#bad history

Jeremy Brett was a feminist. He would never have tolerated the depiction of suffragettes as conspiratorial terrorists and murderers using the tactics of the KKK, and neither would Doyle. Not even with Mr. Creosote Mycroft saying that they had to win. That contemptuous insult was meant purely for the ardent end of the fan base. Of course it’s a clue intended to denote that there is an army of Moriartys, as well as all the other clue baits Moftiss has riddled the show with, but I am now finished with this game. BBCS is nice plot crack and slick production, but the moral meat and potatoes of Doyle is lost to all of them.

The best thing Moftiss ever did was fail to provide a seasonal shooting schedule for BBCS so that the principals could go on to fame and fortune. It made me put down the fandom banner and take up Canon and Granada, and I haven’t looked back since.

Mrs Hudson: “I’m your landlady, not a plot device.” And then suffragettes become an army of plot devices. Ironic much? Women can be bad guys, occasionally, with real motive. We can even be individual assassins if the need arises. But to put us in an organized tactical bed with the Ku Klux Klan is an insult to the gender which holds all of humanity to a moral bar of genuine goodness- that *man*kind persistently fails to raise itself.  A vast section of Doyle’s Canon concerned itself with protecting abused and wronged women, and Dr. Joseph Bell’s invention of CSI was extremely motivated in solving such crimes.  The ripper was the prime example.

I find it ironic that it was Victorian men and Jeremy Brett who could so easily comprehend this. To depict women as stooping to answer their treatment in the same fashion as organized terrorists is infuriating at minimum.  And to make us use orange pips and pointy hats…done, Moftiss.  So done.

The part of this myth that really sticks in my craw is the fact that it’s always stated as if it means something. Look: If, at the cusp of the Year of Our Lord/Flying Spaghetti Monster 2014, you haven’t realized that religious people and atheists both have pretty good odds of being huge assholes, you are beyond my feeble capacity to educate.

Also, in the interests of baring my biases: I am a Christian.

But here goes anyway:

Hitler was not Christian. In fact, Hitler’s regime was very anti-Christian. His government persecuted the Catholic clergy and attempted to purge the Protestant church in Germany of “Jewish influence,” which is pretty difficult what with the whole Abrahamic faith-angle. The Nazis even went so far as to found their own version of the church, calling it “Positive Christianity,” which removed all those pesky Jews (Read: Jesus + almost all of the Old Testament) and the Apostle’s Creed, and replaced it with Nazi philosophy.

I know the internet is fond of crowing about the “No True Scotsman” fallacy, but when you take out the Apostle’s Creed, what you have (no matter how loudly you call it Christianity) is not Christian.

Hitler was not (in all likelihood) an atheist. Hitler’s views on the existence of God are tough to nail down. He was a secretive guy, and had a mercurial streak a mile wide. He frequently discussed the idea that Germany was created by God, or gods, and that the nation was favored by God. At the same time he frequently derided faith (in anything other than Nazism or himself) as being idiocy.

In summation, Hitler’s religious views were ambiguous, and the question of Hitler’s faith is of dubious value.

Mad? My goodness, yes. Genius? No and, again, no.

Mein Kampf, for example, reads as if it was written by a very hyperactive grade-schooler who was just sucker punched by a rabbi.

It leaps from topic to topic so frenetically that its chapter headings are really just literary red herrings to throw the reader off the scent of his inability to write.

Even ignoring his writing, he comes across as a bit of a chump. He constantly saddled the German military with bizarre restrictions that massively hindered its ability to fight. For example, all German bombers had to be usable in a dive bombing role. All of them. Ever wonder why the technical giants of the aviation industry like Messerschmidt, Focke-Wulf, Fokker, and Blohm & Voss couldn’t seem to throw together a serious strategic bomber to save their lives? It’s because every time they came close, Hitler and the R.L.M. came along and demanded to know whether or not their new, 4 engined, long range, heavy bomb carrying beast could dive bomb tanks on the Eastern Front.

Or how about the fact that Hitler overrode the Schlieffen Plan (the Plan so nice, they used it twice) and got Germany involved in a two front war that it had no hope of winning? I’m not talking through hindsight alone, here. Hitler’s whole plan hinged on the idea that Germans could not lose to Slavs.

No matter how you look at him, Hitler comes across as a less than towing intellect beset by numerous mental health concerns.

Look, I’m not sure what this argument is supposed to accomplish, what with the Holocaust having definitely happened, but I see it a lot. And it’s still wrong.

You see, Hitler did a whole pile of terrible things that would get him remembered as a villain, and even if you stripped them away, he did nothing so good as to get him remembered fondly.

So, let’s do this: We strip away the Holocaust. Hitler still was instrumental in starting one of the deadliest conflicts in human history. I speak, of course, of World War Two. You might have heard of it.

Now, for the sake of proving how dense with idiocy this line of reasoning is to its bitter, stupid core, let’s do away with that.

Hitler also instituted the T4 Program.Aktion T4 was the deliberate mass murder of disabled persons of all stripes in the Third Reich. I separate it from the Holocaust, as it was largely carried out by the medical community of Germany and its leaders were tried separately from the rest of the archfiends at Nuremberg.

But let’s be rid of that, too.

Well…Hitler also called for the sterilization of disabled persons prior to T4.

But we’ll cut that loose, as well.

Hitler ruined the Germany economy.

Hitler ordered the destruction of thousands of pieces of so called “degenerate art.”

I think we’ve gotten rid of most of the really evil things Hitler was personally responsible for, let’s see if we can find something he can be remembered fondly for: His art? No, he was a pretty mediocre painter. His military service in WWI? Eh…kind of a lackluster performance there, too. The Autobahn? More of a Weimar thing, actually.

In the end, Adolf Hitler was a villain. He was an evil man. And no amount of mental gymnastics can turn him into a hero.

This myth is widely held as fact, and couldn’t be further from the truth. Adolf Hitler and the Nazis took Germany’s economy, which had begun to stir from its deep, Depression-induced torpor thanks to the tireless work of the economist Hjalmar Schacht, and ran it into the ground.

Schacht had worked as Commissioner of Currency under the much maligned Weimar government, and had been remarkably successful in battling inflation. When Hitler seized power (more on that later), Schacht’s careful policies were largely swept aside in favor of forcing the German economy onto a war footing, a system which could only survive on a steady diet of war loot and assets seized from “racial undesirables” within Germany.

Even Hitler’s long term plans for Germany’s wealth were nonsensical trash. The end economic goal for the invasion of the East was to turn the area into some kind of bucolic plantation dream where sturdy German burghers oversaw toiling Slavic slaves, an economic model of autarky that had ceased to make any sense in the latter half of the 19th century.

In short, Hitler took an ailing economy on the road to recovery, and steered it toward certain ruin.