Moms for Liberty Speaker Says It's Time to Start Re-Reading Hitler, Stalin, & Mao
Moms for Liberty Speaker Says It's Time to Start Re-Reading Hitler, Stalin, & Mao
North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson (R) suggested at a prayer breakfast for the fascist "parental rights" group that dictators are being taken out of context.
“Here’s the thing,” Robinson said. “Whether you’re talking about Adolf Hitler, whether you’re talking about Chairman Mao, whether you’re talking about Stalin, whether you’re talking about Pol Pot, whether you’re talking about Castro in Cuba, or whether you’re talking about a dozen other despots all around the globe, it is time for us to get back and start reading some of those quotes.”
This is the Lieutenant Governor of a state (North Carolina) saying we can get gems from the quotes of genocidal maniacs. This is where we are now.
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You can learn names and dates of battles etc., but you won't understand the driving forces if all you have is "Nazis are bad."
Nazis were humans, not some kind of mythological monsters. If they could do what they did, you can too. You need to understand why they did what they did, how the ideology motivated them, or compelled them, because those same forces can work on you as well, and sometimes in ways you don't realize.
Primo Levi survived the death camps, and wrote about his experience extensively. Despite being a prisoner, he felt complicit in the Nazi project, just through trying to survive. At one point he recalls being on a work detail, during which he discovered a water pipe that had some water in it. He drank the water, and although he saw another prisoner lusting after the water, he didn't share, because he wanted to survive.
That other man also survived the camps and later found Levi, and asked why he wouldn't share the water. Levi had no answer at that time, but when writing his memoir he said the structure of the camp system was such that it employed even the inmates as agents of their own extermination.
He ended up committing suicide in the 80s.
If you don't understand the psychological and social pressures working on you - which come from everywhere, btw, not just Nazis - you can't fight against them. You will go along to get along.
You don't actually need to read Mein Kampf to understand the driving forces of Nazism back then and the fascism we face today. Actually the underlying forces nowadays are too different for Mein Kampf to even be relevant. History doesn't repeat itself, it rhymes.
Why do you need to read Mein Kampf to understand that?
So you know what Hitler actually said? So you don't fall for something like "the Germans didn't really know what was happening"? Yes, they did. It was published, and you can cite chapter and verse.
Same reason to read anything.
No, I don't fall for that because I read history books. So I don't have to read Mein Kampf. What's next, making it required reading in schools?
Are you really under the bizarre impression that no one who hasn't read Mein Kampf has any idea of what Nazism was about?
It's always worth putting your eyes on the primary source yourself. History texts are not without their own agendas. You're familiar with 1984, yes?
Again- should all schoolchildren be reading Mein Kampf so they can understand the horrors of WW2? Or is there another way to do that?
I didn't say school children, and I didn't say all. I said it was necessary for anyone studying ww2. Here, that's usually done in university.
Schoolchildren study WW2. My daughter did. Therefore it is necessary for them to read Mein Kampf, correct?
It's functionally impossible to assign whole books to middle schoolers. And don't confuse what you learn in primary education with real study.
First of all, middle schoolers read whole books all the time. You clearly don't have any kids who are or have been through middle school. Secondly, there's also a thing called high school and they study WW2 during it.
Thirdly, this was what you said initially:
We should be reading them though
I thought we were the party of “banning books is bad”?
Read them with historical context.
You didn't say anything about real study. You just said we should be reading Mein Kampf within historical context. So I'm now confused as to why you don't think school children should be reading Mein Kampf.
History books are secondary sources. Which are sufficient for the average person studying history. Perhaps even preferable, since they are written with historical context already supplied, although you do also get the inherent bias of the author.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't a place for primary sources like Mein Kampf. Primary sources are the only thing that tells scholars what was happening in history at any given time, and history books can't be written without scholars studying primary sources. So should Mein Kampf be required reading for middle schoolers? Of course not, no one is saying that. But it may absolutely be required for, say, a graduate level course in WWII history.
Blacklisting or stigmatizing a text serves no one except those that want others to remain ignorant.