Nobody's into history.

From Thirtysomething, decades ago, Miles Drentell said this: "We are paid handsomely to tell the public that if they simply buy our client's product, everything will be fine - and to that public, 'history' is last week's People magazine."

I know a talented and otherwise intelligent lady who refuses to look at the voting record or past actions of any political candidate... "I don't want to talk about the past."

That is why history repeats itself.

People writing these "history will be a harsh judge, sir!" tweets have seldom read a history book outside the one they skimmed in high school.

They imagine "history" to be this harsh, karmic judge who is always on the side of the cool and the righteous.

Miles Drentel was right. For most people, history is last week's People magazine, last year's elections, last week's news cycle.

History to the poorly educated is a bullet-point fashion trend. Nazis are evil, Che is cool, and the Soviet Union had all these neat tchotchkes. Capitalists are greedy and Marxists only want social justice and equality.

Yesterday, they found out that Thomas Jefferson and George Washington owned slaves, so the Founding Fathers are no longer acceptable as American heroes - mostly because they don't know anything else about them that could offset the terrible thing they just found out.

That Confederate memorial statue has to come down because they never knew who it was memorializing anyway and all their cool friends say the guy was as evil as the Nazis, whom they just know are the embodiment of all evil, even if they don't quite know why.

Conan,

I am curious why you would place "Nazis are evil" directly after indicating that in your opinion history is equivalent to a "fashion trend".

Is it just "trendy" these days to regard the industrial slaughter of ~12 million people based on their heritage as "evil"?

Just to be clear, it is your consistent statements like this that have led me to conclude that you are sympathetic to neo-nazis.

Exactly what are you trying to say here with this particular example?

Artie,
The way I took it, "Nazis is evil" is a timeless piece that anyone can wear safely in public. Che is a hip, counterculture accessory. Demonizing Jefferson and Washington is a cutting-edge statement; despite its impracticality and counterproductiveness - like saggy pants.
I only offer this mansplaining in case Conan is too flabbergasted by your short-stroke intellect to summon a response before noon.

I am curious why you would place "Nazis are evil" directly after indicating that in your opinion history is equivalent to a "fashion trend". ~ Artemis at November 11, 2020 7:25 AM

Spider pretty well covered it, but I'm gonna add:

Artie, that post was not to say that Nazis are not evil. Read the last sentence in that post. Most people know the Nazis are evil, but cannot articulate why. In the movies, the Nazis always the bad guys, so they must have been evil, right?

Ted Rall, posted a heinous cartoon unfavorably comparing GW Bush to Hitler years ago. His cartoon was full of historical errors regarding Hitler, from "Hitler won most of his military campaigns" to "Hitler was democratically elected."

Most people cannot describe the circumstances of Hitler's rise to power, often repeating the myth that "Hitler was elected" without understanding parliamentary democracy or the political environment of Weimar Germany. Hitler was never democratically elected chancellor of Germany. Nor was Winston Churchill democratically elected to lead Britain through World War II. Both came to power through a quirk of parliamentary democracy.

Rall has also compared Trump to Hitler and Republicans to Nazis - because he only understands that Hitler and Nazis were bad and knows just enough facts to hang his opinion on something few can rebut. By doing so, he cheapens the very real evil that was Hitler; as does everyone else casually comparing Trump to Hitler.

While I mostly agreed with Rall's assessment of Joe Biden a few days ago, I generally hold Rall in contempt for his displays of blatant historical ignorance and his rigid, dogmatic worldview.

The reason I equated history to a fashion trend in the minds of most people is because few of them recognize any true evil that Hollywood and the cool kids haven't told them was evil; or true evil that Hollywood has embraced as cool.

To them Che was a t-shirt icon and not the psychotic mass murderer he really was. To them Soviet regalia is cool, not a symbol of a regime as evil, possibly more so, than the Nazi one they've been taught it's cool to hate. That's why Marxism and collectivism is so hip right now. They don't know any better. The cool kids are all for it, so they are, too.

I only offer this mansplaining in case Conan is too flabbergasted by your short-stroke intellect to summon a response before noon. ~ Spiderfall at November 11, 2020 7:52 AM

Thanks, Spider, but I've learned to never be surprised at Artie's interpretations of my posts. He likes to think he's caught contradictions when he hasn't.

Conan Says:

"Artie, that post was not to say that Nazis are not evil. Read the last sentence in that post. Most people know the Nazis are evil, but cannot articulate why."

Really???

Your contention is that the majority of people cannot articulate why the mass genocide of entire groups of people is evil?

Or is your contention that the majority of people do not know that the Nazis engaged in the mass genocide of entire groups of people?

I find both of those contentions to be highly dubious.

In any event that example doesn't even remotely belong with the rest of your examples.

You lumped in "Nazis are evil" with "Capitalists are greedy" and "Marxists only want social justice and equality"

You have made it abundantly clear on this blog that you vehemently disagree with the second 2 characterizations.

So why group "Nazis are evil"?

Surely is cannot be because you honestly think the majority of people are unfamiliar with the horrors of the holocaust.

Surely is cannot be because you honestly think the majority of people are unfamiliar with the horrors of the holocaust. ~ Artemis at November 11, 2020 8:15 AM

Artie, are you being deliberately obtuse?

People are only somewhat familiar with the existence of the Holocaust, but largely ignorant of the details.

My main contention is that most people have an understanding of history, economics, and world affairs that is an inch deep and an inch wide. They only know that they see on YouTube, in the movies, and learn from their Twitter, SnapChat, and Instagram influencers.

Our schools have done a lousy job teaching history with context. It's all bullet points. Ask students and they'll tell you the Civil War was fought to free the slaves (it wasn't). They'll tell you the Emancipation Proclamation freed the slaves (it didn't free all of them).

They may of Nazi genocide. If they do, they think only Jews were slaughtered by the Nazis. Catholics, Poles, Slavs, homosexuals, and others died in Nazi concentration camps, too. They may think Hitler was a military genius, as Rall did. He wasn't.

You lumped in "Nazis are evil" with "Capitalists are greedy" and "Marxists only want social justice and equality" ~ Artemis at November 11, 2020 8:15 AM

These things that you say were lumped together were in different sentences. As in, they know only the bullet points taught to them by social media and in school, "Nazis are evil, Che is cool, and the Soviet Union had all these neat tchotchkes." Do they even teach that communism was evil any more?

That lays the groundwork for people to believe the things their influencers tell them about America, "Capitalists are greedy and Marxists only want social justice and equality."

They're never taught that many prominent American leftists opposed going to war with Nazi Germany in 1939 and early 1940 because Germany was a military ally of the Soviet Union - both countries invaded Poland together in September 1939.

For example, prominent leftist, Pete Seeger, sang songs protesting going to war with the Nazis until the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact fell apart and then he pulled those albums from the shelf and put out pro-war songs. During the Cold War, he went back to being anti-war.

They're never taught the evils of communism and the death toll therefrom. Alan Charles Kors, the editor of the Oxford Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment, opined,"We rehearse the crimes of Nazism almost daily, we teach them to our children as ultimate historical and moral lessons, and we bear witness to every victim. We are, with so few exceptions, almost silent on the crimes of Communism."

Hence, Che and Mao became t-shirt icons while the American left celebrated Chavez and Castro. But we all know "Nazis are evil."

Conan Says:

"People are only somewhat familiar with the existence of the Holocaust, but largely ignorant of the details."

Why exactly would someone need to be largely familiar with the Holocaust in order to be able to properly articulate why the Nazis were evil?

I'm not being obtuse here Conan, you are engaging in bad faith arguments.

People for the most part understand why the Nazi agenda was evil... one doesn't have to fully understand the details of Mengele's horrific experimentation on living human beings in order to properly categorize the Nazi regime that controlled Germany as "evil".

You are just playing a game of shifting the goal posts.

People largely understand why the Nazis were evil... and they can articulate it as well.

The only folks who don't really seem to understand that the Nazis were evil are white supremacists.

"Our schools have done a lousy job teaching history with context."

They aren't doing a lousy job if the take away is that "Nazis are evil.".

This is where what you said makes absolutely no sense.

Here are your examples:

"Che is cool" - You believe this summary to be in error

"the Soviet Union had all these neat tchotchkes" - You believe this summary to be in error

"Capitalists are greedy" - you believe this summary to be in error

"Marxists only want social justice and equality" - you believe this summary to be in error

In other words, each and every example you provided above is one where you think people have gotten the summary wrong... that there is more nuance that if only they were more educated would change their mind. That the above summaries demonstrate ignorance or naivete on the part of the adherent.

Along side all of these you have "Nazis are evil".

You keep harping that you are some rhetorical master and that everything you write is carefully crafted... even your emotional outbursts.

There is a principle within writing known as parallelism where all of the items within a list should express the same rhetorical sentiment.

So either you made a massive writing error and failed to properly make your examples parallel with one another... or you intended "Nazis are evil" to stand side by side with four different examples of items where you think the general public has gotten their entire interpretation wrong.

"Nazis are evil" should be regarded a fair take away from a proper historical education (even if one doesn't know exactly which sets of twins were sewn together by Nazi "scientists").

...while youtubes about the vikings having laser weapons get 200 million views.

Trump's tweets are kinda like a rampaging Viking with a laser weapon.

Donny Deutsch: ‘Donald Trump is in pre-production right now’

Donny Deutsch predicts Donald Trump’s next act will be in television (the "Trump Revolutionary Network"), and says if you were pre-producing Trump’s next move, you’d rather the president act aggrieved than accept his loss.

People for the most part understand why the Nazi agenda was evil... one doesn't have to fully understand the details of Mengele's horrific experimentation on living human beings in order to properly categorize the Nazi regime that controlled Germany as "evil". ~ Artemis at November 11, 2020 11:58 AM

And yet they persist in comparing the Republican Party and Donald Trump to the Nazis. Do they really understand what Nazi Germany was, or do they just understand the Nazis were somehow evil?

Because if they truly understood the scope of the Holocaust, that is the mobilization of every facet of an industrialized society to effect the complete extermination of a people, they'd know the Republicans and Donald Trump, while distasteful to them, are nothing like the Nazis.

Now if brutal human experiments are reasons to call the Nazis evil, then what about the communists, the Japanese, and even the Americans?

The Soviets conducted brutal human experiments on their own people. Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov tried to breed a human-ape hybrid, injecting women with orangutan sperm. The Soviet Union's Laboratory 1 conducted experiments on prisoners from the gulags (designated "enemies of the state") to find an undetectable poison.

If you're wondering where you've recently heard the term "enemies of the state," Nancy Pelosi used it to refer to Republicans.

The Chinese Communist Party built labor camps to punish "enemies of the people." Hmmm. Tell me again how the Republicans are the ones emulating brutal dictatorships.

The Japanese Army's Unit 731 conducted unspeakable experiments on Chinese and Mongolian prisoners during World War II; prisoners they called "logs" to further dehumanize them. After the war, the US secretly gave immunity to members of Unit 731 in exchange for the information they collected on biological weapons research.

Even the US has a dark past, infecting black men with syphilis to track the progress of the disease in the 40-year "Tuskegee Study" that lasted from 1932 to 1972.

Do these little side trips in any way excuse Nazi barbarity? No. Those little side trips enforce my point, that the Nazis are the go-to bad guys for popular culture, cartoon villains straight out of central casting. You don't have to know anything about them, just call your political enemies Nazis and everyone gets it without any context.

Few will understand the gross exaggeration in which you are engaged. It's cheap rhetoric and the casual use of "Nazi" cheapens the impact of actual Nazi evil.

You can praise Marxism and no one will call you on the evils of communist regimes throughout history, brutal human experiments for which you, and they, condemn the Nazis as evil. If you're gonna hold the the Nazis up as the exemplars of evil, you might want to be able to explain why they were more evil than other evil regimes; and few today can.

Now, on to your complaints about my "rhetorical mastery."

You knew exactly what I was saying and the point I was making, as did Spiderfall. That means I effectively communicated what I was saying, despite the rhetorical shortfalls.

You're quibbling about the arrangement of the points - which you have a right to do, but your argument is lost by the fact that you readily understood my point.

It was not a polished comment, but a hastily constructed one - yet a hastily constructed one that effectively conveyed its points. And that's what it was supposed to do. While I might grade the comment's construction harshly in an English class, I'll let it pass as effective here.

Looks like NASA has given the green light to the SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule and Falcon 9 lifter.

So we'll be sending people into space on an all-American platform again. Which is nice.

Haven't there been all sorts of surveys showing that young Americans don't know much about the Holocaust at all? I feel like I keep reading articles about it.

I always find it hard to believe because every other movie is about the Holocaust, but apparently something is missing.

Haven't there been all sorts of surveys showing that young Americans don't know much about the Holocaust at all? I feel like I keep reading articles about it. ~ NicoleK at November 11, 2020 9:22 PM

Here are a couple of links to articles about that.

The lurid headlines said that nearly 2/3 of Millennials and Gen-Z are unaware of the Holocaust, unaware that 6 million Jews were killed in it, and some even believe it to be a myth.

A deeper dive into the data show that they are aware of the Holocaust, but not well-informed about it.

While many survey respondents had a grasp of what the Holocaust was and who was responsible, and a majority saw the Jews as victims, a concerning 12 percent — 17 percent in California — said the number who died in the Holocaust has been “greatly exaggerated,” and 20 percent said people talk about the Holocaust too much.

The results also showed high exposure to Holocaust denial and neo-Nazi imagery, especially through social media.

63% were unable to answer in a multiple choice question that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust. Many were unable to name a single concentration camp, ghetto, or death camp.

World War II ended in 1945. That's 75 years ago - ancient history to teenagers. And if they're not Jewish, they lack context in which to put the Holocaust. So, remembering names, dates, and places is merely an academic exercise to them, information quickly forgotten once the exam is over.

They do remember that the Nazis were evil and killed lots of people, so the left's casual denunciation of their right-wing political opponents as "Nazis" strikes a tone. It also trivializes the evil that was the Nazis.

========================================

Years ago, there was a silly television show, Hogan's Heroes, featuring a group of Allied POWs engaging in guerrilla warfare from a Luftwaffe POW camp run by an incompetent Colonel played by Werner Klemperer, himself the Jewish son of a refugee from the Nazis. His father was the famous Jewish conductor, Otto Klemperer.

The show was criticized for portraying the Nazis as bumbling and inept, trivializing their evil; but that was partially at the insistence of Klemperer who said, "I had one qualification when I took the job: if they ever wrote a segment whereby Colonel Klink would come out the hero, I would leave the show."

Several others of the cast were also affected by the Nazis.

John Banner, who played the genial and bumbling Sergeant Schultz was Jewish and escaped the Nazis. He was later an actual sergeant in the US Army Air Force during World War II. His family members who remained in Austria perished in a Nazi concentration camp.

Robert Clary, who played the French prisoner, La Beau, was interred in a Nazi concentration camp as a child and survived by singing and dancing in shows for the SS guards. Most of his family perished at Auschwitz.

Leon Askin, who played Nazi General Burkhalter, was beaten and tortured by the SA and the SS. He lost his parents at Treblinka, but was able to escape Austria to the US, where he joined the US Army.

While the show trivialized the Nazis, it did so with a cast and an audience for which World War II was recent history and portraying the Nazis as bumbling incompetents was cathartic and understood to be in jest. Too many people today don't truly grasp the extent of Nazi evil and have never met a victim of Nazi brutality.

Democrats and leftists calling Republicans "Nazis" and Trump "Hitler" trivialize a great evil to an audience that does not recognize it as a trivialization.

"Artie, are you being deliberately obtuse?"

Jeesh, it's just how he is. He didn't misunderstand anything - you didn't write what he wanted to see.

That's why he's dead last in content/syllable, and why threads like this are far longer than they need to be.

Dammit, anyway.