By now you have all seen the footage. Elon Musk, amidst the pageantry of the so-called "indoor parade" after the inauguration of a President -- Musk showed his own view of our new chief executive by offering him a long familiar sort of salute. Then, to make it clear that this was no accidental expression of exuberance, he turned around and did it again. He wanted to make sure we all saw the Sieg Heil gesture. [Also, look at that facial expression: neither accidental nor exuberant.] Nor has he denied that this is what he was doing. Others have denied it for him. But he has not denied it. He has said that "they" shouldn't make such a big deal of it. That is not a denial. “Frankly, they need better dirty tricks,” he wrote. “The ‘everyone is Hitler’ attack is sooo tired.” I am happy to speak for a moment as one of the "they" who think this a big deal. We don't think you're Hitler, dude. We think you're Hugo Ferdinand Boss. The German cl...
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In our four further discussions of the Edmonds book this week, we will break little if any truly new ground. We will try to go more deeply into some questions that we raised last week. First, I mentioned last week that Wittgenstein's discussion of the foundations of mathematics after an exposure to Brouwer's views was what brought him fully back into philosophy. I omitted a related point. Wittgenstein did eventually write up his thoughts on that subject. REMARKS ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF MATHEMATICS was published after his death, in 1956. There he makes the remarkable observation that what is called "losing" in chess may constitute winning in another game. That is his analogy. His example involves "Russell's system," the logicism/logical apparatus of PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA. A proposition could be proven the case in Russell's system yet sti...
I am looking at a paper presenting a psycho-historical view of Hitler and Nazism written by a woman of whom I know nothing at all -- by Amelia Clark, a student at the University of Mary Washington working on her Masters Degree. This is well-trodden ground. I'll just pick one nugget in Clark's discussion that seems of interest. There is no evidence, she writes, "that he had any anti-Semitic feelings before he left Linz or even that he had any during his first years in Vienna." Such references to Linz, an Austrian city straddling the Danube between Vienna and Salzburg. and the place where Hitler was a boy. Clark's phrase "before he left Linz" reminds me of Auden's poem, September 1, 1939. "Accurate scholarship can unearth the whole offense, from Luther until now, that has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, what huge imago made...." Clark is saying (and Auden might well agree, if I understand his poem correctly) that nothin...
Grandfather paradox The “grandfather paradox” is an argument used to prove the impossibility of time travel. The idea is that an individual (usually called "Tim" because the name looks a lot like "time") who could travel backwards in time, could kill his grandfather, prior to the conception of his father. But this would imply that Tim’s father would never have been born, and that in turn would imply that Tim would never be born. And if Tim was not born, Tim could not go back in time. This situation leads to a contradiction. Tim both could and could not kill his grandfather. He could (because he would by hypothesis be in the right time and place with a weapon) yet he could not (because he would have to have been born!) And since our “Tim” could be anyone this means that nobody could - that time travel is impossible. Syllogistically, the macro argument is this: Premise 1. If time travel is possible, then contradictions are possible. Premise 2...
I have sometimes before mined Yahoo!Answers for posts here when I've been lazy. So I am lazy today. Someone on YA asked for the "reasons for the Holocaust." I said the following: It's a complicated question. Contra some of the others who have answered, I don't believe one should focus too much on Hitler personally in responding to this question, to "what happened at Linz" as Auden said. My strong suspicion is that if Hitler had died of some childhood disease, the whole thing would have happened in much the same way with some other front man, and we'd be talking about that other guy's childhood! I think you have to start by taking Hegel seriously. Hegel was the figure in the history of thought who most clearly represented a wrong turn, and a specifically German wrong turn at that. Hegelians who prefer the color red became one sort of totalitarian and Hegelians who preferred the color brown became another. And Jews became the victims of...
The history section of Yahoo!Answers has been overrun by holocaust deniers. Once in awhile I rise to their bait, but I've tried to limit those occasions. A recent example: some genius asked, "Was Hitler really that bad?" Below this, his graf of explanation for the question starts thus: "Sure he supposedly killed 6 million jews (the number keeps going up) but...." you get the idea so I'll stop there! I'll also reproduce my answer here, because it's easier than writing something new for today, and because these holocaust-denying asshats often say crap like the bit in that parenthesis. Yes. That monosyllable answers your headline question adequately. As to the other stuff, I'll comment on the number 6 million and your statement that the number "keeps going up." It doesn't. Scholarly consensus had formed at 6 million by about the mid seventies and has stayed there. You are discussing a large and complicated historical event ...
The publisher Hurst & Blackett brought out an English language edition of AH's book, Mein Kampf, in 1939. It was, as George Orwell says in the review to which I'll link you in a moment, edited in an appeasementist spirit: 'see? Hitler's not so bad, maybe we can all get along.' A year later, the same publishers re-issued it, apparently with new prefatory material etc. because Britain and Germany had in the meantime gone to war. I think Orwell's review, written in response to the re-issuance, holds up very well through all the intervening decades. I especially like the summary of the world Hitler wanted: " a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder." Here's the URL: https://worldview.carnegiecouncil.org/archive/worldview/1975/07/2555.html/_res/id=File1/v18_i007-008_a010.pdf
The online magazine SLATE recently ran an essay "against subtlety." The gist of it is that the idea that a work of art should be subtle is a bit of New-Critical misdirection that has gone mainstream, has become a cliche, and now ought to be retired. Consider Dickens' names! Heavy-handed and wonderful. My own reaction -- I'm all in favor of subtlety. (And Dickens, names notwithstanding, had a good deal more of it than he is generally given credit for). Norman Rockwell once created an illustration of Rosie the Riveter on a lunch break. She was seated with one of her feet resting on a book. The book? Hitler's Mein Kampf , of course! This suggests various distracting lines of thought. Did she bring the same book in every day? Did she have to sneak it past security, or was this regarded as normal furniture for a break room? Didn't Il Duce ever write anything she might have used to rest her other foot, or to rest THAT one on alternating days? Yes, yes, Mr....
On February 27, 1933, the Reichstag (the parliament building) in Berlin, Germany, caught fire. A suspect, Marinus van der Lubbe, soon confessed, and portrayed himself as a lone-wolf arsonist. But Hitler had only just become Chancellor, and the fire gave him an opportunity to consolidate his power – he saw a broad Communist plot behind van der Lubbe, and soon prevailed upon President Paul von Hindenburg to suspend civil liberties to allow for the “ruthless confrontation” with that conspiracy. From the start, many anti-Nazis agreed with Hitler that van der Lubbe was merely a cog. On their account, the Hitler and his henchmen themselves had been the malefactors. Since the end of the Second World War, the hypotheses of the lone-wolf arsonist and of the Nazi conspiracy have vied for dominance. Defenders of the lone-wolf view need not harbor any Nazi or neo-Nazi sympathies: distinguished historians like Hans Mommsen, Ian Kershaw, and A.J.P. Taylor have take...
It is a truism that "hyperflation in Germany paved the way for Hitler's takeover." Everybody knows this ... right? Everybody has seen the photos of the wheelbarrows -- filling one wheelbarrow with marks was enough to get the bearer of the barrow a loaf of bread. Like much that everybody knows, this isn't quite ... accurate. There is some truth to it, but ... The worst of the hyperinflation in Weimar Germany was over long before Hitler became Chancellor in 1933. It was in the early 20s that those famous wheelbarrows were rolling about with those bills. Late in '23, after a new currency was introduced [one Rentenmark, as above, was pegged to each one TRILLION of the cheapened Reichsmarks ] the govt wisely pegged the new Rentenmarks to the US dollar at a ratio of 4.2:1. A peg to the U.S. dollar was, indirectly, a peg to gold. Then the currency situation gradually normalized. This is worth noting because there was no very direct relationship between th...
Just a quick book note today. The Simms book, EUROPE, is a very ambitious effort to put between two covers a discussion of the modern history (mostly the old-fashioned sort of history -- politics, war, and diplomacy) of the named continent. The book gives to this convoluted subject matter, ranging from the fall of Constantinople in 1453 to headlines in the early 21st century, fewer than 700 pages. Excluding the lengthy source notes gives you just 530 pages. Personally, I'm a sucker for Big Picture books like this. Anyway: one of the themes of Simms' book is contingency . There was nothing inevitable, Simms tells us, "about the defeats of Charles V, Louis XIV, Napoleon, and Hitler." Charles V was the King of Spain, and the Holy Roman Emperor, at the time when Spain was conquering much of the New World. Charles' big defeat was in his efforts in his Imperial capacity to suppress the Protestant Reformation. (He did keep it out of Spain, though!) Louis XIV...