Thread: to Germany and other non-USA nations

I have 20 channels and I guess I could find you a documentary on WWII any day after 20:00. Hitler's Generals, Hitler's Women, Hitler's Henchmen, Stalingrad, Submarine Warfare, Africa, Rommel and so on. Same for the war in the Pacific.

Same here... except it's only a few channels. It's a deciding moment in history.

In Germany, in contrast to America, every man or woman old enough has participated in the war in one way or the other.

I guess America is lucky to have learned the lesson about devastating war in Vietnam without actually fighting on our ground.

Every German exchange student or German I have listened to has condemned Hitler. (When the subject was brought up, not out of the blue.) I'm sure there are still nazi sympathizers, but they're few and far between.

Showing symbols of Hitlers idealogy is forbidden. Actually, there is a law that allows the police to confiscate anything they think might serve someone as a Nazi symbol.

I don't really agree with these laws. There's no need to supress free speech to root out nazism, not anymore.

That's because the Japanese were very bad at telling time. They had arranged for their ambassador to Washington to deliver their declaration of war at the precise time the attack was beginning, but somehow the letter wasn't delivered until after the attack had started. Not sure how late they were but I'm sure it's searchable on Google.

I thought it was on purpose... a delay tactic.

My experience, as an American, with history has been that the school year is over before the 20th century is even reached or that it is covered quickly. My high school college-credit American history class focused mostly on the 19th century with pretty much everything after World War I, arguably the most relevant history, covered in less than a month. For my world history credits, I took two semester classes: ancient civilizations (Egypt, Greece, and Rome) and Emerging Europe (feudalism, the Church, the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the early development of the modern European nation-states from feudalism, etc.). I never took the Modern World class, which focuses mostly on the French Revolution onward.

On a related note, it was quite a shock to me to discover, while searching for geneological information on the Internet, that my surname is shared with a Nazi general or some other high-ranking officer. The only solace I can find is that my ancestors with this surname came to the United States in the early 19th century and so this general would have to be very distantly related if related at all. This could have been the reason why the German exchange student last year seemed slightly shocked by my last name.

About the Aryans: The Aryans were the Persian- and Sanskrit-speaking settlers of Iran, Pakistan, and India. The name Iran itself is related to the word Aryan because that is what Aryan really means. Nazi doctrine seems to have extended the meaning to be some mythical race that spoke the ancestor of German, Greek, Persian, and all the other Indo-European languages (the hypothetical, partially reconstructed language proto-Indo-European) and who were the true original Germans in his eyes. The Arian "heresy" was based on an Iranian bishop called Arius because of his Iranian origins. It is true, though, that after the established Orthodox Christian church labeled it a heresy, Arian missionaries went outside the Roman world and converted many of the Germanic tribes, including the Saxons and Lombards, to Arianism. It was only after some of the Franks had accepted the Roman version of Christianity and begun conquering the Arian and pagan Germanic tribes to their east that Germany truly came into Medieval European culture/civilization.

The one thing I think that is most important about history is
to read original sources. Just about any history
class in the US about the Protestant Reformation will never
share with you the anti-semetic paper that Martin Luther wrote. Of course they will be all to quick to share with you how the church spent their money furnishing their churches ...