h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well to be fair my point was just that this is just an interesting thing - the syllabus is really weighted in favour of everybody in England knowing more about WW2 and the holocaust than any other period in history.

Well, there is a difference between The Holocaust and World War Two, you know. Quite a big one. But to refer to people in England having to learn about World War Two as "the Nazification of school history in the UK" is...misleading, to say the least.

"n fact the banning of usury and other, similar limitations on what Jews were permitted to do for a living, all but ensured the extreme (financial) prosperity of (some) Jews compared to Christians" [Hoovooloo]

Point taken.

"It's almost funny how diametrically opposed to reality that statement is. Christians were almost as effective in that mission as they were in their mission to ensure that Jesus was forgotten as soon as possible."

Feel free to laugh. It's good for your digestion. The idea that the early Christians were on a mission to ensure that Jesus was forgotten is a new one for me. Do you have a source that you can refer me to, preferably a peer-reviewed one? For what it's worth, I've read a number of books by alleged scholars arguing all sorts of fantastic things about Jesus and the Crufixion. One claim was that Jesus allowed someone else to be crucified in his place. Another was that Jesus wanted Mary Magdalene, his wife, to lead the disciples after his death. There is supposed to be a long-missing collection of Jesus' sayings, which can happily be extrapolated by careful textual analysis of the official Gospels. After reading enough of these contradictory theories, I gave up on making sense of the whole thing.

" If that was the Christians' 'plan' for seeing to it that Jews didn't prosper, then Christians are even dumber than I thought they were, and believe me, that's pretty dumb."

Thank you for that statement, which deserves to be quote of the day. An incredible number of dumb things have been said based on Christian teachings. Being a learned and respected scholar does not make one immune to the temptation of saying dumb things.

"The idea that the early Christians were on a mission to ensure that Jesus was forgotten is a new one for me"

That'll be because I literally just made it up on the spot. It was sarcasm. It was a response to the suggestion that Christians made it their business to ensure Jews were poor, whereas in reality the things Christians did, the rules they enforced, all but guaranteed that Jews would have little alternative but to go into the extremely lucrative banking business, thus arguably creating the stereotype of the greedy Jewish moneylender.

`>"the Nazification of school history in the UK" is...misleading, to say the least.<

I dunno, I had some pretty strict history teachers in my day, one even wore little round glasses, a leather longcoat and had a limp.

Just to return to Sol's point, I do find a certain tendency in the UK not to move on from WWII attitudes, and to attribute those kind of characteristics to modern Germans. I can't see how this can be helpful, so if over emphasis in schools is contributing to it, then it is worth analysing why this is happening.

I have to say that I took history to A level without ever doing WWI or WWII - lots of 1789 to 1870, a big module on N Ireland conflict, and before that bits and pieces of prehistoric, medieval all over the shop really. This was twenty years ago.

sprout

Hoo



I've always loved the irony of that...Jews have far more power than they would have done if they'd just been left alone to get on with things but as they could 'only' lend money they started getting rich and then moved into areas that others had not 'exploited' like movies/entertainment/media...and what are the most powerful forces around the world now? Media/entertainkent outlets...just superb...