I’m sure that many of you have heard this dilemma asked. As a baby, Hitler was innocent. He remained innocent through his youth, through World War I, and beyond.
At some point, he became evil.
I would not kill baby Hitler. My world is what it is today because of WWII. Would it be better if Hitler had never been the leader of Germany? I don’t know, and neither do you.
We know the results, and we are where we are today because of our history, good and bad.
In 1989 or so I was interviewing with Cray Research. They gave me two options: I could work at an Army site, or I could work at NASA Langley.
I knew where Langley, VA, was. It was in the heart of the swamp. I couldn’t afford to live in that area, and I would hate the city life. Everything about living in Langley, VA, sucked for me.
I accepted the job offer for the Army site. It turned out that I got to work on the bleeding edge of computer graphics. I got to do stuff with amazing computers. I found a mentor that taught me more than I had learned in years. It took me through two bad marriages and into a great one.
It turns out that NASA Langley is located in Newport News, VA. About 20 miles from where I graduated from high school. It was in a part of the country I love. If I had known that NASA Langley was not located in Langley, VA, I would have taken that offer.
Would I change that decision if I could? No.
This is my world.
We live with the consequences of choices—both the ones we make and the ones we refuse to make. Today the same people who claim they would kill baby Hitler are screaming that Trump had no right to stop the Iranian regime before it could build its own final solution.
We hear from the better educated elites about how horrible it is that Trump attacked Iran without permission or provocation.
Let’s get some facts very clear. Iran has been at war with the United States since 1979. When the “students” deposed the Shah, they installed the current theocracy—at least until last week. They declared, “Death to America”. They declared war on us.
Except for the time when Iran and Iraq were busy killing each other’s child soldiers, Iran has been actively attacking the United States.
The bombing of the USS Cole? Iran. The mining of the Strait of Hormuz? Iran. The mine almost sinking the USS Samuel B. Roberts in the Persian Gulf? Iran. The first bombing of the World Trade Center? Iran. The arming of Hamas and Hezbollah? Iran.
If you look at any Muslim terrorist action, you can trace it back to Iran. (And if you aren’t covering for the the media’s beloved Obama, you can see the money he sent them funding those operations.)
Now I called them “students,” because in 1979 that was how they were labeled by the lying media. They were communist-trained revolutionaries—the same militant radical instigators we find on US college campuses today.
Over the last 3 months, somewhere between 20,000 and 40,000 people were murdered in Iran by the regime. This makes Chicago’s murder rate pale in comparison. And it wasn’t black on black violence.
The media mostly ignored it. They ignored women risking their lives by baring their hair. They ignored it when the Revolutionary Guard fired into the crowds.
They ignored the deaths of those screaming, begging, and pleading for freedom. For the United States to help.
This is compared to how upset they are over 160-some being killed by an Iranian missile falling on a girl’s school. Or six servicemen losing their lives for the cause of freedom.
Trump killed baby Hitler. He decapitated the Iranian regime before they could detonate a nuclear device on Israel or on US soil.
It was the right thing to do.
Because this is history being made, not history being changed.
playing “what if” with history is impossible to judge the outcome…
only thing I would have done differently was listen to General Patton instead of kill him..
and maybe earth would be a dead burned rock today, maybe it would be perfect.
Amen, Chris.
Had Europe developed a spine and given Hitler the smack down he so richly deserved, WWII may not have happened, and the world would be a very different place. But, appeasement was the choice, the world went to war, and the US became the preeminent superpower as a result.
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Curby is right. Playing “what if” with history is the domain of fiction novels and movies. Had Hitler been destroyed as a child, someone else would have risen to power and slaughtered millions. Who, I have no guess. History may not repeat, but it often rhymes.
And that’s the question – did the situation make the man, or the man the situation? There’s a pretty good argument for the former in this case.
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And there are some things to be thankful about regarding Hitler, in that the way he ran things, some things didn’t happen that could very well otherwise have. For instance, Hitler’s disdain for “Jew science” pretty much nixed Germany’s chance of successfully developing atomic weapons, arguably at all and almost certainly not well in advance of the allies.
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If it hadn’t been him, maybe someone with more of an engineering or sciences background would have come to power and had a more … pragmatic … approach to such things.
I highly recommend “The End of Eternity,” by Isaac Asimov. Lots of books explore similar themes, of course, but this is one of the first truly thoughtful ones in my opinion.