> White supremacy can be reasonably credited for the Holocaust,

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.

Sure. But to say the Nazis weren't white supremacists because their ideology differs from today's white supremacists isn't really saying anything at all. It's still racism, just differently defined.

I'm breaking with my usual rule of not commenting on downvotes, this only seems to happen with historical topics, to say that trying to make a distinction between the Aryan supremacy of the Nazis, as weird as the details would sound to a 21st century mind, and the racists of our day, is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments.

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.

> ...is just a distinction without a difference. You see the exact same mentality, the exact same sorts of arguments.

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.

> but not for the war itself.

Have you never heard of Lebensraum? Generalplan Ost?

I'm not disputing that racism was at the heart of the Nazi Party, what I'm disputing is that the Nazi Party singlehandedly brought about the war. The war would have happened anyway. It would have been somewhat different without Hitler at the helm, but that Germany would give it another go was inevitable once the ink was dry on the Treaty of Versailles. There were many many more war hawks in Germany than the Nazis.

Those were völkisch (as in "Germans are the best, we need that space for us"), not white supremacist (since Poles, Russians, European Jews etc are white as well).

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.

> not white supremacist (since Poles, Russians, European Jews etc are white as well).

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.

> 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.

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.

And racism makes no sense, because we are all members of the human race. Therefore, I posit that American Slavery was not based on racism. Aren't pointless semantic games fun?

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?

The distinction between racism and nationalism matters. You can ultimately never completely quell racism. Racists emerge out of the woodwork any time they think they can find solidarity. It's evil, and evil is fought through awareness.

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.