A rope leash wrote:
You know, Hitler was Time magazine's Man of the Year in 1939. Why? Because he took a broken country and made it prosper. He went a little nutso after that, but it's all "history" now.
Call me a Soviet if you will (
) but...
I think Hitler was made man of the year in 1938 as a result of the Munich Conference (remember Chamberlain and "his peace in our time" speech?) Weirdly enough, Stalin won in 1939 (the Nazi-Soviet pact) and in 1942 (Second year of Barbarossa). As to making Germany prosper during that period, he was preparing for war, running up massive state debt to finance rearmament and public works programmes with a military background, which ultimately made his declaration of war an economic necessity. He also passed numerous antisemitic laws, excluding Jews in both public and private law, instituted Reichskistallnacht (the first pogrom in around 200 years in Germany), imprisoned all political opposition in concentration camps, killed many members of his own party that he thought proved dangerous to his position and was the head of a corrupt and ultimately utterly Byzantine, corrupt government. I understand the irony of the word "nutso", but I think if one must use it, it definitely applies to Hitler before 1939 (or 1938). In any case, Time's depiction of Hitler as man of the year, with the background of Reichskristallnacht
in that year, could be compared to the possibility of giving Assad the same title in 2012 i.e. pretty dumb, even with the knowledge that people had at the time.
As to comparing Paul to Jefferson (and I'm posting on Jefferson here), I personally would be reluctant to make comparisons:
"In November 1776, Jefferson was chosen as a member of a committee whose task was to revise, modernize, and codify the statutes of Virginia. Among his assignments was the job of drawing up the legislation dealing with slaves. He later described this bill, which he completed in 1778, as a "mere digest" of the existing legislation on the subject, and to a certain extent this was true. . . .
Nevertheless, the bill was more than a digest of earlier codes and it contained some significant additions which were designed to prevent the increase of the state's free Negro population. It was to be illegal for free Negroes to come into Virginia of their own accord or to remain there for more than one year after they were emancipated. A white woman having a child by a Negro would be required to leave the state within a year. The individual who violated these regulations would be placed "out of the protection of the laws." This would have left them subject to re-enslavement or even to murder at the whim of their neighbors and was, therefore, a most severe punishment...
Jefferson probably treated his slaves somewhat better than other slaveowners did, but he seems to have been at least as harsh as other landowners in his treatment of slaves who escaped and were recaptured. Cohen writes,
When he dealt with runaways, sales of slaves, breeding, flogging, and manumissions, his behavior did not differ appreciably from that of other enlightened slaveholders who deplored needless cruelty, but would use whatever means they felt necessary to protect their peculiar form of property." (BTW, the whole article seems pretty interesting to me - showing clearly Jefferson's schizophrenic attitude towards African-Americans it can be found at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/is ... obrien.htm). This doesn't make him unusual for his time, but hardly IMO makes him an ideal role model.
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