Ben, what do you think would have happened to the Japanese in internment camps if America had started losing the war?
If food supplies for ordinary Americans plummted due to the destruction of key rail and road networks, do you think FDR would have prioritized Japanese civilians in camps over ordinary American citizens looking for food?
Do you think the same American leaders that happily firebombed Japanese and German cities would have really cared if their civilian prisoners starved to death?
If after the war, American guards at the Japanese internment camps were rounded up and put on trial, what excuse do you think they would have given for their actions? Just following orders, perhaps?
The real purpose of the holocaust, as you so clearly demonstrate, Ben, is to shut down any deeper moral or political thinking about the war.
The relentless focus on Nazi crimes obscures deeply problematic aspects of WWII, most importantly the inclusion of Josef Stalin among the Allies. Before a single scholar claims a single Jew died in a single death camp, before Adolf Hitler even became Chancellor in 1933, Stalin had already starved, murdered, and tortured millions of his own citizens.
In 1930-1933, nearly half of the population of what is now Kazakhstan, some 1.5 to 2.3 million people, died in the Kazakh famine. In the Red Terror of 1918-1922 some scholars estimate that as many as 1.3 million died. In the Decossakization of the 1920s some half million were deported and killed. This is to say nothing of the 3-7 million starved to death in the Ukraine in 1932-1933.
I could go on. Josef Stalin ruled from 1922 onward and was in a position of power before, as well. He owns all of this. And yet the United States gave him $300 billion in military, economic, and food aid after 1941. Stalin sat at the table at every major Allied conference and received control of half of Europe after 1945.
All this to a man who had been an ally of Adolf Hitler and who had himself invaded Poland in September, 1939!
If mass murder of eastern europeans is wrong, then how could the United States ally itself with a brutal dictator who had committed such acts?
Moreover, if the mass murder of civilians is a moral evil and the justification for American involvement in WWII then how can we explain away the aerial bombardment of the heart of western civilization? How can we give a consistent moral account of the decision to annihilate women, children, and the elderly in man-made infernos?
In the end, every strident defense of Allied conduct in WWII becomes a defense of mass murder and communism. I cannot abide that.
I think it was wrong to give Stalin military aid. I think it was wrong to intentionally target European cities. I think it was wrong to round up American citizens and put them into camps once the war began. I think there were meaningful alternatives to all of these policies.
As a humane man and as a scholar, I am troubled by the conventional narrative account of WWII. We need to start asking serious questions.
Yeah, get fucked Tucker and your dream big anti-Semite bestie Darryl.