I would love to hear thoughts and opinions on Whoopi Goldberg's recent controversial comments concerning Jews and the holocaust.
Whoopi needs to read, "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich."
The Nazis/Hitler contrived their own, new, notion of race, applying it to themselves and 'others'. They had no criteria, so it really was mainly a propaganda device. The use of the device sought to downplay the reality that the disparagement of Jews came from Christian anti-Semitism.
Nazis also used their notion of racial purity to murder the sick and handicapped, supposedly under the auspices of eugenics. The problem again being that they whatever criteria they claimed was bogus, and applied the term 'science' the same way Christians used to use it in the term 'Scientific Creationism'; no real science being involved in either.
It is bizarre that Goldberg, who identifies as Jewish by ancestry only, should then denounce the issue of race as a conflict within Whites. Plainly, Nazis considered Blacks to be an inferior race, along with all non-Aryans.
The bigger problem behind Whoopi Goldberg and Ron DeSantis' incendiary comments.
By Jill Filipovic, CNN. Feb. 2, 2022
"The View" co-host Whoopi Goldberg said during a roundtable discussion of the "Maus" ban that the Holocaust wasn't about race. It was "White people doing it to White people," she said of the Nazi plan to exterminate Jews and other non-Aryan groups in their quest to establish a single master race.
Goldberg didn't just say that the Holocaust wasn't about race. She said, "Well, this is White people doing it to White people, so y'all gonna fight amongst yourselves," making the Holocaust someone else's issue. The Tennessee school board banned "Maus," it said, because of the book's "unnecessary use of profanity and nudity and its depiction of violence and suicide," as though it would be possible to depict one of the most violent events of the last century without depicting violence.
History, it turns out, contains a lot of disturbing and inappropriate content.
And so does the present: Anti-Semitic incidents are up, and just last month, a gunman held four people hostage at a Texas synagogue.
This insistence that terrible historical events are simply the outcome of individual bad actors -- or simply "man's inhumanity to man," as Goldberg put it -- is dangerous. History is not divorced from the long arc of what came before; it is not unrelated to us today.
Believing terrible events are simply random and isolated blips consigns us to collective ignorance and leaves us well positioned for a repeat. You hear echoes of this same school of thought from the White people who insist that slavery has nothing to do with me because I didn't enslave anyone, and who in turn seek to obscure the many ways in which slavery shaped and continues to shape America's laws, its geography, and its unequal racial outcomes.
Instead of grappling with our history and what it means for our lives today, a lot of people want to wash their hands of it.
One Republican politician in Texas emailed school superintendents a list of 850 books that might "make students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish" -- as though discomfort, guilt, and anguish are not normal human reactions to learning about genocide, enslavement, and other horrifying things that human beings have done to each other, often after organizing people into race- or ethnicity-based hierarchies.
Republicans in Texas and several other conservative states have also tried to change the way history is taught -- to literally rewrite history to suit their political aims, to position their state's past leaders and citizens as less culpable in wrongdoing than they were, and to curtail the ability of educators to teach students how to think critically and connect the past to the present.
.
These moves matter not just because of the cliché that "those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it." They matter because education, history, and information are the grounds upon which a society is built. When you erode them, the whole house can crumble.
Whoever controls the narrative about the past has more power over the present. Totalitarian leaders know this, which is why rewriting history is a staple of autocratic regimes.
The United States is at a fragile moment. The stability of our democracy has been tested by four years of a despotic-wannabe president, a deadly riot that sought to overturn the results of a free and fair election, a right-wing party that has descended further and further into authoritarianism and that includes hundreds of members who, like the violent Jan. 6th rioters, refuse to accept the results of the 2020 election, and three years of a devastating pandemic.
We are atomized, isolated and divided; we don't just disagree on policy or even values, but on the very definition of truth and what counts as fact versus fiction. Huge swaths of the country have been taken in by dangerous conspiracy theories and believe outright lies related to the 2020 presidential election results. Hundreds of thousands of people have died or gotten seriously ill and still a horrifying number of Americans have refused to get a safe, effective and free vaccine that has been shamefully politicized by conservatives and the Republican Party.
These are not conditions under which a functional democracy can survive. They are conditions under which thousands of human beings are not surviving. Pulling through requires what increasingly feels impossible: living in a shared reality.
Writing off the horrors of history as someone else's problem and dismissing them as unrelated to today is factually incorrect. It also diminishes our ability to understand how complex systems of power, the manipulation of information, and the falsification of history have led, again and again, to horrific outcomes -- and it condemns us to repeat the same dangerous cycle.
I remember just a few years back there were some people saying that the Civil War was not about slavery. It's difficult, and mostly ineffective, trying to reason with these people.
A scolding is probably appropriate, she is clearly not ill intentioned but is a public figure who needs to choose her words more carefully. When actual intentional violence is being perpetrated by white nationalists and state governors refuse to condemn nazi's this isn't something to waste a lot of attention on.
I agree
I like her, and believe she messed up with this comment. I’m glad she apologized, and think the 2 week suspension is a little over the top. She learned from this experience.
I'm with you on this
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