Teacher criticized for Hitler 'pros and cons' assignment

It is easy to see why there was outrage in the community. My original search did turn up excerpts of other articles which quote Miss Lyons as attempting to defend the regime by pointing to medical advances which resulted from the death camp experiments.

I would like to weigh in here with a little more background. The term facist comes from Italy--the old conundrum about the trains running on time in Italy ignores the cronyism and corrupt liaisons with business and industry which was killing the Italian economy by the 1930's and which lead to Moussolini's imperialist adventures in Africa. Of the four Facist dictators in Europe in the 1930's, he was arguably the most inept. Mataxas in Greece was a great admirer of Hitler and Franco, and would likely have been an ally, had not the idiot Moussolini invaded his nation. Franco was simply repeating the conservative counterrevolution which was a feature of every attempt to install a liberal government in Spain after 1814. Hitler was the worst of the bunch, although Stalin was much more destructive--but Stalin was not a facist. If the discussion were whether or not some good was eventually extracted from the insane cruelty of the concentration camps, that might be an appropriate discussion. Hitler was not responsible, however, even for those ghastly experiments. He was simply responsible for the atmosphere which allowed them to be carried out.

The standard defense of facist dictators has been that they did their people some good in a time of need. This ignores, however, that these men in particular had really no useful political ideas of their own. Moussolini had been a socialist newspaper editor, who used a mish-mash of the ideas of others to create a governmental equivalent of Scientology. Facism in Italy was doomed, because it simply did not work. It survived in Spain because of a history (easily demonstrated) of a deep conservatism in that nation which runs counter the liberal tradition which had grown up in Europe since 1789 and 1848. In Germany, Hitler was responsible for none of the programs which seemed to benefit the average Germans. The economy in Germany was recovering when he took power, because the Weimar Republic had knuckled down and paid the reparations from the First World War, and then practiced the essential austerity without which economic recovery would not have been possible. The soup kitchens and make-work public works projects which the Nazis were at pains to publicize were the brain-child of Ernst Rohm and his brown shirts, co-opted by Hitler--even then, the idea of how to organize the public relations campaign was very more likely the idea of Rudolph Hess. The danger inherent in such a discussion is that as a result of the necessarily shallow examination of the historical record which is the norm in secondary education, and even in university historical survey course for non-majors, the student will not get sufficient information to make a realistic assessment of the man, as opposed to the course of events. Hitler was a dangerously pathological individual, and there is no stretch of the historical imagination which can tie him to any benefit having accrued from his reign of terror. I rate only Josef Dugashvilli (Stalin) as a worse blight on the history of mankind.

An unidentified physician wrote:

I learn from my patients all the time. That is one of the great joys of being a physician. Tenth-grade teacher Anne Lyons needs to take a lesson from her students who objected to her instructing them to defend Adolf Hitler.

Incredulously, it appears that she is under the impression that so called "medical experiments'' done on concentration camp prisoners "led to advancements in the medical field.'' These "experiments'' were nothing less than torture, participants did not volunteer . . .

It is easy to see why there was outrage in the community. My original search did turn up excerpts of other articles which quote Miss Lyons as attempting to defend the regime by pointing to medical advances which resulted from the death camp experiments. Given the background i've already referred to, this is what lead me initially to conclude that Ms. Lyons is either a dupe of, or a subscriber to the secret admiration of the Nazis and of Hitler.

BM, you're not worth the time to respond in any detail. Read the entire thread, and perhaps your adolescent opinions will one day mature, so that you understand that holding an informed opinion has more to do with learning and understanding, and nothing to do with simply disagreeing with others because you think it makes you cool. I find your "logic" here, as everywhere else i've encountered it, pathetic.

Lot of hot air from someone who claims not to care . . .

In fact, i stated that you're not worth the time to respond in any detail. Read the thread, open your mind . . .

There have been no TOS violations on my part, RR. I got tired of this child in other threads. As i spent a great deal of time in this thread explaining why the admirers of Hitler are full of hooey, and knowing that BM disagrees just because he can, i'm making it plain that he doesn't know what he's talking about, and that i'm not going to write it all over again just so he can interject his petulant and uniformed, contrarian objections.