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The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich<\/em>, William L. Shirer. Simon & Schuster, 1959. 1,252 pages.<\/strong><\/p>\n If I had read this book five years ago, I would have read it pretty much purely as history. Barack Obama was still president of the United States. Having elected its first black president and experienced eight years of economic recovery with competent, scandal-free government, America seemed to have outgrown its worst vices. Now we know that America has not<\/em> outgrown its worst vices.<\/p>\n In writing this post, three times I’ve written something angry, and three times I’ve deleted it. Instead of venting my anger over the ugly turn in American history that we are now living through, I think I’ll just say this: There is no better time to read this book than now. Adolf Hitler, of course, was character number 1 in this history. Just behind him were Hermann Goering (who cheated the hangman with suicide by cyanide) and the others who had great power who were hanged at Nuremberg. There were hundreds more with lesser roles whose names are on the historical record. And there were the millions of nameless Germans who should have known better but didn’t. If you read this book now, you will recognize these people, because today people just like them are still with us. That these people today have not acquired the power to do the damage the Nazis did, or that they’d be satisfied with domination and oligarchy and anti-democracy tyranny rather than genocide, says little about their character. They are the same people. <\/p>\n We are fortunate that so many records survived to document this history: the secret government records captured in Berlin, the diaries, the letters, and the Nuremberg interrogations, depositions, and testimony. Those are the sources that Shirer used to write this history. <\/p>\n Shirer writes, in his afterword to the 1990 edition:<\/p>\n “Perhaps it will help too if the erring governments and the wondering people of this world will remember the dark night of Nazi terror and genocide that almost engulfed our world and that is the subject of this book. Remembrance of the past helps us to understand the present.”<\/p>\n If only the worst people among us could recognize what they are and how eager they are to be misled. But, because of what they are, I doubt that they ever will.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, William L. Shirer. Simon & Schuster, 1959. 1,252 pages. If I had read this book five years ago, I would have read it pretty much purely as history. Barack Obama was still president of the United States. Having elected its first black president and experienced eight years … Continue reading “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,22,8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","category-literature","category-political-issues"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19003"}],"version-history":[{"count":21,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19003\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19025,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19003\/revisions\/19025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/acornabbey.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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