Shadowing Practice: Why H!tler Saw Jews as a Threat to Humanity | Explained - Learn English Speaking with Video

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- If there's a list of history's most infamous villains, H!tler is at the top.

He's the poster boy for antisemitism, the guy who turned mass murder into an industry, and though he hated a lot of people, he was uniquely obsessed with J3ws.

He believed that only he could solve the Jewish problem, and his solution was d3adlier than anyone could have imagined.

Antisemitism had poisoned Europe for centuries, but even the most hardened Jew haters hadn't envisioned total annihilation.

Not until H!tler.

By the time he was done, one in three of the world's J3ws were gone.

So why did H!tler hate the J3ws with such a consuming obsession?

Europe had never been particularly good to its J3ws, but by the time H!tler was born, J3ws had mostly left their ghettos in Western Europe and were participating in public life.

The Enlightenment had taught that all human beings were born with a natural right to life, liberty, and property, even J3ws.

Before the Enlightenment, J3ws had been treated as complete outsiders, a foreign and corrupting element with no rights and no recourse.

As Enlightenment ideas spread through the continent, Western European J3ws did their best to assimilate.

Whether they lived in Germany, Austria, or France, they attended universities, served in the army and the government, wrote bestselling novels, made art, and did research.

From the outside, they looked and lived just like everyone else.

But Europe's antisemitism was deeply rooted, and it never fully went away.

And that is where our story starts, with a young H!tler picking up a newspaper and reading about the J3ws.

Even as a kid, H!tler had been drawn to politics, and he had some strong opinions.

The Austro-Hungarian Empire which was in power at the time, was multi-ethnic and multinational, but not everyone was happy about the state of affairs, and H!tler soon fell in love with German ethnic nationalism, the idea that all ethnic Germans should unite under one banner.

This vision of a united Germany left no room for ethnic minorities, especially not J3ws.

Nationalist papers openly refer to J3ws as lice, the lowliest of all peoples, and the abomination of the human race, rhetoric that the young H!tler swallowed without a second thought.

Like I said, even in enlightened Europe, antisemitism was alive and well.

At 18, H!tler moved to Vienna, hoping to become an artist.

To a small town kid with big city dreams.

Vienna was like an electric shock, bustling, cosmopolitan, and full of dangerous ideas.

The city was a battleground where modernity and tradition collided head on.

The government tried and often failed to crack down on the p0rnography and immorality that seemed to be everywhere.

From Freud's theories of s3xuality, to Mahler's operas, to Klimt's er0tic paintings.

H!tler came to Vienna to make art, but found himself disgusted by the city's degeneracy, which he blamed on Vienna's Jewish artists and intellectuals.

Modernism was overtaking traditional values, and the open exploration of social taboos like s3x, poverty, pr0stitution, v!olence, and alternate forms of government terrified conservative thinkers.

Everywhere H!tler looked, he saw conspiracy to destroy all that was pure, noble, wholesome, and German.

At the same time, H!tler fancied himself an artist.

But good art requires bravery, open-mindedness, a willingness to challenge convention.

H!tler's art had none of those.

His paintings were technically proficient, but stiff and solace.

And so when he applied to Vienna's Academy of Fine Arts, he was rejected.

Twice. Broke and aimless, he took to wandering the streets.

Well, for the first time, he came face to face with religious J3ws.

These traditionalists looked nothing like the modernists he blamed for Vienna's moral decay, but they were just as alien and threatening to the honest, hardworking Volk of his beloved Germany.

True, H!tler had been born in Austria, but he'd always idolized the Germans on the other side of the border.

And by his teens, he was fully immersed in the Volkish ideology, a toxic mix of racism, romanticism and German superiority.

This pseudo-scientific populism was all the rage in H!tler's Vienna, helped along by the city's antisemitic mayor.

Karl Lueger was a contradictory kind of guy.

On the one hand, he had many Jewish friends who vouched for his generally decent character, and he never passed any anti-Jewish laws.

In fact, he counted J3ws among his confidants and advisors, even appointing a handful to public positions.

At the same time, his political platform was built on populous scapegoating.

He needed someone to blame for the city's moral decline, and J3ws were a convenient target, shapeshifters who could be made to fit any charge, communist or capitalist, practitioners of an alien religion or p0rnographers and pr0stitutes, and always, always outsiders.

H!tler had found his hero.

It would be an exaggeration to say that Lueger normalized antisemitism in Vienna, because antisemitism was already in the air.

But his political savvy and talent for public speaking electrified the young H!tler.

Here was a man who understood PR, a steering orator with a knack for political theater, whipping up crowds with a well-chosen word.

Whether or not he was sincere, Lueger's grandstanding offered H!tler a blueprint for how to seize and wield power effectively.

In his hands, antisemitism wasn't just a feeling, but a tool, a platform that unified and inspired decent Volk to take back their city from the capitalists, communists, p0rnographers, and modernists destroying their traditional Volkish values.

H!tler might have started putting Lueger's lessons into practice much earlier, if not for WW1.

As a volunteer in the German army, he spent the latter half of his twenties carrying messages to and from regiment HQ.

Though he usually wasn't on the front lines, he was temporarily blinded by a mustard gas attack and sent back to Germany to recover.

So he had front row seats at the starvation and hopelessness of the home front, images that would haunt him for the rest of his life.

But H!tler never returned to the battlefield.

By the time he recovered, the w@r was over and his beloved Fatherland had lost.

He couldn't believe it.

He had been awarded two iron crosses for bravery, and half his regiment had given lives or limbs to the cause.

As far as he was concerned, the military had done everything right.

The soldiers had been brave.

The strategy had been sound.

Like many Germans, he believed that trade risk politicians had stabbed the ordinary people in the back.

They had surrendered, hypnotized by bad actors who exploited Germany's weakness for their own dark ends.

And who were those bad actors?

Social democrats, communists, J3ws.

H!tler either didn't know or didn't care that 100,000 J3ws had served loyally in the German army.

It was much easier to blame the misery all around him on outside influence.

And misery was everywhere in post-w@r Germany.

The empire had fallen, and various groups jockeyed to fill the power vacuum, with d3adly results.

Socialists and communists duked it out, often violently.

And for many Germans, including H!tler, it seemed clear that someone was behind all this upheaval.

Someone was infecting Germany with the virus of communism.

Someone had forced the German government to sign a profoundly humiliating treaty, which made an already devastated Germany pay reparations to all parties involved.

Humiliated Germans didn't have to look far to find the mysterious someone who took such obvious pleasure in ruining their country.

By 1919, German translations of "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" were popping up everywhere.

A few years before, a Russian journalist claimed to have found the minutes of a series of secret meetings of a shadowy Jewish group called the Elders of Zion.

Each chapter meticulously noted the various methods that the Elders employed to take over the world, because when you're in a secret cabal, you definitely write down every detail of your evil plans and leave them around for anyone to find.

Said plans were all super achievable and normal.

Seizing control of the banks, the media, the schools, world governments, and so on.

In order to rule the world, enslave all non-J3ws, and destroy all other religions.

Cue the evil laugh.

(group laughing) I really wish I didn't need to say that "The Protocols of the Elders of Zion" are completely and totally fake, but I read the comments.

So for anyone who needs to hear this, there is no Jewish plot to take over the world.

And if there were, we'd be too busy arguing with each other to actually put it into action.

I realize I'm using logic and reason as well as some much needed humor to combat a deeply illogical and unreasonable paranoia.

But H!tler didn't see himself as a madman.

In fact, Rabbi Raphael Shore explains in his book that it would be both inaccurate and unsatisfying to merely dismiss him as a lunatic.

At the core of his hatred was a deeply developed worldview that positioned J3ws and Judaism as the antithesis of everything he valued and cherished.

Above all else, it was this tension between Judaism and H!tler's values that lay at the heart of his hatred.

All his other accusations about Jewish domination, Jewish p0rnography, Jewish Marxism, or capitalism or alienists, were merely window dressing, useful embellishments to a much deeper animus.

- That is the accepted approach that almost everybody considers to be true without ever giving it much of a second thought.

The parallel that goes along with that is that H!tler was a complete madman with no coherent thinking in his brain and ideology.

He was just a a megalomaniac psychopath, and all that together is why it all happened.

Germany was the most intelligent, sophisticated, academic, logical country in the world.

And in the 1920s and '30s, if you wanted to get the best education, you went to Germany.

So how a madman with no coherent ideas could have whipped up an entire country to do g3nocide on a minority group and spend so much of their energies without any coherent ideology behind it, on the surface is illogical, doesn't hold any water.

The reality is that H!tler had an incredibly coherent ideology, a consistent, systematic ideology.

And not only that, it wasn't even his original ideology.

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He called himself a rational antisemite.

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He distinguished himself from emotional antisemites because he had a coherent ideology.

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- On its face, H!tler's so-called rational antisemitism seems a little nutty.

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How was a blind hatred of a single group rational in any way?

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- H!tler hated the J3ws because he viewed the world in an ideological battle for the core ideas that Western civilization should maintain and should believe in.

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If the one that he did not believe in would be successful, then that would be the destruction of humanity.

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And H!tler viewed himself as the man who was going to bring the correct ideology into the world for the sake of humanity, he was gonna save humanity.

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What was the bad ideology?

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The Jewish ideology.

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H!tler believed that the Jewish people, Judaism, that brought into the world a series of ideas they called the human concept, humanitarianism, love your neighbor, equality, human rights, peace on earth, brotherhood of all mankind, ethical monotheism, those ideas were going to destroy humanity.

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Through us, through Christianity, through various other movements, we have successfully transformed the world.

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- H!tler had found a way to warp scientific theories into twisted social "truths." Natural law was the only law that mattered.

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And if natural law dictated the survival of the fittest, then so should society.

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- What did he think was going to save humanity was the idea of social Darwinism, might makes right.

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He believed that just like the animal kingdom is governed by survival of the fittest, natural selection, which means the stronger destroy the weaker, the weaker go away, and as a result, you have an evolution of the animal kingdom to greater strength and survivability, and he believed that that was what was also the rule for mankind.

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But equality and peace on earth opposes those ideas of survival of the fittest.

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Survival of the fittest means you have a hierarchy and the lower one should be wiped out.

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You don't help the poor and help the weak and help the sick.

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You don't. You get rid of them.

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You allow them to die so that the species or the nation can continue to thrive.

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- To H!tler, individuals were worthless unless they were strong, which meant that human beings had no inherent worth on their own.

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The sick, the weak, the underdog, they were worthless to the survival of the Volk, unworthy of even being alive.

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But someone had inverted these natural laws.

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Someone had taken the pure and holy rules of nature and softened them.

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Why else would society care for the sick and poor and weak?

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It had to be a plot, a conspiracy to weaken and enfeeble strong, pure, muscular Volk.

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And H!tler knew exactly who was behind it.

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The J3ws had brought this "sickness" into the world.

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They'd introduced the dangerous idea that all human beings had inherent worth, with their outlandish claim that even the sick and the weak were made in the image of God.

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And this corruption of the natural order extended to the J3ws' very existence.

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By rights, they should have disappeared long ago.

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And yet despite their statelessness, their weakness, their dispersal all across the corners of the world, the constant attempt to wipe them out, here they were, alive and kicking, free to unleash their dangerous ideas on the world.

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Okay, so maybe it's not so rational to you and me, but H!tler laid out his ideas very openly, championing his anti-Judaism position as though it made all the sense in the world.

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And in doing so, he actually grasped something that many J3ws have forgotten.

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- So to understand that H!tler was not insane, but that he actually perceived something real about the J3ws, if you take that to the logical extreme and you're Jewish, that means there's something deeply important about who you are and your mission.

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- Of course, this wasn't particularly comforting to the J3ws of Europe.

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As H!tler amassed more and more power, their mission was to simply stay alive.

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But why would ordinary people, the majority of whom were Christian, even listen to a guy who was raging against ideas that were explicitly biblical?

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- H!tler was building on a very fertile ground.

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Antisemitism was deep in the German culture, and so H!tler was careful.

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He was against Christian values, Judeo-Christian values, totally.

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So he explained in his private discussions that he thought Christianity would die a natural d3ath, and that it was not really something that Germans naturally adhered to.

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It's a foreign ideology brought on by the J3ws.

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But he saw it dying, all the way from the emancipation in Europe.

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Christianity was losing its grip on Western civilization, and it was fading.

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So he didn't talk too much to Christians, the ones who were serious about it, about how he's gonna destroy Judaeo-Christian values.

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He was careful about that.

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- H!tler had learned from Lueger that desperate people are easy to manipulate.

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All it takes is a speech, a slogan, and a target for their anger.

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It's much easier to believe there's a global conspiracy arrayed against you than it is to accept that sometimes things just suck.

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For the next couple of years, H!tler refined his ideology and his political skills.

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He had stayed in the army at the end of WW1, eager for a purpose.

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And there was plenty of work for an intrepid soldier in postw@r Germany, like spying on far left groups.

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WW1 had left a power vacuum in Germany that all sorts of people were desperate to fill, but the Army was most concerned about communists taking over.

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And so they sent H!tler to spy on the German Workers' Party, which they thought was a Marxist group.

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But despite its name, it wasn't Marxist at all.

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The German Workers' Party was ultranationalist, Volkish, and anti-Marxist, and very, very antisemitic.

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H!tler was entranced.

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Even though he was supposed to be a silent observer, he found himself speaking up in the meeting so passionately and eloquently that the group's founder invited him to join.

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Two years later, he was the group's new leader, having booted out the old founder, and he decided it was time to rebrand as the National Socialist German Workers' Party, or in short, N@zi.

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The party had started out small and marginal, but H!tler had no intention of staying on the fringes.

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Soon, the party even had its own newspaper, where it put out calls to young men looking for a purpose.

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And the young men began joining.

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By 1923, the N@zis even had their own paramilitary wing, 3,000 members strong.

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Their first act was to try and overthrow the government.

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The coup failed, and the story should have ended there, a blip in Germany's chaotic history, a weird memory of the time a bunch of fascist goons tried to take over the government, but that's not what happened.

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Instead, H!tler found himself in front of a very sympathetic judge.

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Technically, the guy had committed treason, so the judge outlawed his party and sentenced him to prison.

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It was in prison that H!tler wrote his magnum opus, "Mein Kampf," a poisonous treatise explaining why J3ws were a threat that needed to be eliminated.

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Less than nine months into his sentence, H!tler was free once again.

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Almost immediately, he got the old band back together.

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A decade after his attempted coup, he was elected the Chancellor of Germany.

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And a decade after that, the so-called Final Solution was in full swing.

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It's easy to call H!tler crazy, easy to pretend he was just a madman.

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But there was a method to his madness, a reason for his hatred.

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And we should all understand those reasons.

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We can't fight what we can't understand.

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So whether you're Jewish or not, if you believe in love and compassion, in the sanctity of life, in the divine spark inside each human being, you're already resisting H!tler and his twisted ideology.

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You are proof that he lost, that hatred will always lose.

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And if you are Jewish, or Roma, or disabled, or LGBTQ+, or any of the other groups H!tler tried to destroy, take a moment to savor the fact that he failed.

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Our existence is defiance, a light keeping the darkness at bay.

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Vocabulary and speaking notes for this lesson

This C1 speaking lesson is built on the video “Why H!tler Saw Jews as a Threat to Humanity”. The speaker keeps coming back to these words: tler, German, Jewish, ideology. This video has 180 sentences and 3186 words to shadow. The speech runs for 18:05. The speaker talks at a natural 176 words per minute, close to everyday conversation. Only 74% of the words are among the 3,000 most common in English, so the vocabulary is demanding.

Key vocabulary in this video

The 15 most advanced words in the video, with pronunciation and meaning:

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
ideology noun	/aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/	Doctrine, philosophy, body of beliefs or principles belonging to an individual or group.
coherent adjective	/koʊˈhɛɹ.ənt/	Unified; sticking together; making up a whole.
hatred noun	/ˈheɪtɹɪd/	A strong aversion; an intense dislike.
madman noun	/ˈmædˌmæn/	A man who is insane or mentally disturbed.
rational adjective	/ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/	Capable of reasoning.
illogical adjective	/ɪˈlɒ.dʒɪ.kəl/	Contrary to logic; lacking sense or sound reasoning.
modernist adjective		Of, relating to, or characteristic of modernism.
outsider noun	/ˌaʊtˈsaɪdəɹ/	One who is not part of a community or organization.
bravery noun	/ˈbɹeɪ.və.ɹi/	Being brave, courageousness.
worthless adjective	/ˈwɜːθ.ləs/	Having no worth or use; without value.
inherent adjective	/ɪnˈhɪəɹənt/	Naturally as part or consequence of something.
mankind noun	/mænˈkaɪnd/	The human race in its entirety.
weaker adjective	/ˈwikɚ/	Said of one proposition with respect to another one: that the latter entails the former, but the former does not entail the latter.
misery noun	/ˈmɪz(ə)ɹi/	Great unhappiness; extreme pain of body or mind; wretchedness; distress; woe.
regiment noun	/ˈɹɛd͡ʒɪmənt/	A unit of armed troops under the command of an officer, and consisting of several smaller units.

Phrasal verbs you will hear

Word	Pronunciation	Meaning
take over verb		To assume control of something, such as a business or enterprise, and sometimes by force.
go away verb		To depart or leave a place.
go along with verb		To acquiesce to or comply with a proposal, despite lacking a desire or value for it.
help along verb		To euthanize.
lay out verb	/ˌleɪ ˈaʊt/	To expend or contribute money to an expense or purchase.
pick up verb		To lift; to grasp and raise.
pop up verb		To come up with a "pop" sound.
put out verb		To blind (eyes).

Grammar in this video

The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:

Structure	In the video
Conditional sentences if + clause, will/would + verb — a condition and its result	if there were, we'd be
Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it	was born · were born · had been treated
Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing	guy who turned · Empire which was · friends who vouched

Pronunciation to watch

The speaker uses 28 contractions and reduced forms, such as didn't, wasn't, you're. Say them the short way, as you hear them.

The “th” sounds: worthless /ˈwɜːθ.ləs/, sympathetic /ˌsɪm.pəˈθɛt.ɪk/, brotherhood /ˈbɹʌðɚˌhʊd/, threaten /ˈθɹɛt.n̩/, ethical /ˈɛθɪkəl/
The “sh” and “zh” sounds: rational /ˈɹæʃ(ə)nəl/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, accusation /ˌæk.jʊˈzeɪ.ʃ(ə)n/, practitioner /pɹækˈtɪʃənəɹ/, fascist /ˈfæʃɪst/
Long words — get the stress right: ideology /aɪ.diˈɑ.lə.d͡ʒi/, illogical /ɪˈlɒ.dʒɪ.kəl/, civilization /ˌsɪv.ɪ.laɪˈzeɪ.ʃən/, accusation /ˌæk.jʊˈzeɪ.ʃ(ə)n/, practitioner /pɹækˈtɪʃənəɹ/

How to practise with this video

Listen to the whole video once without speaking and note the words you do not know.
Start at 0.75× speed, shadow it sentence by sentence, then go back to normal speed once it feels easy.
Record yourself and compare with the original, paying attention to words like ideology, coherent, hatred.

What is the Shadowing Technique?

Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.

Shadowing technique: read the full step-by-step guide →

Shadowing Practice: Why H!tler Saw Jews as a Threat to Humanity | Explained - Learn English Speaking with Video

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