Tag: Hitler

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general freedom ideological culture

The Pivotal Issue

Hitler, baby

A recent video about vaccination passports brought to mind an old parlor game: “If you could go back in time, would you kill Baby Hitler?”

Most civilized people realize the moral problems of this thought experiment. Sure, Baby Hitler grew up to be Nazi Führer Hitler, a mass-murderer worthy of assassination. But young Adolf wasn’t a monster. Yet. 

Moreover, every step on the way to becoming a monster was accompanied by situations in which civilized people could have stopped the coming horrors without murdering a child:

  • World War I was a choice (or set of choices).
  • The Versailles Treaty was a choice.
  • The Weimar Republic hyperinflation was the result of bad decisions.

More interesting than Killing Baby Hitler would be a parlor game about who could have stopped each horrific event that went into the rise of Hitler’s Third Reich. What decisions could they have made that would have changed history?

The point of these counterfactual exercises? To learn how to make better policy.

Such as in a pandemic, when governments are expanding their power over citizens with lockdowns and business shutdowns and mask and vaccine mandates. While in America many such mandates are being struck down as unconstitutional, beyond the authority of officials, in Germany and Austria vaccine passports are going into tyrannical effect.  

We need to take seriously the warning in the video mentioned at top, This Pivotal Moment. Stop vaccine mandates. Reverse the mandates in effect. Abolish internal passports. Resist this tyrannical notion of a two-tier society.

In Europe, masses of people have taken to the streets in defiance.

Open defiance is also necessary here . . . in “the land of the free.”

That’s how you stop Baby Hitler.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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education and schooling ideological culture

The Awful Strain of Insurmountable Parody

Hitler, Downfall, parody,

What if “political correctness” were really a problem of rampant cowardice?

University of Massachusetts Amherst administrators removed Catherine West Lowry from her 13-year gig as an accounting lecturer because of an extra-credit project. 

She had shown a previous year’s student-produced parody video using the infamous Hitler breakdown scene in the excellent 2004 movie Downfall. I assume you’ve seen dozens of these; I know I have. Their ubiquity notwithstanding, the university claims to have received student complaints about the one Ms. Lowry showed.

The proper response to a protestation of offense at a Downfall parody? Eye rolls. Were I a professor, I’d have to resist the nearly irresistible desire to reduce office hours starting immediately. 

Any other response, especially dismissing the lecturer, is pure pusillanimity.

Or, make that cowardice of the impure variety, for I suppose something else could be going on here.

Lowry claims that she’d shown this particular effort in previous years and no one had complained. And I believe her.

Can we believe the university’s claim to have received complaints from students this year?

Before we accept such a statement, we should peruse the evidence. After all, in the case of the Wilfrid Laurier University mistreatment of the T.A. who had shown a Jordan Peterson video in class, administrators had simply lied — there had been no complaints.

Had UMass Amherst actually received complaints, then their response would be merely cowardice. But were there no complaints, the whole thing becomes far more ominous.

And I wonder: what would today’s university make of Hogan’s Heroes?

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

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Hitler, Downfall, parody,

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Categories
general freedom individual achievement responsibility

Freedom’s Friends

Yesterday marked a solemn anniversary. Seventy-four years ago — on Feb. 22, 1943 — three German students at the University of Munich were tried for treason by the Nazis, convicted and then executed via the guillotine, all in one day.

Days earlier, Hans Scholl and his sister Sophie had been caught distributing a leaflet at the university, which read: “In the name of German youth, we demand restitution by Adolf Hitler’s state of our personal freedom, the most precious treasure we have, out of which he has swindled us in the most miserable way.”

Hans had in his pocket a draft of another leaflet, in Christoph Probst’s handwriting. That seventh leaflet, never distributed, led to Christoph’s arrest and execution, along with Hans and Sophie.

The three were part of a small group of students who wrote and distributed leaflets under the name The White Rose — a symbol of purity standing against the monstrous evil of the Third Reich. The leaflets decried the crimes of National Socialism, including the mass murder of Jews, and urged Germans to rise up.

Three more members were later executed: Willi Graf, Alex Schmorell and Professor Kurt Huber. Another eleven were imprisoned.

Their resistance was ultimately futile, unsuccessful . . . but not pointless. They would not remain cogs in the killing machine that had taken the most advanced society in the world to the depths of depravity. They took a stand against what George Orwell later characterized as “a boot stamping on a human face, forever.”

Let’s remember, and say, “Never again.” And have the courage to make those words true.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

N.B. For an excellent account of The White Rose, consult the aptly titled A Noble Treason, by Richard Hanser. See also Jacob Hornberger’s The White Rose — A Lesson in Dissent. The Orwell quotation is from the dystopian novel 1984.

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Categories
ideological culture

Hitler, Ha-Ha

Monday night on E! network’s late-night chat show, Chelsea Lately, British comedian Eddie Izzard got laughs with partisan hyperbole:

  1. Izzard identified the Tea Party as “extreme right wing”;
  2. He said, oh-so-amusingly, that Sarah Palin and Tea Party folks want to take things back to “1773 when slavery was legal”;
  3. He thanked America for helping Britain out when “we had a problem, in the Second World War, with extreme right-wingers in Europe”;
  4. He identified the Democrats with the people who’ve pushed progress and “caring about other people” since the beginning of civilization.

He went on. But you get the idea, you see how partisans treat their opponents — in this example, somebody vaguely on the left attacking Tea Party folks as right-wingers of Hitlerian proportions.

Now, Izzard is a funny guy, and not just because of his funny name. But politics is allegedly serious, and you’d think he would know that Hitler was not a right-winger. Hitler was a “national socialist” whose policies don’t resemble Tea Party policies at all. He knows that the number of American activists who look back before 1776 and think fondly of slavery is pretty close to zero.

He may not know, however, that “caring” as such, without follow-through and principles and a rule of law — and balanced budgets, just to avoid mass insolvency — does the opposite of good.

Except in short-run politics. And on Chelsea Lately.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.