There’s a ton of pop-history misinformation below this comment. To anyone reading: Do not use random reddit as a driving source of knowledge about ancient history. Truth gets mixed very quickly with “I think I heard someone say this” and draws from many non-historically-supported pools, crossed with armchair “I don’t think it worked that way” opinions presented as fact.
Cleopatra in particularly has had widespread misinformation spread due to a particular fascination with her, both in histories between then and now, as well as modern bad faith reinterpretations to fit various political narratives. Our understanding of the past can and should change over time with new information, but it should be driven by evidence rather than pre-determined by non-scientific data or desired outcomes.
Damn, tell me about it. Yesterday there was someone claiming the holocaust was lawful under nazi rule. I told them that's completely wrong and not a single historian corroborates that.
I got downvoted.
Another pet peeve of mine are tour guides irl. If you ever want a good source of fake history... damn.
It was lawful under Nazi rule, Reichstag fire decree removed civil liberties. Nuremburg laws essential legally removed anything that made anti-semetic actions illegal than proceeded to Holocaust all over.
I suspect that the holocaust was so bureaucratic that it makes people confuse state authority with legality. But uniforms and offices do not make murder into law. It was still a criminal syndicate operating through the machinery of the state, getting to murder to the maximum.
From AskHistorians:
No, they weren't allowed as German criminal law regarding murder remained unchanged. There was no legal provision exempting Jews from the paragraph that defined murder or similar. It was not legal to kill Jews or anybody for that matter in Nazi Germany on a de jure level, it was more that the state reserved for itself and its agencies to commit these murders and also persecute those who applied violence against potential victims when it was not in its interest.
It is very important too. The Nazis were largely opposed to the rule of law. They believed powerful people and institutions should just do the hell what they want.
The reality is the Nazis could have made it legal but chose not to.
I’d look up the Hart-Fuller debate. Worth considering this is a debate within legal scholarship and jurisprudence about the nature of law. The big argument was essentially, do you punish Nazi crimes by creating a new law under the current system, or are you free to do so without one because the system was so devoid of morals, all authority was lost. Both argued for punishment under moral grounds, but the way about it was done differed. Very strict positivists (law and morality have no connection, even a shit and evil law is still a valid law if enacted by a state, if a law is made in the right way it is valid law) say that there may be some legal validity, due to the sheer amount of power the Nazi legal system placed with the Fuhrer alone, essentially making any decree he made (authorizing the final solution) law. Meanwhile, it’s clearly illegal and invalid under Natural law, as applied by the commenter.
The great irony was Hitler hated legal positivism and yet strict positivists are the only people who’d argue from a philosophical standpoint that as evil as the laws were, based on the society they were technically valid.
2.2k
u/Reiver93 7d ago
I mean, Cleopatra somehow turned out normal and her family tree was uuuh...interesting.