Is Wikipedia good for the Jews?

Jerusalem Post

As online user-generated encyclopedia celebrates 100000th Hebrew-language entry, it prompts debate in Knesset....

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No comment needed.

In my opinion, Wikipedia is awful for the Jews.

The World War II article doesn't mention the Holocaust until near the bottom, and then only gives it cursory coverage.

You also have lists of Jews and other tagging and tracking activities.

And Syria is written on the Golan Heights map.

So? World War II was not about the Jews, although (to be honest) I think a lot of people think so. And want you to think so.

If the Jews had never existed, we would have had the very same WW II, with all the same battles and 90% of the dead (54 million instead of 60 million or so). The Jewish holocaust was an awful thing, but in terms of the big picture, it was a byplay.

The idea that a modern industrialized state can single out a minority group for genocide was and still is big news.

Hitler thought the Jews important enough to persecute them. Scapegoating helped him come to power.

1.5 million Jews fought on the Allied side, so I don't know how you can say every battle would have gone the same. Warsaw was 30% Jewish. Jewish scientists helped develop the A-bomb.

I should have qualified that. What do I mean by "Jews had never existed"? If I go back and kidnap Abram in my time machine and the religion never happens, I presume those 1.5 million soldiers don't just disappear, as the though the religion was necessary for the procreative acts that made them....

The bigger problem obviously is that without the Hebrews there's no Christianity, and without Christianity, the history of the modern world would be utterly different-- so much so that there doubtless wouldn't have been anything like WW II, four millennia later. The history of Western civilization would be changed into unrecognizability. So there's that.

Lots of alternative history guesses as to what the world would be like if no Jesus or Christianity. I dunno. After the Roman Empire collapsed, Christianity (C.) helped preserve literacy. On the other hand, there's a good argument that the rise of C. in the Roman empire helped make it decay from within (which it did, right on schedule as C. became the official religion). Then eaten by barbarians which weren't at first Christian, but then lost their fangs as they converted. Which makes you wonder if one had something to do with the other.

Perhaps there might have been no Roman collapse and dark ages without C. Then, the world wasted a lot of time and precious advance opportunity with semi-barbarian Christians on Crusade, and kicking the culture of the Arabs 1100-1500, which had previously been quite advanced. So a big loss there.

When the world finally started pulling its head out, about 1550 AD when the printing press and trans-oceanic trading hit, they did their reboot by looked backward during the renaissance to Greek philosophy and to some extent Arabic learning-- not ancient Hebrew. So what if THOSE rich traditions hadn't been temporarily stomped by the one-two punch of Rome, then the collapse of Christian Rome? Without Paul, it might not have happened.

The re-rise of the Jews was made possible by the reformation, and I'd be open to the idea that they inbred themselves to better brains (this idea makes many Jews uncomforable, since they are officially Leftist nurture >> nature types). But even if the Jews had superior mental hardware, they did it with superior western software, again not particularly Hebrew mysticism. Lots of these people were Westernized, and thoroughly secular.

And it worked. One in 500 people in this last century has been Jewish, but 1 in 5 Nobelists. That's just a taste of the impact that Jews have had, with the hybrid approach.

So I probably should have said, not if Jews had never existed, but if Jews had never been persecuted by the Nazis. I think the Nazis could have risen without them. They had the indignities of the WWI treaty, and the inflation, and so on. And they managed to start WW I without help from much antisemitism. They'd have made it.

Boy, that would be a great 30 minute essay question for a college or grad school. "Remove Abraham from history, then speculate on changes resulting, up to the present."

Too much for me to do on-line when I'm sleepy.

The Romans probably would have been better off adopting some religion other than a deranged sect of Judaism obsessed with poverty and self-sacrifice. I'm not sure exactly what religion would have helped them the most, but something that keeps the clerics out of control would have been nice. Perhaps Arianism?

WWI was a preemptive war because Germany was worried about Czarist Russia. With Poland as a buffer state, WWII doesn't quite make as much sense unless Hitler's unique ideology comes into play.

Wikipedia can mention every single battle, fill itself with stats and cool images of tanks and subs, but if it fails to get across why the "civilized" German people decided to follow Hitler, then it's failed, and actually misled readers a bit by giving them a skewed sense of priorities.

I don't see why the "never forget" crowd among Jews should help the Wikimedia Foundation to do this.

Don't Be A Dick, Philip.

Jon (Cacher in the Wry)

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Goldberg / FlickrCC Jewish religious scholarship in Israel may have a new ally: Wikipedia. ...



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Yes, Dick did it first and better. What if FDR had been assassinated and thus the Germans and Japanese won WW II?

The only problem with this being that I think it's mostly a agreed-on by historians that FDR didn't get the US out of the depression-- that was done by the massive borrowing associated with war, after the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and Hitler declared war on the US (which he didn't have to do; this was probaby the second-worst decision of his life). So FDR or no, WW II should have turned out much the same. Even if the Japanese had picked a different time and sunk all our carriers at Pearl, thus no battle of Midway, we should still have been able to outproduce them before they could mount a land invasian across 2,000 miles of ocean, staged out of Hawaii. Just the thought of the last makes me smile. It's a completely ridiculous idea. Nobody could pull off a land invasion across 2000 miles of ocean in 1942. Or 1962. I don't think anybody has pulled off a major amphibious assault over that kind of distance to this day (land action in the Gulf War of 1991 was staged out of Saudi Arabia, and 2003 Iraq land invasion was staged out of Kuwait).

Harry Turtledove has carried on in Dick's footsteps. I've read most of his stuff, which also includes a Japanese victory at Hawaii scenario (as well as aliens appearing right in the middle of a conventional WW II, uniting all sides in common battle with them-- lots of fun).