Posted on 08/27/2022 6:53:14 AM PDT by rktman
Promise Me You'll Shoot Yourself is one of the best books about Nazi Germany I've read. The author is 55-year-old Nuremberg native Florian Huber, who wrote his PhD on British policy regarding the postwar occupation of Germany. The book was first published in Germany in 2015. It became a bestseller. Penguin published an English translation in 2019. Huber's writing is as crisp and gripping as prize-winning fiction. His style is a bit like Hemingway's. The main text of the book is 267 pages, followed by 20 pages of notes. Promise Me is a quick read that covers an astounding amount of history. It opens with the mass suicides prompted by Nazi Germany's defeat. It goes on to describe why so many Germans felt that suicide was the only possible response to that defeat.
...a stark warning to social engineers. Time and again in human history, people, usually young people, have decided that the way things are is flawed, and complete transformation is necessary. Once the flaws are eliminated, humanity can enter a Utopia. Nazism, Communism, and Woke are all Utopian. I want to grab my well-meaning bourgeois lady friends who think that you can redefine something as basic as human sexuality in a few short years without creating any problems. I want them to read this book. The more totalitarian a Utopian belief system is, the more devastating is its inevitable collapse, and the more likely it is that not just those the system defines as outsiders will suffer. True believers, too, will pay in the end, with their own lives. Those taking their lives are often the true believers themselves.
(Excerpt) Read more at frontpagemag.com ...
Sounds interesting! Thank you.
Another good book about Germany under the Nazis is “They Thought They We’re Free”, also “Rape of the Mind”. They’ll scare the crap out of you and the sources relied on are credible.
BKMK
There are maybe 20 million true believers, and a lot of useful idiots.
It only takes a few thousand true believers in a few key states to subvert an election, when the establishment wants it subverted.
I remember talking to a young German woman in 1985 whose parents lived through WWII. When I asked how they dealt with the Holocaust, she was angrily vehement that they did not know and that normal Germans could not have known.
Found out later from her American husband that her family home was just off the railroad tracks at one of the camps. They literally saw the full trains come in and the empty trains go out. She was desperately trying to convince herself that her family was innocent of any wrongdoing.
The “banality of evil”. What an apt description of the attitude we are seeing develop right in front of us today.
As a kid(1962-ish) I visited East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie and that was enough to convince me that I didn’t want to live like that. Talk about depressing. And look where we’re headed now under this (b)administration. But, per branDUHn, everything is just fine and dandy. Easy to say when we’re paying your bills...................
What wrong doing was her family guilty of exactly?
Voting for Fascists, just like they do today.
bmp
Hannah Arendt coined that phrase to characterize Eichmann. The problem is that there was nothing banal about Eichmann, he was a thoroughly evil and enthusiastic anti-Semite. A better phrase might be The Evil of Banality. When tik-tok and gender studies occupy young minds, they become fertile ground for evil thoughts, for wokeism.
hitler only ever got about 35% of the vote before he seized power
Other than that, they're just fine.
What’s going on today is George Soros finishing Hitler’s Third Reich program.
The term ‘banal’ aptly describes in general how the rhetoric followed by policies of the Nazi’s led to the Holocaust. Evil with a bureaucratic varnish, men in suits meeting and writing position papers leading to immeasurable human suffering & seal the fates of millions in an ordinary, detached and sterile manner.
“Time and again in human history, people, usually young people, have decided that the way things are is flawed, and complete transformation is necessary. Once the flaws are eliminated, humanity can enter a Utopia.”
Or as Kipling put it in his prophetic poem, “The Gods Of The Copybook Headings”...
“As it will be in the future, it was at the birth of Man-—
There are only four things certain since Social Progress began:-—
That the Dog returns to his Vomit and the Sow returns to her mire,
And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire;
And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return!”
In homeschool history I read “The Mind of Germany,” by Hans Kohn. Not an extremely ponderous work, and I recommend it as a thoughtful alternative to the p.w.
Basically an overview of modern German intellectual history, it’ll put to rest the simplistic assertion that the Treaty of Versailles was responsible for what came after. If there had been nothing at his disposal but a phone book of Versailles, Hitler would have made a meal with it. But he already had the mush of German minds prepackaged by over a hundred years of poets, philosophers, and politicians.
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