“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.
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.
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?
He really wants you to be reading Mein Kampf. Sounds very suspicious, right? /s
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.
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.