Hello Wanda - your response is super thoughtful and I agree with your conclusion. So, since the story has gotten more complex, a lot of little-known truth about the Nazis and the U.S. is very sad and shocking.
I learned a lot of these things in the past five years. They are definitely not taught in K-12 schools. I've met other college teachers who knew them, and not just Black or Latina (I don't use the strange term "Latinx," I am bilingual Eng-Span and I'm referring to female instructors).
So, while ordinary Americans of all races and ethnicities volunteered or drafted and served fighting Hitler, the whole time, the man had MANY sympathizers here and in the UK (France too). Did you know George W. Bush's grandfather Prescott Bush was the Nazi's U.S. banker? Yes, he was, and his son was in WW2 OSS (George HW Bush) and became head of the CIA, then Vice President, then President for one term. The term for the plan to bring Nazi scientists and other "valuable" Nazis to the US after WW2 was called "Operation Paperclip." One of these Nazis was Wernher von Braun, the head of the U.S. space program. Understanding who the Bushes really were and are put the shocking comments I heard recorded from Barbara Bush after Hurricane Katrina. So callous, so ignorant, so cruel, so RACIST.
One of the most shocking things about the German Nazis is that they sent lawyers to the U.S. in the 1930s specifically to study the U.S. Jim Crow laws and copy them in Germany's Nuremberg laws. They also based the concentration camps on U.S. Native American "reservations." https://asterling.medium.com/hitlers-holocaust-inspired-by-american-race-laws-which-still-exist-in-american-hearts-and-minds-a1daefe184c2
On the one side of my family, my father is a Jew whose family fled Berdichev, Ukraine in the late 1890s. My grandma Mary came to the U.S. at 13 and took over her cousin's program in pharmacy at Columbia University, learning English and getting the degree, becoming a lady pharmacist in Hell's Kitchen NYC before moving to California. My father and his twin brother were born in 1917 in Hell's Kitchen.
On my mother's side, my ancestry is Scots-Irish, so therefore I have the appearance to "pass" as a non-Jew (there's plenty of others in my Jewish family who do not look very stereotypically Jewish but oy! it's not always looks that set off the Jewdar). My great (???) grandfather George Sexton came to U.S. from Ireland on the second supply mission to Jamestown in 1609. My other (???) grandfather Squire Doak came to Canada (New Brunswick) in 1610, also from Ireland. Scots-Irish refers to Scottish people who were deployed to Ireland in the 14th and 15th centuries to oppress the Irish people on behalf of British lords who had received it as their estates in war.
I'm telling you this because the word that Whoopi used that bothered me so much weren't the "white on white" it was the "fighting" part. It is impossible for me to believe that even if she was ignorant of the facts, that Hitler and the Nazis would put ANYONE unlike their vision of "perfect Aryans" (for sure they used the word "race" as in "Master Race" for themselves, below that for everyone else, including Slavs - Russians, other eastern Europeans - and Jewish people in every country they took over). But let's put that aside. How can she think in her mind that armed soldiers busting into someone's house and forcing babies, children, pregnant women and grannies onto trains, then taking them to a concentration camp, murdering them with poison gas, and incinerating their bodies is a "fight"? It is a genocide. And Hitler got the idea for that from U.S. Native American reservations and the Nazis took the "efficient" as opposed to "inefficient" approach of killing everyone. There is a reason the Native Americans refer to their genocide - it was that and the worst, longest one I know of, a criminal, tragic shame and blot upon this nation's history.
So, who *I* am is half really nasty warlike and oppressive pigheaded inflexible Scots-Irish and half survivor Jew. I relate to the Bielski Brothers (look them up). I will FIGHT. I will not lie down. I have thought for years about what John Starr's mother said so poisonously to me. She was a Phillips. John was the heir to the Conoco-Phillips oil fortune. What is this to me? She thought she was so much better than me. But in adversity, I am so much infinitely more able than she to cope because, and Wanda - this is why I will always listen to and support Black Americans - I come from a long line of scrappers and survivors and fighters. Adversity does make those who survive strong in ways that oppressors do not and cannot have. The WW2 Holocaust was not a "fight." It was inextricably linked to the oppression and slavery of Black people in America. There is a reason Hitler was so angered by Jesse Owens winning at the Olympics. The Nazis absolutely hated Black people whereever they came from, whether U.S. athlete or soldier or African - a large part of WW2 was fought in North Africa for control of the Mediterranean. I think Rommel, Afrika Corps commander, was very racist against nonwhites - sure enough yes, he considered it an "insult" for he or his troops to fight against Black people of whatever national origin (French, African - they though Indian troops fighting for British were also "Black").
I do see some Black Americans buying the Neo-Nazi line - these words Whoopi used, this is what is used by white supremacists today. They present that a) the Holocaust was not that bad; b) the figures on how many died are not true; c) it was a "fight" i.e. the German Nazis were somehow "defending" themselves by putting babies, old grannies, children, disabled, onto trains and sending them to Buchenwald.
She was using white neo-Nazi terminology and thinking. She somehow, for some unknown reason, took an obviously Jewish surname. Her statement about her first name is she was inspired by the "Whoopi Cushion". Living in the projects in NYC, she would definitely have known many Jewish people with obvious Jewish names and Jewish culture and behavior. The Jews would have welcomed her (as my family did and does me and my daughter and husband) because that's their culture. Being part of Hollywood, where there are many Jews (my grandma Mary moved to L.A. in the early 1920s - I am partly from Hollywood myself, she would know their stories. She has to have heard people talking about the family they lost in Europe.
She's just confused. I'm sorry she said it. Her track record seems to be to bow to or obey power, and that is how most celebrities get and keep their jobs. In this case, she is confused and whether accidentally or on purpose, said something that is very painful for actual Jewish descendants to hear. A fight - whites on whites.
The thing is, I have heard the things she said before. Out of the mouths of today's neo-Nazis or people like the really bad anti-Semite (have no doubt he also hates and fears Black people) Richard Dawkins.
Whoopi probably will be back on "The View" and she will stay because whether on purpose or accidentally, she expresses the views of very powerful people who are basically still Nazis. I named some of them above.
