What, no apology for assuming that because I disagreed with you I must be arguing for some ideological viewpoint rather than making an objective assessment of the evidence? Well, I shouldn't expect any better on slashdot, I guess.
No, this does not depend upon the definition of "devout". I said the best consensus of historians is that he wasn't Christian. If you don't know what that means, look it up. Saying that historians are divided on the question of Hitler's christianity is like saying saying biologists are divided on the question of evolution. Go read some books (yes, books! not websites!) by some historians (yes, historians! not polemicists!) like Ian Kershaw, Joachim Fest, Alan Bullock, Richard Overy. Get a fuller understanding of both how historians approach and understand historical evidence and of the historical context in which Hitler made such remarks. Then maybe you will realise why I have no time for websites which cherrypick quotes from Hitler without trying to understand why he said what he did, who he was talking to, and what he hoped to gain thereby.
As for your other "evidence": yes, he was raised a Catholic. So what? So was I. Stalin even trained as a Russian Orthodox priest. Familarity can breed contempt.
I've never heard that he was a practising Catholic. He never went to Mass, as far as I know. He attended church only for state occasions. (Eg Hindenburg's funeral.)
Manifestos are hardly devoid of expediency. Politicians write them to appear bold and visionary when they want to get elected. He wrote it in Landsberg prison after his failed putsch, when he was moving towards a parliamentary path towards seizing power. There were no votes in being anti-Christian (or at least those that there were, were sewn up by the communists), therefore he dressed up his rhetoric in pious invocations of divine guidance and so on. The particular philosophy he was trying to promote was racism, not religion. Just ask yourself: would an atheist campaigning for the Presidency of the United States openly say "Hey, your god is rubbish - one day I'm going to destroy your church too, if you vote for me?" No. He'd lie about it or he wouldn't get elected.
Oh the other stuff I won't go into, you keep saying it's "clear" or "certain" that he was Christian, but you don't actually back it up with any evidence. Please give me some REAL references, I'm on a university campus, I'd be quite happy to check them out. (Oh, and it's quite obvious you didn't bother to check those "references" you gave : only one is a book (by a respected historian, John Cornwell), but the others are websites, of which three actually argue against his Christianity - in fact, one of them I had already cited to you! The "Hitler was a Christian" links are just more of the same superficial posturings by atheists and secularists.)
I don't think Hitler was a Christian by any sensible definition of the term. I have yet to see any good evidence for that. I don't think he was an atheist either, or a pagan or occultist. He did have vaguely mystical, semi-religious, perhaps pantheistic beliefs, but his god was his race.
Oh, give me a break. I'm an agnostic-cum-atheist, and a lapsed Catholic to boot. I don't think highly of the Catholic Church, the current Pope, or Pius XII (or Hitler, of course); I have no desire to do any of them "any favours". I'm also a history grad student who reads lots of books by specialists in Nazi history because I find it fascinating (although it is only marginally relevent to my own area); I have no wish to gloss over things whether I find them "distateful" or not. I said what I said about Hitler's non-Catholicism because I believe it represents the best consensus of historians about his religious beliefs, as opposed to some biased selection of quotes I found on some website with an agenda which completely ignore their historical context. Finally, I'm not an American, so your political agenda is irrelevent to me (although FWIW, I think Bush is a moron and his religious evangelism is deeply disturbing). So cut the crap ok?
Hitler made plenty of pious references to Christianity in public. In private he made many derogatory comments about it; you can read many of them here and here. (Yes, those pages are both by Christians. But unlike those rather lame sites you gave, these at least mention the evidence on the other side of the argument, and examine the views of actual historians, quoting them at length. So I have no qualms in citing them.) Have you never heard of a politician lying to the public before now? Furthermore, he made a pact with the Catholic Church which had clear political benefits for him, as something like 30% or more of Germans (from memory) were Catholics, and so the Church represented a possible source of opposition to his regime. The pact eliminated that threat cheaply.
Finally, here's a quote from a respected recent historian of the Third Reich, Michael Burleigh:
National Socialism, like other totalitarian dictatorships, parodied
many of the eschatological and liturgical attributes of redemptive
religions, while being fundamentally antagonistic towards the Churches:
rivals, as the Nazis saw it, in the subtle, totalising control of
minds. However, the overwhelmingly Christian character of the German
people meant that Hitler dissembled his personal views behind preachy
invocations of the Almighty, and distanced himself from the radically
irreligious within his own Party, even though his own views were probably
more extreme. During the Weimar period, he periodically traduced the
Roman Catholic Centre Party for engaging in coalitions with "atheist
internationalists" in the SPD. In reality, his views were a mixture
of materialist biology, a faux-Nietzchean contempt for core, as distinct
from secondary, Christian values, and a visceral anti-Clericalism.
Even though he disdained a confrontation with wearers of "petticoats
and cassocks", in the long term a showdown would come:
The war will be over one day. I shall then consider that
my life's final task will be to solve the religious
problem. Only then will the German nation be entirely
secure once and for all. I don't interfere in matters of
belief. Therefore I can't allow churchmen to interfere
with temporal affairs. The organised lie must be smashed.
The State must remain the absolute master. When I was
younger, I thought it was necessary to set about matters
with dynamite. I've since realised that there's room
for a little subtlety. The rotten branch falls of itself.
The final state must be: in St Peter's chair, a senile
officiant; facing him, a few sinister old women, as gaga
and as poor in spirit as anyone could wish. The young
and healthy are on our side.
Rude though they were, these views were roughly congruent with
the heated rhetoric of nineteenth-century Church-State conflicts.
But, in what followed, Hitler forsoo
Feh, you're both wrong. Hitler was definitely not a devout Catholic (or Christian at all, for that matter), you're right about that. But neither was he an occultist. There's no evidence that he planned military operations using astrology or numerology - at least, no evidence outside of trashy pseudohistorical paperbacks. If you've got any I'd love to see it! (OTOH, Himmler was definitely very interested in all manner of dodgy pseudosciences.)
Hey, you might like cricket too - my attitudes to sport generally range from indifference to contempt, but I like cricket for much the same reasons as you like baseball...
The President has no influence at all over Congress? He doesn't send a proposed budget to Congress? Strange, I must have dropped in from a parallel universe.
Quite so. The same was true of virtually all the world's aviation industries before WWI (such as they were) - they depended upon, or at least hungered mightily for, military contracts. In any event there was basically no civilian use for aircraft beyond joyriding until after WWI (when airlines and airmail services came along).
Radar was also invented before the war. But probably just as important as mere invention is development - aeroplanes were invented well before WWI, for example, but their use in that war pushed their development along tremendously.
I never said anything about seeing. I was talking about scintillation, a subset of seeing. Nor did I imply that only optical wavelengths could have seeing or scintillation. My point was that, contrary to your post, scintillation is in fact the proper term for "twinkling", whether or no the term has other astronomical meanings. I'm not sure why this should be problematic.
Ditto. I have often wondered why, out of all the versions of WotW that are out there, we couldn't have one, just ONE period version even remotely like the novel. (Oh, and hopefully it would be a good film, too!) Thankfully, the answer appears to be: there's no reason why not, and here's the film you requested:)
I saw Things to Come just recently (Wells himself wrote the screenplay). It was pretty good (if you can get past the cheese factor). The first third, depicting an air raid on Everytown (ie London) and the world's descent into barbarism during a decades-long war was very effective. The middle part (where the airmen from Basra - of all places! - impose peace upon what's left of the world) - was less effectively dramatically, I felt, but has some very good performances, ideas, and sets. The last third was a bit silly, involving the preparations for a trip to the Moon via a massive cannon (Wells should have known better) and the attempts by a technophobic demagogue to stir up the masses to smash the cannon (ie to stop progress, as it makes noone happy). But the sets are fantastic, in that (now) retro-futuristic way, and there is some stirring over-the-top philosophizing at the end. Overall, definitely worth seeing.
That is what I though you were referring to. It's really only a Wild Ass Guess. Yes even Mr. Hawking makes those in the face of extremely little research and data.
It's not a "Wild Ass Guess", Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel in 1993 for their discovery of a binary pulsar system which is slowing down precisely as predicted by general relativity - because the gravitational waves being emitted are carrying off energy. See here.
(Yes, I know you mean ripples in spacetime. But it's pretty clear that the other poster
thought you meant gravitational waves, and that's what
the Hawking quote was about, too.)
I hadn't thought of it like that, that's more plausible - still, I'd want contemporary evidence. If he had such a pathological fear of gas there should be some evidence in all his rantings and ravings.
I have also heard it suggested that he mistakenly thought the Allies also had the more deadly types of nerve agents that Germany had already developed, and so feared retaliation, not so much for his own life but for the destruction it would cause to Germany. But then again, he never showed much concern for Germany's well-being on other occasions, and towards the end was more than happy for his adopted country to burn along with him. So why didn't he ever use it as a weapon of last resort? It's all a mystery to me...
Not being a historian I'm not familiar with Paxton and only moderately familiar with the others.
He has a new book out called The Anatomy of Fascism. I haven't read it yet but have read a paper of his proposing a model of fascism emphasizing the different stages a fascist movement goes through over time, which was really excellent. So I'm looking forward to his book now.
I think racism can be a part of fascism if only to unite the unwashed massed against something, but I suppose if the uniting bit has already been done, say with nationalism, then racism need not be a part of Fascism. Although I guess you could argue that Nationalism is just another form of Racism
Certainly fascism is conducive to racism and it has indeed been argued that nationalism is a form of racism and perhaps you are right (though I tend to think the opposite, that racism is an extreme form of nationalism). I think it's easy to play word games here, though - people seem to find a definition of fascism that they like and then start redefining other concepts to fit their pet definition. It has been argued quite seriously that Nazism was so different to Fascism (ie Italian fascism) that it was not a fascism at all, for example, which to me is quite absurd!
Yes, there is certaintly a distinct whiff of something unpleasant about u-238's posts taken in toto... OTOH, as far as I am concerned the post I was objecting to was this one, particulary where it says When you say "That was their ethos" you should consider who do you mean by "they". Them-Nazis? Sure, you're right. Them-German scientitst? You are obviously wrong. It's not obviously wrong that scientists could share the Nazi ethos, because some scientists were Nazis too. But I would agree that science under the Nazis didn't progess because of Nazi ideology, if that's u-238's intention, it progressed despite it. At most, some sciences made progress because they were heavily supported by the regime for their military potential, but that's not little to do with ideology per se, it could have happened under any non-Nazi German government involved in total war. Rockets certaintly aren't specifically Nazi.
Well, when I said it was hard to pin down I was referring to debates about the definition of fascism amongst historians (eg Roger Griffin, Stanley Payne, Roger Eatwell, Robert Paxton) who unfortunately don't seem to have read the wikipedia entry! Certainly at least some of those things you mention are involved, but for example I am so far persuaded that racism (as distinct from ultranationalism) played little part in the first fascism, in Italy. So racism can't be an essential part of any "fascist minimum". Anyway, my main concern was to point out that fascism is not about economics, as the OP suggested, so I tried to show the sorts of elements that might be involved without offering a counter-definition.
I suggest you check out some off-line sources if you think the definition of fascism is simple - it is far more contested than that of socialism, for example.
Sorry, not really a response to your post but... is it just me or is Stross' Singularity Sky modelled on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5? Outpost of a decrepit empire is attacked [Port Arthur], in response they send their outmoded main fleet on an unprecendently epic journey to repel the invaders, on the way accidentally destroy civilian ships from a neutral power [Dogger Bank], and when they arrive at their destination get annihilated in short order [Tsushima]. Even many of the names are Russian and there is an ancien regime Europe feel to the setting too.
Hmmm, while there are certaintly discontinuities in the early history of SF, I think you are exaggerating. Wells wrote popular SF right up to 1914 (and beyond of course, into the 1920s and 1930s, The Shape of Things to Come and all that), and there were lots of juvenile and other SF stories and novels being written right up to the time when Gernsback started pushing scientifiction. Gernsback didn't create or even re-create SF, he marketed it, gave it a label and a place to publish it. IMHO anyway. See Bleiler's catalogue of pre-1930 SF for many glorious examples of the genre in the years before Hugo. And people like Olaf Stapledon could write amazing SF without even being aware there was any such thing...
So how many of the miraculous bits have been "successfully cross-checked" by historians? Sure, there's lots of more or less historical bits in there, but also lots of fantasy. Call it historical fantasy then, something like Mary Gentle's books.
At a guess, if the GP doesn't like near-future stuff then he probably likes Vinge for his far-future stuff... A Fire upon the Deep and A Darkness in the Sky. Dontcha think??
Spot on, anyone who spent much time on Usenet back in the day would recognise the types of posters, rants, vague requests, boasting, flamewars, etc that went on back there. He even based some of the participants on real people, eg "Sander at the Zoo" is supposedly Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.utoronto.edu, a well known and prolific Usenet participant). It was quite well done, I must read it again some day... but it wasn't quite plausible as an interstellar communications network!
Slashdot Mirror
You can do this already - you put your bookmarks on a thing called a "web site". Check it out!
No, this does not depend upon the definition of "devout". I said the best consensus of historians is that he wasn't Christian. If you don't know what that means, look it up. Saying that historians are divided on the question of Hitler's christianity is like saying saying biologists are divided on the question of evolution. Go read some books (yes, books! not websites!) by some historians (yes, historians! not polemicists!) like Ian Kershaw, Joachim Fest, Alan Bullock, Richard Overy. Get a fuller understanding of both how historians approach and understand historical evidence and of the historical context in which Hitler made such remarks. Then maybe you will realise why I have no time for websites which cherrypick quotes from Hitler without trying to understand why he said what he did, who he was talking to, and what he hoped to gain thereby.
As for your other "evidence": yes, he was raised a Catholic. So what? So was I. Stalin even trained as a Russian Orthodox priest. Familarity can breed contempt.
I've never heard that he was a practising Catholic. He never went to Mass, as far as I know. He attended church only for state occasions. (Eg Hindenburg's funeral.)
Manifestos are hardly devoid of expediency. Politicians write them to appear bold and visionary when they want to get elected. He wrote it in Landsberg prison after his failed putsch, when he was moving towards a parliamentary path towards seizing power. There were no votes in being anti-Christian (or at least those that there were, were sewn up by the communists), therefore he dressed up his rhetoric in pious invocations of divine guidance and so on. The particular philosophy he was trying to promote was racism, not religion. Just ask yourself: would an atheist campaigning for the Presidency of the United States openly say "Hey, your god is rubbish - one day I'm going to destroy your church too, if you vote for me?" No. He'd lie about it or he wouldn't get elected.
Oh the other stuff I won't go into, you keep saying it's "clear" or "certain" that he was Christian, but you don't actually back it up with any evidence. Please give me some REAL references, I'm on a university campus, I'd be quite happy to check them out. (Oh, and it's quite obvious you didn't bother to check those "references" you gave : only one is a book (by a respected historian, John Cornwell), but the others are websites, of which three actually argue against his Christianity - in fact, one of them I had already cited to you! The "Hitler was a Christian" links are just more of the same superficial posturings by atheists and secularists.)
I don't think Hitler was a Christian by any sensible definition of the term. I have yet to see any good evidence for that. I don't think he was an atheist either, or a pagan or occultist. He did have vaguely mystical, semi-religious, perhaps pantheistic beliefs, but his god was his race.
Hitler made plenty of pious references to Christianity in public. In private he made many derogatory comments about it; you can read many of them here and here. (Yes, those pages are both by Christians. But unlike those rather lame sites you gave, these at least mention the evidence on the other side of the argument, and examine the views of actual historians, quoting them at length. So I have no qualms in citing them.) Have you never heard of a politician lying to the public before now? Furthermore, he made a pact with the Catholic Church which had clear political benefits for him, as something like 30% or more of Germans (from memory) were Catholics, and so the Church represented a possible source of opposition to his regime. The pact eliminated that threat cheaply. Finally, here's a quote from a respected recent historian of the Third Reich, Michael Burleigh:
LOL, fair enough :) Me, I probably should read more of them ...
Feh, you're both wrong. Hitler was definitely not a devout Catholic (or Christian at all, for that matter), you're right about that. But neither was he an occultist. There's no evidence that he planned military operations using astrology or numerology - at least, no evidence outside of trashy pseudohistorical paperbacks. If you've got any I'd love to see it! (OTOH, Himmler was definitely very interested in all manner of dodgy pseudosciences.)
Hey, you might like cricket too - my attitudes to sport generally range from indifference to contempt, but I like cricket for much the same reasons as you like baseball ...
The President has no influence at all over Congress? He doesn't send a proposed budget to Congress? Strange, I must have dropped in from a parallel universe.
Quite so. The same was true of virtually all the world's aviation industries before WWI (such as they were) - they depended upon, or at least hungered mightily for, military contracts. In any event there was basically no civilian use for aircraft beyond joyriding until after WWI (when airlines and airmail services came along).
Radar was also invented before the war. But probably just as important as mere invention is development - aeroplanes were invented well before WWI, for example, but their use in that war pushed their development along tremendously.
I never said anything about seeing. I was talking about scintillation, a subset of seeing. Nor did I imply that only optical wavelengths could have seeing or scintillation. My point was that, contrary to your post, scintillation is in fact the proper term for "twinkling", whether or no the term has other astronomical meanings. I'm not sure why this should be problematic.
It can mean two things. And it does. But I see you're a radio guy, so you probably weren't to know!
Ditto. I have often wondered why, out of all the versions of WotW that are out there, we couldn't have one, just ONE period version even remotely like the novel. (Oh, and hopefully it would be a good film, too!) Thankfully, the answer appears to be: there's no reason why not, and here's the film you requested :)
I saw Things to Come just recently (Wells himself wrote the screenplay). It was pretty good (if you can get past the cheese factor). The first third, depicting an air raid on Everytown (ie London) and the world's descent into barbarism during a decades-long war was very effective. The middle part (where the airmen from Basra - of all places! - impose peace upon what's left of the world) - was less effectively dramatically, I felt, but has some very good performances, ideas, and sets. The last third was a bit silly, involving the preparations for a trip to the Moon via a massive cannon (Wells should have known better) and the attempts by a technophobic demagogue to stir up the masses to smash the cannon (ie to stop progress, as it makes noone happy). But the sets are fantastic, in that (now) retro-futuristic way, and there is some stirring over-the-top philosophizing at the end. Overall, definitely worth seeing.
It's not a "Wild Ass Guess", Hulse and Taylor won the Nobel in 1993 for their discovery of a binary pulsar system which is slowing down precisely as predicted by general relativity - because the gravitational waves being emitted are carrying off energy. See here.
(Yes, I know you mean ripples in spacetime. But it's pretty clear that the other poster thought you meant gravitational waves, and that's what the Hawking quote was about, too.)
WarGames. I love that movie too ...
I have also heard it suggested that he mistakenly thought the Allies also had the more deadly types of nerve agents that Germany had already developed, and so feared retaliation, not so much for his own life but for the destruction it would cause to Germany. But then again, he never showed much concern for Germany's well-being on other occasions, and towards the end was more than happy for his adopted country to burn along with him. So why didn't he ever use it as a weapon of last resort? It's all a mystery to me ...
He has a new book out called The Anatomy of Fascism. I haven't read it yet but have read a paper of his proposing a model of fascism emphasizing the different stages a fascist movement goes through over time, which was really excellent. So I'm looking forward to his book now.
I think racism can be a part of fascism if only to unite the unwashed massed against something, but I suppose if the uniting bit has already been done, say with nationalism, then racism need not be a part of Fascism. Although I guess you could argue that Nationalism is just another form of Racism
Certainly fascism is conducive to racism and it has indeed been argued that nationalism is a form of racism and perhaps you are right (though I tend to think the opposite, that racism is an extreme form of nationalism). I think it's easy to play word games here, though - people seem to find a definition of fascism that they like and then start redefining other concepts to fit their pet definition. It has been argued quite seriously that Nazism was so different to Fascism (ie Italian fascism) that it was not a fascism at all, for example, which to me is quite absurd!
Yes, there is certaintly a distinct whiff of something unpleasant about u-238's posts taken in toto ... OTOH, as far as I am concerned the post I was objecting to was this one, particulary where it says When you say "That was their ethos" you should consider who do you mean by "they". Them-Nazis? Sure, you're right. Them-German scientitst? You are obviously wrong. It's not obviously wrong that scientists could share the Nazi ethos, because some scientists were Nazis too. But I would agree that science under the Nazis didn't progess because of Nazi ideology, if that's u-238's intention, it progressed despite it. At most, some sciences made progress because they were heavily supported by the regime for their military potential, but that's not little to do with ideology per se, it could have happened under any non-Nazi German government involved in total war. Rockets certaintly aren't specifically Nazi.
I suggest you check out some off-line sources if you think the definition of fascism is simple - it is far more contested than that of socialism, for example.
Sorry, not really a response to your post but ... is it just me or is Stross' Singularity Sky modelled on the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-5? Outpost of a decrepit empire is attacked [Port Arthur], in response they send their outmoded main fleet on an unprecendently epic journey to repel the invaders, on the way accidentally destroy civilian ships from a neutral power [Dogger Bank], and when they arrive at their destination get annihilated in short order [Tsushima]. Even many of the names are Russian and there is an ancien regime Europe feel to the setting too.
Hmmm, while there are certaintly discontinuities in the early history of SF, I think you are exaggerating. Wells wrote popular SF right up to 1914 (and beyond of course, into the 1920s and 1930s, The Shape of Things to Come and all that), and there were lots of juvenile and other SF stories and novels being written right up to the time when Gernsback started pushing scientifiction. Gernsback didn't create or even re-create SF, he marketed it, gave it a label and a place to publish it. IMHO anyway. See Bleiler's catalogue of pre-1930 SF for many glorious examples of the genre in the years before Hugo. And people like Olaf Stapledon could write amazing SF without even being aware there was any such thing ...
So how many of the miraculous bits have been "successfully cross-checked" by historians? Sure, there's lots of more or less historical bits in there, but also lots of fantasy. Call it historical fantasy then, something like Mary Gentle's books.
At a guess, if the GP doesn't like near-future stuff then he probably likes Vinge for his far-future stuff ... A Fire upon the Deep and A Darkness in the Sky. Dontcha think??
Spot on, anyone who spent much time on Usenet back in the day would recognise the types of posters, rants, vague requests, boasting, flamewars, etc that went on back there. He even based some of the participants on real people, eg "Sander at the Zoo" is supposedly Henry Spencer, henry@zoo.utoronto.edu, a well known and prolific Usenet participant). It was quite well done, I must read it again some day ... but it wasn't quite plausible as an interstellar communications network!