r/badhistory CLAPS 👏🏿 BACK 👏🏿 at Micheal Tracey. Discuss

Here it is. It's ten thousand words, but I've saved yous the trouble of reading it, and been as thorough as I could. TLDR: "FDR was a liar, Bomber Harris was Satan, and the Nazis weren't exterminating the Jews until after the USA entered the war."

Context about Michael: he's a "left"-wing journ*list à la Glenn Greenwald. He goes on Tucker. He likes Tulsi Gabbard. Now his shtick is denouncing Lend-Lease to Ukraine. He spent most of the fall tweeting that the 1941 Lend-Lease Act had been part of FDR's scheme to get the US into the war. Of course, people responded that fighting Hitler was good. Tracey bit the bullet, and countered that fighting Hitler was not good. Hence, this article.

In it, Tracey treats the Holocaust as a low-level thing that boiled over once Hitler realized that he'd have to fight the USA. This superficially resembles a school of thought called "functionalism", which holds that as the war became increasingly savage, SS units began murdering Jews on their own initiative, and the Reich's leadership then coordinated these killings into the Final Solution. But no functionalist historian argues that "the Allies provoked Germany into killing the Jews." That's just Tracey.

The first half focuses on how Roosevelt used a salami-slicing strategy to get a reluctant US public ready for war. Tracey claims that FDR strategically antagonized Germany and Japan while supporting Britain, the USSR, and China more openly, betting that eventually one of the Axis powers would attack the US and give the US a valid causus belli. Tracey emphasizes the following actions:

Lend-Lease

The deployment of US Marines to Iceland

The three US-German naval clashes in the fall of 1941

The oil embargo on Japan

This claim—that FDR wanted to intervene, and built the necessary political climate for it—might be descriptively correct. But in my opinion, that makes FDR a great president. He wanted to do the right thing, and he found a way despite major political obstacles.

The Inevitable Dresden

Tracey then focuses on Allied "terror bombings" like Dresden. Interestingly, while he's a pseudo-functionalist about the Holocaust, he's downright intentionalist about the Allied bombing campaigns. He repeatedly alleges that the Allies' intention, from day 1, was to wage war by area-bombing enemy cities:

There is no coherent way to separate the justifiability of these deliberate, civilian-targeting aerial bombardment campaigns from the justifiability of entering the war. Because a foundational feature of the war was these deliberate civilian-targeting aerial bombardment campaigns. "Deliberate, civilian-targeting aerial bombardment campaigns" are no more separable from World War II than [...] "house frame" is separable from "house."

He's incredibly dishonest. If you didn't know much about WWII and you read this essay, you might think that city-bombing was an Allied invention. Take this:

The first “city bombing attack” conducted by British forces was in Mannheim, Germany on December 16, 1940

Notice that date? Well, Tracey doesn't mention that the Luftwaffe launched the Battle of Britain on July 10, 1940. And by early September, the Luftwaffe changed strategies, turning the Battle of Britain into an 8-month city-bombing campaign called the Blitz that would kill 40,000 civilians. The Luftwaffe bombed Coventry exactly one month before the RAF attacked Mannheim.

Coventry wasn't an exception. The Luftwaffe's doctrine had always included Terrorangriffe – literally, "terror attacks." Starting in November 1940, almost every major German raid on Britain was a Terrorangriff. The very last raid of the Blitz, which struck London on May 11 1941, was one of the largest and deadliest raids of the war to date.

Britain wasn't the first country to experience this. The Nazis literally started the war with terror-strikes on Warsaw in 1939. According to historian James Corum:

Von Richthofen believed that massive air attacks upon the city would break Polish morale and force a quick surrender - so he planned for a massive aerial attack with all available forces for the 25th of September. Von Richthofen's attack on Warsaw had characteristics of an indiscriminate terror raid... The Ju 52s flew over the city as airmen shoveled thousands of incendiary bombs out the cargo doors - nothing that one could describe as attacking only military targets or "avoiding unnecessary civilian casualties."

And on May 14 1940, the Nazis did this to Rotterdam. They then threatened to bomb Utrecht unless the Dutch surrendered. That's the most explicit "terror bombing" of the war, done by the Nazis, two years before the RAF began bombing German cities in earnest. FWIW, the RAF retaliated for Rotterdam by bombing oil infrastructure in the Ruhr.

So terror-bombing was SOP for the Nazis from the get-go, and the British endured it for three months before responding in kind. You may now quote Bomber Harris.

Getting back to Michael Tracey: aerial bombing was a "foundational feature of the war" because the Nazis made it a foundational feature. The Allied air campaign was deadlier than what the Axis did simply because the Allies built better aircraft and had a better doctrine.

Tracey is also ignorant about basic philosophy regarding war:

There’s a conceit that the manner in which a war is conducted can somehow be separated, in terms of moral judgment, from whether launching the war was justified.

This "conceit" is called the jus ad bellum versus jus in bello distinction. Thomas Aquinas wrote about it in the 13th century. Almost every philosopher since Aquinas has accepted this distinction.

Holocaust Lunacy Starts Here

After seven thousand words, Tracey finally says what he wanted to say: that maybe if the US had sat WWII out, there would've been no Holocaust. He starts with a disclaimer that has serious "I'm not racist, but" energy:

I have never claimed, nor am I claiming here, that the US “caused” the Holocaust, or that Nazi Germany bears any less responsibility for the Holocaust [...] What I’m saying is this: there is ample reason to believe [...] that US entry to World War II coincided with — and may well have been a motivating factor in — the acceleration of the most lethal phase of the Holocaust.

If I may editorialize a bit, I think that Tracey is claiming that the US caused the Holocaust. But he knows that he'd look like a clown if he spelled that out, so he's JAQing off as hard as he can.

Tracey cites mainstream historians, but he does so dishonestly (eg, turning "could have been" statements into "was"), a lot of his sources weaken what he's trying to say, and the way he interprets some of them is absurd. The worst is when he misuses this quote by Daniel Rafecas of Yad Vashem (emphasis is mine):

By the fall of 1941 the Nazis [did not have] the required means to undertake a last stage to the Final Solution. In November 1941, the only facilities under construction designed to serve that end were the gas vans in Chelmno and the three gas chambers at Belzec.

Rafecas can't have meant what Tracey wants him to mean. At most, it sounds like Rafecas means that when the US entered the war, the Nazis accelerated something that they were already preparing to do.

But here's the important thing: Tracey is ignoring Chelmno and Belzec. This is fricking crazy. Those camps' existence proves that the Nazis had genocidal intent by 1941. Their sole purpose was to kill every inmate on arrival:

Chelmno had 7 known survivors out of 150,000 to 200,000 murders.

Belzec had 7 known survivors out of 400,000 to 500,000 murders.

Tracey also mentions the factoid that the Shoah's first gassings happened at Chelmno on Dec. 8, 1941. It's clear what he's doing. He's implying causality, as if the Nazis decided to start gassing the Jews overnight.

Some of Tracey's sources are just bizarre. They include (he uses screenshots, so I'm linking to those):

This excerpt from a book by Laurence Rees. It suggests the opposite of what Tracey is trying to say: Rees says that the failure of the Moscow offensive "probably" would've been enough to motivate Hitler to accelerate the Holocaust.

Hitler's Jan. 1939 prediction that if another world war broke out, the Jews would be "annihilated." Hitler started a war in Europe nine months later. And in December 1941, Hitler fulfilled his own "world war" condition by declaring war on the US.

This highlighted passage. Hitler attributed the new US-Soviet alliance to Jewish control of both DC and Moscow, rather than to the USA's and USSR's mutual interests. Not the actions of a rational, calculating man.

Heinrich Himmler's Posen speech, in which Himmler congratulated himself for preventing "sabotage" by having the Jews exterminated.

I'd argue that if the Nazis could rationalize the Shoah this easily, then genocide was inevitable. It was only a matter of finding the right excuse.

That's enough of Tracey's statements. Now I'll focus on some things that he conspicuously doesn't mention

The word "Einsatzgruppe" doesn't appear once

He says nothing about the Warsaw Ghetto, which was built in October 1940, when FDR was still promising neutrality.

He doesn't mention the Nazis' genocides of non-Jews. Take the Intelligenzaktion. The Nazis shot about 100,000 Polish intellectuals, army officers, civil servants, writers, priests, and anyone else who might've kept Polish culture alive. The Nazis started this as soon as they invaded, and completed it by the end of 1940.

He says almost nothing about Operation Barbarossa, which the Nazis launched 3 months before the USS Greer incident (the first clash between the US Navy and the Kriegsmarine).

He doesn't mention the Holocaust in the Baltics, where the Nazis encouraged local vigilantes to kill Jews in mobs starting in July 1941.

He doesn't mention the Babi Yar massacre, which happened in September 1941.

All of the above, of course, happened after the Nazis had invaded and annexed neighboring countries. That's a crime in its own right, but it doesn't seem to bother Tracey.

He also ignores one of the most recognized facts about genocide: it happens in stages. There's always a period of social exclusion, propaganda, and intermittent violence before the perpetrators move to full-blown extermination. The Shoah was like all other genocides in this regard.

God, writing this made me mad. Tracey's very proposal is offensive. By his own admission, the Holocaust was underway before the US entered the war; why else would the Nazis have been building two extermination camps in the fall of 1941? "Would this monstrous, genocidal regime have killed fewer people if the US had let it do whatever it wanted?" isn't a question worth asking.