Kitty Pryde-Barton (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
throughaphase) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
fandomhigh2013-10-07 12:01 am
throughaphase) wrote in fandomhigh2013-10-07 12:01 am
Entry tags:
Modern American History- Monday- 2nd period
Thank god there was no sex pollen this week. Thank. God.
Because today the Danger Shop was programmed to look like where Anne Frank had lived. Yeah, you're thanking god now too, aren't you?
"So. Going over the 40's, that pretty much means World War II," Kitty began. "So, there was Adolph Hitler. You might have heard of him. He was an Austrian who took power of Germany in 1933 with the Depression making a mess of everything, and turned the country into a totalitarian, one-party state under the Nazis. Now Germany was determined to capture other countries, which started with them invading Poland in 1939. France and Britain declared war on Germany two days later, which also included the areas Britain had a hand in- Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The problem was that everyone was worried about Germany, but no one tried to help poor Poland, so when the Soviets also invaded, that was it. So you see by now how 'world war' is starting. Germany started going after more and more areas, then Italy declared war on France and Britain and maybe I should have done this class after break? Um. Just keep in mind Musselini was bad, okay?" Oops.
"If you want more details on who invaded who, it'll be on a handout I'll give you at the end of class, but suffice it to say it was messed up. If World War I was tough with everyone fighting, this was way worse. The Axis by now was Germany, Italy and Japan, along with smaller countries or ones they'd taken over, and they tried to get the Soviet Union in on it. The Soviets, who'd been a part of invading Poland on Germany's side, wanted some concessions, though, so Hitler went and invaded. However, the Soviet Union was huge, and while the Germans did some real damage, the troop numbers were just about even.
"Meanwhile, Hitler was just terrible," Kitty said, vastly understating it in case she went on a total rant. She could. Oh, yes, she could. "After he came to power, he started pushing Germany towards antisemitism, and enacted laws on how to identify and punish Jews. He was a big believer in the blond, blue-eyed Aryan master race, despite being a short guy with dark hair and eyes. If you were Jewish, you faced discrimination. Your businesses would be boycotted. Your marriages and sexual relationships were prohibited if you were a Jew trying to marry someone who wasn't 100% Jewish. There was also an issue in that you can't always tell who's Jewish just by looking at them. I'm Jewish, but I don't look it-" There was an eyeroll to tell you what she thought of hearing that. "-and I don't have a Jewish last name. So for people like me, they'd start looking into your ancestry and prying into your life to figure out how Jewish you were and how many rights would be taken away from you. And then came the concentration camps, where Jews were rounded up and sent to work until they died, of disease or starvation or whatever else, because Hitler was actually trying to commit genocide. And it wasn't even just Jews. The Nazis also rounded up black people, Gypsies, the homeless, gays, alcoholics, people with disabilities... Anyone they found 'undesirable.' Polish and Soviet prisoners of war also went there. People were used for experiments, they were sent into gas chambers, their bodies were burned in creamatoria. It was as close to a living nightmare as you could get. By the end of the war, six million Jews were dead, and if you include the other groups into the number, the Holocaust killed about eleven million people. To evade capture, some citizens would open their homes to Jewish refugees to protect them, which was a huge risk. If you were caught hiding Jews, you were dead.
"And that's what this is," she said, finally gesturing to where they were. "This is the where Anne Frank lived with her family, another family, and a single man during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Eight people lived in the upper quarters of an office building for two years, having to be completely silent during working hours so they wouldn't be discovered. She put a name and a face to what happened through a diary that was found after the war. As things went, the family was betrayed in 1945, separated and sent to the camps. Anne's father was the only one to survive, and Anne herself died of typhus, two weeks before the camps were liberated."
And then Kitty cleared her throat, mostly to keep herself from going into more detail, because oh god, she so could. Like why would anyone let her teach a class on this.
"So. For our part, while all this was going on, the US tried really hard to stay out of it. No one really wanted to go to war, but President Roosevelt knew it was a real possibility, so he did everything he could to prepare us for it. And then in December of 1941, Japan launched simultaneous attacks on Britain and the US, which included bombing Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. So it seems the US in world wars are like 'We don't want to get involved, we don't want to get involved, oh great, now that you've bombed us, we have to get involved.' And in a really sick way, it sort of helped the state of things here. Unemployment took a serious downturn because the men were drafted to war, and to keep the country going, women and blacks took to the workplace, so we saw an upswing in the economy again. So... bright side? Though we also did start internment camps for Japanese immigrants who'd come over, so we're not exactly innocent in being assholes during the war. There were also 14,000 Italian and German immigrants interned because they were deemed security risks. Also, the Allies- our side- were beginning to do some good, with the Soviets keeping Stalingrad in Russia, and Britain and the US making things really tough for Japan. And the Allies just kept gaining momentum. We even almost got Mussolini, though the Germans rescued him in time. On what's known as D-Day, the Allies invaded France to take it back from Germany. The Poles started uprisings, even if they were put down quickly. And once the Allies really got going, there wasn't really much the Axis could do. Then we invaded Germany, stormed Berlin, and the Reichstag fell, and that was it for the Nazi military. Yay.
"As for the aftermath, that was still a mess, too," Kitty said. "Mussolini was killed by Italian resistance members. Hitler was a giant coward and committed suicide before he could be captured. Battles were still waged to retake control of places. When Japan still wouldn't cooperate, the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which is terrible when you look at the damage that followed, but it was really the final stages of the war, which ended officially in September of 1945. Nazis were tried as war criminals, Germany was split in two in addition to actually losing territory from before the war started, the United Nations became a thing... About 75 million people had died, many were displaced, families were separated with no way of finding each other or even knowing if anyone else was alive. I was taken to an event once, where Holocaust survivors or their descendents would stand up and try to get information on loved ones by giving any information they had, hoping to find a lead. There I found out that the person who brought me had actually known my great-aunt who died at Auschwitz." What up, Billy's grandpa. "The US came out of it really well, actually, a world power with only the Soviet Union as a rival. And as with every single other big conflict in history, that comes with more problems later. But we'll get to that in coming weeks.
"Out of curiosity, is anyone still listening to me?"
Because today the Danger Shop was programmed to look like where Anne Frank had lived. Yeah, you're thanking god now too, aren't you?
"So. Going over the 40's, that pretty much means World War II," Kitty began. "So, there was Adolph Hitler. You might have heard of him. He was an Austrian who took power of Germany in 1933 with the Depression making a mess of everything, and turned the country into a totalitarian, one-party state under the Nazis. Now Germany was determined to capture other countries, which started with them invading Poland in 1939. France and Britain declared war on Germany two days later, which also included the areas Britain had a hand in- Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. The problem was that everyone was worried about Germany, but no one tried to help poor Poland, so when the Soviets also invaded, that was it. So you see by now how 'world war' is starting. Germany started going after more and more areas, then Italy declared war on France and Britain and maybe I should have done this class after break? Um. Just keep in mind Musselini was bad, okay?" Oops.
"If you want more details on who invaded who, it'll be on a handout I'll give you at the end of class, but suffice it to say it was messed up. If World War I was tough with everyone fighting, this was way worse. The Axis by now was Germany, Italy and Japan, along with smaller countries or ones they'd taken over, and they tried to get the Soviet Union in on it. The Soviets, who'd been a part of invading Poland on Germany's side, wanted some concessions, though, so Hitler went and invaded. However, the Soviet Union was huge, and while the Germans did some real damage, the troop numbers were just about even.
"Meanwhile, Hitler was just terrible," Kitty said, vastly understating it in case she went on a total rant. She could. Oh, yes, she could. "After he came to power, he started pushing Germany towards antisemitism, and enacted laws on how to identify and punish Jews. He was a big believer in the blond, blue-eyed Aryan master race, despite being a short guy with dark hair and eyes. If you were Jewish, you faced discrimination. Your businesses would be boycotted. Your marriages and sexual relationships were prohibited if you were a Jew trying to marry someone who wasn't 100% Jewish. There was also an issue in that you can't always tell who's Jewish just by looking at them. I'm Jewish, but I don't look it-" There was an eyeroll to tell you what she thought of hearing that. "-and I don't have a Jewish last name. So for people like me, they'd start looking into your ancestry and prying into your life to figure out how Jewish you were and how many rights would be taken away from you. And then came the concentration camps, where Jews were rounded up and sent to work until they died, of disease or starvation or whatever else, because Hitler was actually trying to commit genocide. And it wasn't even just Jews. The Nazis also rounded up black people, Gypsies, the homeless, gays, alcoholics, people with disabilities... Anyone they found 'undesirable.' Polish and Soviet prisoners of war also went there. People were used for experiments, they were sent into gas chambers, their bodies were burned in creamatoria. It was as close to a living nightmare as you could get. By the end of the war, six million Jews were dead, and if you include the other groups into the number, the Holocaust killed about eleven million people. To evade capture, some citizens would open their homes to Jewish refugees to protect them, which was a huge risk. If you were caught hiding Jews, you were dead.
"And that's what this is," she said, finally gesturing to where they were. "This is the where Anne Frank lived with her family, another family, and a single man during the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands. Eight people lived in the upper quarters of an office building for two years, having to be completely silent during working hours so they wouldn't be discovered. She put a name and a face to what happened through a diary that was found after the war. As things went, the family was betrayed in 1945, separated and sent to the camps. Anne's father was the only one to survive, and Anne herself died of typhus, two weeks before the camps were liberated."
And then Kitty cleared her throat, mostly to keep herself from going into more detail, because oh god, she so could. Like why would anyone let her teach a class on this.
"So. For our part, while all this was going on, the US tried really hard to stay out of it. No one really wanted to go to war, but President Roosevelt knew it was a real possibility, so he did everything he could to prepare us for it. And then in December of 1941, Japan launched simultaneous attacks on Britain and the US, which included bombing Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. So it seems the US in world wars are like 'We don't want to get involved, we don't want to get involved, oh great, now that you've bombed us, we have to get involved.' And in a really sick way, it sort of helped the state of things here. Unemployment took a serious downturn because the men were drafted to war, and to keep the country going, women and blacks took to the workplace, so we saw an upswing in the economy again. So... bright side? Though we also did start internment camps for Japanese immigrants who'd come over, so we're not exactly innocent in being assholes during the war. There were also 14,000 Italian and German immigrants interned because they were deemed security risks. Also, the Allies- our side- were beginning to do some good, with the Soviets keeping Stalingrad in Russia, and Britain and the US making things really tough for Japan. And the Allies just kept gaining momentum. We even almost got Mussolini, though the Germans rescued him in time. On what's known as D-Day, the Allies invaded France to take it back from Germany. The Poles started uprisings, even if they were put down quickly. And once the Allies really got going, there wasn't really much the Axis could do. Then we invaded Germany, stormed Berlin, and the Reichstag fell, and that was it for the Nazi military. Yay.
"As for the aftermath, that was still a mess, too," Kitty said. "Mussolini was killed by Italian resistance members. Hitler was a giant coward and committed suicide before he could be captured. Battles were still waged to retake control of places. When Japan still wouldn't cooperate, the US dropped atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, which is terrible when you look at the damage that followed, but it was really the final stages of the war, which ended officially in September of 1945. Nazis were tried as war criminals, Germany was split in two in addition to actually losing territory from before the war started, the United Nations became a thing... About 75 million people had died, many were displaced, families were separated with no way of finding each other or even knowing if anyone else was alive. I was taken to an event once, where Holocaust survivors or their descendents would stand up and try to get information on loved ones by giving any information they had, hoping to find a lead. There I found out that the person who brought me had actually known my great-aunt who died at Auschwitz." What up, Billy's grandpa. "The US came out of it really well, actually, a world power with only the Soviet Union as a rival. And as with every single other big conflict in history, that comes with more problems later. But we'll get to that in coming weeks.
"Out of curiosity, is anyone still listening to me?"
Re: Listen to the lecture