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It reinforces the victim status of the most financially and politically influential ethno-religion in America. This prevents reasonable discussions like, “should we be okay with Jews being 3x over-represented at Ivy League schools for 100 years, while their interest groups attack gentile Europeans for over-representation”
It reinforces the “villainy” of Europeans, which is alleged to be complicit ideologically in the holocaust
It detracts from what we should be learning about re: WWII, like the enormous sacrifices of white Christian American men
I suppose it depends on whether you think the Ivy League serves just the North East, or all of America, but the Ivy's ranged from 13% to 40% Jewish. Jewish people are about 2% of the US, (or 2.5% if you include people of other religions with Jewish affinity.) Jewish people were over-represented by a factor of five to twenty, with 12x being the norm for Harvard and Yale. This is not three times over-representation.
In comparison, Asian students outnumbered whites at Berkeley for the first time in 1991. At the time, California was 69% white and 9.6% Asian, so Asian kids were over-represented by a factor of 7. Until 1991, Asian kids had lower SAT scores on average, but this did not count back then, it seems. White/Asian scores tracked together until they changed the SAT in 2005 to make it less g-loaded. For all this time, Asian over-performance in the math section was balanced by under-performance in the language side, driven mainly by the heavily g-loaded analogies and vocabulary. There was a big Asian jump in 2002, which I don't understand.
From 1990:
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World War II casualties by nation, ranked from highest to lowest:
Soviet Union - 26,000,000
China - 15,000,000
Germany - 5,533,000
Poland - 5,820,000
Japan - 2,830,000
Yugoslavia - 1,700,000
Romania - 1,600,000
France - 600,000
Hungary - 580,000
United States - 405,000
Italy - 410,000
United Kingdom - 383,700
Canada - 42,000
Australia - 39,700
Netherlands - 301,000
Greece - 520,000
Czechoslovakia - 345,000
Belgium - 88,000
Norway - 12,000
New Zealand - 11,900
As a percent of the population, America is not even in the top 20.
By this logic, we should focus on the Dungan Revolt of 1860 rather than the American Civil War, which is numerically more significant than the Civil War. But actually, the Dungan Revolt is totally irrelevant to Americans, because Americans are not Chinese. The reason WWII should focus on Americans is because our history focuses on Americans, for obvious pragmatic and identity-related concerns. The most important takeaway of WWII for Americans should be the valiant Americans who fought in it, IMO, and not the Eastern European foreigners who died in concentration camps. We already fought the war with our blood, so we arguably need no holocaust education. We already sacrificed many American lives to end Hitler. No, the public didn’t know that there were concentration camps, but the public was incensed by Hitler’s ideology nonetheless.
Ironically, the nazis were less racist than Americans at the time.
A person with 1/4 Jewish blood was allowed to marry a full-blooded German while the one drop rule was in effect in the US.
The cognitive dissonance is a little bit difficult to swallow for progressives when they want on one hand claim 'anti-fascist America already beat people like you' while talking to white nationalists and that 'America has an ongoing legacy of racism' the rest of the time when they need to browbeat the rest of the sympathetic white population.
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I'd say the average person does in fact, think that WW2 was waged to stop the Holocaust/protect 'human rights', and that is in part due to how the Holocaust is taught.
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Depending on the use of "we" in the above, it's entirely reasonable for @coffee_enjoyer to consider the most relevant sacrifices from the perspective of an American to have been the American men that died. I think this is particularly true if one thinks the cause of the Allies was righteous, as Americans elected to join the fight in Europe rather than being forced in by direct attack. I would go so far as to say that Americans should care more about the men that died storming Omaha beach than Chinese people killed in Nanking. The Rape of Nanking is just about the worst thing I've ever heard about in my life (tied with a hundred other horrible things), but the proper American focus is on the valor of men that won victory.
What happened at Pearl harbour?
Can you elaborate on what you're looking for as an answer? If you're suggesting that I should include the defeat of Japan alongside defeating Nazis or Iwo Jima alongside Omaha I certainly concur.
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Um, America is not the only country that contains white Christian men.
Mea culpa, missed that caveat.
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