18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 37

[cahn]

More diaries of our favorite 18th-century Prussian diary-keeper have been unearthed and have been synopsized!

January 18th: Blessed be thou to me! Under your light, my Prince Heinrich was born!

Comments

Re: Most ruthless?

[mildred_of_midgard]

let's not forget

By which we mean, "Thank you for telling us, Selena, because we never learned this to forget it in the first place." :)

You probably know this already, but American education on WWII and the Holocaust is pretty sparse compared to the same in Europe. I have seen some significant culture clashes just based on "Is X emotionally charged for you, because the first thing that comes to mind for you when you see it is the Holocaust, or is the connection of X to the Holocaust something you've never heard of, or at best an obscure historical fact you might have learned once for an exam and then forgotten?"

Mind you, I've seen the same in reverse for the genocide of Native Americans!

it never ceases to amaze me - and illustrate how much these monsters believed their own lies - that Goebbels told Hitler about Roosevelt's death by saying "The Czarina Elizabeth has died".

Yep! That's the first sentence of Szabo's book:

On the evening of Friday 13 April 1945, Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels excitedly phoned General Theodor Busse, commander of the German 9th Army on the Eastern Front, and announced: 'The Czarina is dead!'

5 sentences later, you get the "not as ruthless as Fritz" comparison.

Truman really, really, REALLY isn't Peter III style into you!

I think we're all thankful Truman was the anti-Peter III!

Re: Most ruthless?

[cahn]

By which we mean, "Thank you for telling us, Selena, because we never learned this to forget it in the first place." :)

HAHA QUOTED FOR TRUTH

You probably know this already, but American education on WWII and the Holocaust is pretty sparse compared to the same in Europe.

Yes, for sure. Although I will say that my education on WWI was an order of magnitude worse than my education on WWII, because at least for the latter I got some pop WWII fictionalization and so on, but there was much less of that for WWI.