John Lukacs

Well, Sam, I wanna read a passage from the start of The Hitler of History because it's, it's just been on my mind the last couple days.

"We are not yet finished with Hitler," wrote two members of a younger generation of German historians independently of each other in the 1980s, "and this is so in both the broader and the narrower sense of finished.

The first of these should be evident.

History means the endless rethinking and reviewing and revisiting of the past.

All human thinking involves a rethinking of the past.

This is true in the narrower sense, too, involving the historical profession.

The notion that once the scientific method has been applied accurately with all extant documents exhausted, the work will be finished and the result will be final." And then he has this great parenthetical, quote, unquote, "The final and definitive history of the Third Reich, certified by German, American, British, Russian, liberal and conservative, nationalist and Jewish historians.

That is a 19th century illusion." But I love it that, that the, the past is always the remembered, let's say interpreted past, right? There's no kind of non-interpretive posture toward the past, and I was thinking about that, and the first example that came to my mind, Sam, was we're recording this on September 10th, which is the one-year anniversary of Charlie Kirk's assassination, and I don't think we were wrong to be alarmed by how the right responded to that.

They are extraordinarily stupid because we are a futuristic country.

We are not, John Lukacs, if you've not read John Lukacs, you've got to read this.

He's from Europe.

He came to this country, I think, in the 1940s.

He taught at Chestnut Hill College in Pennsylvania.

I first heard about him through Clyde Wilson, and his book entitled Historical Consciousness is phenomenal.

Anybody who wants to study history, you must read Historical Consciousness by John Lukacs.

I think he passed away a few years ago, but I found an interview from him on YouTube maybe two or three weeks ago, and I just watched it two or three times.