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this post was submitted on 05 Jul 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.
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.
First of all, middle schoolers read whole books all the time. You clearly don't have any kids who are or have been through middle school. Secondly, there's also a thing called high school and they study WW2 during it.
Thirdly, this was what you said initially:
You didn't say anything about real study. You just said we should be reading Mein Kampf within historical context. So I'm now confused as to why you don't think school children should be reading Mein Kampf.
History books are secondary sources. Which are sufficient for the average person studying history. Perhaps even preferable, since they are written with historical context already supplied, although you do also get the inherent bias of the author.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't a place for primary sources like Mein Kampf. Primary sources are the only thing that tells scholars what was happening in history at any given time, and history books can't be written without scholars studying primary sources. So should Mein Kampf be required reading for middle schoolers? Of course not, no one is saying that. But it may absolutely be required for, say, a graduate level course in WWII history.
Blacklisting or stigmatizing a text serves no one except those that want others to remain ignorant.
What bias could there be about Hitler? That he was a bad guy? Are you saying it's wrong to be biased against Hitler?
Historians need to read the primary sources. Like a lot of primary sources. So many primary sources.
But unless you're an historian writing a paper then it's not all that useful. Because most people don't have the time to read so many primary sources to really understand what was happening in a given time period. It's best to read the summary from historians that can spend many years studying just that one narrow time period. It's feasible for them to read a broad selection of primary source from that time period. It's not feasible for most people to do that.
If you're picking just a few primary sources here and there and thinking you understand what was happening you're going to have view of history that's biased by the very small selection of primary sources that you've read. Remember that in the past people lied just as often as they do now. If you pick a few primary sources, how do you know if the ones you selected aren't just straight up lying?
No one is talking about blacklisting anything, but are you really suggesting there is no stigma to Mein Kampf? Really?
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.