1719
1720

Discussion/QuestionWhat misinterpreted/misrepresented historical fact frustrates you the most? (self.history)

throw_away909090 が 投稿

並べ替え:
ベスト (提案されたアイデア)
トップ新着論争中古い順Q&A
あなたは単独のコメントのスレッドを見ています。

残りのコメントをみる →

[–]IM_A_SQUIRREL 507ポイント508ポイント  (37子コメント)

Before I start my explanation, I want to make it absolutely clear that I am not apologizing for, condoning, or in any way supporting Hitler or the Holocaust. The Holocaust was a truly despicable event that I believe should always be remembered and condemned. This is simply an exploration of the side of the conflict that is difficult to explore impartially. After stating the difficulty of doing so, I will attempt to explore it impartially because I believe that it is important to attempt to do so.

Now, for Hitler. Undeniably, the outcome of his actions was terrible. He directly led to a war that killed many millions, both in battle and in camps. He bred hatred, fear, and violence. But let's temporarily bracket the outcomes of his actions and see why he may have done what he did.

Hitler wanted to bring Germany to prosperity. After World War I, Germany was severely punished and was in economic ruin. He, and many others, believed that Germany had been wronged in the Versailles Treaty, and he wanted to right the wrongs he perceived. To him, the Germans deserved living space in order to fix their economy and unify all the ethnic Germans who were living in other countries due to the redrawing of borders that had taken place at Versailles.

This view of expansion as the right of a people is not new. It's basically a recasting of the idea of Manifest Destiny (which was not a new idea itself). He believed that it was the right and destiny of the Germans, as a superior people, to spread their influence and expand their territory as much as they could. But this idea ran into problems partially because all the countries bordering Germany were already well established. Nobody was going to give up their land to fulfill his German expansionist dream.

To carefully put this in perspective, I propose contrasting it to a time when another country believed that it had the right and destiny to expand. For this contrast, I will use the period when the US expanded westward, even though it is not a perfect comparison. When the US pursed its policy of Manifest Destiny, it was able to expand basically unopposed. There were no great powers blocking the way, only Native American tribes who were mostly unable to defend themselves. We mustn't forget that this instance of Manifest Destiny also led to a mass genocide. Note: this genocide is still very different from the Holocaust. I am not attempting to minimize the Holocaust in any way through this comparison. The system of suffering, violence, and terror that is created and perpetuated is unparalleled as far as I am concerned. What I'm really trying to say that expansionism often creates situations in which one group believes that it is owed something and has the right to take it, no matter the consequences for the people in current possession of said thing.

To unite the Germans under his cause, Hitler, whose extreme antisemitism and desire to persecute Jews had been evident before his rise to political power, used the Jews (and Communists, homosexuals, and other "undesirables") as a scapegoat. It is easier to mobilize a large group of people to do your bidding if you make them hate a common enemy. The ones he could not bring to the cause through hatred, he coerced through fear and other means.

In doing this, he did exactly what /u/TheRedCormorant is warning against: he made one group (the Germans) totally good and another group (the Jews and other undesirables) totally bad in the eyes of his followers. When you paint one group and justified no matter what and another group as terrible no matter what, it is not hard to come to the horrifying conclusion that the "bad" group should be persecuted or even totally eliminated.

This is just one of the reasons why portraying the two sides of a conflict as totally good and totally bad is dangerous. You can also run into another problem that arises from the case of Nazi Germany: you may portray a group as so twisted and evil (think comic-book villain bad) that it seems unimaginable that a person or group would do what they did. When we stop trying to understand the circumstances and causes of an action (no matter how horrible and unjustifiable that action ends up being), we set ourselves up to repeat it through ignorance.

In this way, we have a duty to try to understand why Hitler and the Nazi's did what they did without justifying it. We must not ignore these factors by creating the mindset that anyone who tries to understand is also trying to justify, erase, or distort the past. Inquiry and explanation of horrible events are vital because they help us identify root causes, circumstances, and steps that may lead to a similar situation in the future. Only through careful, impartial study can we achieve an understanding of an event that can help us prevent its repetition.

I know I'm not the person you asked this question to, but I felt compelled to answer it anyway. As I looked through this thread, I saw many people shutting down any attempted explanations about why Nazi's did what they did by bringing up the Holocaust and other Nazi atrocities. In doing so, inquiry is stifled because nobody wants to be construed as apologizing for or defending the Nazi's, even if they are not doing so. Attempting to block any explanations (note: not justifications; justifications are wrong) of the causes of Nazism is wrong. This is a very sensitive topic and while we mustn't ever forget the Nazi atrocities, we have to be able to explore the causes of them without letting the results prevent us from making an impartial assessment of the causes.

If anyone thinks that I am attempting to apologize for, condone, justify, or support Hitler and the Nazi atrocities, I am very sorry that you have missed my point. I hope that you some day come to the understanding that history and life have many nuances and that the view that any one side of a conflict is absolutely right or wrong is in part what led to the rise of Nazism.

Edit: phrasing

[–]arminius_saw 54ポイント55ポイント  (9子コメント)

To unite the Germans under his cause, Hitler used the Jews (and Communists, homosexuals, and other "undesirables") as a scapegoat. It is easier to mobilize a large group of people to do your bidding if you make them hate a common enemy.

I do want to mention that this gives more of a mercenary bents to Hitler's targetting of the Jews. Certainly from a sort of macro politics level it makes sense, but it's worth noting that Hitler was raving about the Jews long before he even had any kind of realistic chance at coming into power. I would tend to say that the "unite the people against a common enemy" strategy was something that dovetailed with Hitler's existing views rather than something he deliberately came up with.

[–]IM_A_SQUIRREL 29ポイント30ポイント  (0子コメント)

Very true. I had trouble wording everything properly. I'll edit what I wrote in order to make it clear that his hatred of the Jews preceded his rise to power and its usefulness for his political purposes.

[–]childoffire02 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Also, the Jews were an already disliked group of people. Europe even now has trouble with anti-Semites. At that time, Jews were an easy scapegoat to point at because there was already this sentiment in Germany.

[–]TheHuscarl 2ポイント3ポイント  (0子コメント)

This exactly. One of the key policy positions of Hitler and the Nazi party as a whole was racial purity. That was not a matter of expediency or uniting against a common enemy. That was a matter of personal conviction. For example, the mass killing of the handicapped prior to the start of the Holocaust would seriously counteract this point. Were the handicapped a common enemy to unify against? No. They weren't a threat. There was no stab in the back myth regarding the mentally handicapped. Were they undesirable for achieving racial purity? According to the Nazis, hell yes they were, which is why Hitler wanted them to die. Similarly, the ethnic cleansing on the Ostfront was far less about "finding a common enemy" and far more about securing racial purity and land for the pure race to live in. There was no mercenary aspect to the Holocaust. It went far beyond that, straight to pure ideology. Hitler had a plethora of common enemies to unite against (remember France, the country that was occupying parts of Germany during Hitler's rise?). He did not need to invent new ones or unite against weak ones.

Also, I'm going to add that if Manifest Destiny isn't even a decent comparison, it's a bad one. Lebensraum involved a distinct racial element when it came to acquiring more land. It was ethnic cleansing, pure and simple. Manifest Destiny did not involve a stated genocidal objective. It was not an orchestrated campaign to exterminate the Native American peoples and take their territory, it was a move to settle in lands that the United States claimed legal ownership, largely based on pre-existing agreements with former colonial powers (i.e. Louisiana Purchase). When Native Americans protested and fought back against these claims, they were killed or forced to move. While Manifest Destiny certainly included elements of racial superiority (not surprising for the time), I do not believe it called for utter racial extermination in the same way Lebensraum did.

you may portray a group as so twisted and evil (think comic-book villain bad) that it seems unimaginable that a person or group would do what they did.

The thing is, I think even an impartial researcher (no such thing, imho) of the Nazis and Holocaust will find many of the things they did unimaginable. Part of the utter horror of the Holocaust is that human beings, beyond all belief, actually carried it out. Rightly portraying the Nazis as evil doesn't make the Holocaust imaginary. The Nazis were, honest to God and as objectively as possible, comic book evil. They set the standard of evil for much of humanity. Does that mean that we shouldn't research their (often crazed) motivations? No. Does that mean that we shouldn't study Hitler's rise to power? No. But we can do these things with a healthy realization that what the Nazis did was pure unadulterated evil on a truly unimaginable scale. Losing that frame of reference, taking a step back a bit and saying, "Now wait a second, these mass-murdering psychopaths weren't really ultimate evil, there's some shades of grey here," leans dangerously close to apologist tendencies and, furthermore, is inaccurate. At the end of the day, not even an impartial analysis of the causes of the Holocaust is going to turn up anything but, "Wow, these guys were really, really evil and crazy." In other words, it possible to study with condemnation. That's perfectly acceptable, especially where the Nazis were concerned. We can still understand their motivations (as batshit insane as they were), but that doesn't mean we have to treat them as anything other than evil.

Edit: Maybe I've restated your point, I'm not sure. But at the end of the day, if there's any incident or group that you can paint as black and white morally bad, it's the Nazis.

[–]alterednut [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Hitler was raving about the Jews long before he even had any kind of realistic chance at coming into power.

Could you expand on this a bit, it may be one of my only chances to hear about it from a neutral view.

[–]DoseOfRealness 0ポイント1ポイント  (3子コメント)

Jews were hated the same way bankers/stock brokers were after the Bush collapse and for the same reason.

[–]arminius_saw 0ポイント1ポイント  (2子コメント)

Are you suggesting that they were responsible?

[–]transfire 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

Blame is like a net, properly cast, far and wide.

[–]thunderdragon94 11ポイント12ポイント  (0子コメント)

I would just like to expand on your reasoning for why it's important to understand why these atrocities took place. The moment you set up an entire group of people as inhuman in their evil doing, you implicitly create the argument that you or your country could never do something like that, because we obviously couldn't, because we aren't monsters; they're the monsters. It's an implicit attempt to absolve yourself of the responsibility of preventing the next massacre. There were many, many monsters in Nazi Germany. There were also many people in denial about those monsters, because they believed that it would take inhuman evil to commit such acts, and they could not bring themselves to believe that their neighbors and friends would be so evil. This second group of people are the ones who had a chance at preventing the Holocaust, but were in denial until too late. There is nothing essential in the difference between those people, and the average citizen in an average country. Some humans in any group have the potential to be evil, and if you create a schema about what kind of inhuman thing it would take to be evil, you ignore the evil next door.

[–]Usernametaken112 15ポイント16ポイント  (2子コメント)

Objective write up.

Its unfortunate you needed to preface just about every point with assurances you weren't a Nazi or that you didn't agree with the ideology of the day.

That should go without saying but in today's world, not so obvious.

[–]IM_A_SQUIRREL 9ポイント10ポイント  (1子コメント)

Thank you!

I may have gone a bit overboard with the assurances, but I wanted to leave absolutely no room for someone to derail the discussion with wild accusations that I support the Nazi's. Then everything devolves to shit-slinging and everybody ends up losing.

[–]Usernametaken112 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

You did what you had to do and even though I have nothing productive to add to the discussion I'm happy you made sure any replies would be on topic and about the discussion, not the person (you) or the ideology.

[–]gesunheit 8ポイント9ポイント  (0子コメント)

Well-said! Very impressive analysis, particularly coming from a squirrel. I think my biggest takeaway was this: "The view that any one side of a conflict is absolutely right or wrong is in part what led to the rise of Nazism." Very interesting take.

[–]nostalgichero 4ポイント5ポイント  (0子コメント)

I feel like you actually belittled the genocides and atrocities of America's Manifest Destiny. Not mad, just my opinion as someone from the SW. Also, I find it pretty shocking and frightening, though not similar, to see so many people vilifying refugees and Muslims. It's learning all the wrong things from history. They point and say how they are as bad the Nazis without seeing that they, in essence, are falling more in line with that form of thinking than any other culture. Again, they are not the same.

[–]phmuz 3ポイント4ポイント  (0子コメント)

First of all, thank you for putting into words what I can't say with my limited English knowledge and I'll try my best to express my thoughts properly.

The main point you are addressing is what intrigues me the most about the view on the second world war outside of the former German territories. Up until a couple if years ago the main view on German guilt taught in schools,was that resulting out of the Holocaust and the acts of German soldiers it must be forbidden to talk about the horrible things our parents or now grand and great grandparents went through during the war. It's only until recently that, in order to enable Germans to find back to their national identity, history portrayal tries to cover both sides of the coin and teach with a certain distance. I think that other ww2 forces need to start and portray a more diverse picture of the war without necessarily trying to decide between good and bad. This is the only way we can learn from this horrible past and progress as a society.

[–]Anonymous_0512 [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Great reply.

Interestingly, this is exactly what some in the Israeli Government are now doing to Palestine. Destroy their houses and take over their land to build settlements. When they resist, they are terrorists. Even children.

Manifest Destiny.

That being said, most in the world are suffering due to corrupt policies of governments, while the general population are normally good people.

[–]GodMayOrMayNotExist 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

You excellently explored a topic seldom even glanced at. Though I was on the level with these ideas, it's wonderful to see them worded better than I word them.

Funny enough, just last night I was explaining to my coworker that you shouldn't look at somebody and say, "Oh, they're just an asshole." and call it good. You haven't solved their malfunction, you haven't even identified it. You just told yourself that they will never think rationally enough to communicate on your level. Which is basically just jerking yourself off for being 'better' than somebody. People can be jerks, but there's always something I'm not seeing that they are and because of that, I can't just label somebody an asshole and never listen to them again. Hitler did this on a national level with the Jews. It's ironic how many ways people make this mistake, I get most infuriated when I see it in social movements because they preach progression but literally shut out every single sound from other progressive movements because progress for everybody is wrong?

Seriously though, every human being is just one big calculator that gets its own answer with every question. Since every answer produced by these calculators individually is probably some shade of wrong, it only makes sense to work together and see who may have had the right answer. Even if they sound batshit crazy and might be hiding all the gold in some jewcave.

[–]Jfurmanek [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

The human calculator. I do love this analogy. Often, I think of matter as a difference engine that steadily increases in power as it organizes in complexity. We are large, squishy, communes made up of countless individual organisms and our consciousness is a reflection of the constantly competing, although ultimately basic, needs of all the infinitesimal parts. All stemming from atoms in molecules bonding, releasing, and merely existing in a common space.

[–]ThrowawayGooseberry 1ポイント2ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thank you very much, very thoroughly thought out, defined, and typed down. Squirrel squirrel? or "Squirrel" squirrel? Nvm.

[–]DerProfessor 1ポイント2ポイント  (1子コメント)

Your point makes sense in the abstract (i.e. if you were talking generally about understanding your average Nazi's view of Jews or your average American's view of Indians...) It is indeed very important to understand the motivations of people.

But you are completely wrong about Hitler. ("Hitler wanted to bring Germany to prosperity.")

First, Hitler was a self-obsessed narcissist. He cared about one person: Hitler. Yes, he portrayed himself successfully as someone interested in defending Germans...and he may have even believed it. (as Claudia Koonz has argued in her excellent book The Nazi Conscience.) But deep down, Adolf cared about one and only one person, and that was Adolf.
(read the first of Kershaw's Hitler biographies, and you'll get a great sense of how self-absorbed he was.)

Secondly, Hitler was an obsessive antisemite: when he was young, unemployed, and down-and-out, he blamed all of his personal failings on the Jews who were clearly out to get him personally. This blaming of Jews for all faults continued through his political career--projected onto "Germany".

By the way, plenty of top-notch historians study why Germans thought the way they did and did the actions they did. Christopher Browning (Ordinary Men), as well as the aforementioned books by Koonz and Kershaw, are all excellent examples.

[–]IM_A_SQUIRREL [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Thank you so much for the book suggestions! I am always looking to learn more about the lead up to World War II and I will be looking into those books.

Also, thank you for your assessment of Hitler and his intentions. It's nice to have differing opinion on a subject. I am by no means an expert on it. I don't really know how to respond to the Hitler was a narcissist through and through angle since this is the first time I hear it being used as the sole reason for his actions. Without the proper knowledge or authority, it would be improper for me to either fully agree with or attempt to refute what you say.

As for his antisemitism, I decided not to delve into it in my original post due to length considerations. My post was getting a bit long, so I kinda brushed over it. I am well aware that Hitler thoroughly hated the Jews from very early on. Mein Kamph was oozing with antisemitism and other horrible, insane hatred, which should have been a clear indication to people of the time that something was not right with Hitler. Sure antisemitism was popular in Europe at the time, but he really took it to another level.

[–]TheFriendlyPostman [スコア非表示]  (0子コメント)

Brilliant post. I think it's a little messed up how many times you "clarified" that you are not pro-Nazi. I mean, I understand why you did, I just wish people wouldn't go apeshit upon hearing someone say that the world isn't black and white.

[–]albright4 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

One can also argue that the Treaty of Versallies actually benefited Germany, due to it breaking up large multi-ethnic empires neighboring it. (Austrian-Hungarian comes to mind) Also the Allies kept agreeing to revise the treaty, especially after the Crisis of the Ruhr.

[–]transfire 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

I just want to point out that Hitler didn't just scapegoat the Jews in a vacuum and magically convince all Germans to blame them. That sentiment was already wide spread, mainly because after WWI Jews were kind of like the Carpet Baggers of the American Civil War -- they often prospered while many others struggled.

[–]Cyber_Cheese 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

It should be added that nazis were transporting jews out of the country until it became a logistical nightmare, which is where Israel originated. It's also worth noting that most of the world hated jews, anti-sematism was not specific to the nazis, they just took it furthest

Other things that I find interesting and people often overlook are the book burnings and heavy drug use

[–]cuntsrlyfuckdhard 0ポイント1ポイント  (0子コメント)

The system of suffering, violence, and terror that is created and perpetuated is unparalleled as far as I am concerned.

I disagree. The Soviets and the Brits are worthy contenders to this title - the former directly and the latter partly directly and partly due to apathy.

[–]syscallgrl -1ポイント0ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think this would have been better if you didn't defend what you were saying and talk about how bad the holocaust was over and over.

[–]moxy801archaeologist of new, week 25 -2ポイント-1ポイント  (3子コメント)

I saw many people shutting down any attempted explanations about why Nazi's did

What are you referring to, specifically?

[–]IM_A_SQUIRREL 2ポイント3ポイント  (2子コメント)

Many of the instances have been deleted. But some may still be buried in the discussions stemming from the top level comment in this chain. What was happening is that some people would charge in with "6 million Jews died how can you say that the Nazi's were not 1000000% evil??", even when the person they were replying to was in no way saying that the Holocaust was ok.

[–]moxy801archaeologist of new, week 25 -4ポイント-3ポイント  (1子コメント)

Yeah, well if you see some of these types of posts you are claiming to exist, please copy and paste them under this comment before they get 'deleted' again.