A German foundation has said it will no longer be awarding a prize for political thinking to a leading Russian-American journalist after criticizing as “unacceptable” a recent essay by the writer in which they made a comparison between Gaza and a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe.
Bullshit. The pro-Nazi elements in the US were never anywhere close to being a majority and were never close to implementing pro-Nazi policies. At worst, the US government was guilty of remaining neutral and continuing to do business with Nazi Germany, but that’s a far cry from supporting the Nazis. This is pure revisionist tripe.
It’s also worth mentioning that at that time the two largest ethnicities in the US were Irish and German immigrants or their immediate descendants. With the famine still in living memory and Irish independence still relatively recent, Irish-Americans were very leery of joining the war on the side of the UK, while German-Americans obviously weren’t necessarily keen on fighting the country from which they’d immigrated. These two constituencies were far too important to be ignored politically, and that’s a huge part of why it took the attack at Pearl Harbor for the US to do the right thing.