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Comment by SenAnder | Hacker News Reader

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> 74-82% of US soldiers felt the army should be segregated.

There's a great scene in "A Welcome to Britain" - 1943 film for US soldiers stationed in the UK - that is clearly trying to sell integration to troops:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyYSBBE1DFw&t=1519s

As well as soldiers, there's a lot of interesting commentary from early jazz and blues artists touring Europe and reflecting on the difference in treatment they received which many of them had previously not had any external benchmark to compare with.

The US DoD did see the need to desegregate, and (perhaps conscious of their own hypocrisy?) started to do so in the 1950's, in advance of the rest of the country.

1948: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_9981

The US also attempted† to free the last slaves in December 1941, so a tiny silver lining on a very dark cloud.

https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Circular_No._3591

† a few exceptions persisted in some backwater areas even after the end of the war.

The people from other nations who fought and died might object to you handing all the credit to the segregationist part of America, especially when Hitler and the Nazis were directly inspired by that segregation, helping to create the situation in which they fought and died.

https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691172422/hi...

> both American citizenship and antimiscegenation laws proved directly relevant to the two principal Nuremberg Laws—the Citizenship Law and the Blood Law. Whitman looks at the ultimate, ugly irony that when Nazis rejected American practices, it was sometimes not because they found them too enlightened, but too harsh.

You're right, credit also goes to the Russians that had just finished starving Ukraine into submission (and would go on to implement a system of brutal repression that killed tens of millions and consigned eastern Europe to dictatorships for decades), and the British colonial empire.

In other words, trying to claim any side of WWII had modern liberal anti-racist sensibilities is farcical, and that such claims so often meet no resistance only speaks to our utter historical ignorance.

Wasn't the claim that even those people, at that time, recognized Nazis as bad news? I'll review the thread but I don't recall anyone claiming the soldiers, politicians or civilians were particularly woke by modern standards.

The claim was that "we figured out how to handle Nazis 80 years ago", where the "we" that did the handling would be considered modern-day Nazis, and it is to people holding a mild version of their opinions that the modern "handling" is being applied.

So you’re saying they were wrong to eject the nazis by force despite sharing some of their ideas (segregation?)?

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