The Complete Idiot's Guide to...

...European History

That's what I'm reading right now. I haven't been reading many novels of late, just educational stuff. Sometimes that happens, although this is an admittedly long phase of all-educational reading. But I love learning new things, or brushing up on things I knew and I certainly don't mind being addicted to this line of reading.

Anyway, I'm nearly at the end. I'm about to begin Chapter 22, The Cold War Era. I just finished Chapter 21, World War: Second Verse, Worse Than the First. That covered World War II, Mussolini, Stalin, Hitler and all the atrocities Stalin and Hitler committed. Mussolini, while no great prize, wasn't the wholesale mass murderer that both Stalin (between 7 and 10 million Russians killed or "purged") and Hitler (between 6 and 12 million Jews and non-Aryans systematically killed) were. These people were monsters. And their timing was perfect for them to make a permanent blood-stained mark on history in a really big way. Although Stalin doesn't seem to attract the fascination and infamy that Hitler has, it may be that he is the largest-scale mass murder on record for killing off people - certainly for killing his own compatriots he is hands-down the winner. Hitler was more an equal opportunity mass murder and had a whole laundry list of races and diverse living styles of humanity that he happily wanted to off.

I may not practice Judaism in any way, shape or form, but I am, in point of fact, considered Jewish. My maternal grandmother was Jewish, and you know how that works (Jews are considerably more practical in establishing lines of descent. It is done through the mother, not the father, as paternity can be suspect). So I am by Jewish doctrine, Jewish. I'm perfectly OK with that. I like to point it out with great pride to anti-Semitic people who think they know me and see them stammer and stutter and say, "Oh, I'm really not against Jewish people." I worked for someone who made a lot of openly anti-Semitic remarks until I dropped that little bomb and then, at least in my earshot, it stopped! Point for me...!

Anyway, I find the whole Hitler thing fascinating to read about. It is horrifying and terrible and it never ceases to amaze me that man can commit such atrocities to his fellow man. And that so many people rallied behind this incredible madman to take up his cause. I don't doubt that a large number of adherents did it to survive and really did not buy into it, but huge numbers did love his twisted philosophies and did buy into ALL of it and happily took up the flag he carried. And then actually went forward in systematically killing in cold blood all those millions of people.

I understand it when diseases rampage the earth and kill off thousands upon thousands of people. It isn't nice and it isn't fun but it is just the course of nature and survival of the fittest. Sometimes humanity is the fittest and sometimes some teeny little germ or bacteria or virus is the fittest and weeds out tons of us in an effort to survive. But when one human being conspires to commit genocide on any scale... that is not nature, that is not just survival of the fittest. It is WRONG.

I am firm believer that if a cure is found for cancer, all or most of the various forms of cancer, something else will rise to the fore to take cancer's place in the line-up of diseases/health conditions that will kill wholesale amounts of people. Nature is struggling to keep a balance of creatures and we keep screwing up everything by wildly procreating, living well past the one-time age range of humans and keeping the death toll down and the birth rates up. That is just the balance of nature. And nature will continue to keep that fight going, whether it is cancer, AIDS, Ebola, natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanoes, hurricanes, tornadoes, etc.), or other bizarre twists of natural fate that attempt to get the numbers of humanity back into a manageable level.

I am not a firm believer that this job needs to fall to mankind.

And what happened? After World War I, erroneously called "the War to end all Wars", where did we go wrong? Well. Some of it was timing, some of it was looking the other way while Hitler was showing signs of being a future disaster looking for a place to happen, some of it was just sheer screaming stupidity. There were, as with anything on so large a scale, a mulititude of factors that contributed to history turning out as it did. Even hindsight is not always 20/20. Clearly we don't always see those past lessons cropping up again.

Thankfully, neither did Hitler. Had he read about Napoleon, he might have had a clue as to how well invading Russia would have gone, once the brutal Russian winter set in. Clearly he missed the big red flags associated with invading a country accustomed to such horrific winter weather. Good thing, for us, really. I wouldn't wish to imagine the world had Hitler managed to meet all of his goals. What a pity he committed suicide, too. Seeing a minority commit his execution would have been much more fitting an end to such as he.

Reading. What a wonderful thing!