I’d love to write about how godawfully antisemitic General George S. Patton was, but alas doing so would be suicide for my career, and the journal I write for would refuse to publish it. Unfortunately, Patton is revered as a god in American military history circles (and is the most likely American general to be known outside of them). Trying to go “hey, this guy is an actually awful human being” would not be received well
Patton grew up in Southern California. His views were extremely parochial middle class. He was a snob, based on wealth, social advantage, and his upbringing where his father insisted on gentlemen being of the country club fashion. He basically viewed anybody who didn’t conform to his positive views on WASP culture as being unequivocally bad. Mexicans, Native Americans, black people, then like literally any war refugee or impoverished persons he ever had to deal with.
Everywhere he went in World War II he viewed the local populace with disdain. If you couldn’t fight, you were worthless to him. If you had any differences to the culture he grew up in, you were alien. He considered Arabs, Egyptians, and Sicilians as subhumans. Then as military governor in Bavaria he viewed Slavs and especially Eastern European Jews as disgusting.
Verbatim from General Patton’s diaries:
“General Louis Craig came in to see me this morning to explain how he has arranged for taking care of the Jews. It has been necessary for him, against his and my instincts, to move twenty-two rich German families from their houses in order to put the animals in them”
“She believes, and I think with some show of veracity, that the Jews are in a psychopathic condition which may be materially improved, although personally I doubt it. I have never looked at a group of people who seem to be more lacking in intelligence and spirit. Practically all of them had the flat brownish gray eye common among the Hawaiians which, to my mind, indicates very low intelligence.”
“It is an unfortunate fact that the people at home who are so vociferous in their demands for the betterment of the Displaced Jews have no conception of the low mental, moral, and physical standards of the objects of their solicitude. . .”
“I believe this was the first time General Eisenhower had inspected or seen much of Displaced Persons. Of course, I have seen them since the beginning and marvelled that beings alleged to be made in the form of God can look the way they do or act the way they act”
“There is a very apparent Semitic influence in the press. They are trying to do two things: First, implement Communism, and second, see that all business men of German ancestry and non-Jewish antecedents are thrown out of their jobs. They have utterly lost the Anglo-Saxon conception of justice and feel that a man can be kicked out because somebody else says he is a Nazi. . . . The attitude of the American people as evinced by the press and the radio is such I am inclined to think I made a great mistake in serving them for nearly forty years, although I had a very good time doing it. . . The more I see of people I regret that I survived the war.” (dies three months later)
Also, y’know, fucked his niece who committed suicide a month after his death
