Universalising the Holocaust was a mistake
Sometimes there is a TV moment that reveals or causes a fissure in the fabric of our society – whether that be political, cultural, ideological or otherwise. Think the Frost/Nixon interviews, the broadcast of Roots, and of course Scott and Charlene’s wedding on Neighbours, and the resulting watercooler conversations (a passé term from a bygone era when we congregated to chat with our colleagues).
Last week, Whoopi Goldberg’s comments on The View about a news item ignited a controversy that itself became news. Her comments came in a discussion about the removal of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Holocaust novel Maus, by Tennessee’s McMinn County Board of Education from its eighth-grade English curriculum. Goldberg first noted, in replying to Joy Behar’s statement that ‘they don’t like history that makes white people look bad’ that ‘Well, this is white people doing it to white people’. She then claimed that the Holocaust was ‘not about race’, repeating this over the objections of her co-hosts. She declared that it was simply about ‘man’s inhumanity to man’.
There is no publicly known evidence to justify Goldberg’s adoption of her stage surname or to support her claims that she is Jewish, and she clearly is no Holocaust scholar, but one doesn’t have to be either to know that the Holocaust was specifically about race. Aryanism, a racial supremacy ideology, was at the heart of Nazism. While the Nazis murdered Slavs, Roma and Sinti, homosexuals, the disabled and dissidents, they believed the primary threat to Aryans’ racial purity was the Jewish people, who they considered to have biological characteristics. Their extermination was necessary for the purification and salvation of Aryans.
Read the article by Juliet Moses in The Spectator.