Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="pemerton" data-source="post: 8203661" data-attributes="member: 42582">On the comparison of Ruskin to Hitler:I don't know who else posting in this thread teaches Holocaust studies. I do (as it happens, in the same module where I teach Williams and hence Ruskin - it's a modernity course). If you do teach Holocaust studies, you will know that it is emotionally very demanding, particularly if you have students who are part of a community whose members include survivors or had relatives who were murdered - because for those students it is more than just an intellectual or potentially abstract moral topic. I often do have those students in my class.Hitler, and the political movement which he led, and the government which he created, was responsible for crimes of almost inconceivable magnitude. National socialism is perhaps the most discredited political movement in the history of humanity.Ruskin, on the other hand, to the best of my knowledge never killed anyone, nor arranged for or called for their murder. He was one of the key thinkers in Britain whose influence led to the creation, after the war that Hitler started, of the British welfare state. Aspects of Ruskin's anti-libertarianism also inform one-nation/"big society" conservatism.Equating the two is facile.</blockquote>