New Area of Study

Now that I know much more than I did previously about the Russian Revolution, another, perhaps more urgant, subject has captured my attention: The Nazi Party's rise to power in Germany. I am eager to learn how such a destructive force could have come to power, though what small bits of information I do know tells me that anti-Semetic beliefs have been prevalent in Germany since, as far as I am aware, the latter half of the 19th century. Another area of anti-Semetic motivation comes from an article I recently read about the heritage of many Bolshevik/Soviet leaders in Russia, listing many, many of the prominent figures in Russia at that time as Jewish, and ideological strife between the USSR and the Third Reich was always tense, comparable to the ideological struggle between the USA and the USSR after WW2, but without external interference motivated by ideology*.

Count Leo Tolstoy argues in War & Peace (which I am almost finished with) that historians only attribute a movement to the actions of one man instead of all the forces that lead to it and make it inevitable, and while Count Tolstoy is remarkably intelligent, he misses the fact that the job of the historian is to explore and identify these forces. We may cite Lenin as the man most known as the instigator of the second Russian Revolution (Bolsheviks overthrow Provisional Govt in 1917 and Lenin assumes power), and Tolstoy is right in his stressing the important of the other multitude of forces that culminates and catalyzes a given historical event, but his criticism of historians is largely unfounded because they do just that.

*During the Cold War, the USSR and the USA armed competing third- and second-world countries such as Israel & Palestine, Pakistan & Afghanistan who seemed to adopt their respective ideologies in order to gain influence in that region (relating to USA's fear of the spread of Communism). This is when many governments that exist there today were set up, and often in pictures of African soldiers, they are using our arms because we gave them those guns to fight our conflicts against the Soviet Union.