On today’s The View, Whoopi Goldberg claimed that the Holocaust wasn’t about “race.” She repeated this contention numerous times. And when asked what the Holocaust was about, she responded, “man’s inhumanity to man.” This is platitudinous twaddle. Every act of malicious violence is about “man’s inhumanity to man.” Slavery was about “man’s inhumanity to man.” Islamic terror is about “man’s inhumanity to man.” Every homicide in Chicago this year will be about “man’s inhumanity to man.” Hitler was obsessed with pseudoscientific notions of “race,” which included the superiority of the Germanic people. Nazis considered Jews a “race” that possessed immutable, inherited characteristics of “parasitic vermin.” In the Nazis’ eyes, one could not renounce their Judaism any more than one could relinquish their skin color. This perverted philosophy was used to justify mass murder. It was about “race.”

Part of the problem is Goldberg’s ignorance, but part of it is an inability to see history outside the prism of contemporary progressive grievances. Ana Navarro, another panel member, chimed in that the Holocaust was actually about “white supremacy,” a popular term used to describe anyone Democrats find distasteful. Apparently Navarro is unfamiliar with Hitler’s view on the couple hundred million white Slavs that lived to his East. Goldberg didn’t advocate a more precise use of the word “race.” She argued that the Holocaust was about “two groups of white people.” But Nazis certainly did not view Jews as just another group of white people. And the Holocaust wasn’t simply a matter of generic “inhumanity.”