"Hitler vas a better dancer than Churchill, he told funnier jokes than Churchill..."
he told funnier jokes than Churchill...
Goddamn it, LB, you beat me every time.
"How the can people judge when for 60 years they just listen to one side?" he asks. "Not even the best judge can rule when he doesn't listen to the other side. People have only heard one side."
The man just wants fair and balanced reporting.
Yeah, B: we should teach the controversy!
Now I know why I got that phone call last week. Oh, my people.
This is quite close, and in a neck of the woods I often get to. I may stop in.
He comes close — almost certainly unwittingly — to recapitulating some of the arguement George Steiner gives "A.H." in The Journey to San Cristobel of A.H.
You are NOT going to a Hitler museum! I draw the line there! After sitting through a half-hour of being droned on to about the fact that Hitler did in fact do some good economic things for Germany's economy in US History, I think I might want to read up on it. But not go to the museum. Ew. I wonder why we live so close to Wisconsin.
The minishrine picture is a little creepy...
This guy ought to get his museum bankrolled by Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder.
Cochova, if he goes to the museum, please hit him for me.
If you don't stop asking if you can go to the Hitler museum, I will turn this blog around, mister!
Great. The newpaper reporter, in her own voice, says this about the the IHR (Holocaust denial HQ) website:
But the compelling evidence they present shows that Auschwitz was not an extermination center and that the story of mass killings in 'gas chambers' is a myth.
(Note "shows", not "claims", and of course "compelling".)
Somewhere in my head is a joke about neo-Nazis with this ending:
"You know, nobody ever talks about the good things that Hitler did. I mean, aside from killing all those Jews."
I sort of hope I didn't just make that up.
I'm assuming that the linked publication is something unsavory itself -- if it's a mainstream news source, someone should be very ashamed of themselves.
Somewhere in my head is a joke about neo-Nazis with this ending
I misremembered. It's The Portage to San Cristobal of A.H.. Speculative, sure. But no weirder than the tale of researchers Gary had last Friday.
I'm assuming that the linked publication is something unsavory itself
The editor has a blog. Judging from the main page of the paper's website, it appears to be just another generic weekly paper.
Aw, jeez. What incredible morons.
13: I think it's the weekly paper for Walworth County, Wisconsin. This is a resort area, with local light industry, a great and historic observatory, artist's colonies, and one very good Liberal Arts College, Beloit. An interesting, pleasant place less than a day's drive from Chicago.
My sister is a journalist, and worked for a similar paper in another part of Wisconsin. Serious, trained journalism would be a miracle under the circumstances, although sometimes the common sense and good writing can surprise you. Not this time. Very good sympatico friends of mine live in East Troy. I'll see what they know.
This is a resort area, with local light industry
I read this and thought "so, they make lights? lightbulbs? artisanal lanterns? what?"
Light Industry means factories and assembly plants that are not very big, don't use many resources or make much polution, and these days are served almost entirely by trucks, not needing rail or barges.
As opposed to heavy industry, you know, steel mills, oil refineries, stuff like that.
To tell the truth, I don't think they've done that badly with it. The blog-editorial seems ok to me; I don't know if they expected the kind of traffic they're getting even from us. At this point it's eccentricity pure and simple, with ritual revulsion and invocation of free speech thrown in. What do you want them to say?
In a sense, covering it as what my sister calls a "local boy's pumpkin" story gives it about the right weight.
Look at 12, and at this:
Contrary to how Hitler has been portrayed, his being a racist was one of the largest fallacies, Junker believes.
"They said he was a racist. It's a lie. He advocated for, he was in favor of these people. He respected other races."
But things did change in regard to German feelings about Jews in 1933, he says. Two months after Hitler was elected the World Jewish Organization declared war on Germany.
Junker says that only then did Germans begin distrusting the Jews
In fact, Junker believes that Hitler himself did more to help the Jews than any other person or government of the time.
Nowhere does the story state or imply that the above is an obscene lie. It's like the joke about the headline after Bush announces the earth is flat: Shape of Earth: Views Differ. A reporter who is treating a Holocaust-denying Hitler worshipper with deadpan respect has something very, very wrong with them.
I figured it out, Idp. I was just saying.
12: For some reason you've reminded me of this joke:
But aside from that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you enjoy the play?
14: I consider "Nobody talks about the good things Hitler did" to be a pre-existing trope, which the existence of the shirt bears out. (In fact, now I see that you used it yourself in the original post.)
There's revisionism and then there's revisionism.
Not in Florida!
Jonathan Zimmerman: A Florida law banning relativism in classes ignores reality and 75 years of academic tradition
Source: LAT (6-7-06)
[JONATHAN ZIMMERMAN teaches history and education at New York University. He is the author of "Innocents Abroad: American Teachers in the American Century," which will be published in the fall by Harvard University Press.]
JUST WHEN YOU thought it was safe to study American history again … the revisionists are back!
You know, those relativists who distort or simply fabricate the past to make it fit their present-day biases. For instance, shortly after the U.S. invaded Iraq in 2003, President Bush attacked "revisionist historians" who questioned his justifications for using force against Saddam Hussein. He did it again on Veterans Day in 2005. "It is deeply irresponsible," he declared, "to rewrite the history of how the war began."
And just last week, in an unprecedented move, the president's brother approved a law barring revisionist history in Florida public schools. "The history of the United States shall be taught as genuine history and shall not follow the revisionist or postmodernist viewpoints of relative truth," declares Florida's Education Omnibus Bill, signed by Gov. Jeb Bush. "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed."
Ironically, the Florida law is itself revisionist history. Once upon a time, it theorizes, history — especially about the founding of the country — was based on facts. But sometime during the 1960s, all that changed. American historians supposedly started embracing newfangled theories of moral relativism and French postmodernism, abandoning their traditional quest for facts, truth and certainty.
The result was a flurry of new interpretations, casting doubt on the entire past as we had previously understood it. Because one theory was as good as another, then nothing could be true or false. God, nation, family and school: It was all up for grabs.
There's just one problem with this history-of-our-history: It's wrong.
Hardly a brainchild of the flower-power '60s, the concept of historical interpretation has been at the heart of our profession from the 1920s onward. Before that time, to be sure, some historians believed that they could render a purely factual and objective account of the past. But most of them had given up on what historian Charles Beard called the "noble dream" by the interwar period, when scholars came to realize that the very selection of facts was an act of interpretation.
That's why Cornell's Carl Becker chose the title "Everyman His Own Historian" for his 1931 address to the American Historical Assn., probably the most famous short piece of writing in our profession. In it, Becker explained why "Everyman" — that is, the average layperson — inevitably interpreted the facts of his or her own life, remembering certain elements and forgetting (or distorting) others.
For instance, try to recount everything you did yesterday. Not just a few things, like going to work or eating dinner or reading the newspaper, but everything. You can't. Even if you kept a diary and recorded what you did each minute, you would inevitably omit some detail: a sound in your ear, a twitch in your nose, a passing glance of your eyes. A 24-hour video camera might pick up these physical actions, but it could never record your thoughts.
So when somebody asks what you did yesterday, you select a certain few facts about your day and spin a story around them.
As do professional historians. They may draw on a wider array of facts and theories but, just like "Everyman," they choose certain data points and omit others, as well they must.
Becker was an optimist. Although historians could never determine the capital-T "Truth," he wrote, they could get progressively closer to it by asking new questions, collecting new facts and constructing new interpretations.
Nevertheless, he concluded his 1931 address on a pessimistic note: Unless the profession engaged lay readers — unless, that is, we taught the public about what we actually do — Americans would reject history itself, taking comfort in banal pieties and sugarcoated myths.
And surely one of the biggest myths of all is that history is simply about "facts." This year marks the 75th anniversary of Becker's famous speech, yet Americans appear no nearer to understanding that all pasts are "constructed," that all facts require interpretation and that all history is "revisionist" history.
Demagogic politicians are certainly at fault for this situation, but historians bear a good deal of blame too. Unlike Becker's generation of scholars, who worked hard to cultivate a lay readership, most of us write only for each other. Is it any wonder that the public has no idea about how we go about choosing topics, identifying sources and arriving at conclusions?
"It should be a relief to us to renounce omniscience," Becker wrote 75 years ago, "to recognize that every generation, our own included, will, must inevitably, understand the past and anticipate the future in the light of its own restricted experience."
Yet this recognition also comes with a responsibility, which most historians have, unfortunately, renounced as well.
If more of us wrote for the people instead of simply about them, perhaps they would turn a deaf ear to specious charges of "revisionism," "constructivism" and the like. People construct their own stories every day, just like we historians do. And may the best story win.
I'll vouch for Dr. Ngo; he's a real person, father of Anarch, professor at a respected university--not a spammer.
Well, a spammer probably wouldn't have quoted some material from a preceding comment, and it was an interesting article anyway. But who's Anarch?
father of Anarch
I did not know that (they're both Obsidian Wings commenters).
a spammer probably wouldn't have quoted some material from a preceding comment
Not true -- some of them do it automatically. It's happened here and at Jo/hn & Be/lle.
22 gets it exactly right. But, FWIW -- not that much -- the passage in 12 is bracket by statements of the form "The IHR say" and "They claim" or something like that, which is compatible with the whole thing being an extended gloss on what the IHR is saying. Still, they should've put a "they say" in that sentence and dropped the "compelling."
The weekextra links Deborah Lipstadt on the front page, which is something, but they should've done a better job in the article. The editor's blog makes it look like Holocaust denial was something they just heard of last week.
2: OMG, the first humorous New Yorker article that's actually funny.
I should say, following my 22, that I don't think, after looking at the website, that the reporter or editor is a Holocaust denier or anything -- just that they're idiots who think that journalistic objectivity requires being respectful to psychos and not pointing out that they're saying insane things.
33: The Times story that it refers to is interesting.
Less fun.
I certainly believe that someone who isn't up on these things might well not know that there is a movement of deliberate, neo-Nazi Holocaust deniers. This suggests that in addition to "ignore them" and the joking "teach the controversy" strategies, it might be necessary to teach the existence of the denier movement, as an innoculation, so that the first time someone stumbles across the IHR website they aren't taken in by it -- I can see how, if you've never thought that anybody would lie about this stuff, seeing all these "new facts" would make you wonder.