It was a great movie. Thomas Crown, though, was the role he was born to play.

It’s pretty unlikely to get two more terms of a democratic presidency. Biden wasn’t VP when he won. The last VP to be elected was Bush 1. Before him, LBJ, special circumstances. Truman, also special circumstances. That takes us back nearly 100 years.

Maybe if Kamala were to step aside we could get a governor as the nominee, but that seems unlikely even though governors have better records in presidential elections. Biden didn’t run when he was VP, but I don’t remember another VP that stepped away from the ticket voluntarily.

So you know what Hitler actually said? So you don’t fall for something like “the Germans didn’t really know what was happening”? Yes, they did. It was published, and you can cite chapter and verse.

Same reason to read anything.

You can learn names and dates of battles etc., but you won’t understand the driving forces if all you have is “Nazis are bad.”

Nazis were humans, not some kind of mythological monsters. If they could do what they did, you can too. You need to understand why they did what they did, how the ideology motivated them, or compelled them, because those same forces can work on you as well, and sometimes in ways you don’t realize.

Primo Levi survived the death camps, and wrote about his experience extensively. Despite being a prisoner, he felt complicit in the Nazi project, just through trying to survive. At one point he recalls being on a work detail, during which he discovered a water pipe that had some water in it. He drank the water, and although he saw another prisoner lusting after the water, he didn’t share, because he wanted to survive.

That other man also survived the camps and later found Levi, and asked why he wouldn’t share the water. Levi had no answer at that time, but when writing his memoir he said the structure of the camp system was such that it employed even the inmates as agents of their own extermination.

He ended up committing suicide in the 80s.

If you don’t understand the psychological and social pressures working on you - which come from everywhere, btw, not just Nazis - you can’t fight against them. You will go along to get along.

Fact is, it’s an important work for historical reasons. If you want to understand how Nazism works, and how it differs from Italian fascism, and be able to draw the lines that connect Nazis to historical German (and other nationalities) anti-Semitism, you need to read it.

If I had a copy, I wouldn’t put it on display, but it is the kind of thing I can totally see being assigned in a college course on WW2 or some similar topic.

NB: I’ve only read a few excerpts for a class similar to the one I described above.

Also, I am against book burning in any circumstance. A book is never worth more as kindling, unless you’re actually freezing and then it would be a hard choice.

It was the bourgeois that win in France, not the peasants.

Sertorius.

We don’t know a ton about his family; they seem to be equestrians, but not particularly notable. He became a career military man, serving in, and surviving, the Battle of Arausio, which was a huge Roman defeat by the Cimbri and Teutones.

He later served under Marius, and became attached to the Marian/Cinnan party during the civil wars against Sulla.

Sertorius found himself in command of an army guarding Rome when Sulla came back from the East and began his second march on the city. Sertorius judged that he was completely outclassed by Sulla’s veteran army, and noped out to Spain. The Sullan party pursued Sertorius constantly, wearing down his last few troops until he was forced to abandon Spain. He joined some pirates, visited the Canary Islands, and eventually took his surviving force to Africa.

While the Sullans were chasing him into the interior of Africa, he got very, very sick. When he recovered, he had a new plan. He took his remaining soldiers, evaded the pursuing Sullans, made it back to the North African coast, stole a fleet and launched an amphibious night-time invasion of Spain.

This time he had the support of the locals, and he trained them in Roman style fighting, using his few remaining Roman soldiers as officers. He established schools for the kids of the local aristocracy, and found a pet deer that supposedly brought him intel on his enemies (Plutarch says this was a completely cynical fabrication on Sertorius’ part, but the locals bought it and it led them to believe Sertorius had divine support).

He mopped the floor with every army the Sullans in Rome sent against him for seven years. Even Pompey couldn’t get a handle on this guy.

In the end, Sertorius’ officers assassinated him for reasons that are not entirely clear. After capturing Sertorius’ camp, Pompey weirdly burnt Sertorius’ papers and correspondence unopened and unread. There’s some suspicion that Sertorius was engaged in negotiations with some people in Rome looking to secure a return to the city and a restoration of the Marian party, and just maybe Pompey might have been one of those people.

The only other man Pompey couldn’t beat was Caesar, and even Caesar took a strategic, if not catastrophic, loss at Dyrrhachium.

If I ever write my sword-and-sandal historical novel, it’s going to be about Sertorius. The whole story seems very Heart of Darkness or Apocalypse Now

Red Five standing by.