ABC has suspended Whoopi Goldberg for her controversial remarks about the Holocaust during her show last Monday. Furthermore, an insider with the media company reportedly claimed that ABC staffers are furious that Goldberg hasn’t been formally fired yet.
But what did Goldberg actually say that made the #cancel mob so upset? During a discussion on The View about critical race theory (CRT) and book censorship in schools, Goldberg claimed that the Holocaust wasn’t about race because both the nazis and Jews were white Europeans. She went on to say
“But you’re missing the point. You’re missing the point. The minute you turn it into race, it goes down this alley. Let’s talk about it for what it is. It’s how people treat each other. That’s the problem. It doesn’t matter if you are Black or White, because Black, White, Jews, Italians, everybody eats each other”
Not long after Goldberg’s ill-advised comments, the Anti-Defamation League jumped in. Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the ADL, corrected Goldberg in a tweet:
But there’s a problem. Goldberg is right and Greenblatt is wrong. Also, Greenblatt is a liar and is the one distorting Holocaust history, and is doing it in several different ways. I’ll list them off, and explain each in detail.
- Racism and morality aren’t the same thing
- The ADL peddles a false Holocaust narrative
- False narratives promote Holocaust denial
- Holocaust deniers are (partially) correct.
Racism and morality aren’t the same thing
First off, this whole thing is ridiculous. Goldberg didn’t say she liked nazis or that she agreed with them. She just said they weren’t racist. Even if someone else disagrees, there was nothing in her statement that should be considered remotely offensive, let alone severe enough to cancel her over.
Racism isn’t the alpha and omega of morality. It’s possible to be racist but still a good person, and it’s equally possible to be progressive, but still evil. Hitler’s followers weren’t any more or less evil because of racism. Using racism as a measuring stick for morality will get you some really stupid answers. Would Hitler have been less evil if he killed people at random? What if he only killed people who posed a substantiated political threat to his regime? Is killing people an acceptable thing to do if you can gain something from it? According to the ADL, yes, apparently. As long as you’re not a nasty, mean bigot you can kill however many people you like.
What does “racism” even mean?
In 2020, the ADL website “updated” its definition of racism. Here are the definitions, before and after the update:
Now under the old ADL definition, Goldberg would have been wrong. But as I mentioned, the ADL changed that definition back in 2020. Again, here’s the official definition at the time Goldberg made her comments.
Racism: the marginalization and/or oppression of people of color based on a socially constructed racial hierarchy that privileges white people.
-The Anti-Defamation League’s definition of “racism”
There you have it. Goldberg is 100% correct. By the ADL’s own definition, racism always privileges white people against people of color. It is literally impossible to be racist against white people. European Jews were (and still are) white. Therefore, World War II was not about race and the nazis were not racist.
Not only was Goldberg right, Greenblatt was clearly wrong and contradicting his own organization’s written definition of racism. And no, I’m not going to be nice. This wasn’t an honest mistake. Greenblatt was lying, and he clearly knew he was lying because shortly afterward, the ADL changed their definition of racism again. Here’s what it is now:
Granted, by common sense standards, yes, it is possible to be racist against white people. But I don’t care. The ADL insisted on defining racism to mean one thing, and are now crying when Goldberg correctly used that definition in a context they don’t like. Why did the ADL have that stupid and demonstrably false definition anyway? The answer is obvious. The ADL are professional victims, grifters, and bigots who make money by going around accusing people of being antisemites. Back in 2020, Black Lives Matter was hot, and the ADL saw it as a great business opportunity like the Holocaust. So they rewrote the definition of racism to be stupid, knowing that would please the BLM culture warriors. Notice how they also removed the text talking about segregation, because they knew many BLM proponents are in favor of re-separating whites and darks.
When someone is too greedy and short-sighted, he might not see how his ideas will backfire in obvious ways. How could the ADL declare it impossible to be racist against white people and somehow forget that they’re white? The ADL wants to have their cake and eat it too. I like how they had the audacity to declare their latest re-write an “interim definition.” Oh yes, because words’ meanings are completely arbitrary and the ADL can change them to mean anything to match their current grift project, no matter how weirdly specific it is. Yesterday, 2+2 = 5. Now it equals 3. Maybe tomorrow it will equal 7. Or maybe 2+2 will be declared an antisemitic hate symbol like the “okay sign.” God only knows at this point.
In short, the ADL spent years pushing a narrative, and then punished somebody for repeating it back to them.
The ADL peddles a false Holocaust narrative
Here’s another problem I have with the Goldberg drama. When I heard about the scandal I looked up her actual comments, an immediate and obvious rebuttal appeared in my head. My kneejerk first impression didn’t even involve whether or not Jews are white, or if it is possible to be racist against them. The nazis were racist against, well, everybody. They thought Aryans were the master race and all other races were inferior, including black people. Hitler perceived Jews as communist agitators, both in Germany and abroad, so decided to eliminate them first. But he oppressed, abused, and killed many different people, not just Jews.
On Tuesday, Goldberg invited Greenblatt for a segment on The View. He could have told her that yes, obviously the nazis were racist against black people too, not just Jews. But he didn’t.
This could have been a teaching moment to show Goldberg and viewers that the scale and barbarism of the Holocaust is consistently downplayed and underrepresented. They didn’t just kill six million Jews. Here’s a trivia question, which country lost the most people in World War II? The USSR, with 27 million people killed. I’m sure most history buffs know this, but how many people in the general American public would correctly guess the answer? I’m not sure and I wasn’t able to find any surveys asking, which is interesting in of itself. How many of those people would guess that the Belarusan SSR (Belarus) lost more than 2 million people, a quarter of their total population, and more per capita than any other state in the war? I’m guessing very, very few.
Consider this Business Insider article from 2013 about a “shocking” study that the Holocaust might have killed up to 20 million people. Why is that shocking? It shouldn’t be shocking, but it is. In 2016 I attended a US Army Holocaust memorial (I wrote about it here). The figure all of the speakers cited was 10 million killed. At the time I didn’t know that number was embarrassingly wrong, and apparently none of the “experts” in attendance knew either.
I have written about this topic repeatedly before. Downplaying the Holocaust was useful in the Cold War for two reasons. 1) to placate nazi allies in West Germany and 2) to dehumanize the Soviets. That narrative is still useful and for the same reasons. Recently the Financial Times published a propaganda piece calling for Germany to become a defender of Europe against the USSR Russia. Great except that’s verbatim the nazis’ marketing strategy for themselves (see my post here), and probably why Germans are reluctant to repeat the mistake.
That said, it’s unlikely that the ADL is motivated by the peculiarities of American foreign policy. I think they just like being in the sympathy spotlight and don’t want to share it. Regardless of their intentions, the ADL is still complicit in the disinformation campaign, and there are real consequences.
False narratives promote Holocaust denial
A 2020 survey in the USA found a “shocking” lack of Holocaust knowledge among American millennials and Gen Zers. 63% of respondents did not know that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, and half of those thought the Jewish death toll was under 2 million. Almost half of respondents could not name Auschwitz, or any other nazi death camp.
It’s a perplexing puzzle, but I can solve it immediately using common sense. I typed “auschwitz camp ” into my browser’s search bar and got this:
Google autocomplete listed “auschwitz camp germany” as one of the top results. It’s two entries higher than “auschwitz camp location.” Think of the significance of this. It isn’t just that a large number of people don’t quite remember where Auschwitz is, which is more understandable. They falsely believe it is in Germany, and type that wrong statement into Google enough times for it to list as an autocomplete suggestion, ironically ranking it higher on the list than the correct location in Poland.
Most people forget the majority of what they were taught in school while growing up. Unless they take a job or life interest in a relevant field, they’ll forget the details of world history, secondary languages, algebra, and things like that. History is important to remember, for obvious reasons. What people need to remember history is context. That’s why children learn the alphabet as a song. Can a typical person list the alphabet backward or from a different starting letter without pausing to think or going slower? Probably not. The same principle applies to history and geography (and they go hand in hand). If a school system consistently teaches kids the most significant people and events in history, and the rough context of where and when they lived and how they interacted with each other, students are more likely to at least remember the basics, even much later in life.
A crucial part of context with any historical event like the Holocaust is scale. A typical person on the street should be able to differentiate between a small conflict like the French and Indian War, and a huge catastrophe like World War I. My hypothetical person wouldn’t remember exact casualty figures, but he would know that the French and Indian war was fought by small groups of 18th Century soldiers and militias on the frontier so probably only had a few thousand battlefield casualties. World War I was a huge fight between many different industrialized nations so must have inflicted millions of casualties, and he would be correct. He doesn’t need to remember details from 6th grade to get the correct answer, he just combined general awareness and common sense and got something close to right.
Bring back my hypothetical person and he should know the following basic facts about the Holocaust:
- The Holocaust was entwined with Hitler’s war against the USSR.
- Hitler wanted to wipe out half a continent to create “living space” for the Aryan people.
- The Holocaust happened across Hitler’s empire with widespread participation from the army, and in many cases, the local population too.
The problem with Holocaust awareness is that it has become an extremely profitable industry for money-grubbing grifters, and they have stripped it of historical context. My hypothetical person is an American, so might not know any of those three things. Every generation of Americans since 1945 have been taught disinformation about the Holocaust their entire lives. We are taught this instead:
- The Holocaust was unrelated to the USSR (notice even the NBC article about the Holocaust survey didn’t mention the USSR at all, despite Auswitch literally being on the Eastern front and was liberated by Soviet soldiers).
- The Nazis were a handful of baddies who did the Holocaust by themselves (The Clean Wehremacht theory. See my post here)
- The Holocaust was against Jews, and only Jews.
Here’s a classic example of disinformation from Secretary of State Anthony Blinken. He recounted his stepfather’s story about surviving the Holocaust, but left out crucial details. It’s true that Samuel Pisar was eventually liberated by American GIs, but Blinken left out the part where Pisar praised the Soviet army, and also left out the inconvenient fact that it was the Soviets who liberated Auschwitch (Pisar had already been transferred westward). Blinken is playing the same game as the ADL, but Greenblatt is simply a grifter. Blinken’s actions are much more deplorable because he’s almost certainly doing it to prop up the propaganda war against Russia.
Now understand why Americans are so confused about the Holocaust? We’re taught that it was the American army that liberated the death camps. We know that the American army landed in France and attacked the Western side of Germany, so that must have been where the camps were. Yes, there were camps in West Germany too, but we aren’t aware that 80% of the German military was on the Eastern front. We know the American army wouldn’t have marched past Germany, so that must have been where Auschwitz was. But despite being the largest camp, it had the misfortune of being liberated by the wrong side, not a convenient American success story, so almost half of us don’t know about it at all.
Out of the 63% of respondents who didn’t know that six million Jews died in the Holocaust, why would half of them think only 2 million or less died? Again, it’s scale. If a person falsely believes that the Holocaust was perpetrated by a handful of nazis in Germany with no help from the German public, or participation of other countries, he’s going to get a wildly incorrect answer. How many Jews could there have possibly been in Germany?
The same study states that 90% of recipients believed the Holocaust happened, 7% were unsure, and 3% denied the Holocaust or believed it was exaggerated. 11% of all respondents believed that the Jews caused the Holocaust. Those are alarming statistics, and seem to favor the idea of mandatory Holocaust education in American curriculums. However, there are two problems with that idea.
- A state not explicitly requiring Holocaust education doesn’t mean it isn’t taught.
- There seems to be little or no correlation between mandating Holocaust education and achieving better results on the survey. Wisconsin, Minnesota and Massachusetts ranked the highest in Holocaust awareness, despite not having any formal legal requirements in place. There does to be at least some data to suggest that stricter laws on Holocaust education might have the opposite effect. New York mandates Holocaust education, but has the highest percentage of respondents who believe Jews caused the Holocaust (19%).
Can we actually blame these people for doubting the official story, though? The Holocaust narrative as it is taught to Americans doesn’t make any sense, which brings me to my last point.
Holocaust deniers are (partially) correct.
Every country has to deal with the issue of Holocaust denial, especially since nazism and antisemitism are ongoing issues. Holocaust denial is not by itself explicitly illegal in the United States like it is in some other countries. Such legislation here is not the solution, and here’s why. Countries like France, Germany, and Russia have such laws on the books, but to my knowledge, they don’t have such a uniquely distorted and ideologically loaded perception of the Holocaust like we do here.
I have had at least several people express to me that they either think the Holocaust was exaggerated or that it might not have happened at all. To be honest, up until about a year ago, I didn’t even have a clear answer for them. Nowadays I do, and say more or less what I wrote above. After clearly realizing that the Holocaust was a wartime event, not just a random thing that happened at a handful of sleepy little camps in Germany, it makes much more sense. Killing people on an industrial scale is what war is all about, and it’s very easy. After successfully destroying an enemy supply chain, their people will almost die on their own without any additional help. Maybe for some non-American readers I’m just stating the obvious, but this is what we’re told.
When an American with critical thinking skills starts to wonder about the details of the Holocaust, and how the whole thing seems a little implausible, naturally, he’ll do some research. And when he does, pretty move everything he comes across in an internet search will fall into two categories:
- Mainstream articles insisting that the Holocaust as told by the US State department is absolutely 100% true and if you doubt it you’re a bad person.
- Various fringe websites promoting white nationalism and conspiracy theories.
Sooner or later, our internet sleuth is going to decide that Mr. Blinken and Greenblat are liars who can’t be trusted, and may start believing the conspiracy theories. Yes, if he researches the topic properly he’ll come up with the correct answer eventually, but that’s not a fair thing to expect of a normal person. Schools and the media should tell the truth.
Here’s another related problem with the Holocaust “industry.” After it becomes grift, there’s no attempt at fact-checking or quality control. When someone says something particularly weird or outlandish, then he absolutely must be verified. The media loves sensationalism, which just encourages unscrupulous individuals to say obviously not true things, like that the nazis manufactured people furniture, or victims shot themselves with bendy shotguns like in a cartoon.
It almost goes without saying that media sensationalism is a problem across the board, not just with Holocaust history. Like how they believe everything Yeonmi Park says about North Korea, no matter how stupid it is or how often she contradicts herself. Another example, both researchers and journalists were overeager to announce “possible” bodies of indigenous children found on Canadian school grounds, causing some reports to be inflated or possibly false altogether. What’s happening in these cases? Ground-penetrating radar is detecting normal ground disturbances, like tree roots, and they’re misidentified as bodies. Some months ago I did hear a Holocaust denial theory claiming that unmarked graves found by radar scans at concentration camps are scattered and don’t make any sense – it’s possible these are more incidents of someone preferring sensationalism over facts. I can’t say for certain until I look into it further. I’ll post an update when/if I find one. Saying that one particular event or portrayal of the Holocaust is false does not mean the Holocaust itself did not happen. Our collective inability to separate emotion from reason is partly to blame for why so many people doubt or deny the Holocaust.
It’s past 4:00 in the morning and this post took about five hours longer for me to write than I meant to, so I’m going to bed. Good night/morning.
Featured Image Source: Still from Ninety Eighty-Four (1984) film
Ian Kummer
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