A lot has happened in my history class but I haven’t been writing “journal” entries due to being busy with other things. For the most part nothing much has happened, that is until now. I currently have amassed a bunch of comments and weird discussions happening in class that I will write about here. I think you’ll find it very interesting and maybe even enraging too. I’pm going to fire them off one by one, with important context from the lectures if needed:

back in January Alaska was mentioned, my professor believed it should be a part of Canada but ever since Putin’s invasion (his words not mine) he’s glad Alaska is American, because apparently if it was a part of Canada that would make us geographically closer to Russia and thats a problem?

Okay this one is kind of insane, this was during a discussion about the Algerian genocide. My professor brought up the Palestinian genocide (he didn’t call it that) and how he doesn’t see it as a black and white situation as Israel has an arsenal of good defence and Hamas is explicitly genocidal.

During our discussion about the Armenian genocide my professor joked that often times Russians are the villains but in the case of being a protectorate of Armenia they weren’t, at least to Armenians. Also during this lecture my professor claims to have spent his career criticizing imperialism (press X to doubt). He also brought up the Uyghur “genocide” and how Palestine is not black and white.

The first lecture on the Holocaust my professor mentioned the non-aggression pact between Stalin and Hitler but failed to mention how Stalin tried to unite with other European leaders and this pact was a last ditch effort to buy time for all out war, he also failed to mention how other European powers made pacts long before Stalin even did. He called the pact “strange” and then made a weird comment about the “joint” invasion of Poland. Later into the lecture a student low key compared modern Russia to Nazi Germany because of expansion.

This lecture was about the genocide of disabled people in Nazi Germany. He made a comment about totalitarianism in relation to Nazi germany and said China is a totalitarian state that used COVID as a reason to do mass surveillance, but had to pull back due to protests. Totalitarian states have a thing about surveillance and stuff like that, that is why he talked about China.

Banality of Evil was what we had to read for this lecture. During this lecture my professor brought up Origins of Totalitarianism by Arendt, and he claims it is an absolute classic. He seems to push back a bit to criticisms of Arendt, as when a student brought up how she read papers from Arendt’s critics he got kind of weird about it, sort of going on the defensive if that makes sense. George Orwell and New Speak was referenced as well, relating it to how the Nazis called their killings/murders different things to downplay the horror (this obviously isn’t a problem but George Orwell sucks).

He had us watch SAMSARA food sequence before starting the lecture. This isn’t a bad thing but it was weird, though it as related to that day’s discussion.

Today the lecture was about the Jedwabne massacre. When we were trying to figure out why something like this would happen a student said that the Soviets screwed the Polish so they massacred the local Jewish population because of the perceived link/relationship between the Soviets and the Jews. What did she mean by “screwed?” We will never know. Later in the discussion (not really a lecture tbh) a student said that Stalin was famously antisemitic and Trotsky was smeared as Jewish, he brought this up to say that the perceived link between the Soviets and the Jews was “wacky” because the Soviets hated Jewish people. The totalitarianism book by Arendt was brought up again to illustrate a link between Soviet antisemitism and Nazi antisemitism, and to also briefly mention this thing called the “Doctors’ Plot” which I’ve never heard of before but apparently was some type of document/action taken against Jewish doctors in the USSR? This lecture was not great…

That is all I have for you in terms of weird shit said in my History class so far. Thoughts? Feelings? Knowledge to share? All comments are welcome.