I haven’t even read the classics 1984 or Animal Farm. I’m also interested in anything about the rise of Bolshevism to better understand the enemy.
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks.
Comments (14)
sorted by:
I haven’t even read the classics 1984 or Animal Farm. I’m also interested in anything about the rise of Bolshevism to better understand the enemy.
Suggestions welcome.
Thanks.
It has historical value. This modern New Left of adult children see even its existence as a threat, and all words in general as violence. Most of it is obnoxious nonsense and the author's victimhood ("My struggle"), but it's crucial to understand the origins of WWII (embarrassment over the Treaty of Versailles etc). Just as it's crucial to read Lenin's "What is to be done?" and Marx's rants from Paris.
Fundamentalists are literal thinkers, who believe everyone else also thinks literally as if they are reading scripture. Says more about them than it does everyone else.
It’s interesting to see why people have thought certain things. They teach you as a kid that Hitler just randomly decided to round up the Jews one day. But there is a lot leading up to it. In fact, in his own words he was against antisemitism and it was a movement in Germany well before he rose to power. Obviously he changed his views, and the book explains his thought process on why, but it’s very interesting to hear these things from the source.
It's strange to me how so much of this is missing from the US/Canada curriculums, as well as basic civics. In Quebec, for example, their history classes last two years and focus on the last 150 years up to the origin of fur trading. The roots are so, so much deeper than that. Your heritage tells you who you are.
Hitler was a strange, complex character: it was Germany's third act of imperialism aggression. As were Stalin, Mao, Lenin, Mussolini, and even Churchill. We forget there were entire political groupthink systems of the day and it wasn't just some strawman avatar. Not to mention the role of Bolshevism, fascism in England and Spain, the role of Mexico, the collapse of Liberia, communism in Southern Africa, and so on.
My most frequent comment to American buds is my total bewilderment at them not being able to recognise what this woke/BLM/big tech thing is. It's very, very old, and most Eastern European residents know exactly what they're seeing.