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>> No.23294046 [View]
File: 923 KB, 2707x1523, portrait-of-thomas-paine.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
23294046

>>23294033
Those words remind me to something a certain freemason who helped founding the world's most degenerate country in existence with the largest propaganda mechanism for immorality ever once said.

>> No.22717433 [View]
File: 923 KB, 2707x1523, portrait-of-thomas-paine.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
22717433

>>22717052
>many concerned regarding Hitler's portrayal in the film as a human being with emotions in spite of his actions and ideologies
This is such a dangerous line of thought, and it's bad for the obvious reasons: Hitler was evil BECAUSE he was human like the rest of us. He had the capacity to do good, he had a personal life with ups and downs, an internal life where he felt things deeply that he never told anyone, fond memories of childhood and truly loved those around him. He also sanctioned the killing of millions of people. If "Hitler" was just some natural disaster, a hurricane that tore through Europe and killed the exact same amount of people, killed the exact same people, it wouldn't be "evil", it would just be tragic. The fact that Hitler wasn't some inhuman monster, but instead a human like the rest of us shows the awful things that we as a species have the potential to do.
Of course, people don't like this because it means they don't have the certainty of knowing that they're always right since they can't entirely "other" the concept of evil. Good. People should always be aware that humans are capable of awful things, themselves included, and check themselves and those around them for it. Otherwise you get shit like Israel annihilating a city of innocent people to the world's applause because certainly they can't be like Hitler, he was an inhuman monster!
>inb4 implying hitler was evil

>> No.22428791 [View]
File: 923 KB, 2707x1523, portrait-of-thomas-paine.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
22428791

>>22428724
I've been reading a biography of Thomas Paine recently and it's made the sharp fall in the average person's literacy/linguistic understanding all the more apparent. This was a writer who was known specifically for writing in the common vernacular of the day, and his works being read aloud in pubs and general public spaces is one of the key things that swung public sentiment in the 13 Colonies towards thoughts of Revolution. Then you read the text of this "voice of the people" and he's writing at a level that the average American ~250 years later would find unintelligible, and not because of an excess of archaic words or because it deals with the specific politics of the time. It's simply the complexity of the syntax
>It has been the folly of Britain to suppose herself more powerful than she really is, and by that means has arrogated to herself a rank in the world she is not entitled to: for more than this century past she has not been able to carry on a war without foreign assistance. [...] England was never famous by land; her officers have generally been suspected of cowardice, have more of the air of a dancing-master than a soldier, and by the samples which we have taken prisoners, we give the preference to ourselves. Her strength, of late, has lain in her extravagance; but as her finances and credit are now low, her sinews in that line begin to fail fast. As a nation she is the poorest in Europe; for were the whole kingdom, and all that is in it, to be put up for sale like the estate of a bankrupt, it would not fetch as much as she owes; yet this thoughtless wretch must go to war, and with the avowed design, too, of making us beasts of burden, to support her in riot and debauchery, and to assist her afterwards in distressing those nations who are now our best friends.

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