Memoirous

I love the work of Russell Freedman, who writes  for the YA audience non-fiction, historical essays using photographs as a foundation for his work. He has been awarded the Newbery Medal, three Newbery Honors, the Sibert Medal, and well the list goes on. In 2016 he published We Will Not Be Silent: The White Rose Student Resistance Movement that Defied Hitler . Basically it is the story of how the millennials of that time stood up to their government. Can you imagine? These were mostly middle-class, sheltered college students. The ones comedian Ck Louis claims cannot stop looking at their cell phones long enough to have a conversation. Brother and sister Hans and Sophie Scholl and young father of three Christoph Probst were initially arrested but then the dragnet fanned out and others were caught and convicted. Yet it is these three who are most easily identified with the movement. Certainly they paid with their lives. They put out altogether 5 or 6 pamphlets—...

In light of last week (Sean Spicer claiming Hitler had never gassed his own people) I had to take a few days to process this. I had to sort of what bothered me the most. But, first let’s look at what he said: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/11/us/politics/sean-spicer-hitler-gas-holocaust-center.html But first of all: This was an unforced error—he didn’t have to say anything. He was talking off the top of his head, comparing Assad to Hitler. All of this was Spicer’s attempt to defend Trump’s aggressive retaliation (59 or 60 missiles, the number I wasn’t able to nail down) on Shayrat Airfield because of an earlier chemical attack authorized by Assad. This is despicable. Saddam Hussein gassed his own people, Kurds. Poison gas was used in both WWI and WWII. From all appearances it appears to be a horrible way to die. Nevertheless, Sean Spicer sought to invoke a comparison to Hitler when discussing the US response. And here is where he got tripped up. I’m still not sure...