Whoopi Goldberg - should the LBGQT community support her?

[Nigel Gordon]

Whoopi Goldberg has come under a massive amount of criticism and attack over her comments on the holocaust. She said it was not about race but about man's inhumanity to man.

As a somebody who has in the last couple of years done a lot of reading about the holocaust, I find myself agreeing with her. Yes, there was a racial element to the holocaust, but that did not apply to a significant proportion of those who were killed in camps. Many were ethnic Germans. There was no racial element in their persecution and their deaths. They suffered because they did not fit with the majority view of the society they were in. They were the gays, the disabled, the Jehovah Witnesses, the socialists, and any others who did not fit with the narrow Nazi view of the perfect member of society.

In book 2 of the Johnny series I have raised the issue of the holocaust and the treatment of gay men in the occupied countries. There was a lot of background research that I had to do before writing about this. What I became aware of doing that research was the wide range of social groups that were victims of Nazi persecution. 

There is a danger in denying the holocaust. There is also a danger is viewing the holocaust as simply a racial issue. It is far more complex. Gay men and woman were victims of the holocaust. If we allow the holocaust to be defined as a racial thing, worse still a strictly anti-Semitic programme, we are denying the persecution of those others who suffered. We are denying the persecution of gay men and women by the Nazis and those that supported them.

Whoopi Goldberg is not denying the holocaust, she is identifying its true underlying cause, man's inhumanity to man. If we allow those who strictly want to define the holocaust in terms of the persecution of specific racial groups, we are denying justice to those gay men and women who suffered under Hitler and his supporters.

 

[Rutabaga]

The controversy over Whoopi's remarks stems from her implication that, because the victims of the Holocaust were not black, the event somehow did not really count.  Whoopi described the Holocaust as "white people doing it to white people. So, this is y’all go fight amongst yourselves."  

R