Posted on 02/10/2022 7:13:11 AM PST by Kaslin
The Holocaust is a 77-year old story. Yet Whoopi Goldberg got in trouble last week for getting a major aspect of it wrong.
On January 31’s edition of “The View,” Goldberg said that the Holocaust was not about race.
The context was a discussion about the book, Maus, being banned by a Tennessee public school board because of nudity and profanity. Goldberg said: “I’m surprised that’s what made you uncomfortable, the fact that there was some nudity. I mean, it’s about the Holocaust, the killing of six million people, but that didn’t bother you? If you’re going to do this, then let’s be truthful about it. Because the Holocaust isn’t about race. No, it’s not about race.”
She has been suspended from the show for two weeks.
Hours after the program, she tweeted an apology to those offended by her remarks: “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.” Greenblatt accepted her apology.
I asked Rabbi Daniel Lapin, President of the American Alliance of Jews and Christians, for a statement on this story. He told me that he disagrees with her often, but does not agree with the suspension: “Stuffing a gag into people’s mouths and trying to harm their careers doesn’t win the argument. It actually prolongs it by breeding anger and resentment.”
He added, “By the time the left has silenced the right and the other way around, and by the time secular and religious have silenced one another and by the time blacks and whites have silenced one another, we’ll all be living in a dull, silent, monotonous and resentful world.”
Interestingly, the very next day after this broadcast of “The View” came the release of abook,Darwinian Racism: How Darwinism Influenced Hitler, Nazism, and White Nationalism. This is the latest book by Dr. Richard Weikart, author of,From Darwin to Hitler. Weikart is professor emeritus of history at California State University, Stanislaus and a Senior Fellow with the Discovery Institute.
I’ve been following Dr. Weikart’s research for years. In 2006, I traveled to his college to interview him for our television production on the impact of Darwin on devaluing human life for D. James Kennedy Ministries, “Darwin’s Deadly Legacy.”
I asked Weikart if there was a link between Darwinism and what Adolph Hitler and the Nazis did. He told our viewers, “Among German historians, there’s really not much debate about whether or not Hitler was a social Darwinist; he clearly was drawing on Darwinian ideas.”
Weikart added that Darwin wasn’t anti-Semitic, but his ideas were used by the anti-Semites to do away with those viewed as sub-human.
Recently, Weikart wrote an op-ed initially called “Whoopi Goldberg, the Holocaust, and Race” to address her “misguided comment…that the Nazi Holocaust was not about race.”
Weikart notes that historically Jews were viewed as a religious group in Germany, but with the widespread acceptance of Darwinism came the acceptance of “biological determinism.” He writes, “Biological determinism taught that human traits, including behavioral traits, were determined by one’s heredity, not by one’s education and upbringing. When applied to Jews, this meant that the common stereotypes of Jews—that they are greedy, deceitful, sexual immoral, etc.—were allegedly biologically ingrained traits.” By the time of Hitler’s Third Reich, this view was widespread and Jews were viewed more in racial terms than in religious terms
So indeed the Holocaust was about race. It was all about achieving the so-called Master Race and eliminating those viewed as subhuman. The Jews were the largest group killed. Said Weikart, “For them, the killing of Jews was all about race.” The Nazis also killed Gypsies and Slavs for racist reasons.
Weikart said that in the Nazis were putting into practice genetic selection in the concentration camps---deciding who would live and who would die: “Natural selection was a guiding idea for Hitler and the Nazis…. and the term was related directly to Darwinian terminology….They were selecting this person to survive and this person to go to the gas chambers.”
On a recent radio segment, Weikart told me, “Hitler saw this life as a struggle for existence among many races opposing his so-called Aryan (or sometimes he’d use the term Nordic) race, and he framed it as a Darwinian struggle for existence.”
So what was the Holocaust all about? Said Weikart, “Adolph Hitler was clearly trying to speed evolution along.” Hitler believed that the evolutionary survival of his “master race” required the extermination of Jews.
Darwinian evolution is the missing link in Whoopi Goldberg’s verbal mistake last week.
We talkin’ Caryn Elaine Johnson? Or KAREN if you prefer.
Whoopi —> missing link?
There are all kinds of stupid BS that people spout, like the History Channel "It was aliens" guy, or people who think man never landed on the moon. Rosie O'Donnell was allowed to state her opinion on The View Spew that 9/11 was some sort of hoax/inside job. All it did was nake her look like the ignorant sow she is.
From the view of a population geneticist, it would be difficult to properly define any religious group as a “race”. However since Hitler corrupted science and used such definitions in his inhuman effort to eliminate groups he hated, then in a real political sense what he did was genocide. It is the primordial fear of all minority groups be they racial, religious or political, living within a culture, given the right political and social circumstances, such genocidal policies can happen again almost anywhere.
Let’s see.. Characterizing a group of people as ‘subhuman’. Justifying hate for them. Calling for them to be culled from society.
Sounds a lot like the left’s hate for Trump voters.
In some small way, this dust-up might be good for the country. Whoopi said some thing wrong, something that offended a few people.
So what! She did not advocate violence, or anything like that. A brief clarification on her part should have been enough. No apology was even necessary.
Unfortunately Whoop now joins the long list of folks who got smacked around just because some delicate soul somewhere got offended. Maybe this event will make at least some leftists reconsider the whole “cancel culture” thing.
Disclaimer #1: I’m probably dreaming here. Cancel culture will keep claiming innocent victims.
Disclaimer #2: Yep, I know that Whoopi was a big cancel culture proponent - until it happened to her.
“Adolph Hitler was clearly trying to speed evolution along.”
I think that was an excuse, at the most. He was driven by hate, not science, not even perverted science. I think he was trying to erase the Book, and its moral imperatives, by exterminating the people that he regarded as representing it in the flesh.
racism = determinism + collectivism + subjectivism
this is what lefturd loons do all day long
Applying today’s concept of race to the concept of race as understood 100 years ago is always going to lead to misunderstanding of history.
A book called ‘The Story of the Irish Race’ was published in 1921. Not just the times were different.
::When the ADL guy straightened her out, she aplogized for her ignorance. ::
Why is someone like Whoopi so ignorant of the holocaust?
Because she has lived her entire existence in the echo-chamber of the Democrat party. She was TAUGHT nothing, she learned how to regurgitate to obtain the approval of her betters.
She has lived her life on the plantation porch and would never say anything that would have the Party kick her off.
Correct. He said this clearly in both of his books.
13 million people were killed during The Holocaust, 6 million were Jews.
On the other hand, and despite long winded theories, to Hitler, the Jews were a convenient and useful scapegoat.
Hitler didn’t just view Jews as another “race,” but another species.
A mere two week suspension is what she got. Normal people have gotten much worse for less. She be just mad cuz she got some punishment. She is convinced that she should not have to pay any penalty for that, and every time she looks in the mirror she sees the two reasons why she normally gets a free pass.
I agree. The term “race” being more akin to tribe. I have had “The Story of the Irish Race,” by Seumas MacManus, in my library for many years. Fascinating source of old writings.
“I have a dream that my four little children, will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character."
Racism occurs across all peoples, of all colors, ethnic origins, and socio-economic strata.
Yes Whoopi is a nut. But what she said is hardly a cause for major screaming and crying and rending of garments. When she said that it was more about man’s inhumanity to man than race that was an arguable point. And when she later said that you can’t tell a Jew from any other white person just by looking at them, that was true as well. I’m all for taking liberals to task, but this was stupid.
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