WhyI'mEndingTheClassOnThisTopic

Summary

In the final video of the history class, the educator reflects on his approach to discussing contentious topics such as Harris vs. Trump and the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict. Emphasizing the importance of exposing students to diverse perspectives, he explains why he leaves certain current events unexamined due to their complexity and recency. The instructor defends his choice to address the Israeli-Palestinian tensions, stressing his intent to inform rather than indoctrinate, likening his role to that of an ethical bystander aware of injustice. He concludes with a reminder of the course's goal: fostering critical thought and understanding of global historical dynamics.

Highlights

• The instructor wraps up the class by reflecting on the challenges of covering real-time history. 🕰️
• Topics like Harris vs. Trump are left unfinished due to their unfolding nature. 🚧
• Importance of exposing students to a variety of viewpoints is emphasized. 🔍
• Addressing controversial topics helps foster understanding and dialogue. 🗣️
• Discussion of the Israel-Palestine conflict is used as a current real-world example. 🌐

Key Takeaways

• The course ends just as current events become too fresh for historical analysis. 📚
• Diverse opinions were presented to enhance critical thinking, not impose bias. 🤔
• The Israel-Palestine conflict was discussed due to its intricate involvement in U.S. policy. 🇺🇸
• Complex topics often defy simple explanations, needing deeper, unbiased exploration. 🌍
• The goal is to encourage lifelong learning and awareness of historical contexts. 🎓

Overview

In this closing session, the history instructor dives into why he's choosing to end the class focusing on the Israel-Palestine conflict among other pressing issues. As these topics are often loaded with personal and political biases, the aim is to ensure students have a broad view to build their own perspectives. Understanding the complexity and recency of these issues is key, especially when they impact international relations and domestic policies alike.

Throughout the course, a diversity of perspectives was presented even if it meant showing opinions he personally disagrees with. The instructor stresses the course’s intent to promote critical thinking rather than advocating any specific ideology. By discussing controversial issues like the Israel-Palestine conflict, students are encouraged to engage with the complexities of current geopolitics without being directed towards a particular stance.

The goal of the class is not merely to impart knowledge but to inspire students to further investigate historical and current events, highlighting how they’re intertwined with today’s global dynamics. As students prepare for their final assessments and continue their academic journeys, they are encouraged to think deeply and critically, recognizing that history is not just about the past but a vital tool for interpreting the present and influencing the future.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 00:30: Introduction and Context This chapter serves as the final video of the class, aiming to integrate all discussed topics and provide additional context and explanation about the entire course, particularly addressing aspects from the previous video content.
• 00:30 - 01:00: Ending the Course Before Current Politics This chapter discusses concluding a course before delving into contemporary political conflicts, specifically the Harris versus Trump situation. The speaker emphasizes the difficulty of providing a detailed historical perspective on events that are still unfolding.
• 01:00 - 01:30: Challenges of Course Content and Bias The chapter discusses the challenges of course content and bias, particularly in the context of teaching politically sensitive topics. It highlights the difficulties in covering all aspects of a topic within a survey course and the natural limitations this imposes. The transcript reflects on criticism a teacher might receive for potential biases, as they might have to omit certain topics due to time constraints or personal discretion. Moreover, it underscores how such omissions can lead to perceptions of bias, whether intentional or unintentional.
• 01:30 - 03:00: Critical Thinking and Different Opinions In this chapter titled 'Critical Thinking and Different Opinions', the instructor discusses the challenge of presenting a wide range of opinions due to time constraints. Despite these limitations, there is an emphasis on exposing students to diverse perspectives. The instructor clarifies that the materials shared, such as articles and videos, may not always align with their personal views. This approach is designed to enhance critical thinking by encouraging students to engage with varied viewpoints and develop their own informed opinions.
• 03:00 - 04:00: Focus on Israel-Palestine Conflict The speaker discusses the complexity of the Israel-Palestine conflict, acknowledging that while some individuals may not align with their personal values on various issues, they can accurately articulate historical aspects of the conflict. The speaker highlights the challenge of fully understanding someone's ideology based on their stance on specific issues.
• 04:00 - 06:00: Historical Background and Personal Perspective The chapter titled 'Historical Background and Personal Perspective' appears to focus on the analysis of various sources that may have conflicting views. It emphasizes the importance of being attentive to these differences and understanding the perspectives provided through the materials linked for the week. The instructor hopes that by the end of the class, students will have gained sufficient exposure to the discussed topics.
• 06:00 - 09:00: Addressing Misunderstandings and Criticisms The chapter titled 'Addressing Misunderstandings and Criticisms' likely emphasizes the importance of exploring diverse perspectives and encourages critical thinking. The transcript indicates a focus on delving deeper into topics, regardless of agreement or disagreement, as the ultimate goal is to make students aware of different ideas and perspectives encountered in a US 102 course. The objective seems to be about fostering awareness and understanding, rather than pushing for consensus or persuasion.
• 09:00 - 12:00: Professor's Ethical Stance and Historical Context The chapter addresses the Professor's current focus on the Israel Palestine conflict within the context of a US History class. The Professor acknowledges having a biased perspective which may influence the class discussion, even though it seems counterintuitive given the course's aim to conclude US history topics.
• 12:00 - 15:00: US Involvement in Global Conflicts The chapter titled 'US Involvement in Global Conflicts' begins with a review of older videos and articles that the speaker has made, some of which are dated and relevant to the starting time periods of the conflicts discussed. The narrator highlights the ongoing civil wars in Sudan and the Congo, indicating the dire situations in those regions.
• 15:00 - 18:00: US as a Superpower and Global Perception This chapter discusses the role and actions of the United States as a global superpower, particularly focusing on historical events where its lack of intervention has been criticized. A notable example mentioned is President Bill Clinton's response to the Rwandan genocide, where the criticism was not about direct involvement but rather the inaction and passive stance during the known atrocities, contrasting with direct engagement in other global conflicts.
• 18:00 - 21:00: Current Political Climate and Challenges The chapter delves into the complexities of deciding when and if the US government should intervene in international humanitarian crises such as genocides. It raises the fundamental question of whether such interventions are always the right course of action, even from a humanitarian standpoint. The discussion acknowledges the intricacies and potential consequences of intervening in global conflicts, highlighting that while the ideal is to prevent atrocities, real-world scenarios often present challenging choices with complicated implications.
• 21:00 - 25:30: Conclusion and Encouragement for Critical Thinking The chapter discusses the ongoing Israel-Palestine conflict, highlighting its escalation and the political entrenchment in the issue across both Democratic and Republican lines in the U.S. It emphasizes its recognition as potentially genocidal by some authorities, and notes that this perspective is increasingly acknowledged by mainstream politicians, indicating growing momentum in public discourse.

WhyI'mEndingTheClassOnThisTopic Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 so in this uh last video for um our class that I'm making I want to kind of tie in everything together and explain where uh why I'm ending it where I'm at and um put a little more context and explanation into um even what I discussed in the last video uh the one that I'm posting of of
• 00:30 - 01:00 the topic that I'm covering so few things um I am like I mentioned I'm ending this just as we're getting to uh Harris verse Trump so I don't really cover I are we we we're aware that that is where things are going next and I'm stopping there first of all uh we're too much in the thick of things now to really get a proper historical
• 01:00 - 01:30 analysis of what to make of you know a few months in to the Trump uh second term as president and I also think it's just too much there's just so much going on and uh I had to pass over so many things keep in mind or always remember these are a survey course um somebody might say "Well Mr pollock didn't bring up this or that." Or "Oh he shows his bias by only bringing up this or that."
• 01:30 - 02:00 And the fact of the matter is it's very difficult sometimes I would like to just give you all like an overview of like several different opinions on different things and then I'm just we're limited with time and so but let me actually make clear also in this class I have not always posted things especially when it comes to articles and videos that I'm always 100% on board with if you see something that has an opinion mixed with the
• 02:00 - 02:30 history I might just be wanting you to be exposed to that there's also sometimes people that are are going to speak that uh I don't don't align with my own values on a lot of things but on a particular issue I think that they nailed the history uh relatively well so um it's not possible to always get a full reading you know about like like what is what is the ideology is there is there a particular ideology that I'm
• 02:30 - 03:00 actually like pushing out when it comes to the various sources some of these things are are opposing opposed to each other and so I hope you're paying attention to that and also just seeing that and some of the links that I'm showing for this week okay so please keep that in mind um and uh what I'm hoping is that by the time you're done with this class right now you're going to have enough exposure to all of these topics
• 03:00 - 03:30 that you will dig deeper if you're interested and you may find that uh you agree less with me but but you got to a certain point because of what I brought up in class you might agree more uh uh with me but again that's not my goal on most of the subjects it's it's just I want to get you aware of all of what we we should you know have general ideas of by the time you come out of a US 102
• 03:30 - 04:00 history class so um you know uh um we we we covered a lot now so moving forward into where I'm at specifically now um I'm posting a lot on the Israel Palestine conflict which would be counterintuitive for ending the US history 102 class and I'm clearly giving a biased opinion
• 04:00 - 04:30 uh from the last video that I'm posting that I made uh over a year ago um which also by the way some of these videos and some of the articles I'm posting are dated from the time periods that these things started so be aware of that as well um there's um but okay so having said that uh why why would I do this um you know Sudan has a terrible civil war the Congo has a terrible civil war
• 04:30 - 05:00 and kind of like Bill Clinton uh if you remember when we covered that he was blamed not for a particular action committ committed in Rwanda but for the lack of for the Clinton was criticized by some for not trying to stop their genocide in Rwanda not for contributing to it but by just kind of letting it happen and doing nothing about it while it was known to be happening and that's a different set
• 05:00 - 05:30 of debates i mean there's always like um a question right okay yes ideally we don't want anybody to have genocide but but should the US government always intervene is that the right idea uh even if you're a humanitarian-minded person and know that that you don't want that to happen but there's there's implications and it can get complicated if you just intervene everywhere in the world right and so that's that's another set of
• 05:30 - 06:00 topics i bring up the Israel Palestine uh conflict mainly because it's the one that we are thoroughly entrenched in like massively and that's been under a Democrat or Republican and it's escalated to a point now where Israel is accused of committing a genocide okay and it's happening now in real time and it's even something being mentioned more and more by more mainstream uh politicians uh the momentum is going
• 06:00 - 06:30 more and more against the Isra Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Is Israel's narrative that it's not a genocide and the idea that it is a genocide um but this requires me to get involved in a very controversial topic right the topic of Israel um United States has been historically fully in support of Israel especially after Eisenhower eisenhower was more nuanced uh in the Middle Eastern foreign policy but now uh
• 06:30 - 07:00 most US politicians they will always make like the majority of the politicians will be 100% pro-Israel um and so also then getting involved in this one is accused of being anti-Semitic so I I I want to address this again because I addressed that in my last one but I but I just wanted for clarity um my mentor on this topic uh is a very interesting older uh Jewish
• 07:00 - 07:30 man that grew up in Florida and he grew up next to a high school that was named uh I think it was Forester High School uh it's no long it's no longer named after this Confederate general but that was the guy who founded the KKK okay and so he was a Jewish kid growing up in Florida around a people that have a town with a high school named after the Confederate general that founded the KKK so he's
• 07:30 - 08:00 aware of racism anti-semitism all those things and then as he gets older he sees the the uh anti-segregation movement you know Martin Luther King Jr and so forth and he really takes to that he doesn't believe in segregation and then long story short he meets a Palestinian and he takes a journey and goes to Palestine himself he goes to
• 08:00 - 08:30 Israel and he saw things that shocked him that made him change his mind about what he was raised to think about in terms of the state of Israel and relationship to the Palestinians and he information dumped on me uh all of this and that's what got me started in this topic for myself uh several decades ago and and as you'll see in what I show in the videos and in the readings is
• 08:30 - 09:00 that there are many Jewish Americans who have a different opinion about Israel as well are critical and they're not ashamed of being Jewish they're not self-hating Jews uh and so what I'm trying to say is if any of my students are from a Jewish background this is not this is not attack on Jewishness unfortunately unfortunately there has been some people in politics that make it that the idea of criticizing
• 09:00 - 09:30 uh Zionism in Israel the the political ideologies wrapped up to the state um that by default if you don't agree with the the idea the way it's all set up that you are denying something of the Jewish people that that it's a it's an attack that you're anti-Semitic and I'm making a serious push back on that uh I'm reiterating that because the whole entire point of why I'm upset and feel I need to talk about this more more is I want to see
• 09:30 - 10:00 uh I don't believe in identity politics that hurts other people okay and it's not about saying one a group of person is a it's not a critique of a people of an ethnicity of a religion it's about a political situation that we are in right now and I thought about this because I had one friend and colleague that was very upset with me for bringing this up the last time he said that's inappropriate that you would even go there with your students in this class on this topic and I was thinking okay if I'm a
• 10:00 - 10:30 professor in Germany during the time of the Nazis and I'm just going to use this as an example it's not the best to be parallel to what's going on now but but hear me out so I'm a German professor let's say and I learned that the Holocaust is happening i know that it's happening let's say now in Nazi Germany if I speak out against a Nazi party I get I'm going to get arrested so um that's different
• 10:30 - 11:00 than now i might lose a job under certain possibilities but but not like get arrested necessarily well that's kind of changing right now if you pay attention to certain politics so it's it's kind of going there but anyways if I as a history professor in Germany during the time of the Nazi rule was to tell my students look you should know that our state is contributing to
• 11:00 - 11:30 the Holocaust of Jews it's it's persecuting other people it's wrong what's happening what's happening is wrong would history say if we now look you know go into the future would it be said that that I as a German professor should have stuck to the professionalism of my my job and that it was inappropriate for me to try to indoctrinate my students and that you know that's not my place to kind of like critique whether or not the state is
• 11:30 - 12:00 committing a holocaust or committing political oppression of of of other people i think that we know that that that would be something that you would say was even heroic now I'm not trying to be a hero but I'm just simp simply saying if I'm living in a state and it's contributing to a genocide something that I think is well documented and it's so much so that it even was affecting the current elections that took place and that's still this raging thing this
• 12:00 - 12:30 ongoing thing and and creating a lot of international turmoil and that it's there's all of this going on how can I not try to bring attention to it and say it needs to stop so keep in mind I'm not asking for Israel to have a genocide i don't want Israel to be stop i don't want anybody's kids to be messed up and I put the article about October 7th you'll learn you know Hamas has done some bad things also as well it's not about um saying that there's never been
• 12:30 - 13:00 anything uh extreme on the other side but there is a big total story here and the reality is there is uh this there is a genocide taking place and there's ethnic cleansing and uh you you'll see also that Trump is now escalating that with Netanyahu we didn't cover that in class but it's actually getting worse not better um and so yeah that's why I'm speaking
• 13:00 - 13:30 out about this i think as an American this is my tax money it's my politicians from Biden Harris to Trump that are contributing to this and I also have a lot of Jewish friends and people scholars and and activist groups who are trying to also bring awareness to this and they're being silenced in a lot of the mainstream media and I want to stand with them too and make this part of history show that not everybody supports these kind of things uh in this day and
• 13:30 - 14:00 age okay and so that's something I want to make clear and then I need to actually just kind of I should have started off with talking about the Ukraine Russia war also very complicated very terrible and I have a lot of friends in Europe that really are frightened of Russia and the they're really upset about the Trump pulling out of the war uh uh with that there's a lot that felt that Biden was doing the right thing and then I
• 14:00 - 14:30 know other scholars that are saying that the US really contributed to this and has actually prolonged this and made it worse there is a lot like so I'm also against Russia's invasion of Ukraine and the killing and the bombing there uh the politics around this and the argument for this has its own set of complications and all I'll say is this what I've looked historically uh from my own studies and and I talk about this more in my western civilization
• 14:30 - 15:00 class russia and the rest of Western Europe have a long history of being at odds with each other russia kind of is not it's it's sort of European and it's sort of Asian like Eastern and its historical political history and the influences that it has and it's been on the outs with Western Europe and what I noticed is just historically I'm not necessarily
• 15:00 - 15:30 fully talking about what's happening right now but Europe will do things that make Russia from their perspective feel justified and being that they're under siege and it makes them have their own logic on why they have a right to take a position that would be against the interests of Western Europe and Russia will then do these certain things that makes the rest of Western Europe say "Well we were right about worrying about Russia." The history of
• 15:30 - 16:00 both sides has made both sides feel justified in why they feel like they need to do X Y or Z and um that's another entire it's you know that's a whole another entire complicated topic uh uh that I don't have time to go over so again this class we're covering we we covered a lot the Ukraine Russia war US involvement NATO Europe uh US for foreign policy in the Middle East our policy towards Iran what's
• 16:00 - 16:30 going on with the Houthies in the Red Sea why we should care the Israel Palestine conflict so much why what what do we make of all this the United States is the world's largest superpower we are the most powerful nation in the world and really China would be second and I think Russia kind of third in terms of like nation state power and the EU its own type of interesting block but in the middle of all this the US is the most powerful nation and so we're involved in
• 16:30 - 17:00 everything and how we're involved is not always clear to American citizens and that's regardless of whether you're a Democrat or Republican and I know this is going long so I'll just kind of end this to say when I was traveling overseas and I lived overseas for a year three months in Europe basically and the rest in Asia you know they don't you know when Americans care about like you know Trump or Biden the way we look at
• 17:00 - 17:30 it is through our domestic lens but the world looks at a Biden or a Trump simply through the international lens and it's very different they don't see any president as weak they simply see different priorities they see escalation and deescalation of different things and right now what's currently happening with Trump is unprecedented these tariff wars nothing at this nature
• 17:30 - 18:00 there's the the the the crackdown on uh universities and free speech and ignoring potentially uh things being said from federal judges and the and the and the Supreme Court history right now is a game changer but again uh we didn't cover how we got to that part like directly now but I think
• 18:00 - 18:30 you're going to see all of the the what we've covered so so being pro Palestinian has a lot to do with some of even what Trump feels about like going after certain universities or students saying you know they have a right to say that or not um the that that we're talking about potentially going to war with Iran which is really in Israel's interest and Saudi Arabia's interest by the way I didn't get to even cover Saudi Arabia's relationship with the United States which is also a complex one so uh here
• 18:30 - 19:00 we are what almost 20 minutes into this discussion what I'm hoping that you get from this class is that there's a lot to study there's a lot to be on top of there's a lot of subjects to to learn about and history matters what you know matters the way that politicians are moving things on either side uh make it easy to manipulate us when we are not aware of what is going on what where terms are um you know the current
• 19:00 - 19:30 president says that a trade imbalance is a bad thing look up what a trade imbalances and see if it's a bad thing or not uh we hear certain terms um uh you know by the way um the first time Trump was president he condemned using Howard Zen and said it's an anti-America book basically do you think does that how you feel am I guilty of
• 19:30 - 20:00 that um and uh uh you know so um there's so much to go over think about i hope you all do well and thrive we're going to have an exam coming up and it'll be worth 25 or 30 points I'm going to think but that's it having uh uh your grade in this class was based on keeping up with the work and being engaged in the class and I'll give one farewell a goodbye video after this um
• 20:00 - 20:30 uh next week um but uh uh I wish you all all well on your journey of continuing to study and I'll leave it at here right