LegalAction

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.

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.

Fact is, it's an important work for historical reasons. If you want to understand how Nazism works, and how it differs from Italian fascism, and be able to draw the lines that connect Nazis to historical German (and other nationalities) anti-Semitism, you need to read it.

If I had a copy, I wouldn't put it on display, but it is the kind of thing I can totally see being assigned in a college course on WW2 or some similar topic.

NB: I've only read a few excerpts for a class similar to the one I described above.

Also, I am against book burning in any circumstance. A book is never worth more as kindling, unless you're actually freezing and then it would be a hard choice.

Dan Savage pointed out in his podcast yesterday that in interwar Berlin, lgbtq-whatever-else-we-add-now people were more free than any time since probably ancient Rome before the Christian period.

It took about 3 years of Hitler in power to start shipping those people off to the camps. They still haven't really recovered.

No, the Revolution got rid of the monarchy and neutered the clergy and nobility, but it was an urban revolution of the Parisian middle class, or bourgeoisie. The situation of the peasants changed little through the revolution, and it was persistent efforts of the bourgeoisie to impose Parisian culture on the countryside. It took until WW1 to construct a coherent French nation. Weber (not that Weber) showed that in Peasants into Frenchmen in the 70s.

And Napoleon had family connections in the Italian nobility. His uncle was a cardinal. His father was a lawyer and inherited a fair chunk of change. Napoleon was hardly any sort of peasant.

It was the bourgeois that win in France, not the peasants.

That's surely not true for a number of reasons. The UK wasn't a thing, and modern English wasn't a thing. Beowulf has a fair bit of jokes in it, and that's some 200 years earlier, in Old English, than this thing.

Hell, I'm pretty sure Plato's Symposium starts out with a three word pun. That's Greek and not English of course, but the idea of picking out an earliest joke is just ridiculous.

No one commented or voted on my comments for a few days. So I logged out and ran a search for my username, and got told I didn't exist.

I agree that college should be publicly funded, but that doesn't seem to be in the cards. Even CA, where college tution-free is in the state constitution, has found ways to get tens of thousand of dollars out of even residents in "fees."

Because fees aren't tuition, apparently.

I've been involved in higher ed for a long time, and I don't know anyplace where government funding for college or university is increasing. Even the free CC idea seems to be a non-starter.

There's also the issue that USPS DID accommodate him for 4 years and then changed their mind. I would be upset if my employer capriciouly changed the terms of my employment to my detriment too.

That seems like a disaster with the student loan situation. You're letting in people who will not only need loans, but BECAUSE they need loans.