The war where a bunch of white and Asian people fought against a bunch of white and Asian people? The one where the Nazis said that the Japanese, Arabs, even Jews could be "honorary Aryans" when it was convenient for the cause?
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".