Antisemitism in Canada - Education

So I've finally finished all my research about my Antisemitism in Canada project, and it's finally time to put it all together. What I intend to do is create the Facebook account of a Jewish person living during the 30s and WW2 in Canada. I want it to be as accurate and representative of the Jewish population as possible. I just started making the account and I've already run into my first problem: Education Facebook asked me what high-school and university I graduated from. This was something I had not looked into before. So high-school was not a problem because I decided to assume that this person had immigrated from Europe as did many others, and would therefore have undergone high-school education before coming to Canada. University was more of a problem. I found out that antisemitism extended even as far as University enrollment. Jew were not banned from university; however, it was difficult for them to get into some universities because the universities capped the number of Jewish students allowed. So after doing some research, I found out that Queen's was the least strict on the quotas, and allowed the most Jews in, including Jews escaping Germany during the 30s. So that's why I have now decided to put Queen's University as education. "Universities and Antisemitism." Wikipedia. N.p., 1 Nov. 2012. Web. 01 Dec. 2012. . Millar, Anne. "Education During the Second World War." Wartime Canada (200?): N. pag. Web. 01 Dec. 2012. .

Palestine - Israel Situation

With the recent news of the U.N. election, it seems to me that the situation needs to be cleared up a little bit. On the one side you have all the countries that were in support of making Palestine a non-member state that could monitor U.N. proceedings. On the other side, were several countries including U.S., Canada, and most importantly Israel.
So the obvious question arises:
What's the deal between Israel and Palestine?
Personally, I think this video is a pretty good explanation of the situation.



Seems silly, but it's the truth. Now that you've seen this you should turn a critical eye towards any media you've seen related to Palestine and Israel. Then find out the facts of what actually happened in that event. Take a look at media from both sides of the story. You'll probably notice that it becomes quite similar to this video.
What would you do in this kind of situation, defend yourself or allow yourself to be bullied?
If you can answer this question easily, then you should probably be a president or leader of some sort.
Otherwise, you're just another mundane individual. Sorry.

Learning from the Past - Brainwashing

Learning from the Past - Brainwashing

While we were learning about World War II an obvious question came up when we learned of Hitler's atrocities, why would people follow him. We watched a movie entitled the Wave to answer this.

In the movie, an experiment is conducted in America where a history teacher attempts to build a Hitler-like following from his students. The students go along with it, and quickly give up their individualism in order to join the teacher's movement which is called "the Wave". This continues to escalate until members start threatening nob-members.

What the point of the movie is, is to show how easy it is to just give in to preachings of others. Especially if you get brainwashed from a young age.

http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/articles/effectiveorganization.aspx

What's interesting is that this still happens today.

Kids are brainwashed to say, do, even believe certain things. They are brainwashed to such a degree that they lose all individuality. They are made into an army that does anything they are commanded to do, because they were brainwashed from a young age. The techniques used on kids today, mimic those used by Hitler to brainwash the Hitler Youth into believing Nazi ideology, hating Jews, and being able to even go as far as killing for the Fuhrer.

How could this happen you say?

Who could possibly do this?

Why has nobody stopped this?

The kids I'm talking about can be seen in this video:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LACyLTsH4ac

This is brainwashing at its best. Even at their age the kids are already brainwashed and it will only get worse as they age if they keep being exposed to this brainwashing.

The sad truth is that the lesson, apparently, that we have learned from the war and Hitler,  is not that we shouldn't brainwash people because this can allow them to commit atrocities, but rather we learned how to more effectively brainwash people, especially children.

Hopefully, future generations will be able to see this as wrong. Meanwhile, let's just hope this 'army' won't follow in the Hitler Youth's footsteps.

Learning from the War

Learning from the War

Now that we're done studying WW1, I have a couple thoughts.

This is the first one:

So what's the point of learning all this?

I personally think there's two very important reasons:

The first is so that we don't make fools out of ourselves:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJuNgBkloFE

To become part of the "educated adult Canadian club" we have to know Canadian history. 

In fact, we at least have to know some history, unlike the people in the video.

The second reason is to learn from the past.

At the end of World War 1, the Treaty of Versailles was signed.

It held Germany as the sole party responsible for the war.

It also forced Germany to pay massive reparations and give up resource rich lands.

What did this lead to?

The rise of Hitler and World War 2.

Learning about WW1 and what happened afterwards, teaches us important lessons about the economy, and politics. It can help us prepare for future situations like those in the past.

My next post will be about Hitler and brainwashing. Another main pint will be not learning from the past.

History can teach us alot, but the question remains are we learning to learn?

The Great Depression - Innocent Mistake or some thing entirely different?

So we all know about the Great Depression and how one of the main parts was the Stock Market Crash. We also know that the Stock Market Crash happened because of overzealous investors investing more into companies than they were worth. This of course resulted in inflated stock prices, which resulted in people being afraid of a crash, which resulted in people selling off all their stocks, which ironically enough, resulted in  ... a crash.The crash then resulted in everyone losing tons of money.

So all this seems relatively straight forward, but to me there seems to be one strange thing about all this. At the time of the founding of the Stock Market, there must've been many intelligent people who understood how the economy worked. Of course there were many such people, otherwise they wouldn't have been able to create the stock market.

So we have all these smart people, they make the stock market, and suddenly everybody's buying stocks and then then the prices inflate. What's strange to me, is what caused all these people to suddenly invest? Wanting to be able to make extra money is often called the reason for this. However, I don't think that that many people could've all been wanting to gamble money on the stock market at the same time. Most people couldn't afford risks like that.

So this means that there had to have been some other kind of motivation. This was most likely the smart people who had founded the stock market, after all, what's the point of making it if people don't use it? However, the question arises, couldn't they foresee what would happen if too many invested too much? It seems a relatively simple matter.

I believe that these smart people were more than smart enough to foresee the possible consequences of the stock market, yet they still decided to promote it.This means that they must've had some kind of motivation to persuade others to buy stocks, and I think this motivation was money
.
As creators of the stock market, these smart people (as I will continue to refer to them), had first-hand access to stocks and stock information. In fact, due to the low amount of knowledge people had about the stock market back then, the smart people could've easily manipulated it.

So what these smart people did was what's known now as an illegal pyramid scheme. They purchased certain stocks before anyone else could. Since this would've happened just after the recession, prices would have been low. They then promoted the heck out of the stock market, as a tool to safely and easily make money from home. People started buying stocks because they were listening to these smart respected people. Stock prices inflated an insane amount.

This is where it gets interesting. The smart people who's stocks are now worth a lot tell everyone not to sell their stocks because they can still continue going up.- Irving Fisher famously proclaimed, "Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau."^{[6]- wikipedia} Meanwhile, they themselves secretly sold their stocks because they foresaw the crash. They escaped the market with thousands upon thousands of dollars in profits and left everyone else to sink.

Once the common folk found out about this sale, an avalanche began. They all started following lead and sold off their stocks. This is what ultimately caused the crash. In one day, the Dow lost 12% of it's value, a record amount. This day became known as Black Tuesday.

So what we see now is that in reality, not everyone lost because of the crash. Those who were poor, the common folk, the majority of people lost a lot of money. However, the rich smart people gained thousands of dollars and became richer than ever.

In the beginning, the stock market was nothing more than a well-planned scam. Who knows, maybe the same is still true today...

Billy Bishop - Hero or Zero? Resources

I had general notes and points about written about these at different times (mostly after Oct. 20th) and now I'm posting them all together.

Greenhous, Brereton. The Making of Billy Bishop: The First World War Exploits of Billy Bishop, VC. Dundurn, 2002. Kindle Cloud Reader file.

This one had lots of great info on Billy Bishop. Because it was a book, it contained a lot more details that other sources didn't. It helped me get a general idea of what kind of a person Billy Bishop was.  Even though the book doesn't say anything bad as such about Billy, it helped me see that he wasn't as perfect as people thought he was.

Thistle, Rich. "Air Marshal William Avery Bishop." Billy Bishop, VC. N.p., 13 Apr. 2012. Web. 19 Oct. 2012. <http://www.billybishop.net/bishop.html>.

Lots of great info here. Lots of info about the controversy. Seemed to be in support of Bishop. Helped me gain an idea of what the main arguments were in this topic. Also helped me make my arguments stronger because now I knew what the main arguments for the opposing side were. Definitely helped shape my essay and decide on my arguments.

"William Bishop." The Aerodrome. N.p., n.d. Web. 18 Oct. 2012. <http://www.theaerodrome.com/aces/canada/bishop.php>.

This was one of the best sources. It had info that came straight out of archives. Most of my fact based info was originally found or verified here. This was great because it had a list of Billy's claims and from studying that I was able to realize to what extent he flew alone. This site was great for verifying info that I also found on other sites because there was lots of factual info here and it seems like a dedicated, trustworthy source. 

"World War I Fighter Pilots." United States Air Service, USN & USMC Aviation In World War I. N.p., 2009. Web. 18 Oct. 2012. <http://www.usaww1.com/World_War_1_Fighter_Pilots.php4>.

 and

Sherman, Stephen. "Legendary Aviators and Aircraft of World War One." Ace Pilots. N.p., 26 Aug. 2012. Web. 18 Oct. 2012. <http://acepilots.com/wwi/main.html>.

 Before I finalized my topic decision, I went here to look for info. This was back when my topic was Pilots - Heros? After seeing that just arguing that topic wouldn't be too interesting or controversial, and my history teacher in class talking about Billy Bishop, I decided to focus on my current topic. These two sources provided my background info for both my new and old topic, and were the original sources I was using to start forming arguments. Here I got info about aces and pilots, and finally chose Billy Bishop as the pilot I'd focus on.

"Air Marshal William Avery "Billy" Bishop." Canada Heros. N.p., 18 Feb. 2011. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://www.canada-heros.com/bishop_bill.html>.

Although this source contains far less info than my other sources ( it only has several main points), it's probably the most important source I have found so far. I discovered that Billy was part of the cavalry. Wasn't it really dangerous to be in the cavalry? I'll have to research this more, but I think I'm onto something that could give me a whole new angle on Billy's cowardice. This source would've definitely made a great starting place for my research.

"Canada's Part in the Great War." Old And Sold. Web. 25 Oct. 2012. <http://www.oldandsold.com/articles26/world-war-one-26.shtml>.

I found this source recently. It has definitely come in handy so far. It's an old newspaper article from right after the war (but now restored and posted online). This is definitely helping me form my cavalry arguments. It talks of the cavalry being decimated and that's exactly the proof I need to show Billy was actually in fear. I'm definitely changing my essay and arguments up a bit now, it'll be a bit different from the proposal but I think that my arguments will be stronger this way. It also talks about pilots a bit but apart from gaining some more general insight, I don't think this info will help much.

"William Avery "Billy" Bishop." Canadian Air Aces And Heroes. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2012. <http://www.constable.ca/caah/bbishop.htm>.

This source is just perfect for my new arguments. It talks about how Billy was part of the cavalry and how he got sick. Then his regiment was wiped out, and soon after he transferred to become a pilot. This fits in so perfectly with what I'm writing right now, I'm definitely taking quotes from here.