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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • 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.





  • 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.