How will Hitler be viewed in a thousand years?

History is a funny thing.

If we look at some of the great villians from history the same sense of revulsion as we feel today for Hitler is not there. When TV stories or movies are made about the Ghenis Khan or similar he is shown in an almost romantic and heroic fashion. Mind you his Mohgul weren't bothered by smashing babie's heads in, raping or destroying whole towns.

So how will the future judge Hitler?

KTK

 

There is very little historical record to go on for most if not all previous atrocities.
No literature, no film, no art, no photographic record and little if nothing in the way of physical artifacts.

Hitler and his thugs will dwell in the realm of revulsion for perpetuity in every culture.
That was probably his intent from the get go - IMHO a subject worthy of further study.
_________________

List of events named massacres: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres

Atrocity statistics from the Roman Era: http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/romestat.htm

Christian massacres: http://www.truthbeknown.com/victims.htm
Holy Atrocities in the Bible: http://www.come-and-hear.com/editor/br_1.html

Top 10 Evil People From Ancient Times: http://listverse.com/2012/05/30/top-10-evil-people-from-ancient-times/

Genocides in history: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history

 

When I read the title of this thread, I immediately thought of Genghis Khan.

Even in recent history, let's not forget that Stalin is viewed by many in Russia in a sort of wistful way and Mao is a genuine hero in China, and both of these gentlemen killed more people than Hitler. Hitler is a hero among many Islamics, and Islam is a growing culture.

History is a prism viewed through our own cultural prejudices, and I wouldn't want to guess how Hitler will be viewed a century or two from now.

 

People are wilfully ignorant...especially when it comes to history. In a thousand years you will struggle to find anyone who has even heard of Hitler...interestingly "NAZI" may survive as a uphermism for evil or totalitarian or a fascist.

Give it ten thousand years and even "Christ" will be a forgotten name...such is the human condition.

 

Hitler used modern technology for mass destruction. Had these technologies existed before, other tyrans would probably have used them too, but history will remember Hitler for being the ONE who wanted to wipe out entire races with the gaschambers.
Another aspect to be taken into account is the massive scale.

 

THAT is a particularly valid comment...but it needs tweaked just a little...

"I wouldn't want to guess how we would want to view Hitler a centruy or two from now..."

Our cultural prejudices can be quite strange, actually - starting in the 1950s and lasting until the late 1970s/early1980s there was a trend among the young of the West to take up opinions and symbols guaranteed to piss off their elders just for the sheer rebelliousness of it. Just like a lot of kids...even today!...in the re-unified Germany and before that in WEST Germany chose to sport Communinst symbols to get up their elders' noses...

...in the UK and the U.S. "we" culturally went through several decades of young people choosing to sport Nazi regalia and symbols as an expression of their reblliousness against the standards of their parents and the behaviour expected of them in turn. It was only in the late 80s, for example, that the Hells Angels worldwide banned the wearing of iron crosses, swastikas etc.; and Swastikas...along with OTHER ways of getting up peoples' noses like defacing the Union Jack or the Queen's face LOL was a staple of what passed for Punk "culture". W've got other examples too, from modern culture - John Lennon and George Harrison being perhaps rather TOO interested in hitler...and look at the treatment of the Nazis also as anti-heroes in that classic of the 1950/60s, Billy Liar...

And NOW we're busy turning them into a "comic book"-level evil; look at the dozens of "Nazi Zombie" movies to date, there's new ones appear in a constant dribble every month on discount shelves near you!

And that's what I would worry about for the future - how are things going to be in a couple of hundred years' time if already...inside living memory...we've turning them into mere shadows of what they were! Look at the trend for endless reworkings of the Hitler tantrum scene from "Downfall"...Adi is ALREADY the go-to "comedian" for a whole generation of teens and twenty-somethings! For THEN he has already lost his demonic status...

Here's a test for you to try on your school-age children - if any Sit them down, and ask them who "The Beast" was......

I can guarantee that not one will mention NAPOLEON....

That's how quickly time buries great events and evils.

 

I don't think we know how ignorant younger people are about history today, let alone what it will be a thousand years hence. At the rate knowledge about what went on before seems to be disappearing, it woud be a very sunny optimist who would predict there would be any recollection whatever of Hitler and the Third Reich.

To promote her new Holocaust-themed novel 94 Maidens, author Rhonda Fink-Whitman recently visited the campuses of Penn State and Philadelphia’s Temple University, and asked the local college kids what they knew about the Holocaust and World War II. The answer is: not much.

Questioner: Which country was Adolf Hitler the leader of?
American College Student: I think it’s Amsterdam?
Questioner: What was Auschwitz?
American College Student: I don’t know.
Questioner: What were the Nuremburg Trials?
American College Student: I don’t know.
Questioner: How many Jews were killed?
American College Student: Hundreds of thousands.*

Grievance studies have in the main replaced history in both secondary schools and universities in the English-speaking countries, and forget about military history -- there is no subject matter suffering from greater neglect. The steady march of the left through the educational system beginning in the 'Sixties has thus ended in victory. This has been accompanied by a tragic loss in literacy and thinking. The Dead White Males (as the Marxists know them) who created the foundations of Western Civilization have been dethroned in favor of theories that argue the meaninglessness of words and even existence itself. The corrolary to that is the individual must give way to the greater good of the ant hill, and the village it takes to raise a child is merely a way station en route to that goal.

The popular culture, which is also in the hands of the left, has helped in the deterioration of standards, whether moral or intellectual. As Mark Steyn wrote: "Popular culture is more accurately a 'present-tense culture': You’re celebrating the millennium but you can barely conceive of anything before the mid-1960s. We’re at school longer than any society in human history, entering kindergarten at four or five and leaving college the best part of a quarter-century later—or thirty years later in Germany. Yet in all those decades we exist in the din of the present. A classical education considers society as a kind of iceberg, and teaches you the seven-eighths below the surface. Today, we live on the top eighth bobbing around in the flotsam and jetsam of the here and now. And, without the seven-eighths under the water, what’s left on the surface gets thinner and thinner."

If the advance in historical forgetfulness has gone so far so fast and seems even to be accelerating, I think George Orwell may be the best guide to how the future will treat the present and the past. At some point, the good of the ant hill may determine that there be official truth. A kind of history death panel will decide Hitler's standing. At the rate his crimes are being forgotten, it might be a toss of the coin that depends on the needs of the collective.

 

Interesting in thta the statement about the Hollocaust is actually correct althoug it does imply somewhat lesser numbers than were the case.

Of course it would be interesting to know how many students were questioned vs how many replies were used. Given that it looks like the interviews were being used to publicise the book were only the answers viewed helpful reported?

Not to say that college students are as up on things as we think they should be though. I remember when I was a freshman in college asking sophemore pollitical science major on our floor someting about Machiavelli. He'd never heard of him. Later in the term he mentioned to me that his name had come up in one of his classes.

On the otherhand how many people really know for instance what it means when they say a poll has a 3% margin of error?

 

When is the last time you saw a Che tee shirt sported by some college kid? Che tortured, imprisoned and shot homosexuals for the crime of being homosexual. He tortured, imprisoned and shot those who opposed the revolution, and even the families of those in opposition - children as young as 14!

“To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary. These procedures are an archaic bourgeois detail. This is a revolution! And a revolutionary must become a cold killing machine motivated by pure hate.” – Che Guevara

If people today can ignore monsters like Che, Mao and Stalin, they can certainly forget Hitlers crimes.

 

This is from the WSJ, June 18, 2011: "We're raising young people who are, by and large, historically illiterate," David McCullough tells me on a recent afternoon in a quiet meeting room at the Boston Public Library. Having lectured at more than 100 colleges and universities over the past 25 years, he says, "I know how much these young people—even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning—don't know." Slowly, he shakes his head in dismay. "It's shocking."
He's right. This week, the Department of Education released the 2010 National Assessment of Educational Progress, which found that only 12% of high-school seniors have a firm grasp of our nation's history. And consider: Just 2% of those students understand the significance of Brown v. Board of Education.
Mr. McCullough began worrying about the history gap some 20 years ago, when a college sophomore approached him after an appearance at "a very good university in the Midwest." She thanked him for coming and admitted, "Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original 13 colonies were all on the East Coast." Remembering the incident, Mr. McCullough's snow-white eyebrows curl in pain. "I thought, 'What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman could get this far and not know that?'"

 

There are lots of worse people than Ernesto "che" Guevara in recent history, and I sincerely doubt he was ever in the position to "emprison" anyone, guerrillas cannot afford large amounts of prisoners. The Batistas, the Argentinian generals or Pinocet were just as bad if not worse and still far from true monsters like Amin Dada, Papa Doc or Pol Pot just to look at post WW2 heads of state.

There is a difference between a ruthless leader and a madman, though it makes little difference to the victims, Stalin was borderline, the Mao of the cultural revolution crossed it, Tito was sane but Balkan politics are a very bloody affair, and in the end history may look at them as builders rather than destroyers. What Hitler "built" was mostly based on of a delusional belief in "the will conquers all" that would never have resisted the test of time. So there is a decent chance he will be remenbered for the monster he was.

AFAIK Temujin (Genghis Khan was his title) and Timur (Tamerlane) used terror as a tactic to break enemy resistance, not as end to itself. Such tactics are still pretty common, WW2 terror bombing being a recent case.

My ancestors were pretty drastic in that regard as well though they had no WMDs, the original Jewish diaspora is not an isolated instance of the Romans resorting to low tech genocide, and when they started on that path they were pretty thorough , no "internal front" in Roman times, the plebes were more likely to cheer Masada than disapprove of it.


Wonder why Cortez and Robespierre are not on those list, and IIRC Napoleon was the ogre not the beast so that question would have cought me napping and I suggest you don't use that term with a Frenchman ......

 

Even now, when we write/read this, many people are dying for unjust causes. Perception of death predominantly depends on personal involvement. Mongolia and many other countries worship Genghis Kahn as a great warrior and a statesman. In some countries the Nazis are celebrated as national heroes, for time being unofficially. Who knows what comes next? That trend has nothing to do with "education" but tradition of hatred, disrespect for human life if a corpses belong to the "enemies". I personally don't see much differences among corpses burnt in crematorium and corpses burnt by the napalm. I see no exceptions here: that morbid view exists even among members of "highly civilized societies". How else we can understand that people do not oppose ruthless killing of "enemies" today. The difference is perhaps numerical or politically better founded, But murder is a murder. In 1.000 years, millions killed by Hitles's willing executioners will be just a drop in an ocean of murdered human beings in an organized way. From that time distance people would once understand that all their predecessors were the same: ruthless predators.

 

You're absolutely wrong. He was in charge of "justice" (executions and imprisonment) after the revolution. He shot several thousand people and imprisoned tens of thousands more, almost all of whom were tortured first. Many of those people were absolutely innocent - families of opponents, homosexuals, small businessmen, etc.

 

Dear Kodiak, I really like and appreciate majority of your views but just imagine yourself walking up in another country in another body as an "enemy" of your formerself. A hunted one. Then, re-read what you've just said.

 

Dunno, don't care, I'll be dead.

 

Dear Tamino, imagine yourself as a Jihadi who took a momentary break from torturing and murdering your fellow Muslims to stage an attack on a powerful country with a large military, who then began tracking down and shooting and bombing your fellow Jihadis.

Really, other than a wider racial classification, Islamic militants are the Nazi's of the 21st century. They are fascists who engage in genocide. They aren't victims.

 

I cannot do that. I live my peaceful life, care for my family, care for my six pets, make donations for charities, support a shelter for cats, in winter I will care for animals in the near forest. For about 1/4 of a century I was completely apolitical person and intend to resume my lack of interest for politics for another 1/4 of a century. Over the past several weeks I've made a mistake to get involved in completely wrong discussions in "The Stump". I will refrain from doing that in the future. And beleive me: both Jihaddists and Imperialists are the same - if people use adequate optics.