Why History Matters (About Hitler’s Failure to Distinguish Between History & Myth)

Eric Zuesse (blogs at https://theduran.com/author/eric-zuesse/)

On 15 June 2006, my article of this same title was published at History News Network, which defines itself as “History News Network puts current events into historical perspective,” which this article did if World War Two and the Holocaust still remain as being events in “current history”; and this article was my first public statement of my scientific hypothesis that when the profession of history — historians — practice our profession fully in accord with the requirements of the epistemology that is known as “science,” this profession is constituting the foundation for all of the other social sciences. That was a radical hypothesis, and after no one paid any attention to it, I wrote my 2022 book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, to demonstrate, and thus state, this hypothesis as constituting the general theory of the social sciences, by displaying it as being so in the fields of history itself, political theory, international-relations theory, legal theory, and economic theory — all of them are shown there to be founded only upon, and generalizing from, scientific historianship (historiography).

To my knowledge, that article still has not yet been cited anywhere; and, when I searched on 11 May 2024 to find how many copies of it had been made (stored) at the largest online Web archive, I found that none were; so, I copied it into that archive, and now am republishing this article here, since it apparently is still “news” if it was so on 15 June 2006 (news about history that still remains as being news):

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In my (2000) book WHY the Holocaust Happened (summarized here), I argued that the Holocaust would not have happened if Adolf Hitler had not wanted it to happen (this not being a controversial position) and that the reason Hitler wanted it to happen is that he concluded, in 1919, as indicated in Werner Maser’s (1973) Hitler’s Letters and Notes, that he believed in “The Bible — Monumental History of Mankind,” and that, on that mistaken, false, basis, Hitler took literally such biblical passages as John 8:44 and Matthew 23:31-38, where Jesus allegedly said that Jews are the children of Satan. (Hitler in 1919 was sketching an outline for an ambitious book he never wrote, The Germanic Revolution — Volume I. He was going to base this book upon “The Bible — Monumental History of Mankind.” He outlined in these notes the theory behind the Holocaust yet to come.) I argued there that without this belief that the Bible was a book of “history” instead of myth, the Holocaust would never have happened (this being a very controversial position indeed). On December 18, 1926, Hitler told a group of followers, “The teachings of Christ have laid the foundations for the battle against Jews as the enemy of Mankind; the work that Christ began, I shall finish.” My book on why the Holocaust happened, documented the development of Hitler’s understanding of the Bible, which, I argued, led him to aim for the ultimate extermination of all Jews, as a Christian. There are many different ways to interpret the Bible; Hitler’s was one of them, and it led him to perpetrate the Holocaust. But his biggest error was that he believed this book of myth (as I explained it there to be) to have been instead the “Monumental History of Mankind.”

History matters because, as this example indicates, mistaking myth or false “history,” for real history, can make the difference between life and death for millions of people. I argued that this was what produced the Holocaust.

Some historians have told me that they agree personally that Hitler was a biblical literalist, but that they would never wish to be associated publicly with endorsing that position, because doing so might encourage the large numbers of Christian fundamentalists to think that the Holocaust was justified. My response to those historians has always been that the proper way to deal with that problem is not to cover up and distort history, as they have done (such as via their asserting that Hitler wasn’t “really” a believing Christian), but instead to set forth the evidence that what fundamentalists take to be a book of “history” (the Bible) as Hitler believed, is not that, but is rather a mixture of numerous falsehoods with truths, so that the problem behind the Holocaust was that it was based on falsehoods, and not that Hitler was some kind of non-Christian. My answer has always been that so long as truth is of only secondary interest to historians, the historical profession itself is corrupted, and that the real danger to the profession is not that it will stand for truths which might encourage another Holocaust, but that the profession places a price of any sort on truth, which, to any authentically scientific profession of history, can only be priceless.

If we do not teach truth without regard for consequences, then the lies which give rise to such things as genocides can only replicate themselves time and time again in the future as in the past, and there will be no way by means of which mankind will ever become able to transcend religious or other types of myths.

History is the basic social science, because the data for all of the social sciences come from history and from nothing else than history. If these data are corrupted by falsehoods — as was the case in the mind of Adolf Hitler — then no genuinely scientific social sciences are even possible. If the data are corrupted, then all that we can ever have are social myths, never authentic social sciences. And the Holocaust showed the dangers of that.

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Investigative historian Eric Zuesse’s latest book, AMERICA’S EMPIRE OF EVIL: Hitler’s Posthumous Victory, and Why the Social Sciences Need to Change, is about how America took over the world after World War II in order to enslave it to U.S.-and-allied billionaires. Their cartels extract the world’s wealth by control of not only their ‘news’ media but the social ‘sciences’ — duping the public.