Conservapedia - User contributions [en]

Shi'ite

2010-06-04T04:30:02Z

Solomos: Redirected page to Islam

#REDIRECT [[Islam]]

Leon Trotsky

2010-06-04T04:27:10Z

Solomos: /* Exile */ -- fixed grammar

[[Image:Trockiy2.jpg|right|thumb|Leon Trotsky]]

'''Leon Trotsky''' ([[Russian language|Russian]]: Лeв Давидович Трóцкий) , born '''Leon Davidovich Bronstein''' (Russian: Лeв Давидович Бронштéйн) (1879-1940), pronounced (traht'-skee) was a leader with [[Lenin]] in the Bolshevik (Communist) [[October Revolution]] in Russia in 1917. A charismatic orator, systematic organizer and brilliant theorist, Trotsky was primarily an intellectual whose writings greatly influenced leftist movements worldwide. An energetic organizer he planned the successful Petrograd uprising in November 1917, created the Red Army, and played the central role in winning the civil war (1918-20). Trotsky's independence and aloofness made him a poor backstage negotiator and he was easily outmaneuvered by Stalin, who controlled the party apparatus, After Lenin's disability in 1923, Trotsky lost power to [[Stalin]]. Forced into exile, he denounced the Soviet regime as an impure form of Communism; Stalin had him assassinated in Mexico in 1940.

Trotsky made many blunders and exaggerations, including losing his nerve when Germany invaded Russia in 1918; taking the credit due the generals for the Red victory in the civil war; claiming to be the father of the New Economic Policy of the 1920s; claiming to be on good terms with Lenin in the 1920s; displaying profound naivety in dealing with Stalin in 1924; and his wishful thinking that Stalinism was on the verge of collapse in the 1930s.

"Death came early to him, explains his leading biographer, "because he fought for a cause that was more destructive than he ever imagined."<ref>Service (2009)</ref>
==Career==
Trotsky, was the son of a prosperous Jewish farmer in the Ukraine. Well educated and rebellious, he became a professional revolutionary as a teenager. He was arrested in 1898 and was later exiled to Siberia, where he joined the Social Democratic party. In 1902 he escaped abroad, met Lenin.

In 1903, while Lenin headed the Bolsheviks, Trotsky joined the rival Mensheviks. Mensheviks did not believe trying to ignite a revolution, expecting that it would happen when the people were ready. By contrast the Bolsheviks who believed that the people needed to be led. From 1904 until 1917 Trotsky had a stormy relationship with Lenin, accusing Lenin of wanting to become a dictator. But the two of them resolved their differences in 1917, and after that point Trotsky was totally loyal to Lenin.

Trotsky was the most powerful orator in the Bolshevik party, and due to his numerous spells in jail and his active role in the failed 1905 revolution he was much more famous than Lenin was to ordinary Russians. He was the actual organizer behind the [[October Revolution]], as Lenin was still in exile and so unable to participate.
==Civil War==
Trotsky also helped build the [[Red Army]] that defeated the White Russian Army in the subsequent Civil War in Russia, despite having no military experience of any kind.

==Power struggle==
Lenin was always primarily a politician; politics absorbed his waking hours. The conflict between Trotsky and Lenin led to the subsequent struggle between Trotsky and [[Stalin]] in Lenin's last months. Multiple rivalries within the Bolshevik Party emerged because history did not unfold as predicted by theory; the Communist revolution did not spread into a worldwide spontaneous uprising of the working people. Lenin accused Stalin of Russian chauvinism when he proposed the incorporation of different nationalities into a unitary Soviet state. But Lenin was disabled by a stroke in 1923 before he could remove Stalin, and Stalin proved the master politician.

When Lenin died in 1924, a lengthy power struggle began between Trotsky and Stalin. Trotsky took the view that socialism in the Soviet Union must await a revolution in western Europe and even worldwide. Stalin wanted power immediately and offered a rival ideology, ''Socialism in one country''. To fend off accusations of becoming the new 'Napoleon', he gave up his command of the Red Army.

The struggle for power in the Soviet Union during Lenin's last illness in 1923 was not based merely on a clash of personalities but involved fundamental issues concerning the future political and economic development of the Soviet Union. Trotsky's desire to lessen Party control over the administration while centralizing the economy and giving priority to heavy industry, as well as his doubts about reforms of government proposed by Lenin, made him isolated on the Politburo. Trotsky did not carry out Lenin's wishes toward Stalin and the "Georgians" because he agreed with Stalin's ideas on the nationality question and centralization, but he was outmaneuvered by Stalin's strengthening of the powers of the Secretariat, which contradicted Trotsky's ideas on freeing administration from direct political control.

Trotsky was a quick-witted combatant and ruthless foe; he was an articulate intellectual, but he lacked humanism or normal human qualities such as empthy, respect for the sacred, loyalty to his friends, or indeed, loyaty to anything except his theory of how should happen, but never did. His theory suffered from lack of nuance, and from Trotsky's inability to adjsut it to account for the uncertainties and human dimensions of actual history.

==Exile==
Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Bolshevik party in 1927 and exiled him from Russia in 1929. Trotsky's constant goal was to gain control of world Communist leadership and implement more radical programs. Trotsky formed a loose organization of German followers in 1930 but failed either to defeat or take control of the German Communist Party. Indeed, his supporters nearly everywhere were outmaneuvered and defeated by the Soviet Communists, and lingered in numerous countries as a far-left party with little influence. Intellectuals who joined his movement were put off by Trotsky's dogmatism and his intolerance of the least deviation from his ideas.

After spending time in Turkey and France, Trotsky settled in Mexico in 1937. On August 20, 1940 Spanish communist Ramón Mercador, acting on orders from Stalin, murdered Trotsky with an ice pick in Trotsky's Mexico City apartment.

==Permanent revolution==
Trotsky's most influential idea was the notion of permanent revolution. Drawing on the experiences of the 1905 Russian Revolution, Trotsky maintained that revolution would spread worldwide after the international proletariat's aid to the Russian workers, who in turn would "export" the revolution abroad. By contrast Stalin rejected Trotsky’s theory and presented his own thesis on socialism in one country (Russia) in 1926. Trotsky asserted that the unification of developed and backward countries in the worldwide operations of capitalism created a combination of separate and uneven stages of development in backward countries like Russia, permitting the Russian proletariat the capability of carrying out a revolution but at the same time requiring the permanent extension of revolution in time and space until the extinction of class distinctions.
==American influence==
American Trotskyites were political activists in the 1930s who follows the teachings of Trotsky and opposed Stalin's version. All of them broke with Trotsky, and many became conservatives, such as [[Max Eastman]], [[James Burnham]] and [[Seymour Martin Lipset]].

[[Paleoconservatives]], who dislike [[Neoconservatism]] intensely, have argued that it emerged from Trotskyite theories, especially the notion of permanent revolution. There are four fundamental flaws in the paleoconservatives' attack: most of the neoconservatives were never Trotskyites; none of them ever subscribed to the right-wing Socialism of Max Shachtman; the assertion that neoconservatives subscribe to "inverted Trotskyism" is misleading; and neoconservatives advocate democratic globalism, not permanent revolution.<ref>William F. King, "Neoconservatives and 'Trotskyism'" ''American Communist History'' 2004 3(2): 247-266 online at [[EBSCO]]</ref>

==Historiography==
Western commentators on Trotsky generally fall into four categories, aside from orthodox Trotskyists, who have generally been concerned with preserving his ideas rather than developing them. First, the pro-Soviets oppose him and his ideas, especially on the issue of socialism in one country. The second group, described as sympathetic critics, has examined Trotsky's stands and while generally in agreement, has commonly found his views mistaken on three points in particular: his conversion to Leninism, his failure to move against Stalin in 1923, and his characterization of Stalinism as a workers' state. A third group of commentators has viewed Trotsky skeptically, an unlikely alternative to Stalin. The realist group, in contrast, faults Trotsky for failure to realize the true nature of events after 1917. After glasnost in the 1980s Trotsky was rehabilitated in Russia as an important leader and some of his writings have been published.<ref> Michael Cox, "Trotsky and his Interpreters; Or, Will the Real Leon Trotsky Please Stand Up?" ''Russian Review'' 1992 51(1): 84-102. </ref>

==Religion==
One of Trotsky's famous quotes (which also sums up the [[Atheism]] in the Communist Movement) was : "Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government."

==Further reading==
* Alexander, Robert J. ''International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement'' (1991), 1128pp [http://www.questia.com/read/27804413?title=International%20Trotskyism%2c%201929-1985%3a%20A%20Documented%20Analysis%20of%20the%20Movement online edition]
* Brotherstone, Terry , et al eds. ''The Trotsky Reappraisal'' (1992) [http://www.questia.com/read/59387717?title=The%20Trotsky%20Reappraisal online edition], 19 short essays by scholars
* Daniels, Robert V. ''Trotsky, Stalin and Socialism.'' (1991). 208 pp.
* Deutscher, isaac. ''Trotsky'' (3v, 1954-63), by a far-left admirer of Trotsky
* Garza, Hedda. ''Leon Trotsky'' (1986) short survey
* Kolakowski, Leszek. ''Main Current of Marxism'' (1978), 3:183-219, on Trotsky in 1930s
* Molyneux, John. ''Leon Trotsky's Theory of Revolution.'' (1981). 238 pp.
* Pomper, Philip. ''Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin: The Intelligentsia and Power.'' (1990). 446 pp.
* Renton, Dave. ''Trotsky'' (2004) [http://www.amazon.com/Trotsky-Life-Times-Dave-Renton/dp/1904341624/ref=sr_1_34?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245111487&sr=1-34 excerpt and text search]
* Service, Robert. ''Trotsky: A Biography'' (2009), 600pp; by a leading historian; the best biography
* Thatcher, Ian D. ''Trotsky'' (2002) [http://www.amazon.com/Trotsky-Routledge-Historical-Biographies-Thatcher/dp/0415232503/ref=sr_1_14?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245111296&sr=1-14 excerpt and text search]; also [http://www.questia.com/read/108142763?title=Trotsky full text online]
* Volkogonov, Dmitri. ''Trotsky: The Eternal Revolutionary.'' (1996). 560 pp. [http://www.amazon.com/Trotsky-Eternal-Revolutionary-Dmitri-Volkogonov/dp/1416576649/ref=sr_1_8?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1245111189&sr=1-8 excerpt and text search], very hostile
===Primary sources===
* Trotsky, Leon. ''The Basic Writings of Trotsky'' ed. by Irving Howe, (1963), [http://www.questia.com/read/58369460?title=The%20Basic%20Writings%20of%20Trotsky online edition]
* Trotsky, Leon. ''The Age of Permanent Revolution: A Trotsky Anthology'' ed. by Isaac Deutscher (1970)
* [http://www.questia.com/library/leon-trotsky.jsp online books and chapters on Trotsky and by him]

== See also ==
*[[Trotskyism]]
*[[Great purge]]
*[[Diego Rivera]]
*[[Elizabeth Zarubina]]
*[[Floyd Miller]]
*[[Gregory Rabinovich]]
*[[Sylvia Callen]]
*[[Jack Soble]]

====references====
<references/>

{{DEFAULTSORT:Trotsky, Leon}}
[[Category:Russian History]]
[[Category:Soviet Union]]
[[Category:Communists]]
[[Category:Marxism]]
[[Category:Trotskyite]]

Haumea

2010-06-04T04:24:34Z

Solomos: Created page with ''''Haumea''' is a dwarf planet found in the Kuiper belt, a region of the Solar System lying beyond the orbit of Neptune. It was discovered in mid-2005 and revived attent…'

'''Haumea''' is a dwarf planet found in the [[Kuiper belt]], a region of the Solar System lying beyond the orbit of [[Neptune]]. It was discovered in mid-2005 and revived attention for its odd shape, looking like a "plump cigar".<ref>http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/09/080918234427.htm</ref> Huamea's diameter is approximately the same as that of the dwarf planet Pluto, but is much tinnier. Jaumea rotates approximately ever four hours giving it the fastest rotation period for large objects in the solar system.<ref>http://365daysofastronomy.org/2009/03/31/march-31st/</ref>

Haumea is named after the Hawaiian god of the same name. Haumea's two moons, Hiʻiaka and Namaka, were named after the Hawaiian god's daughters.<ref>http://www.iau.org/public_press/news/detail/iau0807/</ref>

==References==
<references>

Going Rogue: An American Life

2010-01-20T22:33:49Z

Solomos: /* Reception */ -- Added link to 2012 election page

[[Image:GoingRogue.jpg|200px|right]]'''Going Rogue: An American Life''' is a 2009 autobiography of [[Sarah Palin]], former governor of [[Alaska]] and 2008 Republican vice-presidential candidate.

==Summary==

''Going Rogue'' is an autobiography of Sarah Palin's early life, and a memoir of her experiences in the [[2008 Presidential Campaign]].<ref>Palin, Sarah. ''Going Rogue: An American Life''. HarperCollins, 2009.</ref>

==Reception==

After the publisher pushed the release date to Nov. 17, the book achieved best-seller status.<ref>http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jlxDCO3o2Lipkwnit2WjvF0TCa5gD9B1VRQ00</ref> Once it became available for pre-order in late September, the book spent three days on Amazon.com's Top 100 list<ref>http://www.reuters.com/article/vcCandidateFeed7/idUSTRE5905X220091001</ref> before becoming the #1 best-selling title across all categories on September 30, 2009.<ref>http://voices.washingtonpost.com/44/2009/10/02/palins_book_gets_a_cover_to_ju.html?wprss=44</ref> The book also became the Barnes & Noble #1 best seller based on pre-orders.<ref>http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/09/30/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5354122.shtml</ref> This is considered to be "absolutely unprecedented performance for a non-fiction book so far in advance of its release date."<ref>http://www.northstarnational.com/2009/09/30/tough-sell-palin-biggest-seller-ever-explain/</ref> Palin has appeared on a number of television shows to promote the book, including [[Oprah Winfrey]]'s.

Liberals have condemned the book out of a fear of Sarah Palin<ref>http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/washington/2009/11/sarah-palin-going-rogue-democratic-national-committee-.html</ref>, who is respected by many conservatives and may be a presidential contender in [[United States Presidential Election, 2012|2012]].

==References==

{{reflist|1}}

[[Category: Books]]

Essay:Greatest Conservative Movies

2010-01-02T01:58:57Z

Solomos: Added link to the Ben-Hur article.

Conservative movies exist, and some are immensely popular. Here is our growing list (in no particular order):

#''[[Invasion of the Body Snatchers]]'' (1956), a science fiction condemnation of [[communism]]
#''[[The Exorcist]]'' (1973) (not for children), a portrayal of evil with sympathy to Christianity. In its time it was the top-grossing film ever.
# ''Dark Matter'' (2008), a brutally candid portrayal of [[professor values]] along with problems associated with lack of assimilation; liberals first praised the movie, but after realizing its conservative message then panned it
#''[[Iron Eagle]]'' (1986)
#The first ''[[Spider-Man]]'' (2002), which praises moral virtue (hard-working teenager, devout aunt and well-meaning uncle) and pokes fun at assumed [[liberals]] (entertainers and journalist). Hero chooses [[abstinence]]. This was one of the most profitable films ever made.
#''[[Gone With the Wind]]'' (1939), which celebrates a strongly ''feminine'' heroine who is the antithesis of a modern [[feminist]]
#''[[Ben-Hur (film, 1959)|Ben-Hur]]'' (1959), celebrates honor and duty to family and country, with a pro-Christian ending
#''[[The Sound of Music]]'' (1965), solid family entertainment
#''[[The Ten Commandments]]'' (1956)
#''[[Mr. Smith Goes To Washington]]'' (1939)
#''[[Star Wars]]'' series (1977-2005) - simple truths about the triumph of good over evil
#''The Winning Team'' (1952), starring [[Ronald Reagan]] as a pitcher who overcomes his problems to help his team win. This was one of Reagan's own favorites.
#''[[King of Kings]]'' (1961)
#''[[On The Waterfront]]'' (1954) - a simple but hardworking longshoreman takes on his Mafia-controlled union
#''[[Sergeant York]]'' (1941)
#''[[Knute Rockne: All-American]]'' (1940)
#''[[Ninotchka]]'' (1939)
#''[[Forbidden Planet]]'' (1956)
#''[[Rudy]]'' (1993)
#''[[The Prince of Egypt]]'' (1998)
#''[[Strategic Air Command (film)|Strategic Air Command]]'' (1955). Actor (and Brigadier [[General]]) [[James Stewart]]'s story of the real [[Strategic Air Command]] and its transition from prop planes to jet planes.
#''[[A Gathering of Eagles]]'' (1963). Illustrates duty, honor, and the burden of command.
#''[[Red Dawn]]'' (1984)
#''[[Harry's War]]'' (1981)
#''[[The Patriot]]'' (2000) (the one starring Mel Gibson, there are several other movies with this name)
#''[[Ladder 49]]'' (2004)
#''[[Rocky]]'' (1976) (perseverance and talent can overcome all odds)
#''[[October Sky]]'' (1999)
#''[[Amazing Grace (film)|Amazing Grace]]''
#''[[Bruce Almighty]]'' (2003)
#''[[World Trade Center]]'' (2006) (highlights the bravery of the firemen and police in [[9/11]])
#''[[Flight 93]]'' (2006)
#''[[A Man For All Seasons]]'' (1966)
#''[[Chariots of Fire]]'' (1981)
#''[[One Foot In Heaven]]'' (1941)
#''[[Quo Vadis?]]''
#''[[The Lost Weekend]]'' (1945) (dangers of alcohol)
#''[[The Manchurian Candidate]]'' (1962, 2004 remake) (anti-communist in general, but with a swipe at [[Joseph McCarthy]])
#''[[The Green Berets]]'' (1968)Vivid defense of our troops' conduct in the Vietnam War.
#''[[My Son John]]'' (1952). A small-town couple's world is turned upside-down by the discovery that their adult son is a Communist.
#''[[True Lies]]'' (1994), starring the future Republican governor of California, [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]]. Teaches conservative values like marital loyalty, and political incorrect facts such as the fact that most terrorists are Middle Eastern Arabic speakers who don't value human life.
#''[[The Island]]'' (2005) Pro-life statement against cloning to harvest organs.
#''[[Evelyn]]'' (2002) True story of Irish father's legal struggle to recover his kids from an orphanage.
#''[[Shane]]'' (1953) Western about defending a homesteading family.
#''[[Hero]]'' (1992) Even those with character flaws can do good.
#''[[The Day of the Jackal]]'' (1973) celebrates conservative values like honor and duty.
#''[[The 6th Day]]'' (2000) Pro-Life, Anti-Cloning movie Featuring Republican Governor [[Arnold Schwarzenegger]]
#''Ghostbusters'' (1984). Fitting satire of an environmental regulator.
#[[Facing the Giants]] 2006. Trust in [[God]], let him take over, and good things will happen.
#''Flash of Genius'' (2008) - the intellectual property of a hard-working, solitary inventor is promoted, and his children stuck by his side through enormous difficulties.
#''Oh, God!'' (1977) - Acceptance of God's calling is rewarded, the faithful are vindicated, and naysayers are proven wrong.

== Debatable Whether Conservative ==

#''[[The Passion of the Christ]]'' (2004) (downplays the [[Resurrection]]<ref>The original version of the film had no references at all to the Resurrection.</ref> and strength of Christianity and omits powerful angels; instead exaggerates triumph of evil; film had little lasting effect on public or its producer)
#''[[It's a Wonderful Life]]'' (1946) (falsely teaches that humanism is what makes life worthwhile; marginalizes faith with a cartoonish depiction and demonizes capitalism as sadistic and greedy)
#''[[High Noon]]'' (1952)
#''[[P.C.U.]]'' (1994) - college students fight back against a campus where the administration promotes official [[diversity]] awareness weekends and radical [[feminism]], [[vegan]]ism, and [[political correctness]] run amok, but a conservative group on campus is also portrayed just as negatively as the P.C. groups.

== References ==
<references/>

[[Category:Essays about Conservatism]]

Ben-Hur (1959 film)

2010-01-02T01:58:14Z

Solomos:

{{Infobox Film
| name=Ben-Hur
| image=BenHurposter.jpg
| caption=A Tale of the Christ
| director=William Wyler
| producer=Sam Zimbalist
| writer=Karl Tunberg
| narrator=
| starring=[[Charlton Heston]] Jack Hawkins Haya Harareet Stephen Boyd
| music=Miklós Rózsa
| cinematography=Robert L. Surtees
| editing=John D. Dunning Ralph E. Winters
| distributor=Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
| released=November 18, 1959
| runtime=212 min
| country=USA
| language=English
| budget=$15,000,000
| gross=$75,000,000
| preceded_by=
| followed_by=
| website=
| amg_id=
| imdb_id=
}}
'''''Ben-Hur''''' is a 1959 film released by [[Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer]], and based on the novel by General [[Lew Wallace]]. One of the greatest of the epic film "spectaculars", ''Ben-Hur'' won a record 11 [[Academy Awards]], a feat not repeated until ''Titanic'' in 1998.

The film stars [[Charlton Heston]] as Judah Ben-Hur, a [[Judaism|Jewish]] merchant who is sold into slavery after being betrayed by his childhood friend.

Tamils

2010-01-02T01:21:22Z

Solomos:

'''Tamils''' are people of southern [[India]] and northern [[Sri Lanka]] speaking the language of Tamil.

The [[Tamil Tigers]], a Tamil terrorist group, has been engaged in a violent secession movement against the Sri Lankan government since the 1970s. Amongst other methods of violence, they have used suicide bombings, most notably in the murder of former Indian Prime Minister [[Rajiv Gandhi]].

[[category:Dravidian languages]]
[[Category:India]]

Reinhard Heydrich

2009-10-17T23:04:55Z

Solomos: Heydrich's rank in the SS was ''Obergruppenführer'', not ''Obersturbanfuhrer''.

[[Image:Heydrich.jpg|right|300px|thumb|''Obergruppenführer'' Reinhard Heydrich]]
'''Reinhard Tristan Eugen Heydrich''' (byname Der Henker: ''the hangman'') was German political officer in the notorious ''Schutzstaffel'' (SS), the chief lieutenant of [[Heinrich Himmler]], and the man most responsible for the creation and implementation of the final solution (Endlösung) against the Jews of Europe.

==Early life==
Heydrich was born March 7, 1904 in Halle, Germany, the son of a director of a musical conservatory; one of his compositions done several years before Heydrich was born was a work ironically entitled “Reinhard’s Crime”. Richard Wagner would be one of his influences, and son Reinhard was exposed to him a great deal, becoming gifted on the violin within a few years. A rumor a grandparent was Jewish, coupled with a slight build and high-pitched voice, caused young Reinhard to be introverted, and yet be as competative as possible with those around him. He would also develop a hidden desire to get even, which would be put to use later on.

When he came of age just after the First World War, he joined a Freikorps unit in 1919, and entered the German navy with the intent to secure a commission. By 1931, he was a lieutenant and on his way to a discharge after a court of honor found him guilty of conduct unbecoming an officer: he had an affair with a shipyard director’s daughter, yet married someone else. Jobless for several months, he secured an appointment to the SS, and after an interview with Himmler he was entrusted with the organization of the intelligence and surveillance arm known as the ''Sicherheitsdienst'' (SD; “Security Service”).

==Nazi==
Heydrich became head of the political department of the Munich police force soon after Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany in 1933; his rapid reorganization of that force spread to others and helped bring them Himmler's control. Despite rising in the ranks rapidly in the SD, his hopes for advancement rested only with his specialization (Himmler was just four years older than Heydrich). In 1934 he was appointed SS chief for Berlin; in 1936, when Himmler became the SS chief, Heydrich took charge of the SD and the [[Gestapo]].

Several events during the late-1930s expanded Heydrich’s influence and power. In 1938 a purge was conducted against the German High Command, removing many officers from their posts, either through forced retirement or being denounced and led off to concentration camps; Heydrich himself played a leading role, and as head of the Gestapo, he could arrest and jail his enemies with impunity. In early-November of that year, Kristallnacht took place; some 35,000 Jews were arrested on his orders, their property confiscated with the addendum that they would pay for the damage that was caused. And by 1939, Heydrich assumed the leadership of the Reichssicherheitshauptamt (“Reich Security Central Office”), the agency in charge of all of Germany’s secret police forces.

==World War II==
In the last week of August, 1939, several German convicts were dressed in Army uniforms, sent to the Gleiwitz radio transmitter near the Polish/German border and summarily shot; the plan for the fake attack was certainly Heydrich’s, and the “news” of German soldiers being swarmed over by Polish raiders gave Hitler the pretext to invade Poland on September 1, 1939.

Soon after the conquest of Poland, Heydrich and his head of Jewish affairs, [[Adolf Eichmann]], began the first large-scale deportations of Jews to ghettos in established in Polish cities, principly Warsaw, for the purpose of confining Jews until further actions to be determined; the ''Judenräte'' (“Jewish Councils”) was largely his creation as well, meant to increase German control over the ghettos, and in the future, direct the removal of Jews to the extermination camps. At the same time, Heydrich established and organized the Einsatzgruppen (“deployment groups”), which fanned out into the occupied territories and murdered up to one million Soviet and Polish Jews in German-occupied territories.

====Wannsee Conference====
:''To Gruppenführer Heydrich:''
:''Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.''
:''Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, these organizations are to collaborate.''
:''I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question.'' (Order from Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich, July 31, 1941)

On January 20, 1942 at a lakeside villa near Berlin named Wannsee a top secret [[Wannsee Conference|conference]] was convened by Heydrich to implement methods and ideas for a "final solution to the Jewish question" (''die Endlösung der Judenfrage''). At the conference were fifteen men, among them Eichmann, who would be instrumental in providing the logistical plans for removing the Jews to the camps. The men present were highly educated, and represented government agencies, such as the Gestapo, the Race and Resettlement Office, the S.S., as well as a representative from the General Government in Poland. As Heydrich himself explained near the beginning of the conference, ideas were bartered about as to relocating Jews:

:''“Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration—i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east…Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.”''

The minutes of the meeting were kept, but had been edited by Heydrich. The language it contains euphemisms in place of what was really said. ''Evacuation of Jews to the east'' and ''resettlement'' meant relocation to the concentration and extermination camps in Poland; ''special handling'' regarded the killing of Jews, either through slave labor in which the Jew was worked to death, or being killed immediately on arrival. The ''final solution'' was put into practice within a few months of the conference, as the bullets of the machine guns and the exhaust of carbon monoxide were replaced by the more efficient killing methods installed in the first gas chambers.

==Prague==
In September 1941 Heydrich was appointed the position of Reichsprotektor (governor) of Bohemia and Moravia (now in the Czech Republic). As the “head” of a state with a free hand, he mollified the Czechs with improved social and working conditions, combining them with repression and mass executions. His success in “pacifying” the Czechs lulled Heydrich into a false sense of security; he referred to them as “my Czechs” at times, and refused to believe they would cause him harm. On May 27, 1942 two Free Czech agents trained in, and transported from, Britain, had lain in wait on a Prague street corner as he arrived in his typical style, an open car without an armed escort. The corner forced the car to slow, allowing the agents to bomb and shoot the car, wounding Heydrich. Although his injuries were not life-threatening, embedded horsehair fibers from the seat caused an infection, and he died June 4.

After his state funeral in Berlin, “Operation Reinhard” was commenced in his memory, a retaliatory act against the citizens of [[Lidice]], just north of Prague; hundreds were executed, and the town was dynamited and razed.

==References==
*[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jbKnlI242JQ&feature=related Video of Heydrich posted on YouTube]
*Breitman, Richard. ''The Architect of Genocide: Himmler and the Final Solution''. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991.
*Dederichs, Mario. ''Heydrich: The Face of Evil''. Greenhill Books: Newberry, United Kingdom, 2006.
*Fleming, Gerald. ''Hitler and the Final Solution''. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984.
*Gilbert, Martin. ''The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War''. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1985.
*MacDonald, Callum. ''The Killing of SS Obergruppenfuhrer Reinhard Heydrich''. New York: The Free Press, 1989.
*Toland, John. ''The Last 100 Days''. New York: Random House, 1966.
*[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60A10F63C5E1A7A93CAAB1782D85F458485F9 "CZECH STATE GETS GESTAPO MASTER; Heydrich, Chief Lieutenant of Himmler, Succeeds von Neurath as Protector"; ''New York Times'', 28 September 1941]
*[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F4091FF83B5F1A7A93C7A9178DD85F468485F9 "HEYDRICH'S FAME RESTED ON MURDER; Known as 'Hangman' and 'Cobra,' He Rose in Nazidom as Killer of Friend and Foe", ''New York Times'', 5 June 1942]
*[http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F30B12FF3E5E1A7A93CBA8178DD85F468485F9 "Heydrich Killers Slain, Say Nazis, As Ultimatum to Czechs Expires; HEYDRICH KILLERS DEAD, SAY GERMANS", ''New York Times'', 19 June 1942]
*[http://www.historyplace.com/worldwar2/biographies/heydrich.htm History Place bio]
*[http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Holocaust/Heydrich.html Jewish Virtual Library]
*[http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/GERheydrich.htm Spartacus Educational]

[[Category:World War II]]
[[Category:Genocide]]
[[Category:Mass Murderers]]
[[Category:Nazis]]
[[Category:Anti-Semitism]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Heydrich, Reinhard}}

Holocaust

2009-10-17T23:03:42Z

Solomos: /* Endlösung */ I believe Heydrich was ''Obergruppenführer'', not ''Obersturbanfuhrer''.

[[Image:Warsaw ghetto.jpg|right|300px|thumb|Jewish families are forced from the Warsaw Ghetto in the aftermath of its destruction by the S.S. in 1943. Their final destination was the killing center at Treblinka.]]
The '''Holocaust''' was systematic destruction by the [[Nazis]] of [[Jews|Jewish culture]], society, and, in ''die Endlösung'' (the '''Final Solution'''), the lives of all Jews, 1933-1945. Before Hitler and the Nazis came to power in 1933 they demonized the Jews as subhuman and the cause of all Germany's troubles. In power, the Nazis first removed the Jews from power and prestige; from 1938-41 they imposed severe restrictions on Jews in Germany (many of whom fled). The killing started in 1941, as the [[SS]] under [[Heinrich Himmler]] systematically rounded up all the Jews the Nazis could reach, and killed about 6 million in extermination camps. Millions of non-Jews were killed in separate Nazi operations.

The Holocaust was known but downplayed 1945-60, but since 1960 has become one of the central memories and horrors of [[World War II]], shaping policies by and towards [[Israel]] and profoundly shaping the modern conceptions of guilt and evil.

==Origins==
Hatred of the Jews has a long history in Germany and Europe, but the modern forms of antisemitism emerged in the 19th century as a new spirit of nationalism allowed some Germans to sharply differentiate themselves from the Jews, a cultural subgroup that was well integrated into German society. By the end of the century ant-semitic politicians and organized movements had emerged. Antisemitism was muted during World War I, but exploded in 1919 as the defeated war veterans cast about for someone to blame for the national disgrace.
===Stage 1: to 1933===
The Nazi party emerged among veterans in the early 1920s, with a violent attack on Jews as [[Adolf Hitler]]'s central theme. After years of struggling to push their ideology into the masses through propaganda and violence, the Nazi Party in Germany came to power in January 1933, with Hitler as Chancellor, with his ideology firmly entrenched within the party. In his book ''Mein Kampf'', Hitler expounded on the idea that the Aryan race, of which he was a part, was the so-called “master race”, and had a moral right and duty to subjugate the world; in the way stood the ''untermenschen'' (“sub-humans”), which, according to the Nazis, were meant to serve the master race as slaves. At the very bottom were the Jews, who were depicted as an evil race bent on world domination.

The [[Nazis]] violently hated all the Jews and everything they stood for. They worked relentlessly toward the goal of removing all possible Jewish influences. Starting in the 1920s (when they were a small party) with a violently anti-Semitic rhetoric that blamed Jews for all the problems of Germany and the modern world, the Nazis defined Jews as a permanent “race” that would never change and could never be improved. The Nazis also strongly disliked Christianity as being too Jewish. Their goal was to return to a pre-Christian, all-Aryan (imaginary) world.

The Nazi goal was first to remove all Jewish influence, then deport all Jews from Europe.

===Stage 2: 1933-38===
The second stage of Nazi policy concerning Jews, from 1933 to 1938, when Hitler was dictator in a peacetime Germany, involved the removal of Jews from all public office. The Nazis encouraged the Jews to leave and half of the Jewish population in Germany did so (including famous scientist [[Albert Einstein]] and the teenaged [[Henry Kissinger]]). The Nazis opened Dachau and other “concentration camps” to punish thousands of their political enemies—including many Jews. About 1,000 Jews were murdered in concentration camps inside Germany before 1939; these were distinct from the killing camps that were opened in 1942 in Poland.

Jewish businesses began feeling the effects of a boycott that began on April 1, 1933, followed by the dismissal of Jewish civil service workers, judges, and university professors a week later. On May 10, some ten days after laws were enacted which prevented Jewish children from attending public schools except by quota, thousands of university students and professors stormed bookstores and libraries to remove books they deemed “un-Germanic” and opposed to Nazi teachings, throwing them into public bonfires. The [[Nuremberg Laws]] were enacted in 1935, which revoked German citizenship from Jews as well as declaring the marriage between a Jew and a [[German]] illegal. By 1938, the political and economic foundations of German Jewry were completely decimated.

===Stage 3: 1938-41===
Stage three, from 1938 to 1941, involved increasingly severe and humiliating restrictions for Jews. “Kristallnacht” in November 1938 was a systematic violent attack on all synagogues. World public opinion grew hostile to the Nazi actions, who ; they responded by supporting pro-Nazi, anti-Semitic political movements in France and other countries, including the “German-American Bund.” After invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis forced two million Jews into a few ghettos with below-starvation food allotments. Before the war plans were made to start deporting Jews from Germany. The war meant Nazi control of millions of Jews in the east (and many in the west too), and deportation became impossible. That left extermination as the Nazi plan.
====Crystal Night====

On November 7, 1938, Herschel Grynszpan, a German Jew living in Paris and upset over his family’s forced deportation to Poland, shot the third secretary (Ernst vom Rath) to the German ambassador in France, who died two days later. His assassination touched off a wave of riots on November 9, seemingly at the behest of the Nazi minister of propaganda, [[Joseph Goebbels]], but this was expanded and organized better with the issuing of orders by the head of the S.S., [[Reinhard Heydrich]], later that evening, who specified that S.S. and S.A. units in various cities would march out with sledgehammers against Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues - but in civilian clothes only (to symbolize the “righteous” anger of the German people). Business could not be looted, as the property inside was deemed property of the state; Jewish property near German shops and homes could not be burned, but smashed; and many Jewish males, particularly the wealthy, were subject to arrest. Over 35,000 men were arrested that night, and according to figures released by Heydrich the total number of arrests exceeded 100,000; 815 Jewish businesses were destroyed, 191 Synagogues were destroyed or demolished, and over 2,000 were dead. By the end of the week local jails as well as the new [[Buchenwald]] and [[Dachau]] concentration camps were quickly filled. The Jews were declared responsible for the damages done to their property and ordered to pay the staggering sum of one billion Reichmarks.

The sidewalks were littered with shards of the expensive storefront glass that was preferred for shops in Germany, which was called ''Kristallglas'' for its high-quality. The amount of glass left behind gave the incident its name: ''Kristallnacht'' (“Crystal Night”), or the Night of Broken Glass.
====World War II: 1939-41====
When World War II began in the fall of 1939, Jews in Germany were completely marginalized. They could not own property, go to a park, associate with Germans, enter a library or museum, work in any professional field or engage in business, nor could their children attend public schools. Public transportation was forbidden them in 1941, and the wearing of the yellow Star of David badge on their clothing became mandatory. They were also, prior to September 1, forced to migrate from countries and territories which had come under Hitler’s wing (the Rhineland, Austria, the Sudetenland), with many being deported to Poland.

====Poland====
By September 21, 1939, Poland was now the “General Government” protectorate under former lawyer [[Hans Frank]], and on that day Heydrich ordered the establishment of ''Judenrates'' (Jewish councils) which comprised 24 men - political leaders and rabbis – and whose personal responsibility was to carry out, to the letter, all German orders. This would include supplying people for work details, usually mundane things like digging ditches to amuse their Nazi overlords. Later, they were made to be responsible for supplying thousands of people a day for the “work” camps of [[Treblinka]], [[Sobibor]], [[Belzec]], and new one under construction near the town of Oswiecim, which the Germans called [[Auschwitz]].

Thousands, nearly 30% of the total population of Warsaw, were crammed into just over 2% of the city’s total land area, a density of 200,000 people per square mile. Naturally disease and malnutrition would take its toll, but for the German overlords this was a minor inconvenience. The ghetto was a temporary place to hold all of Europe’s Jews until a final solution was determined, and when the Nazis attacked its ally, the Soviet Union, in June 1941, the killing began in earnest.
====Black soldiers====
The Germans did not generally commit atrocities against Allied soldiers in the West in 1940, with one major exception. About 40,000 black African combat troops in the French army became targets of Nazi wrath. Elite German units, acting on the own in accord with longstanding racial hatred of Africans, shot about 1500 to 3000 black soldiers in French uniforms after they had surrendered.<ref>Raffael Scheck, ''Hitler's African Victims: The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940'' (2006) [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24173 online review]. </ref>

===Stage 4: 1941-42===
Stage 4 began when the Germans invaded the Soviet Union in June 1941. All Russian Jews were assumed to be Communist agents and large scale killing of political enemies began in Poland. Special units of the SS, the Security Police, and the Security Service (Einsatzgruppen der Sicherheitspolizei und des SD, Einsatz- and Sonderkommandos) not only massacred large numbers of Jews, but routinely included handicapped persons in open-air mass shootings. Seven of the “Einsatzgruppen” rounded up and shot Polish Catholic priests, intellectuals, and political leaders. Another five units (with 3,000 men) followed the Red Army and executed Communist commissars and partisans, and about 600,000 Russian Jews.
====The Einsatzgruppen====
[[Image:Babi Yar.jpg|right|150px|left|thumb|1943 German photo of Soviet POWs forced to dig up the thousands of Jews killed at Babi Yar two years before; the Nazis destroyed the evidence by burning the bodies.]]
Alongside the German Army were special mobile units whose job it was to locate and kill Jews, Gypsies, Soviets commissars, and others deemed unfit in the areas controlled by the army. These ''Einsatzgruppen'' (“special units”) were also aided by local populations who felt the Germans had relieved them of [[Soviet]] occupation as well as sharing a hatred for Jews and other minorities. Making no difference between young or old, male or female, the Einsatzgruppen killed 70,000 Jews at Ponary, near Vilnius, [[Lithuania]]; 33,771 Jews were machine-gunned in a ravine known as Babi Yar near [[Kiev]], [[Ukraine]], between [[September]] 28-29, 1941 [http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/yevtushenko.htm]; 9,000 Jews were killed at the Ninth Fort at Kaunas, Lithuania, on October 28, of which half of the dead were children. On November 30 in the Rumbula Forest outside of Riga, Latvia, between 25,000-28,000 were killed.

By mid-1941, the Ukrainian SSR had the largest population of Jews in Europe. The addition of the eastern provinces of Poland in late 1939 as well as the seizure of sections of Romanian territory in June 1940 led to some 2.7 million Jews living within the borders of the newly enlarged republic. About 85% lived in cities. By 1944, 1.6 million of these Jews had died at the hands of the Germans and their allies and auxiliaries. Unlike the majority of the Holocaust's later victims who died in the industrialized mass murder of the death camps, the overwhelming bulk of Ukraine's Jews died in mass shootings during the initial stages of the war.

The killings were done in first and second waves, with the bodies buried in mass graves. When the Soviets threatened and carried out counter-offensives to reclaim lost territory, special units made up of concentration camp inmates (''sonderkomandos'') would return to the sites, dig up the bodies, and burn them in mass pyres, destroying the evidence of their crimes. The number of individual persons killed by the Einsatzgruppen has been estimated at a bare minimum of one million.

===Stage 5: 1942-44===
Stage 5 began at The [[Wannsee Conference]] in January 1942 began stage five of Nazi power; it was then that when top Nazis decided on a “Final Solution” —to round up and secretly execute all the Jews of Europe. Killing centers were opened in Poland, and thousands of trainloads of Jews were transported there. Jews were gassed immediately upon arrival. Over three million Jews (and numbers of gypsies and other hated groups) were murdered, mostly in 1942–43.
====Wannsee Conference====
On January 20, 1942 at a villa near Berlin named Wannsee a conference was convened by Heydrich to implement methods and ideas for a "final solution to the Jewish question" (''die Endlösung der Judenfrage''). At the conference were fifteen men, among them Heydrich’s head of Jewish affairs, [[Adolf Eichmann]], who would be instrumental in providing the logistical plans for removing the Jews to the camps. The men represented government agencies, such as the Gestapo, the Race and Resettlement Office, the S.S., as well as a representative from the General Government in Poland. As Heydrich himself explained near the beginning of the conference, ideas were in play on relocating Jews:
:''“Another possible solution of the [Jewish] problem has now taken the place of emigration—i.e., evacuation of the Jews to the east…Such activities are, however, to be considered as provisional actions, but practical experience is already being collected which is of greatest importance in relation to the future final solution of the Jewish problem.”''

The minutes of the meeting were kept, but had been edited by Heydrich. The language it contains euphemisms in place of what was really said. ''Evacuation of Jews to the east'' and ''resettlement'' meant relocation to the concentration and extermination camps in Poland; ''special handling'' regarded the killing of Jews, either through slave labor in which the Jew was worked to death, or being killed immediately on arrival. The ''final solution'' was put into practice within a few months of the conference, as the bullets of the machine guns and the exhaust of carbon monoxide were replaced by the more efficient killing methods installed in the first gas chambers.

===Stage 6: 1944-45===
Stage 6 arrived when the Soviet armies overran the Polish camps in 1944–45 and, liberated the survivors.

But the killing continued unabated, even to the last week of the war. As territory was regained by Soviet forces, the death camps were evacuated of survivors and destroyed as much as possible in a futile attempt to hide the evidence. The survivors were moved west into Germany, usually in hellish death marches, and interned in concentration camps where death still awaited them; such killing by the S.S. took priority over military matters at times.
[[Image:Ike at Ordruf.jpg|left|150px|thumb|General Dwight D. Eisenhower saw for himself the carnage wrought by the Nazis when he toured the Ordruf concentration camp on April 12, 1945. These prisoners were executed prior to the camp's liberation.]]

In all, six million Jews were murdered; most of the 300,000 survivors emigrated to the United States or Israel.

==The people involved==
Analytically, the people involved in the Holocaust can be divided into the following groups:
===Victims===
Millions were victimized by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. The Jews were always the principal targets; [[Anne Frank]] in the Netherlands was the most famous victim. However, the Nazis also systematically hunted down and murdered the Roma people (“Gypsies”). They also targeted special enemies, including Communist activists, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals, and people with disabilities. The last group was the target of euthanasia programs carried out in German hospitals in 1939–1941. Some of these programs were stopped when German Christian leaders mobilized public opinion against them.
===Perpetrators===
Under the guidance of an all-powerful führer (Hitler), the Nazis believed fervently in force, violence, and terror as their best weapons. The most fanatical Nazis joined the [[SS]], which carried out most of the executions. The Final Solution was directed by [[Heinrich Himmler]], commander of the SS and Minister of the Interior. His top aide was [[Reinhard Heydrich]], head of the Gestapo and, after 1939, of all the secret police agencies grouped into the RSHA; he was assassinated by Czech commandos with British help in 1942. [[Adolph Eichmann]] was the senior SS bureaucrat in charge of handling deportation and transportation. However, regular German army police units also systematically killed large numbers of civilians and POWs on the Eastern Front.<ref> After the war, West Germany recognized its guilt and made large financial payments to Israel; Communist East Germany refused to do the same.</ref>

====Endlösung====
[[Image:Heydrich.jpg|right|150px|thumb|''Obergruppenführer'' Reinhard Heydrich, the man who convened the Wannsee Conference with the intention of determining a "final solution to the Jewish question".]]
:''To Gruppenführer Heydrich:''
:''Supplementing the task assigned to you by the decree of January 24, 1939, to solve the Jewish problem by means of emigration and evacuation in the best possible way according to present conditions, I hereby charge you to carry out preparations as regards organizational, financial, and material matters for a total solution (Gesamtlösung) of the Jewish question in all the territories of Europe under German occupation.''
:''Where the competency of other central organizations touches on this matter, these organizations are to collaborate.''
:''I charge you further to submit to me as soon as possible a general plan of the administrative material and financial measures necessary for carrying out the desired final solution (Endlösung) of the Jewish question.'' (Order from Hermann Göring to Reinhard Heydrich, July 31, 1941)

====The death camps====
[[Image:Hgdye56.jpg|right|200px|thumb|''Selektion'' of Hungarian Jews at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in May/June 1944. To be sent to the right meant slave labor; to the left, the gas chambers.]]
In the early years of Nazi Germany concentration camps were built with the expressed purpose of housing political prisoners; this was quickly expanded to Jews and other people the Nazis considered undesirable. But by 1942 new camps were built in eastern Poland as death camps; the victims, once targeted by the Einsatzgruppen coming to them, had been rounded up by units of the Army and Waffen S.S., and forced to travel to their own destruction. The victims were packed tightly into cattle cars - so tight in fact that many would die standing up – and transported by rail to the new extermination camps of Chelmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, [[Majdanek]], and Belzec. The camps were essentially factories which specialized in death, making the process from arrival to counting to shower to disposal coldly efficient.

As they arrived the victims were divided in two: those fit for work, usually young to middle aged men, or possessed a special skill needed in the camp, and the remainder sent for delousing in the showers. Deceived to the end, the “showers” was actually a sealed room in which a chemical tablet known as “[[Zyklon B]]” was dropped through a hole in the ceiling. The cyanide-based vapors would kill the entire room within minutes; within thirty, the room was emptied by the ''sonderkomandos'', cleaned, and ready for another group of victims.

Of the death camps, the one at Osweicim, Poland - Auschwitz - was perhaps the most notorious. Auschwitz was three camps: a prisoner-of-war camp (Auschwitz I), a slave-labour camp (Auschwitz III–Buna-Monowitz) and the extermination camp (Auschwitz II–Birkenau). The arrivals would disembark the trains at Auschwitz II, where the old, handicapped, infirm, sick, and pregnant women would face a German doctor (among them the notorious [[Joseph Mengele]]) in the ''selektion'', where a flick of a thumb could mean the difference between slave labor in the nearby factory run by I.G. Farben (which took advantage of the forced labor by investing some 700 million Reichsmarks in the project), or to their immediate deaths. Those selected for labor would be worked to death by a combination of hard labor and inadequate food and medical care; a second ''selektion'' of their numbers, if they had survived, would mean a trip to the gas chambers.

===Bystanders===
In recent years much controversy has arisen over when President [[Franklin D. Roosevelt]] learned what about the Nazis, and what he did or did not do. Switzerland was neutral and accepted in some refugees, but it also made large profits by trading and banking with Germany. The Swiss were forced in the 1990s to make reparation payments.

===Collaborators===
In rounding up Jews the Nazis sometimes had the enthusiastic cooperation of pro-Nazi governments (as in France and Slovakia). A few countries, including Italy and Hungary, tried to stall the Nazis, but the Germans took power directly and seized the Jews. Only Bulgaria and Denmark were largely successful in protecting their Jews.
===Resisters===
Resistance took many forms, from individual acts to hundreds of examples of organized, armed resistance. The most famous episode was the month-long uprising of 60,000 remaining Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto in April 1943. At the Sobibor death camp, an uprising in October 1943 allowed 600 prisoners to escape.

Jews stood virtually alone against the Nazi war machine and those who collaborated with them, receiving no aid or assistance from outside, as well as having no access to arms with which to defend themselves. Further, the Nazis took great care to prevent their victims from knowing their true plans right up to the moment of their deaths; at Babi Yar many had believed they were being transported to a “family work camp” right up to the point of standing before their own mass grave. There was also the fear of reprisals against large numbers of Jews within the ghettos, which also prevented resistance. But word of the unbelievable atrocities of the death camps filtered into places like Warsaw, and as the trains were leaving packed with Jews many saw that resistance was preferable to the death that awaited them.

Nine months after the Warsaw deportations had commenced, and after confirmation that their destination was the Treblinka extermination camp, 24-year-old [[Mordecai Anielewicz]] and his Jewish Resistance began the [[Warsaw Ghetto Uprising]] on April 19, 1943, which lasted just over a month.

Jews fought alongside partisans elsewhere in France, the Balkans, and Soviet Russia during the last three years of the war. Uprisings also occurred in two of the death camps, Treblinka and Sobibor; the latter was closed as a result and the site razed to hide the evidence.

===Rescuers===
Rescuers hid potential victims as best they could; the tragic story of [[Anne Frank]] is the most famous. The Danish people managed to ferry their entire Jewish population to neutral Sweden in one night, under the noses of the Nazis. The pope helped protect some Italian Jews; it is still being debated whether or not he could have done much more. The most famous rescuer was Oskar Schindler; —“Schindler’s List” the movie is a tells the true story about of how he saved 1,100 Jews from the Nazis by setting up factories that produced defective munitions.<ref> For further information, see [http://www.teachwithmovies.org/guides/schindlers-list.html] </ref>.

In territory occupied by the Germans the situation was bleak for Jews. Their allies were few and resources were meager. Despite this, many put their lives on the line to provide aid and comfort, as well as putting them in hiding or through a network of underground units to get them to safety. In Poland it was punishable by death to aid Jews, yet a “council for the aid of Jews” known as the Zegota rescued about 5,000 men, women, and children, providing hiding places and forged identity papers. A similar number was hidden by French Huguenots in the little town of Le Chamblon-sur-Lignon.
====Vatican====
Although criticized by many for his silence about the Nazi persecution of the Jews, Pope [[Pius XII]] hid several hundred inside the Vatican, away from Mussolini and German occupiers and quietly worked behind the scenes to do what they could. The Vatican estimates they were able to save upwards of 150,000 Jews during this horrible time. For those who say the Vatican should have done more to save Jews, it should be noted that they weren't even able to stop the killing of Polish Catholics, of whom more than a million lost their lives, so how could they stop the killing of Jews?
====Wallenburg====
Swedish diplomat [[Raoul Wallenburg]], in an attempt to save the last remaining Jews in Hungary, arrived in Budapest on July 9, 1944, and working with neutral diplomats and the Vatican, secured the release of several thousand; his efforts at the rescue of Jews would total well over 100,000 by war’s end, including [[Tom Lantos]], a survivor who became a powerful member of the U.S. Congress.
====Schindler====
A Nazi businessman who took advantage of the slave labor conditions to make a personal profit, [[Oskar Schindler]], would use that profit to bribe camp guards and Nazi officials at the Plazow camp to ensure that the workers he had grown to love and admire would survive the end of the war; among the individuals he played cat and mouse with for their lives was the camp's commandant, Amon Goeth, a sadistic man who shot Jews for target practice from his villa and tortured a captured escapee by shooting the prisoners around him. These men and women, who hid Jews out of a sense of common humanity, would not be forgotten: the state of Israel would recognize them with honorary citizenship several years later.

===Liberators===
The Allies liberated the concentration camps in 1945 — but the question remains as to whether they could have bombed the camps or otherwise stopped the Final Solution.

===Survivors===
The survivors of the Final Solution were very quiet about their experiences until about 1961, when Adolph Eichmann was captured in South America by Israel, tried in Jerusalem, and executed. Since then the Holocaust has become recognized as the most horrible episode of the twentieth20th century, and it has been analyzed in numerous with many books, courses, museums, and movies. The most important museums are the Holocaust Museum in Washington, and the Museum of Tolerance in Los Angeles.

===Non-Jewish victims===
Jews were not the only victims of Nazi persecution. <ref> It is estimated that around 6 million Jews were killed during the Final Solution, along with as many as another 6 million non-Jews. [http://www.holocaust-history.org/short-essays/heinrich-himmler.shtml] </ref>
Members of unions, members of the Social Democratic Party, and political dissidents were also sent to the camps; indeed they were among the first ones incarcerated immediately following Hitler’s appointment as chancellor. Some 20,000 [[Jehovah's Witnesses]] also were rounded up and sent to the camps, primarily because of refusal to register for the draft, swear allegiance to the state, or give the “Heil Hitler” greeting. [[Homosexual]]s were arrested; they were forced to wear a pink triangle on their prison garments. [[Gypsies]] as well were rounded up and imprisoned, and like the Jews, were deliberately marked for killing.

The mentally retarded, the disabled, and the insane were selected for the T-4 Program, which was created in 1939. Dubbed “useless eaters” by S.S. general Ernst Kaltenbrunner, these people were murdered as part of a “euthanasia” campaign, usually by placing them in a special room where a vehicle’s engine provided the carbon monoxide gas that flowed in through a hose in a wall.

Following the outbreak of World War II in [[Poland]], the Nazis killed Polish intelligentsia in territories under their control, politicians, priests, and anyone else deemed part of a Polish leadership; the remainder were deemed slaves to serve their new masters; many were forced to perform hard labor, while many of the children who happened to look Aryan were kidnapped and raised as Germans in German households.

[[Image:Goeth.jpg|right|150px|right|thumb|Amon Goeth, commandant of the Plazow concentration camp near Krakow, Poland. A sadistic man, his recreation was to target and kill individual Jews in the camp with a hunting rifle from the balcony of his villa.]]

==Deaths==
The number of Jews put to death were staggering. Beginning in the summer of 1942 a bare minimum of 960,000 were believed killed at Auschwitz during its three years in operation. At Treblinka, between 750,000-900,000 Jews were killed within 17 months, considering the staff and guards there numbered 120. 600,000 Jews died at Belzac within 10 months by a staff numbering 104. In the eighteen months of its operation, Sobibor killed 250,000.

{| border="1" align="right" cellpadding="5" cellspacing="0" width="450" style="margin-left:5px"
|-
!colspan="5" align="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: yellow no-repeat scroll top left;"|Jewish Death Statistics during the Holocaust
|-
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Country
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Prior Jewish Population
!align ="center" style="color: white; height: 30px; background: red no-repeat scroll top left;"|Estimated Number Killed
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Percentage of Total
!align ="center" style="color: black; height: 30px; background: tan no-repeat scroll top left;"|Estimated Number of Survivors
|-
|'''Poland'''
|3,300,000
|'''3,000,000'''
|91%
|300,000
|-
|'''Germany'''
|566,000
|'''200,000'''
|36%
|366,000
|-
|'''USSR'''
|3,020,000
|'''1,100,000'''
|36%
|1,920,000
|-
|'''Hungary'''
|800,000
|'''596,000'''
|74%
|204,000
|-
|'''Lithuania'''
|168,000
|'''143,000'''
|85%
|25,000
|-
|'''Estonia'''
|4,500
|'''2,000'''
|44%
|2,500
|-
|'''Latvia'''
|95,000
|'''80,000'''
|84%
|15,000
|-
|'''France'''
|350,000
|'''77,320'''
|22%
|272,680
|-
|'''Austria'''
|185,000
|'''65,000'''
|35%
|120,000
|-
|'''Netherlands'''
|140,000
|'''100,000'''
|71%
|40,000
|-
|'''Belgium'''
|65,700
|'''28,900'''
|45%
|36,800
|-
|'''Romania'''
|342,000
|'''287,000'''
|84%
|55,000
|-
|'''Bohemia Moravia'''
|118,310
|'''71,150'''
|60%
|47,160
|-
|'''Greece'''
|77,380
|'''67,000'''
|87%
|10,380
|-
|'''Czechoslovakia'''
|88,950
|'''71,000'''
|80%
|17,950
|-
|'''Yugoslavia'''
|78,000
|'''63,300'''
|81%
|14,700
|-
|'''Italy'''
|44,500
|'''7,680'''
|17%
|36,820
|-
|'''Bulgaria'''
|50,000
|'''0'''
|0%
|50,000
|-
|'''Denmark'''
|7,800
|'''60'''
|.8%
|7,740
|-
|'''Finland'''
|2,000
|'''7'''
|.03%
|1,993
|-
|'''Norway'''
|1,700
|'''762'''
|45%
|938
|-
|'''TOTAL'''
|'''9,508,340'''
|'''5,962,129'''
|'''63%'''
|'''3,546,211'''
|
|}

==Survivors==
More than nine million people were discovered by the [[Allies]] to have been displaced throughout the European Theater of the war; of these, six million were returned to their native lands. One million refused, citing either a fear of communist persecution or a fear of being discovered to have collaborated with the enemy. The remainder, more than three and a half million Jews, had nothing. For these survivors, life after the war meant searching for loved ones, as well as recovering from the severe effects of malnutrition and disease at the hands of the Nazis.

As to the future of finding homes for the surviving Jews, that was solved in part by both covert and well-publicized efforts to pressure [[Great Britain]] into relinquishing control of [[Palestine]] for the purpose of a Jewish homeland, as well as the relaxing of American immigration laws in 1948 which allowed a large influx of Jewish refugees. So shocking was the Holocaust to the Jewish mindset that it caused a determination of survivors to speed the creation of the State of [[Israel]] in May, 1948, vowing that a repeat of the Holocaust, as well as previous pogroms against the Jews in the past, would not happen again. Since 1948, Israel has fought in four major wars against their neighbors bent on eradicating it, and each time Israel has emerged victorious.

The Allies were just as shocked over the conditions which prevailed at the Nazi death camps, and set up military tribunals as a result. The most famous was the [[Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal|Nürnberg Trials]], taking place 1945-1946 near the site of the Nazi mass rallies. For the first time in history, an international tribunal would try the 22 major living Nazis for crimes against humanity; all but one would be found guilty, and more than half would suffer death by hanging.
==Punishment==
Hitler and Goebbels committed suicide as the Russians were capturing Berlin. Himmler was captured in 1945 and committed suicide before his war crimes trial began. The main war criminals were tried at the International War Crimes Tribunals at Nuremburg in 1945–1947, and at smaller trials throughout Europe. The Holocaust was mentioned at the trials, but the major allegation against defendants was the systematic planning of an unjust war.<ref> The Far East War Crimes Trials were held from 1946 to 1948, and resulted in the conviction of 25 Japanese generals and high officials accused of crimes against peace. Over 2,000 local and regional trials convicted 4,000 Japanese officers accused of mistreating prisoners and civilians.</ref> Many Nazis fled justice, reaching Argentina or other dispant locations. [[Adolf Eichmann]], a chief architect of the Holocaust, was captured while hiding in Argentina under an assumed name, brought to Israel, and put on trial in 1961. He was found guilty, and suffered the first and only death penalty carried out in Israel’s history. Other Nazis would eventually be brought to trial: [[Klaus Barbie]], the “Butcher of Lyon”, was tried in France in 1987, as well as [[Maurice Papon]] a decade later for collaborating with the Nazis. These trials brought to new generations an awareness of the Holocaust.

==Etymology==
The word '''Holocaust''' comes from the Greek word ''holokaustos'' (''holos'': complete, and ''kaustos'': a sacrificial or burnt offering to a god); the [[Hebrew]] word ''hurban'' (destruction) was also used, and and survivors have used both to refer to what seemed to be the complete and utter destruction of the Jewish people at the hands of the Nazis, specifically in the crematoria of the [[concentration camps|extermination camps]] built for that purpose. In Hebrew, the Holocaust is known by the word "''Shoah''."

==Books and film==
*''[[Schindler's List]]''

==See also==
[[Image:Lovis Corinth Römische Campagna.jpg|thumb|Römische Campagna by Lovis Corinth; returned to the heirs of a Jew in 2007.]]
* [[Holocaust denial]]
*[[Holocaust Memorial Day]]
*[[Kindertransport]]
* [[History of Poland]]

{{Clear}}

==Bibliography==
===Surveys and victims===
* Bloxham, Donald and Kushner, Tony. ''The Holocaust: Critical Historical Approaches.'' (2005). 238 pp.
* Brandon, Ray, and Wendy Lower, eds. ''The Shoah in Ukraine: History, Testimony, Memorialization.'' (2008). 378 pp. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=24078 online review]
* Dawidowicz, Lucy. ''The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945'' (1986)
** '' Hitler's War Against the Jews: A Young Reader's Version of the War Against the Jews, 1933-1945, by Lucy S. Dawidowicz'' (1978) [http://www.amazon.com/Hitlers-War-Against-Jews-Dawidowicz/dp/0874412226/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979155&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search]
* Edelheit, Abraham et al. ''History Of The Holocaust: A Handbook and Dictionary'' (1995) 544pp, a standard reference work [http://www.questia.com/read/9134049?title=History%20of%20the%20Holocaust%3a%20A%20Handbook%20and%20Dictionary online edition]
* Friedlander, Saul. ''Nazi Germany and the Jews: 1933-1945'' (2009) abridged version of standard 2 volume history:
** Friedlander, Saul. ''The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945'' (2007), the standard scholarly history [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Extermination-Nazi-Germany-1939-1945/dp/0060190434/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979435&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
** Friedlander, Saul. ''The Years of Persecution:1933-1939'' (1998)
* Friedman, Saul S. ''A History of the Holocaust.'' (2004). 494 pp.
* Gilbert, Martin. ''Never Again: The History of the Holocaust'' (2000) [http://www.amazon.com/Never-Again-Holocaust-Martin-Gilbert/dp/0789304090/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979238&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Gilbert, Martin. ''The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe During the Second World War'' (1987) [http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-History-Europe-During-Second/dp/0805003487/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979238&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search]
* Gilbert, Martin. ''The Routledge Atlas of the Holocaust'' (2002)[http://www.amazon.com/Routledge-Atlas-Holocaust-Historical-Atlases/dp/0415281466/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979238&sr=8-6 excerpt and text search]
* Gutman, Israel. ed. ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust'' (4 vol 1990), a standard reference work
* Lacqueur, Walter, ed. ''The Holocaust Encyclopedia'' (2001).
* Landau, Ronnie. ''The Nazi Holocaust'' (2002)
* Marrus, Michael A. ''The Holocaust in History'' (1989)
* Niewyk, Donald, and Francis Nicosia. ''The Columbia Guide to the Holocaust.'' (2000) [http://www.questia.com/PM.qst?a=o&d=99854126&oplinknum=4 online edition]; [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=289191002135231 online review]
* Rosen, Philip. ''Dictionary of the Holocaust: Biography, Geography and Terminology.'' (1997)
* Rothkirchen, Livia. ''The Jews of Bohemia and Moravia: Facing the Holocaust.'' (2006). 447 pp.
* Spector, Shmuel ed., ''The Encyclopedia of Jewish Life: Before and During the Holocaust'' (2001).
* Yahil, Leni. ''The Holocaust: The Fate of European Jewry'', (1990).

===Perpetrators===
* Browning, Christopher. ''Nazi Policy, Jewish Workers, German Killers'' (2000)
* Burleigh, Michael. ''The Third Reich: A New History.'' 2000. 864 pp., stresses central role of antisemitism.
* Dawidowicz, Lucy. ''The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945'' (1986)
* Friedlander, Henry. ''The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution.'' (1995) 445 pp. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=2249957902770 online review];[http://www.questia.com/read/9253469?title=The%20Origins%20of%20Nazi%20Genocide%3a%20From%20Euthanasia%20to%20the%20Final%20Solution online edition]
* Friedlander, Saul. ''Nazi Germany and the Jews: Volume 1: The Years of Persecution 1933-1939'' (1998)), the standard scholarly history
* Friedlander, Saul. ''The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945'' (2007), the standard scholarly history [http://www.amazon.com/Years-Extermination-Nazi-Germany-1939-1945/dp/0060190434/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979435&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Gaunt, David; Levine, Paul A.; and Palosuo, Laura, eds. ''Collaboration and Resistance during the Holocaust: Belarus, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania.'' (2004). 519 pp.
* Goldhagen, Daniel Joseph. ''Hitler’s Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust'' (1997).
* Graml, Hermann. ''Antisemitism in the Third Reich'' (1992).
* Gutman, Israel, ed. ''Encyclopedia of the Holocaust,'' 4 vol (1989)
* Johnson, Eric A. ''Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and Ordinary Germans'' (2000). [http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Terror-Gestapo-Ordinary-Germans/dp/0465049087/ref=sr_1_13?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979435&sr=8-13 excerpt and text search]
* Lewy, Guenter. ''The Nazi Persecution of the Gypsies'' (2001). [http://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Persecution-Gypsies-Guenter-Lewy/dp/0195142403/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979549&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Levy, Richard, ed. ''Antisemitism: A Historical Encyclopedia of Prejudice and Persecution'' (2005)
* Lower, Wendy. ''Nazi Empire-Building and the Holocaust in Ukraine.'' (2005). 307 pp.
* Wachsmann, Nikolaus. "Looking into the Abyss: Historians and the Nazi Concentration Camps," ''European History Quarterly,'' 4 2006; vol. 36: pp. 247 - 278. fulltext in Sage; historiography
* Wistrich, Robert S. ''Hitler and the Holocaust.'' (2001). 295 pp.

===Memory===
* Bartov, Omer. ''Mirrors of Destruction: War, Genocide and Modern Identity.'' (2000). 310 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-507723-0. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=23289980364228 online review]; [http://www.amazon.com/Mirrors-Destruction-Genocide-Modern-Identity/dp/0195151844/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979627&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Bloxham, Donald. ''Genocide on Trial: War Crimes Trials and the Formation of Holocaust History and Memory.'' (2001) 292pp ISBN 978-0-19-820872-3. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=122091071198412 online review]
* Carrier, Peter. ''Holocaust Monuments and National Memory Cultures in France and Germany since 1989: The Origins and Political Function of the Véd'Hiv' in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin.'' (2005) 267 pp.
* Douglas, Lawrence. ''The Memory of Judgment: The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust'' (2000) [http://books.google.com/books?id=hiU2C0maeAMC&pg=PP1&dq=intitle:The+intitle:Memory+intitle:of+intitle:Judgment+inauthor:douglas&num=30&as_brr=0&sig=MiETAxY1KKnru9emnC0x3IXWJIE excerpt and text search]
* Greenspan, Henry. ''On Listening to Holocaust Survivors: Recounting and Life History.'' (1998) 220 pp. ISBN 978-0-275-95718-6. [http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.cgi?path=3035937424750 online review]
* Haggith, Tony and Newman, Joanna, ed. ''Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television.'' 2005. 317 pp.
* Mikhman, Dan. ''Holocaust Historiography: A Jewish Perspective: Conceptualizations, Terminology, Approaches, and Fundamental Issues'' (2003)
* Roseman, Mark. ''A Past in Hiding: Memory and Survival in Nazi Germany'' (2001). [http://www.amazon.com/Past-Hiding-Memory-Survival-Germany/dp/031242065X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979685&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Rosen, Philip. and Nina Apfelbaum. ''Bearing Witness: A Resource Guide to Literature, Poetry, Art, Music, and Videos by Holocaust Victims and Survivors'' (2001) [http://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Witness-Literature-Holocaust-Survivors/dp/0313310769/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195980447&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Stone, Dan, ed. ''The Historiography of the Holocaust.'' (2004). 573 pp
* Waxman, Zoe Vania. ''Writing the Holocaust: Identity, Testimony, Representation'' (2007) [http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Holocaust-Representation-Historical-Monographs/dp/0199206384/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195981167&sr=1-3 excerpt and text search]
* Wiesel, Elie, and Robert Franciosi. ''Elie Wiesel: Conversations'' (2002) [http://www.amazon.com/Elie-Wiesel-Conversations-Literary/dp/1578065038/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979990&sr=1-2 excerpt and text search]
* Weisel, Elie. ''Night'' (1999).

===Reactions and memory in U.S.===
* Abzug, Robert H. ed. ''America Views the Holocaust, 1933-1945: A Brief Documentary History'' (1999) [http://www.amazon.com/America-Views-Holocaust-1933-1945-Documentary/dp/0312218192/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195981035&sr=1-6 excerpt and text search]
* Lipstadt, Deborah E. ''Beyond Belief: The American Press and the Coming of the Holocaust, 1933–1945'' (1993). [http://www.amazon.com/Beyond-Belief-American-Coming-Holocaust/dp/0029191610/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979711&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Newton, Verne W., ed. ''FDR and the Holocaust'' (1996). [http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-Franklin-Roosevelt-Institute-Diplomatic/dp/0312122268/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979739&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Novick, Peter. ''The Holocaust in American Life'' (1999). [http://www.amazon.com/Holocaust-American-Life-Peter-Novick/dp/0618082328/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979766&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Wyman, David. ''The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust, 1941–1945.'' (1984). [http://www.amazon.com/Abandonment-Jews-America-Holocaust-1941-1945/dp/159558174X/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979795&sr=8-2 excerpt and text search]

===Primary sources===
* Aroneanu, Eugene and Thomas Whissen, eds. ''Inside the Concentration Camps: Eyewitness Accounts of Life in Hitler's Death Camps'' (1996) 176 pp, [http://www.questia.com/read/26185130?title=Inside%20the%20Concentration%20Camps%3a%20Eyewitness%20Accounts%20of%20Life%20in%20Hitler's%20Death%20Camps online edition]
* Greene, Joshua M, and Shiva Kumar, eds. ''Witness: Voices from the Holocaust'' (2000). [http://www.amazon.com/WITNESS-Holocaust-Joshua-M-Greene/dp/0684865262/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979830&sr=8-1 excerpt and text search]
* Klemperer, Victor. ''I Will Bear Witness: A Diary of the Nazi Years 1942–1945'' (2001). [http://www.amazon.com/Will-Bear-Witness-1942-1945-Diary/dp/0375756973/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979856&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search vol 2]
* Kremer, S. Lillian, ed. ''Holocaust Literature: An Encyclopedia of Writers and Their Work'' (2002).
* Siedlecki, Janusz Nel, et als. ''We Were in Auschwitz'' (2000).
* Szpilman, Wladyslaw. ''The Pianist'' (2000). [http://www.amazon.com/Pianist-Read-Great-Movie/dp/0752864297/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1195979914&sr=8-3 excerpt and text search]

==International Justice==

* Pritchard, R. John, “War Crimes, International Criminal Law, and the Postwar Trials in Europe and Asia.,” Iin Loyd E. Lee ed., ''World War II in Asia and the Pacific and the War’s Aftermath, with General Themes,'' edited by Loyd E. Lee (19987).

===Video===
* “Schindler’s List” (DVD and VHS) (1993).
* [http://college.usc.edu/vhi/ USC Shoah Foundation], largest video archive of testimonies of Holocaust survivors and witnesses,
==See also==
* [[Bergen-Belsen]], one of the main killing camps
* [[Heinrich Himmler]], in charge of the [[SS]]
* [[SS]], in charge of the killing
====Notes====
<references/>

==External Links==
:[http://www.h-net.org/~holoweb/ H-HOLOCAUST], daily discussion group, edited by scholars; numerous book reviews and reports on current scholarship
:[http://www.ushmm.org/wlc/en/ Holocaust Encyclopedia]
:[http://www.ushmm.org/ United States Holocaust Memorial Museum]
:[http://www.ess.uwe.ac.uk/genocide/yevtushenko.htm ''Babi Yar'', poem by Yevgeni Yevtushenko]
:[http://www.hmh.org/ Houston Holocaust Museum]
:[http://www.flholocaustmuseum.org/ Florida Holocaust Museum]
:[http://www.va-holocaust.com/ Virginia Holocaust Museum]
:[http://holocausteducationcenter.org/ Holocaust Awareness Museum & Educational Center of Philadelphia; America's First Holocaust Museum]
:[http://www.jewishgen.org/yizkor/Nuremberg/Nuremberg.html#search Searchable list of 2300 victims from Nuremberg]
:[http://www.holocaustcentre.net/ Beth Shalom Holocaust Centre in Newark, England]
:[http://www.mhmc.ca/ Montreal Holocaust Memorial Center Museum]
:[http://www.holocaust-mahnmal.de/en German Government's Memorial To Jews Murdered During Holocaust]
:[http://www.amcha.org/ AMCHA: Israeli Association of Holocaust Survivors]

[[category:European History]]
[[Category:World War II]]
[[Category:Genocide]]
[[Category:Holocaust| ]]
[[Category:Nazis]]

Pediatrician

2009-10-17T22:30:30Z

Solomos:

A '''pediatrician''' is a [[physician]] who specializes in the medical care of children.
[[category:medicine]]
[[Category:Professions]]

Francisco Rodriguez

2009-10-17T22:20:45Z

Solomos: Undo revision 711290 by Anon44727 (Talk)

{{MLBPlayer
|name=Francisco Rodriguez
|position=Closer
|image=
|bats=Right
|throws=Right
|height=6'0"
|weight=175 lb.
|school=
|draft=Undrafted<ref>http://sports.yahoo.com/mlb/players/7029</ref>
|debut=September 18, 2002
|final=
|birth=January 7, 1982
|countryoforigin=Venezuela
|death=
}}
'''Francisco Jose Rodriguez''', nicknamed "K-Rod" is a [[Major League Baseball]] [[pitcher]]. He was originally signed by the [[Los Angeles Angels|Anaheim Angels]] as an undrafted [[free agent]] in 1998. He currently plays for the [[New York Mets]] after signing with them as a free agent following the 2008 season.<ref>Lupica, Mike. "For Mets, signing Francisco Rodriguez comes as a relief"; ''New York Daily News'', 9 December 2008</ref>

==References==
<references/>

==External Links==
*[http://www.baseball-reference.com/r/rodrifr03.shtml Baseball Reference Profile]

[[Category:Baseball Players]]
{{DEFAULTSORT:Rodriguez, Francisco}}

Angela Davis

2009-10-17T22:17:54Z

Solomos: Undo revision 711288 by Anon44727 (Talk)

'''Angela Yvonne Davis''' is a [[professor]] and [[leftist]] [[activist]] on [[social]] and [[human rights]] issues. <ref>[http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/race/interviews/davis.html PBS Frontline interview]</ref> Davis was also a prominent member of the [[Communist Party USA]]. She is currently Professor of History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz. <ref>[http://humwww.ucsc.edu/HistCon/faculty_davis.htm Faculty bio at UC Santa Cruz]</ref>

==References==
{{reflist|2}}

==External Links==
*[http://www.aim.org/wls/author/angela-davis/ What Liberals Say - Angela Davis], [[Accuracy In Media]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Davis, Angela}}
[[Category:Liberal Activists]]

Mystery:Why do people choose homosexuality?

2009-10-17T22:15:02Z

Solomos: Undo revision 711286 by Anon44727 (Talk)

{{Homosexuality}}
Given that it is known that [[Homosexuality and Choice|homosexuality is a choice]] and that the consequences of this choice are known (and even sometimes acknowledged in the liberal media), why do people choose homosexuality?

== Liberal Indoctrination ==
[[Public schools]] teach in sexual education classes that homosexuality is natural, not a choice, and not wrong. However, this type of education is relatively new (dating back to the 1960's), and does not account for the [[Stonewall riots]].

== Recruitment ==

It is known that, as part of their [[Homosexual agenda|agenda]] homosexuals [[Essay:_Homosexual_recruitment|recruit]] young men to join them.

== Encouragement in college ==
While the emphasis on western humanities is the foundation of a good society, liberal [[Professor values|professors]] may use this as a chance to encourage students to experiment with [[Greek Homosexuality|homosexuality]] as it was practiced in ancient Greece and Rome.

== Rebellion gone wrong ==
As adolescents, many teenagers do stupid things in order to fight their parents. This may be one of those things. In order to fit in with certain peer groups (theater groups are particularly susceptible to this, although not uniquely so), students may declare themselves to be bisexual or gay. They then feel obligated to follow through with these declarations.

== Peer pressure ==
Many youth are pressured into adopting homosexual behaviours and traits by the desire to fit in, or be 'cool'. Television programs such as [[Queer Eye for the Straight Guy]] cultivate a myth that homosexual style is a desirable fashion. Among impressionable youth, fashion trends and the associated ideologies are important sources of popularity and individuals may be ridiculed and ostracized for not conforming. The '[[metrosexual]]' trend is an example of heterosexual youth who bow to the homosexual fashion but do not go as far as participating in [[immorality]].
==See also==
*[[Causes of Homosexuality]]

[[Category:Mystery]]
[[Category:Homosexuality]]

Silk

2009-10-17T22:09:56Z

Solomos: Undo revision 711280 by Anon44727 (Talk)

'''Silk''' is a soft cloth woven from the thread of the [[silkworm]].

[[Category:Textiles]]

Home

2009-10-17T22:09:08Z

Solomos:

A '''home''' is a place where a [[person]] or [[family]] lives. It can be a house, apartment or temporarily living quarters. It can also be used in the context of a place where one was born or raised, like a [[city]], [[state]] or [[country]].

[[Category:Domestic Life]]

Widow

2009-10-17T22:07:59Z

Solomos: Undo revision 711279 by Anon44727 (Talk)

A '''widow''' is a [[woman]] whose husband has died.

[[category:genealogy]]

Tamil Tigers

2009-06-23T03:01:43Z

Solomos: added a list of refrences

The '''Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam''' (commonly known as the '''Tamil Tigers''' or by the acronym '''LTTE''') is a [[terrorism|terrorist]] group operating in northern [[Sri Lanka]]. The LTTE was involved in the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka from 1983 until its defeat in 2009. 
 
It was founded in 1976, originally with the goal of creating an independent state in northern Sri Lanka called Tamil Eelam. The LTTE was involved in four separate peace talks over its two-decade history, all of which failed. However, a ceasefire was declared in 2001. For the next seven years, LTTE militants and government forces engaged in sporadic fighting. Then, on January 2, 2008, the Sri Lankan government formally withdraws from the ceasefire, claming the LTTE has violated its terms more than 10,000 times.<ref>http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/features/view-from-abroad/timeline-sri-lankan-civil-war-$1286292.htm</ref>. Heavy casualties are sustained by both sides as the Sri Lankan army slowly pushes North into heavily Tamil and pro-LTTE populations. 
 
After one year of heavy fighting, the government finally captures Kilinochchi, the LTTE base of operations. The amount of territory held by the LTTE slowly diminishes. By May 2009, the LTTE held only about 840 acres of land, roughly the same size as Central Park.<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8045970.stm</ref>. On May 18, the Sri Lankan government declared victory over the LTTE.<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8053542.stm</ref> Finally, on May 19, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE, was killed in a rocket attack as he fled the combat zone in a stolen ambulance.<ref>http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article6309915.ece</ref> The same day, the LTTE admitted defeat.<ref>http://www.tamilnet.com/art.html?catid=13&artid=29389</ref> Over the next few days, many of the top LTTE leaders are killed, in addition to hundreds or thousands of LTTE militants.

== Terrorist acts ==
*'''Rajiv Gandhi''', the former Prime Minister of India, was killed by a female suicide bomber on May 21, 1991.
*'''Ranasinghe Premadasa''', the third president of Sri Lanka, was killed by a suicide bomber on May 1, 1993.
*Between 1980 and 2000, the LTTE has carried out 168 suicide bombings, more than Hamas and al-Qaeda combined.

== Links to other groups ==
*The LTTE have been linked to supplying arms to radial Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.
*They also provided the false passport used by Ramzi Yousef (mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombings) to gain entrance to the United States in 1992.<ref>http://westminsterjournal.com/content/view/28/</ref>

== References ==
{{reflist}}

[[Category:Terrorism]]

Tamil Tigers

2009-06-23T02:51:36Z

Solomos:

The '''Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam''' (commonly known as the '''Tamil Tigers''' or by the acronym '''LTTE''') is a [[terrorism|terrorist]] group operating in northern [[Sri Lanka]]. The LTTE was involved in the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka from 1983 until its defeat in 2009. 
 
It was founded in 1976, originally with the goal of creating an independent state in northern Sri Lanka called Tamil Eelam. The LTTE was involved in four separate peace talks over its two-decade history, all of which failed. However, a ceasefire was declared in 2001. For the next seven years, LTTE militants and government forces engaged in sporadic fighting. Then, on January 2, 2008, the Sri Lankan government formally withdraws from the ceasefire, claming the LTTE has violated its terms more than 10,000 times.<ref>http://www.inthenews.co.uk/news/features/view-from-abroad/timeline-sri-lankan-civil-war-$1286292.htm</ref>. Heavy casualties are sustained by both sides as the Sri Lankan army slowly pushes North into heavily Tamil and pro-LTTE populations. 
 
After one year of heavy fighting, the government finally captures Kilinochchi, the LTTE base of operations. The amount of territory held by the LTTE slowly diminishes. By May 2009, the LTTE held only about 840 acres of land, roughly the same size as Central Park.<ref>http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/8045970.stm</ref>. On May 18, the Sri Lankan government declared victory over the LTTE. Finally, on May 19, Velupillai Prabhakaran, the leader of the LTTE, was killed in a rocket attack as he fled the combat zone in a stolen ambulance. The same day, the LTTE admitted defeat. Over the next few days, many of the top LTTE leaders are killed, in addition to hundreds or thousands of LTTE militants.

==Terrorist acts==
*'''Rajiv Gandhi''', the former Prime Minister of India, was killed by a female suicide bomber on May 21, 1991.
*'''Ranasinghe Premadasa''', the third president of Sri Lanka, was killed by a suicide bomber on May 1, 1993.
*Between 1980 and 2000, the LTTE has carried out 168 suicide bombings, more than Hamas and al-Qaeda combined.

==Links to other groups==
*The LTTE have been linked to supplying arms to radial Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.
*They also provided the false passport used by Ramzi Yousef (mastermind of the 1993 WTC bombings) to gain entrance to the United States in 1992.<ref>http://westminsterjournal.com/content/view/28/</ref>

[[Category:Terrorism]]

Tamil Tigers

2009-06-23T02:10:23Z

Solomos:

The '''Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam''' (commonly known as the '''Tamil Tigers''' or by the acronym '''LTTE''') is a [[terrorism|terrorist]] group operating in northern [[Sri Lanka]]. It was founded in 1976, originally with the goal of creating an independent state in northern Sri Lanka called Tamil Eelam. It has been involved in the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka since 1983.

==Terrorist acts==
*'''Rajiv Gandhi''', the former Prime Minister of India, was killed by a female suicide bomber on May 21, 1991.
*'''Ranasinghe Premadasa''', the third president of Sri Lanka, was killed by a suicide bomber on May 1, 1993.
*Between 1980 and 2000, the LTTE has carried out 168 suicide bombings, more than Hamas and al-Qaeda combined.

==Links to other groups==
*The LTTE have been linked to supplying arms to radial Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.
*They also provided the false passport used by Ramzi Yousef (mastermind of the 1991 WTC bombings) to gain entrance to the United States in 1993.

[[Category:Terrorism]]

The God Delusion

2009-06-23T02:09:09Z

Solomos:

'''''The God Delusion''''' is a book by the [[atheist]] [[Richard Dawkins]], in which he attempts to show that belief in [[God]] is irrational.

Dawkins' main objectives are to convince his readers that the existence of [[God]] or any other [[deity]] is highly unlikely, that the Bible is incoherent, that [[morality]] does not come from [[religion]], and that if religion does effect morality, it only does so negatively.

Critics have called the book "surprisingly intolerant".<ref>{{cite book | quote=For a scientist who criticizes religion for its intolerance, Dawkins has written a surprisingly intolerant book, full of scorn for religion and those who believe. | publisher=Publishers Weekly | title=The God Delusion | year=2006 | month=August | url=http://www.amazon.com/God-Delusion-Richard-Dawkins/dp/0618680004 | }}</ref>

Dawkins also intends to teach that atheists can live happy, intelligent, lives—perhaps even happier lives than religious people. He asserts that atheists do not do evil things in the name of [[atheism]], while [[religion|religious]] people have been known to commit atrocities in the name of their religion.

==Chapters==

=== Deeply Religious Non-Believer===
Dawkins attempts to establish [[Albert Einstein]] as an avowed atheist, and to prove that religion is unworthy of any respect.

===The God Hypothesis===
Dawkins explains the different kinds of religion, including the divide between [[Monotheism]] and [[Polytheism]]. He also asserts viciously that the founding fathers of the [[United States of America]] were nonreligious. He continues to explain [[Secularism]], [[Agnosticism]], and some basic assertions of the religious.

===Arguments for God's Existence===
Dawkins summarizes some common [[proof]]s for God and attempts to debunk them.

===Why There Almost Certainly is No God===
Dawkins gives his reasons for believing that God is about as likely as "[[fairy|fairies]] living under his garden", and asks the fallacious question of where God came from.

===The Roots of Religion===
Dawkins gives and explains some thoughts about the origins of religion that have been proposed by atheists, trying to undermine the [[Christianity|church]].

===The Roots of Morality: Why are We Good?===
Dawkins explains why he believes that morality "evolved" from [[animal]]s.

===The 'Good' Book and the Changing [[Moral Zeitgeist]]===
Dawkins suggests that morality does not come from religion, but rather a changing moral ''Zeitgeist''.

===What's Wrong With Religion? Why Be So Hostile?===
Dawkins shows why he believes that religion is [[evil]] and repressive, and must be stopped.

===Childhood, Abuse and the Escape from Religion===
Dawkins explains why he believes that religion is a form of "[[child abuse]]", and that the scars from the "indoctrination" last into [[adult]]hood and even the child's entire life.

===A Much Needed Gap?===
Dawkins concludes his book on a more positive level, giving inspiration to those whom he may have convinced to "de-convert" from their religion.

==Criticism==
''The God Delusion'' has been subject to a great deal of criticisms from the religious and the non-religious alike.

===Andrew Brown: Prospect Magazine===
{{Cquote|
"It has been obvious for years that Richard Dawkins had a fat book on religion in him, but who would have thought him capable of writing one this bad? Incurious, dogmatic, rambling and self-contradictory, it has none of the style or verve of his earlier works."<ref>http://www.prospect-magazine.co.uk/article_details.php?id=7803</ref>
}}
Andrew Brown of Prospect Magazine was unimpressed by Dawkins' book. Brown calls atheism "unnatural" and points out that many atheists were violent in their belief (or lack thereof), citing Stalin killing members of the clergy.

Brown also attacks Dawkins' argument that suicide bombers are caused by religious schools. While Dawkins states that if these children were not taught what he calls "faith without question", suicide bombings would not be an issue. Brown, however, says that religion is not a necessity in suicide bombings. He points out that it is a tactic used by Marxists in Sri Lanka.

===Marilynne Robinson: Harper's Magazine===
<blockquote>
"There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins's view of science. Consider this sentence from his preface, which occurs in the context of his vision of a religion-free world: 'Imagine . . . no persecution of Jews as 'Christ-killers.'"<ref>http://solutions.synearth.net/2006/10/20</ref>
</blockquote>

Robinson's major complaints about ''The God Delusion'' lie in how sheerly false the book is in many aspects. Although Dawkins claims that "the majority of us believe in free speech", she points out that most countries do not, pointing out that [[China]] (population 1.3 billion<ref>http://geography.about.com/od/populationgeography/a/chinapopulation.htm</ref>) does not. In her review, Robinson basically says that Dawkins purposefully ignored important parts of history in his attempt to convince his readers. "It's a shame," she says, "to see him reduced to one long argument from professorial incredulity."

===Terry Eagleton: London Review of Books===
<blockquote>
"Card-carrying rationalists like Dawkins [...] are in one sense the least well-equipped to understand what they castigate, since they don’t believe there is anything there to be understood, or at least anything worth understanding."
</blockquote>

===Alister McGrath: The Dawkins Delusion?===
''The Dawkins Delusion?'' is a response to Dawkins' ''The God Delusion'' by [[Alister McGrath]].

== Quotes from ''The God Delusion'' ==
"The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."
::-Chapter 2

"I am one of an increasing number of biologists who see religion as a ''by-product'' of something else."
::-Chapter 5

"By contrast, what I, as a scientist, believe (for example, [[evolution]]) I believe not because of reading a holy book but because I have studied the evidence... Books about evolution are believed because they present overwhelming quantities of mutually buttressed evidence."
::-Chapter 8

"... [Moral absolutism] rules the minds of a great number of people in the world today, most dangerously so in the Muslim world and in the incipient American theocracy... Such absolutism nearly always results from strong religious faith, and it constitutes a major reason for suggesting that religion can be a force for evil in the world."
::-Chapter 8
==See also==
*[[Atheism]]
{{Nb Atheism}}

==References==
<references/>

== External Links ==
*[http://www.richarddawkins.net RichardDawkins.net]

[[Category:Books|God Delusion, The]]

Tamil Tigers

2009-06-22T23:11:12Z

Solomos: reworded awkward phrase

The '''Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam''' (commonly known as the '''Tamil Tigers''' or by the acronym '''LTTE''') is a [[terrorism|terrorist]] group operating in northern [[Sri Lanka]]. It was founded in 1976, originally with the goal of creating an independent state in northern Sri Lanka called Tamil Eelam. It has been involved in the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka since 1983.

==Terrorist acts==
*'''Rajiv Gandhi''', the former Prime Minister of India, was killed by a female suicide bomber on May 21, 1991.
*'''Ranasinghe Premadasa''', the third president of Sri Lanka, was killed by a suicide bomber on May 1, 1993.
*Between 1980 and 2000, the LTTE has carried out 168 suicide bombings, more than Hamas and al-Qaeda combined.

==Links to other groups==
*The LTTE have been linked to supplying arms to radial Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.
*They also provided the false passport used by Ramzi Yousef (mastermind of the 1991 WTC bombings) to gain entrance to the United States in 1993.

[[Category:Terrorism]]

Tamil Tigers

2009-05-05T22:14:08Z

Solomos: Created page with 'The '''Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam''' (commonly known as the '''Tamil Tigers''' or by the acronym '''LTTE''') is a terrorist groups operating in northern [[Sri...'

The '''Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam''' (commonly known as the '''Tamil Tigers''' or by the acronym '''LTTE''') is a [[terrorism|terrorist]] groups operating in northern [[Sri Lanka]]. It was founded in 1976, originally with the goal of creating an independent state in northern Sri Lanka called Tamil Eelam. It has been involved in the bloody civil war in Sri Lanka since 1983.

==Terrorist acts==
*'''Rajiv Gandhi''', the former Prime Minister of India, was killed by a female suicide bomber on May 21, 1991.
*'''Ranasinghe Premadasa''', the third president of Sri Lanka, was killed by a suicide bomber on May 1, 1993.
*The LTTE have carried out more suicide bombings than [[Hamas]] and [[al-Qaeda]] combined. Between 1980 and 2000, the LTTE has carried out 168 suicide bombings.

==Links to other groups==
*The LTTE have been linked to supplying arms to radial Islamic terrorist groups in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Philippines.
*They also provided the false passport used by Ramzi Yousef (mastermind of the 1991 WTC bombings) to gain entrance to the United States in 1993.

User:Solomos

2009-05-05T21:58:06Z

Solomos:

[[File:Gadsden flag.png]]

Karolos Papoulias

2009-03-20T21:20:24Z

Solomos: New page: '''Karolos Papoulias''' (Greek: Κάρολος Παπούλιας) (born June 4, 1929) is the current president of Greece. Papoulias was born in the Greek c...

'''Karolos Papoulias''' ([[Greek language|Greek]]: Κάρολος Παπούλιας) (born June 4, 1929) is the current president of [[Greece]]. 
 
Papoulias was born in the Greek city of [[Ioannina]]. He studied at the Law Schools of Athens and [[Milan]] and recived his PhD at Cologne University in [[Germany]]. Papoulias practiced law from 1963 to 1981 in [[Athens]]. He was elected president of Greece on February 8, 2005, with an amazing 279 votes in the 300-member unicameral House of Parliament.

Karolos Papoulias is married to Maria Panou and has three daughters. In addition to his native Greek, he also speaks [[German language|German]], [[Italian language|Italian]] and [[French language|French]].

Cyrus

2009-03-20T20:58:20Z

Solomos:

[[image:Cyrus portrait.jpg|right|thumb|A portrait of Cyrus the Great.]]
'''Cyrus''' (also called '''Cyrus the Great''') (576-529 BC) was the Emperor of the [[Persian Empire]]. He is famous for conquering [[Babylon]] and sending the [[Jew|Jews]] back to [[Israel]]. 
 
At its greatest extent, the Achaemenid Persian Empire was the largest ancient empire, spanning three continents: [[Europe]], [[Asia]], and [[Africa]]. The empire included modern-day [[Iran]], [[Iraq]], [[Jordan]], [[Israel]], [[Syria]], [[Lebanon]], [[Turkey]], [[Egypt]] [[Afghanistan]], [[Pakistan]], [[Libya]], and northern [[Saudi Arabia]].

==External Links==
*[http://www.iranchamber.com/history/achaemenids/achaemenids.php History of Iran: Achaemenid Empire] 
*[http://ancienthistory.about.com/cs/persianempir1/a/persiaintro_2.htm The Achaemenid Empire, 550-330 B.C.] 
*[http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/hd/acha/hd_acha.htm The Achaemenid Persian Empire (550–330 B.C.)]

[[Category:International Political Figures]]
[[Category:Ancient History]]

{{stub}}

Vladimir Putin

2009-03-20T05:13:07Z

Solomos:

[[Image:Vladtheimpaler.jpg|right|thumb|Vladimir Putin]]
'''Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin''' ([[Russian language|Russian]]: Владимир Владимирович Путин) (born October 7, 1952) is the [[prime minister]] of the [[Russian Federation]] (since May 8, 2008). He previously was [[president]] of Russia, assuming that office as acting president on December 31, 1999, the day [[Boris Yeltsin]] resigned from the presidency. Putin was later elected president by approximately 52.94 percent of the Russian electorate on March 26, 2000. He is mainly backed by the [[United Russia]] (''Единая Россия'') party, which currently holds a majority in the lower chamber of the Russian parliament, known as the ''Duma''. The party usually reflects the political views of Putin, which are that of moderate conservatism and nationalism. On March 14, 2004, he was elected to a second term as president with 71 percent of the vote. Barred from a third term by the Russian constitution, Putin ceded the presidency to [[Dmitry Medvedev]] on May 7, 2008.

Putin was born in [[Leningrad]] on [[October]] 7, 1952 and was baptized as an Orthodox Christian and continue to be a member to this day. He was educated in law and economics at Leningrad State University before being assigned to work in the [[KGB]]. After five years in [[East Germany]], he took up various political positions before becoming [[prime minister]] in 1999.

Putin is seen as an antagonist to the West; his presidency has become increasingly authoritarian and opponents are murdered. It is certain that his military alliance with China, his rigged election system, nationalized oil, weapons sales to Iran Venezuala and the invasion of Georgia, are a real threat to a new Cold War. KGB Putin has complete control of Russia's future, as a [[dictator]] would. For example, on April 14, 2007, Russian riot police beat a number of protesters and journalists at an anti-Putin rally at Pushkin Square in [[Moscow]], <ref>''The Economist'', April 21, 2007</ref> and Putin rigged national elections for his party <ref>http://www.reuters.com/article/homepageCrisis/idUSL03585550._CH_.2400</ref> Despite these political trends, Putin remains popular in Russia<ref>http://www.levada.ru/prezident.html Putin's Approval Ratings</ref>. Since coming to power, Putin has expanded Russia's economy and reduced inflation. <ref>''Time Magazine'', February 26, 2007</ref> The majority of Russians are relatively uninterested in politics outside of issues affecting their personal prosperity. <ref>''The Economist'', April 21, 2007</ref> and journalist [[Anna Politkovskaya]] argued that the Russian people, as a whole, have been willing to tolerate violence in the name of "comfort and peace and quiet". <ref>Politkovskaya, Anna. Putin's Russia. London: Harvill Press, 2004</ref> Politkovskaya, an outspoken critic of Putin, was assassinated in 2006 <ref>http://news.independent.co.uk/europe/article1819666.ece</ref>, and it is widely believed that the Russian government had some involvement in this death. There were 13 journalists killed in contract-style slayings during Vladimir Putin's eight-year presidency. <ref>[http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,438381,00.html Russian Lawyer in Slain Journalist Case Says She, Family Poisoned] AP, October 15, 2008</ref>

He is married to Lyudmila Putina since July 28, 1983 (former airline stewardess). They have two daughters.

== See also ==

*[[Communism]]
*[[New Economic Policy]]
*[[Siege of Leningrad]]
*[[Union of Soviet Socialist Republics]]

==References==
<references/>

==Links==
[http://www.kremlin.ru/articles/V_Putin.shtml Official Putin Biography]
{{DEFAULTSORT: Putin, Vladimir}}

[[Category:Heads of State]]
[[Category:Russian People]]
[[Category:Russian Political People]]

Debate:Do ALL suicides go to hell?

2009-03-20T05:09:54Z

Solomos:

==Not Necessarily==
I understand killing yourself is an ultimatum sin. But what about people who suffer from depression? They have a chemical imbalance in their brain that causes them intense grief. They become so helpless they turn to suicide. Would God punish someone for dieing of cancer? Someone who commits suicide from depression is not thinking with a clear mind due to the depression. However, their are those who commit suicide out of cowardice. I believe those who commit suicide to escape punishment are the ones who go to hell. Not the ones who can't mentally control their emotions. -- [[User:GordonF|GordonF]] 24:05, 15 March 2009.

:Just as we don't know who goes to Heaven or hell (that is for Jesus alone to decide), we don't know if all suicides end in hell. The mercy of God's love is not fathomable. All humans are not worthy of God's glory, yet he loves us no matter. I can see instance where a good holy person and mother loses a child to suicide. The Lord would never break her eternal heart saying she must separate her from her beloved offspring in Heaven, because of the evil one's bidding. For all we know, some suicides may end up in Purgatory. This being just a purification stop with a guarantee of Heaven eventually.--[[User:Jpatt|jpatt]] 02:10, 15 March 2009 (EDT)
[[Category:Conservapedia Debates]]

::Strictly speaking, suicide is a mortal sin, but not an ''unforgivable'' sin. The only unforgivable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. Consequently, I think we have reason to hope that, in at least some cases, suicide is forgiven. --[[User:Benp|Benp]] 12:16, 15 March 2009 (EDT)
:::In the Divine Comedy, only one suicide is shown outside Hell, namely [[Cato the Younger]], who guards the gate of Purgatory. He committed suicide rather than surrender, which the Romans considered a noble act. However, Dante doesn't explain why Cato should escape Hell so the exact reasoning behind his placement is a bit of a mystery, even for scholars.

:::I forgot about Purgatory jpatt. As for Dante one should remember he was going on the seven vices and came up with it from his imagination. However Dante gave a great perspective. [[User:GordonF|GordonF]] 18:30, 15 March 2009

::::I don't think all suicides go to Hell. For example: King Saul, the first king of Israel, falls on his own sword after a horrible defeat and to escape capture by the Philistines. [http://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?book_id=9&chapter=31] In fact, it doesn't say anywhere in the Bible that committing suicide automatically send you to Hell. As stated above, the only unforgivable sin is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit. (I think that ''if'' the Bible said suicide was okay, lots of people would be killing themselves just to get to Heaven.) -[[User:Solomos|Christopher Solomos]] 01:09, 20 March 2009 (EDT)

Leon Trotsky

2009-03-20T02:09:01Z

Solomos:

[[Image:Trockiy2.jpg|right|thumb|Leon Trotsky]]

'''Leon Trotsky''' ([[Russian language|Russian]]: Лeв Давидович Трóцкий) , born '''Leon Davidovich Bronstein''' (Russian: Лeв Давидович Бронштéйн) (1879-1940) was a participant with [[Vladimir Ilyich Lenin|V. I. Lenin]] in the [[communist revolution]] in [[Russia]] in 1917. However, he had previously been a member of the [[Mensheviks]], a communist party that had once been aligned with the [[Bolsheviks]]. They did not believe in actively pursuing revolution, that it would happen when the people were ready, unlike the Bolsheviks who believed that the people needed to be led. From 1904 until 1917 Trotsky had a stormy relationship with Lenin, with him accusing Lenin of wanting to become a dictator. But the two of them resolved their differences in 1917, and after that point arguably Trotsky was totally loyal to Lenin.

Trotsky was the most powerful orator in the Bolshevik party, and due to his numerous spells in jail and his active role in the failed 1905 revolution he was much more famous than Lenin was to ordinary Russians. He was the actual organizer behind the [[October Revolution]], as Lenin was still in exile and so unable to participate.

Trotsky also helped build the [[Red Army]] that defeated the White Russian Army in the subsequent Civil War in Russia, despite having no military experience of any kind.

When Lenin died in 1924, a lengthy power struggle began between Trotsky and [[Stalin]]. Trotsky took the view that socialism in the Soviet Union must await a revolution in western Europe and even worldwide. Stalin wanted power immediately and offered a rival ideology, ''Socialism in one country''. To fend off accusations of becoming the new 'Napoleon', he gave up his command of the Red Army. However Stalin expelled Trotsky from the Bolshevik party in 1927 and exiled him from Russia in 1929.

Trotsky eventually settled in [[Mexico]] in 1937. On August 20, 1940 Soviet agent and Spanish communist [[Ramón Mercador]] murdered Trotsky with a ice pick in Trotsky's [[Mexico City]] home.

One of Trotsky's famous quotes (which also sums up the [[Atheism]] in the Communist Movement) was : "Religions are illogical primitive ignorance. There is nothing as ridiculous and tragic as a religious government."
== See also ==

*[[Karl Marx]]
*[[Vladimir Ilyich Lenin]]
*[[Communist Party]]
*[[Trotskyism]]
*[[neoconservatism]]
*[[Diego Rivera]]
*[[Anna Colloms]]
*[[Elizabeth Zarubina]]
*[[Zalmond Franklin]]
*[[Natalia Sedova]]
*[[Floyd Miller]]
*[[Jacob Epstein (spy)]]
*[[Pavel Sudaplatov]]
*[[Gregory Rabinovich]]
*[[Sylvia Callen]] (4,899 bytes)
*[[Jack Soble]] (2,734 bytes)
*[[Yakov Sverdlov]]
*[[Ruth Wilson]]
*[[Lydia Altschuler]]
*[[Altschuler group]]
*[[Sante Fe Drugstore]]

{{DEFAULTSORT:Trotsky, Leon}}
[[Category:Russian Political People]]
[[Category:Communists]]