After Jeb Bush gave away his private email address to students a rally in New Hampshire so that they could ask him questions, one of the students put it on Reddit so that he really could speak to the multitude. Naturally he was bombarded straight away with the usual deluge of things that people in the internet like to throw around, and to his credit he actually started to respond to some of them, even the stupid ones. One email he received asked him “if you could go back in time and kill baby Hitler, would you? I need to know.”
“Hell yeah I would!” Jeb answered. “You gotta step up, man.”
Going back in time and killing Hitler is a traditional fantasy in western liberal democracies like America and the UK, recently brought to the surface by NYT Magazine’s poll on a slow news day asking readers if they would go back and kill baby Hitler to save the world. It’s a pretty old meme. Imagine the pain and suffering that could be averted! There’d be no Holocaust, no WWII! If we killed baby Hitler we could outflank Ben Carson’s own insane alternate history where all the Jews have guns and stop the holocaust by protecting themselves from big government. Or with no Hitler we could reenact the endless Cold War depicted in Command & Conquer: Red Alert!
Was little Adolf already a seed of pure evil when his mother Klara gave birth to him?
This was the apparent reasoning of the greatest section of people who answered the poll, winning 42%, while only 30% responded that they would not kill baby Hitler. The rest weren’t sure. I want to take issue with those 42%, and Jeb, because however scared we all are of fascism, baby Hitler is the wrong target.
To begin with, we have to wonder what Jeb and others think causes a fascist dictator to come into existence. Was little Adolf already a seed of pure evil when his mother Klara gave birth to him? Perhaps she dropped him at 6 months old and he just sort of turned nasty at that point? The ambiguity of killing a baby is already unsteady enough when it comes from a pro-life presidential candidate. Is Jeb saying that Hitler was just born bad from the get go and should therefore be terminated before he can ruin the world with his inherent degeneracy? I hate to Godwin, but…that sounds suspiciously similar to the basic premise of eugenics.
By XKCD artist Randall Munroe
By saying that Hitler was already bad as a baby, we’re saying that evil men, violent men, do not become so because of the world around them. In the case of Hitler, what is it about him that we’re against? If it’s because we don’t like violent state repression, surveillance, racism, the dangerous entitlement complex of the mediocre white male down on his luck, economic collapse…then why blame a baby for that? Capitalist crises and ethnic cleansing existed long before Hitler, and they got worse well after he was born.
And this lets white supremacy off the hook. Let’s face it: racist violence is an undeniable aspect of white European history. We’ve been at it for centuries. Even ignoring hatred of Jews in the ancient world, Christian antisemitism was prominent since medieval times, with feudal lords whipping up pogroms and expulsions of local Jewish populations as standard operating procedure for a very long time. When the evil non-science of eugenics rose to prominence in the nineteenth century, racial antisemitism took up the old baton, emphasizing supposedly biological characteristics of Jews in order to justify their elimination. Hitler invented none of these, and while he is certainly responsible for exacerbating them and for being at the helm of the greatest such crime of its kind on European soil, he did so on the crest of a nationalist wave that had been rising for some time.
Capitalist crises and ethnic cleansing existed long before Hitler, and they got worse well after he was born
The reason killing baby Hitler seems like such a neat way to let out all that steam is because we are still in denial about the inherent oppressiveness of Eurocentric nationalism and capitalism. We hate Hitler not just for killing Jews but for enslaving them – and yet the modern wealth of Britain, France and America is very easily traceable to that which was created by slavery and colonial exploitation. Libertarians may look back on the 18th and 19th centuries as heroic age of robust free markets, but where capitalist markets did not exist they were coerced onto millions of black and brown people across the world by violent, state-backed force. That so many would prefer to view Britain’s looting of Africa and India as somehow superior to Hitler’s looting of Jewish homes, black homes, the homes of the countries he invaded, contains a nasty little ommission: that Hitler did what his neighbors had been getting away with for a while. And we didn’t give that money back.
A British concentration camp in Africa, c. 1900
The baby Hitler argument assumes that the holocaust was not a social problem and that with the great dictator now removed, it is behind us. I wonder if Jeb Bush would tell that to the Urwintore Theatre Company. This is a Rwandan troupe that performed The Investigation, Peter Weiss’s play about the Frankfurt war crimes trial, where the guards of Auschwitz were tried. The focus of the play is not some trite ‘never again’ message that seeks to comfort audiences that the worst is over. One witness in the play – whose dialog copied from the trials themselves quite liberally – says instead that “the society that produced the camps is our society”, and as a specifically Rwandan cast, they do not have such ease in forgetting their genocide as we do.
The desire to kill baby Hitler ignores the systemic crisis of Europe and America of the time.
Killing baby Hitler forgets also that Hitler had more than a few supporters in the supposedly ‘balanced’ countries of the West who didn’t capitulate to the inexorable groundswell of early 20th century fascism. At home he had the backing of much of Weimar Germany’s capitalist class, and indeed the rate of return on private investment under Nazism skyrocketed between 1932 and 1940 – in other words, there were wealthy interests who very much understood the benefits Nazism could reap for them, until it was too late. Outside of Germany, meanwhile, Hitler enjoyed significant support from antisemites in the French establishment (which was already very well prepared for the racial violence they enacted in the Vichy regime). There was an American coup plotted in 1934 by top Wall Street representatives of the Rockefellers and J.P. Morgan.
The British establishment was especially sympathetic to fascism. Numerous elements of Britain’s royal family were sympathetic to the cause, leading to an interesting scandal recently which revealed that as a young girl Queen Elizabeth was photographed being taught a Nazi salute by her mother and uncle. Winston Churchill gave glowing praise for the nationalist spirit and anti-communism of both Hitler and Mussolini. And, most famously, Lord Rothermere, the owner of the Daily Mail, was a friend of Hitler’s and placed his full support behind Hitler and his British street-level counterpart Oswald Mosley in the years leading up to the War.
Lord Rothermere and Hitler
Clearly the desire to kill baby Hitler ignores the systemic crisis of Europe and America of the time. It ignores the fact that the Nazis weren’t simply imposed on the world by one nasty guy, but were eased into power by ancient racist undercurrents and scheming elites who thought they could control him. That we don’t also fetishize baby Franco, baby Mussolini, says enough to make it suspect – is it because they weren’t as awful as Hitler, and therefore weren’t as sufficiently different from us? Let’s kill baby Pinochet! Oh wait, who put him there?
This is the crucial problem with baby Hitler, the real horror that wanting to kill him tries to disguise: that it could have been anyone. It’s technically correct that, Back to The Future style, killing baby Hitler would change the course of history. It just wouldn’t change the underlying currents – yes, we might end that particular iteration of that particular holocaust, but it’s unlikely that killing one baby would significantly (or at all) shift the balance of power in favor of better forces. Baby Hitler is Agent Smith – the forces of history and hatred and inequality and violence can elevate any random psychopath in the street to arch-villain status, and no matter if you kill one, the system that he infects is still very much alive and will spit him out once more.
To put this another way, would you go back in time and kill baby Dylan Roof? According to a CNN poll, a smaller proportion of white Americans think the adult Charleston shooter should be charged with terrorism than think the infant Hitler should be killed. That is the sound of a system excusing itself for a crime it does not feel it is in any real way connected to. To be clear: I would not go back in time and kill baby Dylan Roof. I would go back in time and change the conditions that he was raised in, that led him to become such a monster. I would change the way he grew up to feel threatened by black men; I would change the social or family setting that gave him that sad sense of entitlement, which made him feel like he had patriarchal ownership over white women. He is not just something horrible, he is the culmination, the inevitable result, of several things horrible. The truth is there is no time machine that can give us absolution for the crimes of white supremacy.
Would you go back in time and kill baby Dylan Roof?
This is what Jeb really wants: to be the hero who saves ethnic minorities and has their gratitude rather than their suspicion. We can ignore for now the fact that the murderers of children have already been conflated with defenders of the nation in recent American history, or that the Bush family really ought to know by now that killing children in faraway lands tends to cause rather than solve national security problems. His denial that matters most on this issue is that every nasty person in a position of power who ever harmed anyone else got their power with the consent of other people – and this is why Baby Hitler 2.0 has probably already been born.
Of course, we won’t know who he is yet, it’s impossible. We can’t, King Herod style, find and kill this baby by eliminating a threatening demographic. For all we know, this baby is currently quite nice, and has nice parents. But if it is an American or European baby, we know certain things to be already true: that the conditions which allowed a whole host of authoritarian dictatorships to rise in the early 20th century are coming about again. States are increasingly authoritarian. Inequality and insecurity are on the rise. Western nations with a penchant for racial violence are returning to old habits where Muslims are being openly talked about now in the same way as Jews were a century earlier. Far right parties are cashing in on this fear and loathing in the same way as before. Our insane financial system and the austerity it has imposed on us is exacerbating all of these conditions.
So if Baby Hitler 2.0 has already been born, it is worthless to hunt him down, but it is perhaps instructive to identify his midwife. Who is it that is creating grounds for inequality and suffering? Who is encouraging ordinary but increasingly impoverished people to scapegoat minorities? Who is increasing surveillance and the tools and powers of state violence? Wouldn’t that quite neatly describe the machinations and impact of the Republican and Democrat parties of recent years?
If Baby Hitler 2.0 is to be killed, our task is to hope that he still has time to become something other than Hitler 2.0. By looking at the ground already being made fertile for fascism and turning it into something better, before it’s too late. As Jeb said: you gotta step up, man.
Cover image: John Pemble
