FILE - In this Feb. 27, 2008 file photo, The Washington Post building in Washington is shown. The Washington Post Co. reported a 69 percent jump in third-quarter profit Friday, Oct. 30, 2009, as its newspapers trimmed their losses and its cable TV and education divisions held steady.(AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, file)
A Jeff Bezos-owned conspiracy theory blog published an opinion piece Monday which bashed World War II allied forces – the ones who defeated Nazi Germany – as racists.
The piece was called “Allied leaders were anti-Nazi, but not anti-racist. We’re now paying the price for their failure,” and suggested that historical figures like Winston Churchill and Theodore Roosevelt are partially to blame for “white supremacy” in 2019.
From Washington Post:
Because while Allied countries opposed the Nazis and Allied troops defeated them, the leaders of the United States and Britain rarely attacked the core tenet of Nazism: the belief in a master race.
In my World War II class recently, I had my students pore through the speeches and letters of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the years around the war’s start in 1939, searching for his basis for opposing the Nazis. They found Churchill wanted to stand up to the Nazis’ expansionism, fight their anti-democracy posture and resist what he called (but largely left undefined) their anti-Christianity. What he did not do, however, was call for the destruction of the essence of Nazism: race supremacy.
In essence, the argument is that despite defeating an evil, genocidal regime, British and American forefather were still racists, and that somehow discredits their work. But holding Roosevelt and Churchill to 2019 standards is an unscholarly, ahistorical hatchet job that could only be conceived by a career academic.
Though there was plenty of speculation about how Allied forces were bigots, there was no speculation about what might have happened had the Allies not sacrificed life and limb to fight Hitler’s regime. Certainly, the result would have led to the eradication of the entire Jewish race.
Welcome to 2019, where going to war with racists is not enough to prove that you’re note one.
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