THE INTELLECTUAL WRECKAGE THAT IS PRESENTISM.

A panelist on a parody public affairs show said something foolish and got herself suspended.  "After making the bizarre claim that the Holocaust was not an example of racism—and then reiterating this view during an appearance on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert — [Whoopi] Goldberg was dealt a two-week suspension by ABC."

It might be, as James Joyner notes, that the best thing to do with a circus act that fails is wait for it to mope off.

If you want to argue that she’s an ignoramus who shouldn’t be given several hours a day on network television to pontificate on current events, I’m incredibly sympathetic. Then again, as best I can tell, ignoramuses giving uninformed opinions is the raison d’être of The View and has been a successful formula for more than a quarter-century.

Yes, and whenever I see supposed "opinion" programming including clips from The View, or a few other kaffeeklatsches masquerading as serious work, I cringe.

It is, rather, the intellectual failure that's behind the lady's thinking.

"This is what's interesting to me, because the Nazis lied," said Goldberg. "It wasn't [about race]. They had issues with ethnicity, not with race. Because most of the Nazis were white people and most of the people they were attacking were white people. So for me, I'm thinking, how can you say it's about race if they were fighting each other? It all really began because I said how will we explain to children what happened in Nazi Germany. I said, this wasn't racial, it was about white on white."

That's how we understand ethnicities, or nationalities, now, going so far in our affirmative action or human resources reporting as to categorize all manner of people as "Asian." That's not how people thought in the 1930s.  Reason's Robby Soave doesn't grasp that.

There's a kernel of an interesting point here, in that the Nazis very deliberately pioneered the idea of a single white race that was set apart from—and in their view, superior to—all other races. Prior to the 20th century, various peoples we would all consider white by today's standards did not identify as part of the same racial tribe: There was no broad, united consensus that the Italians and the Irish, for instance, were racially linked. People of different European countries, even different neighboring countries, were often considered part of the generic other, no matter how alike they looked. The Nazis had different ideas.

Almost. The Nazis had this notion of Aryan-pure supermen, "sooper dooper soopermen" and they might have held off on investing England out of some sense of Anglo-Saxon-Aryan solidarity.  That was not too much of a stretch from social science thinking of the era, which sometimes wrote of an "American" race or distinguishing the "Italian" from "Slavic" or "German" races, that later becoming "nationalities."

They certainly considered Jews to be part of an inferior, non-white racial group, however. Their anti-Jewish rhetoric was starkly racial. That's where Goldberg's comments really go off the rails.

She's right that in a world where racial categories have been expanded to include all white-looking people in the same bucket, modern children might have difficulty understanding why Jews—who are now frequently considered to be white, even though many of them are not—suffered racial genocide at the hands of people who more or less look similar to them. But that doesn't mean the Holocaust was somehow devoid of racial motivations. It was very much about race.

If the relatively young Mr Soave can recognize that there have been changes in the understanding of race, why didn't that register with the Baby Boom educated Ms Goldberg?