I'm surprised you didn't point to colonialism instead, which would be a better argument.
You can argue that the use of the term "white supremacy" is anachronistic in this context (as the Nazis were technically "Aryan supremacists" rather than white supremacists). But the current white supremacy movement has evolved in significant part from Nazi ideology. Take a look at the Wikipedia article on David Duke, for example, and you'll find such statements as "Picketing and holding parties on the anniversary of Hitler's birth, he became known on the LSU campus for wearing a Nazi uniform."
In short, if we're talking about racist movements within the US and Europe that are directly inspired by Nazi ideology, then whatever quibbles you might make about terminology, you can't deny that it's reasonable to project the dangers of the latter onto the former.
You can generalize to ethno-national supremacy. Which covers Nazi Germany, Imperial Japan, and US White Supremacists.
It's amazing how many people actually think this, and how discussions like this bring them out of the woodwork. A couple of years ago I got into a pointless discussion with someone on HN who went so far as to say that Hitler wasn't a racist. (No, really.)
This is why white supremacy is dangerous. The history of WWII and the rise of the Nazis is rapidly being forgotten, and a surprisingly large number of people have a massively inaccurate conception of it.
It historically and factually was not.
It played a role.
It was not the cause.
Nobody is saying Hitler wasn't a racist (wtf.)
I doubt you can point to any reputable historian of World War II who denies that the Nazi's racist ideology, and its expansionist tendencies, played a major role in the outbreak of WWII. Think Sudetenland.
And again, nobody here is denying Nazis were racist.
How can you say it played a major role in the outbreak of war when you can't even say it without tacking on the real causes with an "and" all while ignoring the USA turned a blind eye to the lot of it until Japan got involved?
Nobody here has said it didn't play a role. And it did play a major role later on in WW2 but that's not what this thread is about is it?
Did white supremacy cause WW1 and WW2. No.
Did it play a part? Yes. Why are we talking about this? Because AP minced their words and should have just said nationalist racism.
This is clearly what the comment suggests. It is playing down Nazi racism by suggesting that the Nazis just pretended to be racists when it suited their purposes. (Note the inclusion of “even Jews”, as if to suggest that even the Holocaust was not racially motivated.)
>without tacking on the real causes with an "and"
The expansionism and the racism were intimately linked. Lebensraum.
I just think it seems overly simplistic to the point of being almost nonsensical to say that WW2 was caused by white supremacism. White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China. While I'm no expert, at the very least I can say that the Wikipedia article for "Causes of World War II" seems in agreement with what I said— while racism played a role, facism/militarism and plain old nationalist expansionism were much bigger factors.
It's particularly the mention of Jews here that makes it clear that in your view, the Nazis' racism was merely a matter of expedience, not conviction.
After all, would it not have been "convenient for the cause" for the Nazis to make all of Europe's Jews "honorary Aryans", and thus save themselves the trouble of murdering six million of them? The reason that they didn't do this is - obviously - that racism and anti-Semitism were a core part of their cause.
>White supremacism certainly didn't make Japan invade China.
A red herring, surely. We're talking about the cause of the war in Europe in this context. But in any case, there was certainly a racist component to Japanese nationalism too.
>nationalist expansionism
The Nazis' nationalist expansionism was intimately connected to their racism. Hitler invaded Poland so that racially inferior slavs could be replaced by racially superior "Aryans".
I suspect this is because carving France back up into kingdoms at that point would have left Germany the sole uncontested power of Europe. Wars and nations were just getting too big to fail. When this fear materialized with Germany and Austria-Hungary teamed up to try to take over Europe again, while Austria-Hungary were divided into their constituent nation-states, Germany was expected to pay war reparations and so was kept largely intact so wealth could be extracted.
These war reparations are ultimately what drove WW2, by breaking the backs of the Germans, making them extremely receptive to populist politics.
Not so! There is significant, though not watertight evidence that Hitler intended the Holocaust to be followed by mass extermination and enslavement of Slavic peoples (so-called Generalplan Ost), whom Nazi Germans regarded as an "inferior" race according to their racial ideology, and surely not "Aryan" - despite, y'know, Slavic languages sharing a common ancestry with both Germanic languages and Indo-Iranic ones! Nazi German attitudes to the "supremacy" of race, culture and the like were a lot weirder than people are usually ready to admit these days; while they may have been rooted in some sorts of shared vocabulary from the early 20th-century, to a far greater extent they were just "Nazi Germany and the friends of Nazi Germany good, everyone else bad!" Of course, this is the story of supremacist ideologies everywhere; but the point is that we should not grow complacent and reassure ourselves that there's anything especially peculiar about white-supremacist nationalism; it's just one of many, many ideologies with broad similarities in their appeal to hateful sentiment.
If today's white supremacists found power, they'd look exactly like Nazis. The enemy might be different, but the mindset of fighting that enemy would be exactly the same, and the white supremacist suddenly finding power would find no other example to take heed of than the Nazis, so we can pretty much almost assume that that's what would happen.
Sure, but it's important to realize that this is true about any supremacist ideology. There's nothing exclusive about either Nazism or white supremacism. ISIL's Islamofascism is the same old crap for example, and it too has a line of historical descent from, e.g. early-20th-c. anti-Semitism. The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem was a raging anti-Semite who met Adolf Hitler and ardently supported his most heinous atrocities.
Have you never heard of Lebensraum? Generalplan Ost?
Hi. If you downvote factual statements, please leave a comment. It's annoying if you're using downvotes and flags as "I don't like that somebody says this". Write an argument, don't abuse moderation tools.
Half the bloody point of white supremacy is that the supremacist is the one who chooses who is white enough to be in the in-group, and who is not.
The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
Meh, removing any value from descriptive terms doesn't help.
> The definition of white changes, based on who the supremacist wants to kill, displace, or enslave.
Or it's just not white supremacy, which it never was with the Nazis.
Nazism was absolutely white supremacy. That it excluded ethnic groups that you consider to be white, or stack-ranked various white ethnic groups has nothing to do whether or not it was about white supremacy. Please, pray tell, what exact role were non-whites expected to play in Hitler's Brave New World?
You are using an incredibly narrow definition of the term, to try to make.. What point, exactly?
Nationalism however is the fundamental basis behind modern sovereignty. It's an identity based on shared geography rather than appearances. Nationalism ultimately prevents the people in the nation from getting conquered by other nations. You don't want the sentiments running away on you, but a certain amount of national pride is good for a people.
Nazism hid racism behind nationalism, in order to meld the two political forces together to form a ruling coalition. This was fundamental to its success. You cannot merely say the Nazis were racist, to turn them into the bogeyman, without acknowledging that the rest of the world had a role to play in bringing them to power.
The West, collectively, brought about World War 2. We didn't listen to the lessons learned over a thousand years of grappling with warfare on the continent, we did not do what was needed at the end of World War 1. It was so obvious that Germany was going to rearm and try again that France immediately went to considerable expense to fortify their eastern border.
We left an enormous power vacuum in Germany in the name of greed. We would not make that same mistake again at the end of WW2, though honestly the spectre of nuclear war had a lot more to do with it than moral imperative.
You can argue that whatever your local xenophobic hatreds you have going on aren't technically white supremacy, because you have different historical and cultural understandings of race etc, but at the end of the day, your hating haters sure seem to hate basically the same people as our hating haters, so I'm not sure why it's worth arguing about the distinction between the two groups.