Marie Antoinette in her own words | HistoryExtra - "‘It was also not a foregone conclusion that Marie Antoinette would be executed. If we think back to the role of the Queen of France, I mean even nowadays France isn't very good at giving women a place in politics. And in Marie Antoinette’s day the only role for the Queen of France is to be the consort and to produce children and then possibly, and this had been ruled out from Marie Antoinette by the revolutionaries, possibly being the Regent if their son was an orphan before they were old enough to become the king. So the queen has absolutely no political role, no political power. It's very telling if you look at pictures of the coronation of Louis XVI, Antoinette is among the spectators sitting you know on the balcony and not at all in this very male ceremony where the king is being crowned and in that respect the revolutionaries didn't need to execute her because executing the King was one thing because by executing the king they were stopping a political regime, they were beheading the regime in a sense and not just beheading the individual. Marie Antoinette didn't represent anything she was you know just the king's wife and if we think to another case not very far down the line that of Emperor Napoleon III who was deposed his wife Empress Eugenie was allowed to live in exile to the end of her days, you know and died in her bed and it could quite easily have happened to Marie Antoinette. Her marriage contract said they know she was widowed, she could go back to Austria... I think she was executed because the climate was so appalling in France at the time that there needed to be ways of uniting some of the Revolutionary factions and by executing Marie Antoinette, by you know putting a hated symbol to death the idea was that that would um create a bond uh between uh different factions'"
The history of atheism: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "‘The church has become a real locus of, I say the churches, one church in particular um becomes a real locuus of resistance and of of um reforming an identity against um against communism. I think one of the the lessons of the the eastern and western experiences of atheism in the in the 20th century, the the Communist and capitalist experiences, um is that communism tried much harder than anyone in the capitalist world ever did to exterminate Christianity, but capitalism actually did the job much more effectively'...
‘How is the character of contemporary atheism different from its predecessors? So I guess where are we at with atheism at the moment? How does it look now compared to say 200 years ago?’
‘That's, that's a really good question. I mean in some ways freakishly similar to how it looked 200 years ago. You know if if you were to to pick up you know the the writings of the so-called new atheists, that kind of Dawkins and um Dennett and others in the in the early 20th century, there's not much in there that would have been unfamiliar to the anti-Christian polemicists of the, of the Enlightenment, of the 19th century. There's a few elements, some of the, obviously there's modern bits of science that are being applied to it but it's a, it's a basically familiar structure. Indeed quite a lot of it would seem comprehensible to Lucretius in ancient times. So in some ways these are perennial themes. And I think if you look at Atheism in a philosophical sense, that's true. But if you look at it as a, as a social phenomenon and I mean obviously here the the really extraordinary thing is the way that, explicit unbelief, that identifying as having no religion has gone from being a marginal and extreme position in in Western societies, you know within living memory, to becoming in many social contexts not just the norm, but you know a norm from which it's really unusual to dissent in some, in some circles. I mean that's a, that's a really remarkable phenomenon. It's happened and it's happened very quickly and I mean this is all kind of a sort of, you know the 1960s is I think classically and correctly seen as the, as the, as the pivot of this. One of the features of that shift towards a very widespread unbelief in the in the modern era is that it's it has felt intuitive to many of the people who embrace, it just kind of seems obvious to a great many people now to identify as as as having no religion, without necessarily any clear sense of why it seems obvious. I mean my reading of this is that it's above all to do with ethics, the way that providing an ethical framework, a real sense of what, what is right and wrong was, maybe the key social function of religion up until the early to mid 20th century. But post-second World War posed the extraordinary moral shock of the, of of of the Nazi Genocide, the emergence of, of human rights as a as a moral norm, human rights being something that we all believe, in you know. I believe in, but we struggle to articulate why. Where do human beings get these rights from? You know it's a real kind of castle in the air. But it is one that we, that we absolutely affirm and have that, have that faith in and therefore it feels that religion in general Christianity in particular no longer, it, you know it's it's kind of redundant. Um it doesn't doesn't serve that purpose anymore. If that's so then my suspicion is that our modern consensus around the lack of a need for any kind of religious structure, that you know we we can simply place our place our faith in this this new ethical system, I think it's a lot more fragile than it looks. That it's, it depends on on a set of of intuitions which we assume we all share. I think it's reasonable to look at the history of our societies and of the world over the last 10 years or so and, and think actually some things are kind of unraveling and that the the consensus that we all thought we, we held is not nearly as firm as as we liked to to imagine. So my guess is that both belief and unbelief, at the moment, you know those those two old dancing partners, are at a, at an inflection point. Stuff's gonna change uh over the over the next 10, 20, 30 years. It can't carry on the way it is, but you know I'm a historian. I don't know about the future. So don't ask me to predict what's actually going to happen. Just the blithe faith that many of us have that the world will carry on more or less the way it is it seems to me ill-founded’"
Fleeing revolution: Russian exiles in Paris | HistoryExtra - "‘Many of the aristocrats who who land, landed up there and the officer class, the well-educated people, the men only knew one thing and that was that they'd known the military life in the white Russian army, so they could maybe drive a car. Or drive a, be chauffeurs or taxi drivers. And the Russian taxi drivers in Paris became legendary. But many of the aristocrats and one of them said this Grand Duke Dmitri Pavlovich, her sister Maria Pavlovna, who said well we just didn't know how to earn a living. These people have lived incredibly privileged lives. They'd never had to lift a finger. They never had to you know carry money around with them particularly. So these people suddenly had to support themselves and the extraordinary thing about the women, and again this goes back to a catchphrase that was in circulation was that the men drive taxes and the women sew for a living because interestingly the one thing all these genteel ladies could do was sew. Because many of them being brought up at home with governesses have been taught to sew and embroider. So many of them actually set up their own fashion houses and Maria Pavlovna is a case in point... It was the women who kept the men going. Because unless the men were, most of the Russian men were waiting tables or being MCs at posh Russian star restaurants or driving taxis or working on the assembly line at Renault but there are many many stories including even in George Orwell's wonderful classic account Down and Out in Paris and London where he had a friend called Boris and they used to troop the streets of Paris together looking for work and they both end up washing dishes. And that is not an exaggeration, a lot of Russians, men even. You know the humiliation they had to suffer having perhaps come from a very good profession in Russia, being reduced to washing dishes and washing windows and and doing the most awful menial jobs’...
‘There's a there's a story about a a factory worker from Russia who uh I don't know if this is a true story or apocryphal, wearing a tie on the factory line’...
‘The men on the Renault line… it was said you could always tell the Russian workers cos they dressed smartly and wore a tie. And this is where you see the, the kind of problems of integration rearing their head. The French workers didn't like the Russians. Why? Because the Russians turned up on time, they were never late, they did a job, they took their pay without argument, they did not go on strike. Because they'd come out of Russia penniless. The last thing they were gonna do is risk their jobs. So because the Russians were such good reliable workers, a lot of the French workers especially at places like the Renault Factory looked on them as scabs. Because they wouldn't strike and they wouldn't be bolshy and fight for more money’"
A journey along the Iron Curtain | HistoryExtra - "‘It was not uniform. It was not uniform uh across the length of the European continent and also it was not uniform across the decades of the Cold War. The most kind of Infamous manifestation I suppose is the Berlin Wall. Solid concrete, a death zone, various booby traps to prevent you even getting close to the wall. Um and lots of uh personnel uh deployed constantly to spot anyone who was about to try. There were actually several mini Berlins along the inner German border. So other villages um which happened to straddle the border or were too close to the border and ended up with a Berlin style wall running through them. Really ridiculously, in one case skirting the edge of a duck pond. The kind of the, the next tier down was also in Germany. Germany was always a place of great fear for those in in the East who mostly built these fortifications because the people on either side spoke the same language, so there was an additional draw in terms of the feasibility of escaping and making a new life on the other side. Mostly there you're looking at really dense, uh, stainless steel mesh fencing from the 1960s onwards. And again, a death strip, self-firing devices which would shoot shrapnel into your body if you triggered them when you touched the fence. And lots of watchtowers. However as I said if you go up to the top of Norway where Norway and the Soviet Union met it was a kind of barbed wire fence that you might see um, in a field to stop cows going from one property to another. There were also lots of checkpoints. And there were missile silos, particularly along the Soviet Baltic Coast, so there was a kind of early warning system there which was supposed to deploy missiles. Not nuclear but missiles to prevent a conventional attack by sea. When you get down to the very end of the journey in *something* as you travel out of Azerbaijan back into Turkey what you see is that that's where a kind of two sets of geopolitics meet um because you also have the Azerbaijani and Turkish borders with Iran which was not an easy border either. And so one set of um barbed wire fences suddenly gives way to another as you're funneled towards the checkpoint at the very narrow tip of *something* into Turkey… Lubeck is the West German City that lay closest to the inner German border to the Iron Curtain. Lubeck has a famous holiday resort, seaside resort called Travemünde which is famous for Thomas Mann living there and um for being a kind of big draw for a German tourists in the 1970s. Some nudists in Travemünde were lobbying to get a stretch of the beach that would permanently be a nudist beach and the local council being prudish didn't want to put it slap bang in between all the other beaches where clothed people or textiles as they're known in German nudist culture would be passing back and forward. So instead they allotted a stretch of sand right beside the Iron Curtain. So basically you walked as far along the beach as you could on the pre-val [sp?] peninsula and then suddenly the nnudist beach starts and where it ends is the enormous fundamental mesh stainless steel fence of the East Germans with a watchtower immediately alongside. So from 1975 West German nudists were overlooked not so much by other West Germans but by East Germans in a control tower. Now an interesting kind of paradox of this which we think the West German authorities weren't really aware of is that nudism was far more popular in East Germany than it was in West Germany and and far less frowned upon which is perhaps one of the most strange facts I think about East Germany that I learned in the trip, because you don't associate that culture more generally with kind of a free attitude towards how people behave but um because the East German government wouldn't allow there to be nudist clubs because you couldn't have any clubs that weren't socialist or linked somehow to the party, basically they kind of uh decentralized um nudism and people just took to taking their clothes off when they were on any beach. So there is a famous, infamous story of the people in the watchtower one day finding a sense of humor, which was very unusual and coming out of the watchtower and stripping off and having a skinny dip themselves while the West German nudists looked on from across the fence...
In this little part of Austria and Hungary on the border in the countryside they agreed they were going to have a picnic in August 1989 where locals would come and there would be a ceremonial cutting of the barbed wire fence and then they would each be able to go across and eat food in the other’s country and the others village really for the first time. This got known about much more widely because East Germans still couldn't travel West at all really and lots of East Germans had come on their holidays to Hungary that summer and were looking for ways to escape. That was a kind of typical East German holiday type activity throughout the 1970s and 1980s, trying to escape on your holidays where it might be easier than in East Germany’"
A secret Nazi plot to kill the ‘Big Three’ | HistoryExtra - "'You have this moment in history where, and you'll see it, we've throughout the entire book, um where you have this egotistical leader who says that he can fix all the problems in the world, who uses people's fears, uses their economic disadvantages to his advantage, you know promises them a better life as long as we can get rid of those people, and we can be the rightful leaders, because this is our rightful country, and you I know you can very clearly tell I'm talking about Adolf Hitler, but my gosh that sounds so familiar today especially here in the United States. And for us the reason why we tell the story, I mean we are still in 2023, we're still fighting Nazis, we're still fighting authoritarianism, we're still fighting people who want to go after quote unquote those people and fighting anti-Semitism at rates that are unheard of. And to me all these stories are not just hey here's something interesting about the Nazis you never knew. The reason we tell these stories is to remind you that these stories are repeating’...
‘There were so many parallels between what we learned about then and today and and really I I mean this is something that of course we've all learned before. We've all learned about the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany. Unspeakable, unfathomable but when you really spend some time living in that time period you just see how close we were to a true global calamity and how frightening it was. And how it started with just a political movement that you know is kind of familiar and that we see in different countries in the world today. And you just see how dangerous it is when that kind of intolerance uh and that kind of hate-based ideology takes hold and and what the repercussions are and what the consequences are. And it's just powerful. And it remains powerful today and it remains frightening today’"
Only liberals get to compare everything to the Holocaust, and only liberals get to invoke the slippery slope, while condemning others for doing the same or less
Why did the Ottoman empire implode? | HistoryExtra - "'It was very much believed within you know the senior, among senior leaders in the Ottoman Empire that with the Armenians gone the government would be able to administer its territories better. Economically the country would be stronger because Muslims would gain the economic benefits of these deported Armenians, whether it's their businesses or their lands. And that socially would be more cohesive. And it should be said you know kind of lastly and somewhat parenthetically that you know Armenians are not the only victims of these kinds of policies. Um we see you know similar kinds of policies enacted towards Greeks, um. Ottoman Greeks in the western part of uh of Anatolia. Um we see it even directed at Muslims including Kurds and Arabs. I think one of the big difference is that we don't see massacres but we do see not only deportations but a kind of willful effort to thin the populations of these different groups or at least a blatant disregard for the lives of those who are deported… the country will be better off, it will be stronger, it would be spiritually revitalized as a result of these policies'"
The Romantics: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'Yes it absolutely draws on elements of the gothic but actually if you read Frankenstein the novel as opposed to watching say Boris Karloff's film what you get is a book not particularly interested in in the actual mechanics of creation, it's a bit fuzzy about that. It's not really a proto-science fiction in terms of the fact. It just sort of happens. She doesn't really want to be bothered with telling you how but it's much more interested in the consequences of creating something which speaks to the scale of the human imagination but then becomes terrifying. So it's really about the potential of the human imagination to create something extraordinary and then to lose control of it, which is a very romantic idea... what characterizes all those works I just I've just named is they're all driven by a kind of preoccupation with what it means to be alive. You know what does it mean to be in the world, particularly to be in the world and when the world is in crisis. And there is also driving through all those works is what it's like to be young in the world. I mean yeah all those works are written by young men and women who are sort of in the process of working out what it is they think about politics, about society, about the world in which they live in, about their own role. So these are not abstract kind of philosophical questions. These are urgent questions'...
'At the point that Shelley and Mary Godwin meet, uh Shelley's already married to somebody else. Uh who has had one baby's been born, another’s on the way. So he abandons his first wife Harriet. He and Mary Godwin conduct a romance largely at the site of the grave of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft at Old Saint Pancreas Churchyard. They elope to France in the summer of 1814 taking Mary's stepsister Claire with them… there are experiments in what they variously call free love with Shelley's friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg in the, uh in 1814 and 1815. So there are various experiments in living which are highly idealistic but which cause a great deal of pain particularly in fact to the woman involved and as an old lady Claire writes about the degree of pain occasions by these these experiments in living but they are an attempt to live out the kind of philosophy of the poetry but philosophy and real life can be pretty difficult bed fellows and that's what they all find actually'...
‘How significant do you think it is that Keats Shelley and Byron all died fairly young?’
‘I think it's highly significant because they never have a chance to grow out of it themselves... the three younger poets never have a chance to outgrow their youthful radicalism. They never have to, kind of they never reach middle age and have to confront the work of their youth in the way that Wordsworth and Coleridge have to do, and Blake... the spy reports back in records which you can see at the National Archives that they are talking about a French spy, a French spy called Spy Nosy. But in fact what they're talking about is the philosopher Spinoza. So this is one of the stories which gets sort of told about the level of paranoia actually that they are encountering in their life’"
Since she doesn't believe Shelley was the mother of science fiction she must have internalised misogyny
Life under Cromwell: everything you wanted to know | HistoryExtra - "'The nation was always very divided over Oliver Cromwell. A lot of it was extremely hostile. Uh for one thing most of the nation was either royalist or neutral in the Civil War. Cromwell’s side were a political minority'...
‘Did he ban Christmas?’...
‘Cromwell himself never showed any interest in Christmas. But his party banned it while he was busy doing other things. 1647 when Cromwell's not very active in politics. It's a gap in his career. His boss’s Parliament abolish Easter Christmas and all the traditional religious holidays, because they regard them as being Catholic and Pagan in origin, with some reason. But what this means in practice is they don't abolish Father Christmas and mince pies. They just stop people going to church on Christmas Day and people who want to celebrate Christmas at home can carry on as much as ever. When it comes to traditional merry making, the ban on Christmas is pretty near a non-starter. They can close the churches but we have a great comment by an MP who's in the House of Commons on Christmas Day 1656 when the house is supposed to sit because it isn't a holiday anymore. And he comments on the fact there's practically nobody in the chamber and Sally adds that he's been kept awake all night by people celebrating a feast that's no longer supposed to exist... The ban on Christmas initially produced riots. The very first Christmas after the ban there were five towns and cities in which the populace rose up waving holly bushes and closed down shops that dared to open and beat up the police and generally uh were extremely rumbustious and enthusiastic in bringing Christmas onto the streets. But they were put down by soldiers. And after that things are quieter, but people just draw the curtains, close the doors and bring out the mince pies’"
Sabotage, cyberwar & assassination: a history of covert action | HistoryExtra - "It's it's the the absence of official records, the fact that these things are told through stories, they are easily mythologized… the popular perception hones in on the assassinations, the secret wars, the sabotage, the things that go bang. Um because they're the more visible ones, it's the things glamorized in James Bond, but even outside of James Bond newspapers, books, films write about things that go bang in the night whereas the vast majority of covert operations today and historically are influence operations, propaganda. They are intangible and they're more difficult to represent in a, in a really exciting way… we know more about the ones that have failed because if something was supposed to be secret and it's still secret and was a success then then it will still be secret, so historians like me don't know about it'...
'The British also forged uh some documents by uh Russian press agencies, by um, Chinese news agencies and most controversially of all by the Muslim Brotherhood and there's about four or five examples where Britain is using the Muslim Brotherhood to try to expose misdeeds, particularly by uh Arab leaders like Nasser of Egypt who of course is a bete noire of the British around the 1950s and 1960s. And he had used chemical gas in the Civil War in Yemen in the 1960s and Britain wanted people to know this. But they also know that if they said we the British government are telling you that Nasser used chemical weapons, um, but the people they wanted to believe that would dismiss it. The lying Brits. But in this case it was true, he had. So what they did is they they forged a Muslim Brotherhood document denouncing Nasser as being a bad Muslim etc etc etc, to try and convince that target audience that he was he was using uh chemical weapons. But in doing so, this is where it gets quite controversial, in doing so and it surprised me they had to use very aggressive language because that's how the Muslim Brotherhood wrote. Very aggressive, um people in terms of their extreme language, and the document for credibility purposes was, was littered with anti-Semitic references and criticisms of Israel. And the British justification of this was, we're not lying here, we're just trying to be credible. But in doing so it inadvertently was whipping up um anti-Semitism... British propaganda doesn't generally tend to lie… it uses fake sources to make things um make things credible'...
‘Which countries do tend to lie?’...
‘The most famous example from history is probably the Soviet Union's AIDS lie known as Operation Denver when in 1983 what they did was they planted a news story in an Indian newspaper which accused the Americans of creating the HIV/AIDS virus in a biological warfare lab in, in Maryland. And gradually over time this news article got picked up by different places and different papers and it it traveled. It traveled quite slowly but it traveled. And of course this was a lie, it was an outrageous lie, but it gained momentum and ended up, it's still, you can still see it manifesting itself in dark recesses of the internet even, even today. It's quite hard to shake off, even though the Soviets eventually acknowledged this and I think apologized at the end of the Cold War. The damage was done it's very difficult to get that genie back in the box’...
‘In 1964 the Americans rigged essentially the election in British Guyana… eventually a guy called Forbes Burnham got elected and Americans are delighted. They got rid of this awful Marxist and they've got this this more in theory pliable pro-western opponent. Unfortunately over the next 10, 15 years or so Burnham moves very much into the Soviet camp and does all the policies which the Americans didn't want um Jagan to do back in 1964 and there are so many examples of this where a covert operation has brought about a leader that the sponsors, they wanted but they're their own people. And I think it's it's dangerous to overestimate the success of the Hidden Hand and the agency of the CIA and others because ultimately things are very messy and it's difficult to get, it's very difficult to get that um that long-term change’"
Post-colonial people have no agency. It's all the CIA's fault for supporting puppets who do everything they're told to do!
Prehistoric cave art: everything you want to know | HistoryExtra - "'When we think of cave art traditionally it's effectively French and Spanish, with a few outliers. We have a little bit in the Czech Republic, a little bit in Germany, a little bit in Britain as well. So we should never think that everyone in the upper Paleolithic was doing cave art whenever they found a cave. It was probably only specific groups and those typically in the west of Europe'...
‘The interesting thing is while it really differs, and many caves can have a handful of images quite simple quite close to their entrances, others can often have several dozen or several hundred and they can really go back to the, the deepest part of the cave that humans can navigate through. So sometimes one gets the impression that it's almost a human marking of the cave to show that they've, you know effectively explored the whole depths of the cave and humanized it using that art if you like’...
‘Another suggestion when we do have, not cave art but figurines carved of females, often obese, sometimes pregnant females. Fertility has been suggested but again these are hunter-gatherer groups who would be concerned with keeping relatively small and you know not over exploiting the environment so that never really stuck. And then when we come through the 1960s and 70s the information age people suggest well maybe these are, you know didactic aids. Maybe they’re classroom images and so on which, I've never bought. You know, if you want to show your kids what a reindeer looks like you show them a reindeer. And if you want to show them what their hoof prints look like you show them their hoof prints. You certainly don't go into the depths of a dark and dangerous cave to draw images when you can draw them on hides in your campsite on the walls of your teepee or something like that’"
Patriarchy’s long roots | HistoryExtra - "'[The Shah] banned the veil, he said that women couldn't wear the veil. So during the Revolution women actually started taking up the veil as a symbol of opposition to the Shah, opposition to the authoritarian regime and solidarity with poorer and rural women who tended to, to veil at that period of time. So what's interesting is if you look at that history then the veil was a symbol of freedom from oppression, of liberation, paradoxically'"
So much for parading photos of 1960s Tehran to "prove" that Iran was a liberal country before the Islamic Revolution
Forgotten histories of the Holocaust | HistoryExtra - "‘Most Holocaust historiography from the end of the war onwards was based on the records captured and presented at Nuremberg in the, in the first International Military Tribunal and those documents, which are primarily German perpetrator documents, have formed the backbone of Holocaust historiography ever since. Although now supplemented with the vast range of other sources and I think that produced a picture which suggested that most Holocaust victims were German Jews. It's, I think inevitable if you write a book about the Holocaust and mine is no different, that you start with the persecution of the Jews in Germany in the years 1933 to 38, 39 and it gives the impression that the Jews of Germany were the main victims of the Holocaust. Whereas in fact they they as I tried to show in the book they make up no more than a couple of percent of the victims of the Holocaust and that's something that I think is very surprising to people. Because we still think of people like Anne Frank as representative victims of the Holocaust and and she was not. And and so that's the first thing that we need to think about, that the the victims of the Holocaust were from a much wider range of places than we tend automatically to assume but nevertheless the majority were orthodox, traditionally poor Jews living in what had formerly been the Pale of Settlement in in the Russian Empire. So the borderlands of Eastern Europe. What's today, well the borderlands of Poland, uh the Baltic states, Belarus and Ukraine. That's where the majority of the Holocaust victims were from and where most of them were killed as well. So it's it's quite a different picture from the one that we see when thinking about uh the German Jews. The other issue I think and this is something that is much more recent in terms of the development of the historiography that we see that the Holocaust was actually a worldwide phenomenon. And there's been much greater appreciation of this recently that there was a lot of transoceanic migration. Involved Jews trying to escape whether via Marseille or later via Lisbon, the last port where Jews could get out of Europe, um before and even after the war had started. Jews made their way any anywhere they could get visas to. Large numbers of Jews in Shanghai in uh Japanese occupied ,Manchuria in the Philippines, in Bolivia, in the Dominican Republic, in Mauritius. Etc etc. So this this is a story in world history and the the movements of ships and of refugees...
I am suspicious of the way in which the term trauma has been used in it broadly in our culture to mean you know anything anything bad'...
‘One of the things that I think is underappreciated is that of the six million Jews killed in the Holocaust we still don't even know the names of over a million of them. There are whole communities in Eastern Europe about which we know nothing. And which is really extraordinary when you consider the the vastness of the documentation and how much has been written... Those Jews from Central and Eastern Europe, what happened to them, they ended up in displaced persons camps in Germany or Austria, a small number in Italy because they had nowhere else to go and so this idea of being liberated and free to go where they wanted of was absolutely not what happened...
The idea obviously of talking about the Holocaust as a pan-European crime is is not something that plays well in certain countries that don't want to address their own involvement in in this. And it also doesn't play well in Germany, where conventional Holocaust pieties if you like, are very rooted in in controlling the idea that this was a German crime because anything else was somehow waters down the significance of the event to to German, to the German ethical landscape. If you're on memory landscape...
I'm sure there are lots of people who voted for populist parties across Europe and in the US and elsewhere who've had Holocaust Education, were very moved by what they learned and who nevertheless voted for populist right-wing parties anyway because they feel that they they speak to their interests at that particular moment in time’"
I like how right wing populists are evil and like the Nazis. Will educating people about communism mean they won't vote for the left wing?
