, 8 tweets, 2 min read
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Retweeted nearly 2K times, here's a perfect example of the kind of slovenly, ideologically driven thinking that passes for "history" on Twitter.
On 22 June 1941 – coincidentally the same day that Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union – the NYT magazine published a excerpts from Mein Kampf, Hitler's 1925 biographical manifesto, as a warning about Germany's threat to the US.
The editors prefaced the excerpts with the remark, "Germany is now waging a psychological war against this country." It was not an "op-ed" written by Hitler for the NYT. It was an assemblage of 15 year old quotations from Hitler produced by the Times as a warning.
To say that "the NYT let Hitler publish an op-ed" is entirely false. Hitler did not send an "op-ed" to the NYT that they agreed to publish. It's the equivalent of saying that I'm spreading Nazi antisemitism when I lecture about the Holocaust.
But this sort of thing is commonplace on Twitter (and not just on the political right, I am afraid to say). Read the comments – virtually no one has bothered to fact check the assertion or to contextualize the piece.
This is where a history education can be a powerful tool against ideologues of all political stripes today, because students of history know better than most that the past is complicated, and not to be deployed as a blunt instrument in scoring cheap political points today.
Finally: 2000 retweets from an account with 50000 followers. It is probable that, in that single Tweet, this person reached more people with a false claim than I will in a lifetime of classroom teaching and academic publishing.
Update: 25 November. The original Tweet has been deleted. Anticipating this, I kept a screenshot.
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