I like #Whoopi Goldberg. She doesn’t seem to be a pretentious or particularly vain person, and I haven’t read of any scandalous personal behavior involving her in the past. She’s an actress and television “personality,” and she is very opinionated, but overall she comes across as an everyday sort of person.
I’m sorry to see her embroiled in a continuing controversy over allegedly antisemitic comments. Readers will recall that she previously denied that Adolph #Hitler and the Nazis went after Jews because of “race,” arguing that Jews are part of the so-called white race, therefore could not have been victims of racism.
It was tortured logic on her part, and Whoopi war pretty uninformed on that one. Jews have often been referred to as members of “the Jewish race” in the past, usually in a pejorative sense but occasionally the usage was normalized. In any case, the issue with the Nazis was their supremacism and persecution of inferiors, and Jews had the biggest target on their backs, collectively speaking, including yellow stars stitched to their clothing to make them more recognizable. They were victims of racism.
Yet Jews were not in fact the only group targeted, and Whoopi’s recent remarks on the controversy, which she called a clarification, has stirred up more dust. Yet her clarification was not altogether wrong; at least she does know that groups other than Jews were targeted for elimination. This included homosexuals and “mental defectives” (a construct that not only the Nazis used historically), but also Communists, labor leaders and even Christian clergy who opposed the Nazi program.
You can read up a bit on the latest controversy here.
I’m not much disturbed by Whoopi’s latest comments. I’m a former newspaper reporter and I still follow media practices, both good and bad. Public personalities often are baited into saying something that might have required more careful consideration. I’m more concerned by calls to punish her somehow, or dismiss her from her TV show. I’m not a fan of cancel culture (some people don’t think cancel culture is real – wow!) but the woman’s recent comments were far from over the line. Free speech as such cannot legitimately be constrained. If someone says something truly outrageous then expose that, or refute it, and uncover the menace behind the offensive speech. But stifling speech altogether must be a last resort, not the first.
What if the speech is libelous, though? There are avenues in the law to sue for libel. What if it’s an outright lie told by a journalist or politician, not merely a mistake or the result of muddled thinking? Then terminate the former and vote the latter out of office. The fans of cancel culture ignore that there are legal pathways to deal with truly offensive or dangerous speech.
This is what democracy calls for, and maybe some observers think democracy imperfect (it is), or that free speech needs to be “fixed.” Well, as Winston #Churchill said, (and, yes, I know Churchill was an imperialist), “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time… .”
But, hey, why am I quoting an imperialist, anyway? Shut him down! Shut down this Substack! And shut down the people who are reading this! And … and … .