As a Christian and a father I not infrequently find myself faced with a certain moral dilemma. Specifically, my income is pretty good and I’m in the position of deciding what to do with it.
Of course, there is no end of uses for money. Our family is growing and we need a bigger, better home. The sort we want in our area will run us about $6k/month in rent, or $1.2m to buy. The public education system is less ‘broken’ than it is actively ruinous (but both), so private schooling and tutoring considerations apply. There’s retirement planning in the face of an increasingly cartoon economy.
My parish, naturally, wants tithes. They want a whole ten percent! Off the top! And in fairness, if my dollar was the one to determine whether it thrived or failed, that would be the best investment I could make. Our community is amazing and the only place I’d want to raise my children. We run a thrift store (like Goodwill) that is an absolute lifesaver for many of the area’s poor. Also, we practice almsgiving, which is acts of charity above and beyond tithing, if not always monetary.
But many other mouths cry out to be fed as well, from crook-smiled politicians who nonetheless are important to support over the other guy to NGOs trying to staunch an arterial rupture of human tragedy with the equivalent of band-aids for want of bigger budgets.
And life’s finer things are to be considered as well. I like good art, soundly-crafted furniture, stylish clothing (important for my job too), high-quality ingredients for cooking, and the occasional getaway to see family, friends, or just interesting places. The kids want enrichment also, and while I’m not going to call this demand a pit, it certainly is bottomless. Too, there is the notion of self-care; that it’s important to expend enough resources on my own well-being that I continue to be able to generate the income.
Only, as all of these are valued in dollars, they directly trade off against each other. And in the way of autists, I can’t help but grope my way down the thing toward the root of the problem. It has taken me to some pretty intense places.
~All human societies hold in common an understanding that it is a father’s duty to protect and provide for his children. This is enshrined in law, culture, and everywhere else. Of course a father would do anything to save his child — rob, murder, cheat, lie, or give up his own life without hesitation. To do otherwise would be reprehensible.
This principle is not without its exceptions. Men in office, for example, are expected to set aside their familial obligations when acting in their official capacity (And, actually, one could find far worse yardsticks of a people’s worth than their ability to hold to this standard consistently). If a soldier on the front lines receives word of a family emergency, efforts are often made to excuse him to attend to it, but where this conflicts with operational considerations he is expected to stay put, and failure to do so is generally agreed to be worthy of capital enforcement, even if our hearts are understandably with him.
I have heard a saying along the following lines attributed to the Bedouin of the deep desert:
Me and my tribe against the world
Me and my clan against the tribe
Me and my cousins against the clan
Me and my brother against our cousins
Me against my brother
If my daughter and the neighbor-kid are both starving I am expected to feed my own and let the other die. So with my nieces and nephews over my second-cousins’ kids, all the way up the enumerated hierarchy. This is understood. This is a human universal. Most, I expect, would agree that this is the very foundation of morality, though as we will see I am not so sure.
Where exceptions come in it is because a man has taken upon himself the role of father to a greater family than that of his immediate. We honor enormously the Patriarch who puts the good of the clan above his own children. We remember with fierce admiration the Emperor who adopts a competent successor as his son while consigning his own degenerate offspring to some idle pleasure dome in the countryside. We exalt the young man who gives his own life in the trenches while his pregnant wife waits for him anxiously back home. We depend upon such men. We call them heroes. This, too, is moral. It is perhaps even a higher sort of morality.
A messiah is one who brings such benefit to his People at the grandest scales. A typical Christian narrative on the subject goes something like: The Jews were conquered by one hostile nation and then another, denied their own homeland, constantly at risk of enslavement and extermination, and were able to survive all of this by virtue of their hope in a coming promised messiah. They had many specific expectations of what he would be like, too. He would bloodily uproot the foreigners, bring the earth under his dominion, and elevate his own race to lordship, never to be so threatened again. When Jesus came to Jerusalem the people laid down palm fronds that he (or his mount(s)) might tread upon these instead of the dirt. They were elated. They knew exactly what was coming, and they were ready as only centuries of bitter anticipation can make a people. And then the State executed him in their ugliest fashion and he didn’t even attempt to resist. Even the disciples, whom Christ had tried to prepare for this over and over again, understood that all was lost and that Jesus was not the messiah. Messiahs do not lose. They conquer.
Let me shift gears now and talk about Hitler. There is no figure more reviled in our culture. He serves as our icon of utmost evil; of the worst aspects of human nature. To publicly question this in the slightest is to run a very real risk of losing everything and, in many Western countries, even runs up against laws that will land one in a jail cell.
Why?
Yes, I realize that I’m committing an unspeakable breach of social etiquette by asking. Yes, I know that many of us, even here, have an uncontrollable disgust reflex on the topic. Even those who are more or less comfortable with discussing differences in average racial IQs or impulse control, or personality trait variances between men and women.
Why?
The usual answer for someone in such circles is, “Because such discourse is controlled by the Jews, etc., yada yada yada” and while there is certainly something to this it is, at least at this resolution, entirely beside the point I’m trying to make. So please bear with me — that is not where I’m taking you.
One day a few months ago I, in the way of autists, asked myself what exactly was so unusual about Hitler that he should occupy the mythological position that he does. One can of course enumerate a long list of terrible atrocities for which he was responsible. Only, as I went through them, I couldn’t help but notice that not only were they all basically par for the course for the Father, the would-be messiah of a people, but that worse examples of each can be found (both quantitatively and almost always qualitatively) in the biographies of other leaders — including, not to put too fine a point on this, those seen often enough on t-shirts in public without ruffling anyone’s feathers particularly.
So, finding myself at a loss, I escalated the question to some trusted friends, and discovered that while it was extremely upsetting to most of them, none even attempted to answer, but rather clucked at me while shaking their heads in horrified exasperation. These are people, you understand, whose capacity for decoupled analysis I generally respect very greatly. Disconcerting, to say the least. Can’t you pick as a mascot, one said, someone other than the craziest and most evil man in history?
Only, I cannot fathom how anyone sees this when they look at Hitler. Here was a man who sincerely held the best interests of his People in his heart. He came of age in a time when his nation was — historical aggression notwithstanding — brutally, horrifically, oppressed. Countless of his countrymen, women and children, starved to death needlessly under spiteful, vindictive post-war Allied blockades. The economy was so saddled with reparation debt that rebuilding would take generations if it were ever possible at all. The people had no hope. Men and women who wanted families faced down a seemingly-insurmountable challenge in doing so. The risk of watching their babies die of starvation was all too real. And what chance had those children of decent lives even if they did survive to adulthood? They would end up de facto slaves, servants to the sneering foreigners who now controlled everything.
Germany’s culture — within living memory arguably the pinnacle of human achievement — was brought low, rapidly to be replaced with this new post-war thrust which we can now recognize as the antecedent to the sort of moral and cultural disintegration with which we are today so familiar.
And this man! This man was nobody. He was a failed art student. But he decided that he was not going to let that happen. He was going to save his people or die trying. Yes, in pursuit of this goal he engaged in some of the most reprehensible methods imaginable. But in what sense was he not playing the highest, most honorable role for his people — that of a messiah? Was the alternative really any more moral? Are we clutching our pearls and sobbing because it was mean to kill political opponents when what he should have done was to suffer the children of his nation to starve to death in the streets while foreigners feasted in the beautiful homes built by his forefathers? Can we really suppose for one moment that the Jewish zealots of AD 66 would have had any problem with Hitlerian tactics were the shoe on the other foot and being executed by Eleazar ben Simon against the Romans? Yes, Hitler was a mess and riddled with countless inexcusable flaws, but are we truly to believe that he did what he did simply because he enjoyed causing others pain? The man was a vegetarian for goodness’ sake!
Now contrast this with Stalin (or Lenin). How explicit do I need to be here? Whether they acted more out of lust for power or a sincere ideological commitment to, idk, ‘the working class’ (imo doubtful), these guys did not act out of love for their people, and did not hesitate to consign millions of them to starvation in pursuit of power.
And they killed so many more. So many more. But our politicians can admire them openly and the common man has only the haziest idea of why this might be a problem. And while, sure, the opposition will attempt to make much hay of this, the younger generations increasingly seem uninterested in what they have to say about it.
Last night a friend told me,
my opinion is that you've been brainpoisoned into calling evil good and good evil and rather than leaning into the caricatures of your enemies by using the word 'hitlerism' to refer to good things you should not do that
(Not that I was — it’s precisely the distinction that I’m trying to draw, but we’ll get to that.)
So on the subject of ‘my enemies’, let me tell you a few things I notice about them.
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They get abortions
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They permanently sterilize themselves, or
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They take pills to trick their bodies into thinking they've just lost a baby because this spiritual distress is preferable to them over the prospect of actually reproducing.
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They purchase chihuahuas, and pekinese, and felines, and portage them around in equipment intended for human children which will never exist
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They agonize over the irresponsibility of their own kind having children, but gasp in horror at anyone who suggests that African birthrates might become a problem
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They desire to privilege children of other races above their own, ceding educational access, preferential employment, etc.
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They get nervous at portrayals of healthy white families with several children
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They will loudly insist that they do not have a culture
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They really don’t like borders and seem to think that it’s their responsibility to feed and clothe the world
This list could be ten times as long, of course. You get the idea. So to circle back around to my original point —
My enemies do not feed their own children first. My enemies sell their children at the market and immediately donate the proceeds to the worst, most irredeemably valueless people they can find. And if they can’t find one close enough to hand, they go looking. And it’s disgusting. It’s reprehensible. It offends me to a degree that I have difficulty conveying without jumping up and down and screaming until I’m red in the face and collapsing into a pile of tears. Only, I seem to remember Jesus telling us to do what my enemies are doing — or it’s at least close enough that I can’t help but notice.
Which brings us back to my daughter. As her father, where does my responsibility to her end? At what point should I give a dollar to feed notional children on the other side of the world rather than investing it in her future? How stiff will her competition be? How can I know in advance which investment will turn out to make all the difference?
Consider the following scenario. I am walking down the street and notice my neighbor’s two year old breaking free from her front door and running into traffic. Of course if I can safely rescue her I should, but suppose I’m not sure that I can without endangering my own life in the process, and leaving my children fatherless? I could maybe look her parents in the eye afterward and say “There just wasn’t anything I could do” and they’d likely catch the nuance and understand and even bitterly sympathize.
But supposing I had plenty of time to save the child, and just choose not to because this would mean I don't have time to read my daughter a bedtime story. Is that equivalent to murder? I say yes. Trying to delineate between the two is an unseemly thing for a man to do and belies a womanly discomfort with agency. But when I spend a few extra bucks to get her the pink scooter someone, somewhere, is going hungry, and in aggregate dying.
Or imagine that I’m the chieftain of one of two small tribes on a small island. Resources are getting scarce and everyone knows that at some point soon it’s going to be us or them. Does a good leader, a good father, wait for the threat to ripen, for the enemy to choose the place and time for battle? Or does he strike preemptively? It will be either our children or theirs who die. We will eat their babies or they will eat ours. Shouldn’t a father make sure of which it is? Isn’t that what a good father does?
The reason our society is so reflexively disgusted by Hitler is because we have mostly internalized the notion that our children should die that others might live, and the man with the tiny moustache represents the polar opposite of that.
Hitler seems to me, at heart, a very good father. If I emulated him, I should not hesitate to feed my own child first, even upon the corpses of my neighbors’ children. I should lie and cheat and steal and murder in game-theoretically optimal ways to bestow upon my children as many resources as possible, that they should not themselves end up in chains or on the dinner plate. The notorious Fourteen Words — “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children” — make the connection so explicit and unassailable that the Left dares not to look upon it.
But the icon-stand in my heart labeled “Father” does not have Hitler’s portrait in it. Actually the picture there is blank, ha ha, but that’s another story, and the point is that Christ fills in pretty well. My Father does not feed His own child first. He feeds His child to us. Bit by blood-soaked bit, forever. I can struggle with the apparent discrepancy between disinheriting my daughter to feed what looks to me like a total waste of the Imago Dei, but there it is. I am certain that the difference between my girl, whom I can assure you I adore unbearably and who always seems to have a beam of sunshine on her in my eyes — that the difference between her and the most contemptible human being ever to exist, is as nothing compared to the difference between God’s son and my daughter, or myself.
But the gorge does rise in my throat when I consider failing to protect what seems, to me, the most beautiful person, and the most beautiful People, ever to exist in favor of… that. Every cell in my body says that I should sooner glass an entire foreign continent rather than allow harm to befall one hair upon my daughter’s perfect golden head.
Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.
And we can’t even expect the problem to go away. The least of these will always be among us. He said so. Maybe the only clean way out of this is to not have children in the first place. I’m afraid He might have said that too.
I try to console myself with precedent. I try to believe. We have established two types of morality: A baseline morality of feeding one’s own children first, and a higher morality of sacrificing one’s children for the greater good of the People. But Christ would seem to indicate a third sort, which is to love the foreigner's child more than one’s own. This is, after all, what God did.
And for a minute there humans actually did it too! As Scott says,
The early Christian Church had the slogan “resist not evil” (Matthew 5:39), and indeed, their idea of Burning The Fucking System To The Ground was to go unprotestingly to martyrdom while publicly forgiving their executioners. They were up against the Roman Empire, possibly the most effective military machine in history, ruled by some of the cruelest men who have ever lived. [...] this should have been the biggest smackdown in the entire history of smackdowns.
And it kind of was. Just not the way most people expected.
Food for thought, I guess.
So it seems to me that if I'm to be a Christian, this directly implies feeding my child to the dogs. And if I'm to do otherwise, this fully generalizes to Hitler. Either way I had better get serious about whatever it is I'm doing here.
Long story short, I’m currently trying to decide between this apron and this one for my daughter for when she’s painting at her easel. The first is a little bit cheaper, but she’ll like the second one better because it has unicorns. Hoping someone can offer some insight here.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I profoundly disagree with your view of Hitler.
He overthrew the democratically elected government of Germany and installed himself as dictator. He then used his newfound power to murder approximately 6 million defenseless people in the holocaust (mostly Jews, for whom he displayed a special hatred). He also caused the deaths of millions of other people by launching a war of aggression against his neighbors; I've seen estimates of 30-35 million people killed by the Nazis overall: https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/non-jewish-victims-of-the-holocaust Hitler also committed other atrocities.
Is this not obvious to you?
If you check the historical record, you'll see that murdering 6 million people is a highly unusual thing to do.
So why are you confused by his vilification?
What part of being the messiah of a people involves murdering 6 million of your own people??
That may be, but it doesn't matter much if Hitler is "the worst" vs. "one of the worst"
He murdered 6 million of them. You might as well say that a man is a good father if he murders some number of his own children.
My sources tell me that the blockade killed about 100,000 Germans in the postwar period, which is far less than 6 million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blockade_of_Germany#cite_note-Blockade791-2 . This blockade ended in 1919, so it hardly explains Hitler's rise to power in the 1930s
I dispute this characterization. Foreigners did not control everything in Germany. German reparations amounted to 2.4% of the national income and the reparations were cancelled in 1932. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_I_reparations#End_of_German_reparations
Incidentally, the victims of the Holocaust were not foreigners. They were German.
What part of saving your people involves murdering 6 million of them?
I assure you that not murdering 6 million people would have been much more moral.
There are all sorts of ways to provide for a beleaguered people that don't involve murdering 6 million of them.
Are you telling me that vegetarians cannot possibly enjoy causing others pain? Did it ever occur to you that someone might be cruel to Jews but kind to animals for some reason?
No they can't. Anyone who openly admires Stalin is roundly condemned for it. https://www.foxnews.com/us/professor-praises-stalin-great-leaders-20th-century
Skipping most of these items in the interest of time, I'm confused why you seem to think that wanting to feed and clothe the world is somehow problematic. You said you were a Christian earlier, and Christ placed a lot of emphasis on helping the poor (or at least that's what the Bible tells me)
Are your enemies trafficking in child slavery? Who are these people? And who exactly are the "irredeemably valueless people" to whom they donate the proceeds? I am very confused by this.
Hitler did not save his people! He claimed to be doing that, but in reality he murdered 6 million of them and led the others into a disastrous war.
And considering how much of the United States budget is devoted to U.S. citizens as opposed to foreigners, I'd hardly say that our society (assuming you're American) has "internalized the notion that our children should die that others might live".
Isn't there some moral framework that maximizes human happiness? Shouldn't you be on the lookout for some way to save everybody's children?
While I disagree with the original posters view of Hitler, I disagree with some of your assertions also.
He was quite popular with the German people; he had the most votes of any party at the time, had the support of the majority of the people during his reign and was legally installed the dictator by a coalition government of his and two other parties. Arresting the Communist party for terrorism helped his 1933 election but it was no military coup.
You are completely missing the entire point of Hitler's National Socialism. National referred to the racially German people. In Hitlers' view all non-German people were non-people. Removing Jews, Poles, Blacks, etc was the way to save Germany. Killing non-Germans in Germany was his entire mission, a mission that the vast majority of Germans believed in, supported and fought for. However misguided they may have been; they were following what they saw as their logical mission to save themselves and their country.
You cannot say that killing Jews, which he considered "enemies of Germany", is killing his own people or children.
You can say that losing a war was bad for racial Germans, especially the 4-5 million military deaths (presumably Germans).
I didn't say it was a military coup. I said that he overthrew the democratically elected government.
I'll grant that that phrasing usually implies a military coup, but it was the best phrasing I could come up with for what actually happened.
First off, Hitler attempted a military coup in 1923 with the Beer Hall Putsch. Having failed at that, he then tried other tactics. In 1932 the Nazis won a plurality (but not a majority) in the legislature. Hitler became Chancellor in January 1933. Four weeks later came the Reichstag fire, which was plausibly a false flag operation by the Nazis and in any case the Nazis used it as a pretext to demand much greater power for themselves. The March 1933 election saw the Nazis intimidating voters en masse, so it can hardly be called a free election. Afterwards came the Enabling Act which gave Hitler dictatorial powers, after which time the Reichstag always approved everything Hitler did by unanimous consent. At that point democracy was dead and the common people had no legal method for removing leaders they disliked.
This process, wherein democracy was killed off and replaced by dictatorship, is what I meant by the phrase "overthrew the democratically elected government". In retrospect I should have said that he "ended democracy in Germany". That would have been clearer.
Do you have evidence for this? I know he was popular enough to get plurality support in the Reichstag, but a plurality is not a majority. And however many people liked him in 1932, how did that sentiment change during the remainder of his time in office? It's easy to imagine a scenario where eventually a large majority of Germans resented Hitler or at least felt unsure about him, but they kept their thoughts to themselves because they were afraid of getting shot. How exactly can we measure the level of public support in a place without free elections or scientific opinion polls?
I know that was Hitler's view. I was using the concept of "his people" along the traditional national lines, e.g. if Hitler is the leader of Germany, then the Germans are "his people".
OP was drawing a parallel to fatherhood. If a man fathers 6 children and kills two of them, we would not say he was a good father to his children. If that same man arbitrarily declared in advance that the children he decided to murder were "not my children" based on some weird new definition he just invented, I don't think we would adopt that definition when discussing the question "Was this man a good father to his children?". That was one of the points I was making. OP claims that Hitler acted in the interest of "his people", but OP is using Hitler's own arbitrary definition of who "his people" were, which helps OP to sidestep the horrors of the holocaust. (Though of course in practice murdering 6 million defenseless people for no reason is evil no matter what nationality they happen to have, so it's a moot point.)
Again, I'd like to know if you have evidence as to what Germans really thought as opposed to how they acted. A person who's afraid of getting shot will do all sorts of things he doesn't actually believe in.
Why should we adopt a murderer's definition of who "his people" or "his children" were? Just because a murderer believes something doesn't make it true.
Suppose that a man named Bob murders five women, all of them prostitutes. Suppose that Bob declares that "prostitutes are non-human". In that case, would we go around telling each other, "You cannot say that that killing prostitutes, which Bob considered 'non-human', is killing humans"?
It looks like one of the sources is Götz Aly in his book "Hitlers Volksstaat" unfortunately german but claiming a study he did analyzing sentiment (no polls or rigged elections) among Germans showed his popularity rose from 1933 until 1939 and was above 50% until 1941. The german people were proud of re-uniting german speakers and reclaiming past borders (1933-1939) but they didn't want another war (1939-onward) but his popularity was so high in 1939 that it took until 1941 to go below majority.
https://www.quora.com/What-were-Hitler%E2%80%99s-approval-ratings via Google
While not the first thing Hitler did, he was clear from the beginning that non-Germans would be stripped of their citizenship. The Nuremberg Laws officially did strip the jews (and later blacks and gypies) of their citizenships and rights.
Family is based on genetics. The German Jews, being a different race, would at most be step-children in your analogy. Like fathering 4 and killing 2 step children which he believed bullied his own children for years. Genetics is not some "weird new definition".
I don't care. There isn't some "killing your own people" escape clause that says it doesn't count if you announce in advance that you hate the people you're going to kill and you intend to strip of them of their rights first.
When I said "Germans" I did not mean "People recognized as German by Adolf Hitler's government." I meant "People who had established permanent residence in the territory of Germany, regardless of Adolf Hitler's personal opinions."
In what way were they "a different race"? Do you have some actual science to back up that claim?
If you knew a man who had 4 biological children and two step-children and then he murdered the step-children, would you conclude "This man was a good father to his children"?
The Jews are genetically unique. Most closely related to Jews (from any part of the world), North Africans and Arabs. They were originally (less than 3,000 years) from modern day Iraq/Israel. Their religion prevents marrying non-Jews and it is typically difficult to become a Jew (years). In Europe, the result is almost no genes from non-Jews for 600 years and most Jews decend from ~500 originals.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19008-how-religion-made-jews-genetically-distinct/
https://theconversation.com/ancient-dna-from-the-teeth-of-14th-century-ashkenazi-jews-in-germany-already-included-genetic-variations-common-in-modern-jews-194780
This isn't to say they didn't previously mix with the Celtic and Germani people: they did and those became known as the Ashkenazi tribe.
I think this is mostly definitional. If "his people" are people living within his borders then he killed his people. If a fathers' children are those in his care, then killing 1/3 of them would probably make him a bad father. Same if you define all people north of the Sahara and west of the Mongol Empire as the same race.
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Actually, the jews have their own answer for this, and that answer is an incredibly emphatic "Yes, we are different" - https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2020-01-24/ty-article/.premium/israeli-high-court-allows-dna-testing-to-prove-judaism/0000017f-e13b-d804-ad7f-f1fb85f90000
They don't just consider themselves a separate race, they loudly advertise that they are a separate race and celebrate that separation. The difference between them and the people they live amongst is a constant subject of discussion and art. Their belief in the genetic and biological distinction of their race is so strong that they have religious laws about it and actually allow people to claim citizenship based on DNA, even though their culture insists that it can only be passed down via the mother (due to paternal uncertainty in history I believe). I can understand not liking Hitler, but insisting that jews are actually the same as everyone else and not a separate people is something that they'd object to in the strongest terms, and I get the impression that you don't consider yourself an anti-semite, even though a lot of strident jews would consider your claim that they are not actually special or distinct to be anti-semitism in itself.
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