More Important Than History

Whoopi Goldberg really stepped in it this past week, with her assertion that the Holocaust was not rooted in racism.

Let's be truthful about it because Holocaust isn't about race. It's not about race. It’s not about race. It's about man's inhumanity to man.”

She apologized, but then went on Stephen Colbert's show and repeated her distinction:

I was saying, 'You can’t call this racism. This was evil.' This wasn’t based on the skin – you couldn't tell who was Jewish. They had to delve deeply to figure it out.

So, she first offered the standard celebrity form of apology, as in "I'm sorry you found the form of my opinion offensive but I haven't really changed my mind," but subsequently (and no doubt under tremendous pressure) proffered a better (and quite possibly genuine - we must grant that people can indeed learn) apology.

She then got slapped with a two week vacation... err... suspension, which reportedly has her utterly incensed.

While some have pointed out that Goldberg (nee Caryn Elaine Johnson, whose assumption of a Jewish surname based on an (unverified, to the best of my knowledge) assertion of a Jewish ancestor) should be getting the Roseanne Barr treatment, i.e. be fired by ABC for a "statement [that] is abhorrent, repugnant and inconsistent with our values," I'm not holding my breath.

And, while part of me believes one way to break the Left’s bad habits is to Alinsky them, i.e. make them live up to their own rules, I really don’t want to join in the cancel culture that I criticize.

The interesting part of all this to me is the narcissism bordering on solipsism that appears to be at the core of Goldberg's assertion. Anyone who's got even the slightest knowledge of 20th century history has heard the Nazi concept of "the master race." Hitler and the Nazis deemed Jews (and Gypsies, and Slavs) as lesser races, to the point of being considered sub-human, and even had a hierarchy of the various Aryan variants they 'identified.'

All these groups, Jews included, are considered 'white' by today's identity politicians, of course. That the Nazis engaged in genocidal extermination of lesser races, by their definition, is, should we surmise based on Goldberg's worldview, a semantic error?

Is ownership of the concept of racism so singularly vital to 21st century American blacks that they disallow the word's application to mass murderers who very clearly told us they were sorting people by race?

This is part of the astounding arrogance of today's race-agitators. The 1619 Project, as one example, is grossly insulting not only to historical fact, but to the abolitionists of the Colonial era, to all those who fought tooth-and-nail against the scourge of slavery, to the millions who fought and hundreds of thousands who died on the side of emancipation during the Civil War, and countless others. Racism throughout the world and across history is only "racism" if it passes the filters applied by 21st century Westerners, and the history of slavery, a global practice for all but the last couple hundred years of human history and whose demise is traceable to the Enlightenment that CRT advocates deride and reject, is unique to America.

These divisive zealots have spent years attempting to lay sole ownership to the concept of racism, redefining it as only perpetrable by "oppressors" against "oppressed," and culling all but their own from the ranks of the "oppressed." Anti-Asian racism is inconvenient, and therefore to be downplayed, and some Latinos get tagged as "white-Hispanic" when it suits the narrative.

Goldberg’s initial foray appeared to be laying a special claim the word "racism," no matter what billions of other people in the world think. Not only claim it, but elevate it above all else. Sure, the Holocaust was about "man's inhumanity to man," but calling it racism is a bridge too far that "miss[es] the point."

What point?

That racism is more "special" or "important" than the Holocaust, and therefore the R word must be reserved for white-on-black?

That's about the only parsing I can make of Whoopi's now-retracted insistence.

The sort of racism that exists in America today, apart from very rare and universally condemned pockets of actual atrocity, doesn't even remotely approach the horror of the Holocaust - or of China's Uyghur genocide, or the other ethnic cleansings of the latter half of the 20th Century. Are such as the Armenian, Rwandan, Cambodian, Darfur, Somalian, Rohyngia and other genocides to be set apart from "racism," even if the perpetrators based their actions on their own interpretations of the word? Are such horrors as the Nanjing massacre to be sequestered because today's cultural apparatchiks won't allow that the Imperial WWII-era Japanese considered the Chinese a different race?

Hanging onto the narrative of racism in America may be so important to some Americans that they'd rather diminish the true barbarities of history than allow that things today aren't all that bad.