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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

The whole point of the article is that hindsight should have already been there at 1939 -- 6 years after Hitler came to power, with Main Kampf already published, with the Kristallnacht and tons of other signs...

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Could it really have been there? Remember how the US looked back in these days: The US had to invent its "moral high ground" and chose to be against racism all of a sudden mostly because it had to justify the costs of WWII.

I am an outsider but I could imagine, that this artificially introduced moral is part of the reason why racism and other problems are still big in the US: The people generally believe that they already have the moral high ground and after all won against the evil. It is much easier to handle 800k+ refugees like Germany will do this year, when your moral self-awareness is a bit more toned down to say the least and you still think you owe the world.

In the US, there is an organization called Big Brother / Big Sister. Basically, it enables an adult to make a difference in a child's life. Typically, the child does not have a father, and the Big Brother/Sister will spend a few hours a week with the child.

A friend of mine was a Big Sister to a girl. When the friend moved out of the city to the burbs (got mugged one too many times), they had the little sister (the girl) help them move.

The girl was shocked to find out that you could own a home. She thought that the gov't just provided that sort of thing. You see, she exists in this subculture that not only has lost the skills needed for success, but who are punished by the gov't programs that support them if they attempt to follow more successful life strategies.

If you are on assistance and get married, you lose it. If you get a job, your assistance is reduced. And so on.

Pearl Harbor was the only justification needed in the United States for the costs of World War II, and anti-Japanese racism was a massive part of the war propaganda at the time. Of course, too many discussions of the war run into another sort of racism--a Eurocentrism that forgets that the war also happened on the other side of the world, and for a much longer time at that.

Pearl Harbor is part of the reason for anti-nazi propaganda: America was mostly isolationistic or even pacifistic at that time (maybe not everything was bad back in the days?) and the people had to be convinced why they would want to fight in Europe while they were being attacked by Japan.

People often forget that it was Germany that declared war on the United States. Isolationism (and even pacifism) rarely survives when one is on the receiving end of an act of war.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_declaration_of_war_agai...

The entire western world was pretty racist before (and during) the war, the war (or its aftermath actually) changed that. The article (naively?) applies newer sensibilities to a previous era.

My favorite anecdote: who refused to shake Jesse Owens' hand after his achievements in the 1936 Berlin Olympics? No, it wasn't Hitler [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Owens#Berlin_Olympics

"The Germans were bad for sending the Jews to the gas chambers but the Americans were bad too for running articles about Hitler's homes" is pretty weak sauce.

In true slashdot tradition I did not read the article, but if that is the gist of it, weak sauce indeed...

This "bad too" in your comment, implying that the article intends to say "equally bad", is even more weak.

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