Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
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Notes -
So, what are you reading?
I'm picking up McGilchrist's The Master and his Emissary. The documentary was interesting enough, but I'm still not sure what to expect. The open, scholarly tone is welcome, more nuanced than I would have expected from a book about left and right brain hemispheres.
Meanwhile, Dantes is escaping in Monte Cristo.
I just finished Christopher Moore's Razzmatazz which I found highly disappointing after loving his earlier works as Teen. I just found so many of the tropes tired and lame, the stereotypes of Chinatown and gay nightlife felt so stupid and flat, and the noir pastiche felt ridiculous. I'm wondering if it's that Moore is stuck in the past, or if I'm stuck in the present.
I'm working song by song through Bob Dylan's Philosophy of Modern Song. It's really interesting in that I'm a huge Dylan fan and you see what influenced him.
On digital, I read the first chapter of the War Nerd Iliad. It's fun, I'll probably finish it in between, but it isn't what people claim it is. It's raising in me the interesting question: in translation and abridgement/editing of a great work, what constitutes "reading" it? Clearly reading every word of the original published manuscript in the original language constitutes "reading" Mysterious Affair at Stiles. But what if a copy abridges some superfluous scenes? Have I read Tolstoy if I don't read Russian? I've read the Iliad in multiple translations, and I understand the goal of the War Nerd Iliad and that it considers itself a translation, but if you read the War nerd Iliad I'm not sure I'd say you had "read" the Iliad in the way I would say you had if you read the Fagles translation. But then Pope also took liberties, and his Homeric translations are my prior favorites.
I'm getting to the latter portions of Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. As it wraps up I'm probably going to write an effort post on it. It's a really interesting piece of historiography that I think reflects a really interesting view of the period, in the same way that historical films always give the characters slightly modern haircuts. The strong homophobic invective thrown at Roehm and (hey, gotta hand it to @SecureSignals on this one) the way he views the Holocaust in a way that is clearly different from our current view, along with the relatively few tomatoes thrown at Stalin et al. A better title overall might be "a political history of the Third Reich", while events on the battlefield are covered the author remains most interested in dispatches, internal memoranda, negotiation, and intrigue. I'm happy I broke my WWII fast with this one after seven years.
I want to read Rise and Fall too. Unfortunately, my WWII backlog hasn’t gotten any shorter, and I’ve already got a copy of Speer’s Inside the Third Reich to try.
If you're already knee deep in WWII stuff, I could probably sit down and abridge the chapters for you and halve the length. It aims to be a fully universal history of the Reich, and covers things like battles in sketch form, but where he does his best work is in examining diplomatic and bureaucratic documents.
Overall the book confirms my general view of the Hitler phenomenon as misunderstood as a result of the bastardized Hegel that governs how history is taught in the USA.
Okay, I very much would like to see your writeup(s).
I came away from high school thinking I had a decent understanding of the phenomenon, so I’d ask what you think is missing. Perhaps that’s just bias from immersion in other sources?
Moreso I feel like you could skip/skin 40% of the book that deals with battles, events, etc. because you already know those pretty well. His thumbnail sketch of Stalingrad will probably leave you cold, particularly given the paucity of soviet sources at the time of writing. I've actively avoided WWII stuff since about 2015-16 or so, but I feel that a lot of his material is strong and fairly novel to me.
I think that the tendency of American schools (I can't speak to any particular schools except the ones I attended or that my close friends attended/taught at) to teach in distinct "units" reflecting a sort of pseudo-Hegelian "zeitgeist" view of history. So for example, a lot of schools teach American history unit-by-unit and teach "The Industrial Revolution" or "Westward Expansion" after they have already taught "Slavery/The Civil War"; this tends to obscure the ways that Westward Expansion and Northern Industrialization caused Slavery to become such an important issue leading to the Civil War.
So the flaw in Nazi historiography tends to be that a lot of schools teach "The Cold War" after they teach "WWII/Nazis/The Holocaust." The rise of fascism is best thought as occurring in the context of a Cold War that started before the Tsar's body was cold, was in its infancy from the Paris Commune onward. Every developed, and most undeveloped, nations had major communist parties, many of which took orders directly from Moscow. Germany and Italy came close to falling to Comintern parties. The red scare took America before the 20s. The battle lines were drawn: The western democratic capitalist imperialist powers, against the USSR and the Comintern.
The Western democratic powers very much felt that Fascism, while perhaps distasteful, was preferable to communism. The feeling was that Mussolini and Hitler were better than puppets of Stalin. Western readers of Mein Kampf tended to see the rabid anti-communism, the clear intention to invade Russia, and see Hitler as a reliable partner against the Soviets. He might ultimately need to be brought into line, but he would certainly stop Communism from expanding West. To a certain extent they were correct: Hitler and Mussolini did prevent Moscow from taking Spain, Communism took control of no European nations outside Russia until after Hitler was on his way out, and Hitler did ultimately invade Russia even though by then it was a really bad idea.
On the Soviet side, meanwhile, the USSR can always be thought of as in many ways a theocracy. While Stalin and his clique were unbelievably cynical and evil, they were also in many ways true believers in Marxism. It's a matter of faith for orthodox marxists of the time that the imperialist capitalist powers must come to blows with each other. Stalin did not really worry about Hitler because it was a matter of theory that the imperialist powers would fight destructive wars, exhausting each other, until they fell to Communism. His actions only make sense if he assumed that the Nazis must, inevitably, as a precept of the Science of History, go to war against the Western Capitalists. To a certain extent he was correct: Hitler did go to war with the Capitalist powers first, and as a result Communism swept over half of an exhausted Europe. (As an aside, we should also note that Japan's early invasions of China were hockey-assisted by Mao's ongoing civil war, and that after KMT and Japanese forces had worn each other down Mao would sweep to power in China a few years later)
Of course, while each side was partly right in that Hitler would do tremendous damage to their enemy, they were also partly wrong.
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