Now we KNOW Hitler was a RightyFollow

My track (and remember that this track was about a 7,5 on the hardness track)

World Geography - done very well by a teacher who is basically exactly like pausol; my grade wasn't great at the end for lots of reasons, but I learned tons, and most of what I remember I recall

World History - the recommended first class for freshmen (meaning you do not get geography at all) was taught approximately as well in terms of bredth, but not depth. This means that we went through a crapload of var varied history all over the world, but we couldn't do the last two centuries. The russian revolution and cold war might never have happened.

US History - Typical important propaganda/ information class depending on who teaches it.

economics/polisci or AP econ and AP government - AP levels let you take the opt out test for most universities, depending on your score. I ended up with a B and credit in both but that was um.. sort of the first time of the um.. hospital, so, yeah

I think that the full IB diploma (mine was merely certificate in a could of areas) had a culmination history course, but I can't remember much about it.

Technically, once you finished world hist us hist and econ/polisci your last year was an elective. Not many who had finished SS in 3 years bothered to sign up for an elective, mainly freshman class.

McGame, I don't usually reply such things but, I am curious as to why you keep bringing up how Hitler didn't torture but killed?

I would highly suggest reading up on the Holocaust. Even visit the Holocaust Museum where you can view a pile of the shoes belonging to the mass murdered Jews, Homosexuals, and Mentally Ill people. Even if lets say he killed these people instantaneously and there was no pain to the victim, what about their family and friends who survive them? The people who will have to live with the memories of the horrible acts carried out on their people simply because they were born that way or brought up that way. They are left alone to deal with the loss of their loved ones and some are truly left alone because they were unfortunate enough to have their entire family killed.

Its really important to step back and look deeply into the history. Its not just about the numbers, the way that they were killed, why they were killed, it is also about the ones who survived and the pain and grief that they will always have to deal with knowing that they were being targeted simply for being who they were and that to me is a monstrous and unforgivable thing to make a crime.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functionalism_versus_intentionalism

It's important to note that "elimination" does not equate to "extermination" - nor does "final solution" before (roughly) Wannsee. While the strength and totality of antisemitism in Mein Kampf, some of Hitler's speeches and indeed **** ideology imply some kind of terrible retribution against Jews, the evidence that the holocaust was conceived before '39 is sketchy at best. The concentration camps were of the "worked to death" sort, but whether Hitler really planned on pure death camps back then is guesswork. I mean, for one thing, he didn't really plan on going to war with Britain until '39, when Plan Z was ordered, and it's unlikely that he'd risk international outrage if he was only at war with Russia. Once you're waging total war against someone, they can't really get much more annoyed with you.

What's important, though, is that Hitler hated Jews all along and that as soon as the opportunity was there to effect genocide, he took it. In the context of "how much of an ******* was Hitler", the debate is completely irrelevant.

It's irrelevant, because any historian worth his job withholds moral judgment when studying history. If he stopped to make moral judgments, he wouldn't have time to do history. He'd be too busy weeping in despair for the fate of man.



What maybe didn't get through to you in history class is that whether or not so-and-so was evil or good is totally irrelevant. You're going on about the Romans and the Inquisition and other things you know next to nothing about and every word you type is so unbelievably pointless it pains me to have to point it out.

Hitler was evil. There is no doubting that this is true, by any rational moral scale you care to mention. It is also trivial. I can't write "Hitler was bad" in my history essay. There is no room in history for tales of Bad King John. Pat Buchanan may think that his ridiculous revisionist pseudohistory is an implementation of this morally neutral approach to historiography, but his blatant abuse and misrepresentation of the facts are a more pressing problem with his "analysis." It's insufficient to say that Hitler was evil, but it's a much worse crime to say that he wasn't evil. That's not just bad history. It's dishonest history.

Edited, Sep 8th 2009 10:19am by zepoodle

You didn't actually read the thread, did you?

If I understand correctly, Pat Buchanan is against war. He's worried about communism taking over from the inside, not through military conquest. Pat Buchanan is a neo-con, but he's an antiwar neo-con.

That is to say, even the batsh*t crazy folks think he's batsh*t crazy.

Many people have gotten over categorizing people, their actions or events as simply good or evil.

Thia is not the case.



Could be. He doesn't appear to be consistently isolationist even in the book itself. One of the reasons for WWII being bad is that Europe lost its abilities to control the rest of the world, in his view.

I always thought he was a paleo-con.

But I thought Chamberlain was an appeaser!

I was most amused by the assertion that Hitler "let the British go" at Dunkirk because he only wanted peace.

Had Churchill only knew of Hitler's peaceful intentions, he wouldn't have had to do that whole evacuation thing. Man, those Brits are silly idiots, huh?

You clearly aren't a visionary of Pat's caliber.

They were obviously playing it up for sympathy.

Pinned down, pssh.