s “at the heart of man’s soul” or whatever. Like, there’s a bunch of people who are like “The Nazis were evil people but deep down, if we don’t take care of our darker impulses, we too could slip into those modes of thought. They weren’t so different from us” etc which has always felt a bit… apologetic? Like, you could certainly say that and mean it in good faith but to me, it always seems to come with an unspoken statement of “If we, as Westerners, end up doing what the Nazis do, it’s not particularly the fault of capitalist propaganda or even really my personal fault, it’s because we “accidentally” let the dark part of our souls that is always there and cannot be extinguished take over and oopsie daisy, we killed a few hundred million foreign poor people in a climate catastrophe. Our human nature came out and did it.” As if these people are werewolves but rather than turning into wolves upon the full moon, they’re frantically dodging a moon that turns them into Nazis or something. It’s accepted to be part of us, even if it’s evil and parasitic, and so has some level of rehabilitation in our culture, as you say.
Whereas communism is always seen as an external, foreign threat. It’s the Borg, the zerg rush, the gray goo, that is lapping at our walls and infects the minds of people and turns them into Stalin-worshipping zombies. It’s seen as entirely opposed to human nature. And so it’s almost incapable of being rehabilitated or assimilated into current culture (which is why we must change the culture as well as obviously the fundamental political reality that governs us).
You’ve put into words what I’ve been considering for a while. Western consciousness is much better at sympathizing with Nazis than communists. Fascism can be understood as some dark internal impulse that simply exists everywhere. Like a flick of a light switch and it can happen. It’s perfectly understood by both liberals and conservatives that the US government could flip to being fascist with only the tools available to it now. There’s some sort of national soul balancing that needs to occur and that’s how fascism is defeated, some kind of common mutual belief in how precious America is or something.
Communism though is currently seen as impossible to integrate within America. It’s always an external, failing, clawing zombie like threat that was simply concocted out of thin air one day like a virus. The same people who believe American society is a precious seesaw of freedom that could instantly flip to fascism also believe communism is simply impossible. “It’ll never happen.” is the common refrain. It’ll never happen so let’s vilify this movement that’s impossible to get off the ground. Communists are only external too. The internal communists must be brainwashed high minded egg heads who just don’t realize what communism is. How can they? They’re Americans, they can’t be real communists. That stuff is from Russia or China or whatever and it’s from a long time ago. The people trying to revive it must be stupid kids or something.
It’s going to be interesting to see how leftist politics morph into an internal threat again in the western mind. I can’t even imagine it right now since communism isn’t treated seriously in any facet of American society. It’s either a failed, collapsed thing from the past or its just the scary word you use to describe your opponents.