In fear of a History without Hitler

In Philosophy, there is a thought experiment, which goes something like this:

If you could travel back in time, with the benefit of hindsight, would you kill Adolf Hitler?

Nearly anyone with the faintest knowledge and remotest understanding of 20th Century history may be prone to offer a reflexive, “Yes.” Some of those responses undoubtedly would be entirely sincere and come with the best of intentions, but the answers likely would come from persons, who are both ignorant of history and naïve as to the consequences of playing God. Some persons would be utterly confident in their answer and might respond that they stood ready, willing, and able to undertake the task. Their performance of that “noble” deed likely would be undertaken in a manner similar to many others: in fits of hubris and in demonstrations of arrogance. It quickly becomes evident why most persons are incapable of fully appreciating such a harrowing decision and unworthy of undertaking such a momentous task.

Almost certainly, most persons would base their ultimate decision on the knowledge that thousands routinely died on fields of battle during World War II, that hundreds of thousands starved to death in sieges on Russian cities, and that millions of Jews and others deemed “undesirables” were exterminated in concentration camps. All but the most determined pacifists might consider it a moral imperative to kill the man, who was most directly responsible for such atrocities. So, as to the World War II era Hitler, who we are likely to find with his hands dripping with the blood of innocents, few persons are likely to have a moral compunction against participating in his death.

How about a younger Hitler, before becoming Chancellor of Germany? That Hitler, who was the leader of the “Brownshirts” (1920’s) and who was responsible for the rise of the Nazi Party (1930’s), is almost the same man. He is close enough in time and person to the infamous despot that his death would be a welcomed relief to the world.

However, one might wish to pause and ponder: Was Hitler alone responsible for the “Brownshirts” and the Nazi Party? Did such collectives predate Hitler or might they have existed notwithstanding Hitler’s involvement? Hitler was no doubt the figurehead. He was undoubtedly a charismatic driving force, but the “man” was actually part of a collective that included: Herman Goering, Heinrich Himmler, Joseph Goebbels, et al.

In Hitler’s absence, might this cabal, or any one of them individually, have assumed the mantel of Chancellor? Consider that the complicit and sympathetic Italian fascist, Mussolini, rose to power independent of Germany’s Hitler. Might Mussolini have been “Hitler” were there no Hitler?

So, would the solution then be to kill any and all such persons, who were involved in the Nazi Party? And, to kill all fascists in other nations (e.g. Mussolini)? If so, how deeply should such a purge proceed? How do you identify those, who were directly “responsible” for the evil and for the resulting atrocities, as opposed to those, who either blindly (or naively) followed orders or who acted in the interest of self-preservation?

What if you are only capable of travelling to the time of an even younger Hitler? Before Mein Kampf? … Do you kill the disaffected corporal injured in battle during World War I? Do you kill the frustrated artist living in Vienna? Younger still … as a child? Do you kill the boy or teenage Hitler at a time before he becomes the merciless killer that we later know him to have been?

But wait …

What of his mother? Or, his parentage? If you kill the infant/boy/teenage Hitler, do you dare to chance that his parents would produce another of Satan’s spawn? After all, Hitler was the fourth of six children. He had a younger brother. Should you dare to risk that the younger child might be nurtured in the image of the man, with whom he shared a surname? Having only one chance to “change history,” do you just kill Hitler himself, or do you erase all things and persons, with which he is associated?

How confident are you that such an act will ultimately prove “better” for mankind than history as we know it? At what point do you “become” Hitler in an effort to stop Hitler?

We may acknowledge the “Butterfly Effect.” However, we cannot control it or predict it. The ultimate outcome is not immediately certain. We know that our actions will change history, but we cannot know for certain whether the cumulative or net effect of all resulting changes is for the better or worse.

What if you return to a changed “present day” to find that Hitler’s “nonexistence” led to the unabated rise of Communism, which dominated and destroyed Europe as we know it? What if you learn that America, without motivation to support and protect its European Allies, stayed out of WWII, and the ruthless kingdom of Japan thereafter expanded throughout the entirety of Southeast Asia?

Is the well-meaning time traveler then responsible for the deaths of many millions in the resulting wars and conflicts that took place after his assassination of Hitler? Or, do we measure the “new” present-day against the alternative(s) and determine whether it is “better” or “worse”? Or, do we simply acknowledge that, with human behavior being what it is (and immutable), some death and destruction are inevitable, and should we thus take comfort in the fact that we did “something” (even if it proves more costly or destructive in the end)?

Similar mental gymnastics can be applied to the popular pastime of blaming “Western Civilization” and particularly the United States of America (USA) for many of the ills, which exist or which have befallen the modern world. Western Civilization is imperfect. The rise of Western Civilization includes histories, which are filled with failures and atrocities. A more lenient description would be “trial-and-error.” However, in the course of those failures western peoples have endeavored to learn from their mistakes and specifically the United States came together “to form a more perfect union.” Perfection was never the goal or expectation. The Founders and the generations of Americans, who have followed, just wanted the opportunity to strive toward something better — something “more perfect.”

However, many persons evaluate the United States and the western world without reference to history and without consideration of the most likely alternatives, both past and present. On that measure, I would argue that, while there is still room for improvement, America represents the “best game in town.” To paraphrase, an oft quoted remark from Winston Churchill, “[The United States is] the worst [society] except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.” Many persons judge governments, societies, and peoples against some unattainable ideal (e.g. “Utopia”), and measured against fanciful perceptions, pipe dreams, or unrealistic delusions related to that “ideal,” any institution, which exists within our imperfect reality, must necessarily fail or be found lacking.

Those, who believe that Utopia is not only attainable but who also pursue it with a religious fervor, are quick to decry the failures and shortcomings of the United States, and they are reluctant to acknowledge the great strides and successes of the American people (and Western Civilization generally). They pretend that a great nation and people can just “be” — that it can just spring into existence perfectly aligned and assembled. There is no allowance for trial-and-error. There is no opportunity for growth and learning. The expectation is seemingly perfection or death.

Well, let’s go back in time and eliminate the United States. What then? With no USA, presumably colonial America would remain a British colony. It may today look like Canada. Or, without Great Britain having received its comeuppance from those brazen “Yanks,” would Britain have continued to “exploit” North America, as it is accused of having done other colonial interests, including India.

Without the industrial power that was the United States, Europe likely would have fallen in either World War. Without the United States as an international hegemon, Communism (in a similar vein to Russia and China) likely would have spread around the world unchecked. Nevertheless, the continued outsized role of the United States in international affairs is supposedly among the biggest problems that the rest of the world has today. It may be that persons wish to imagine a future with a less powerful United States, but personally, I do not care to imagine a past with such an impotent nation.

Let’s go further and remove Great Britain from the picture. After all, any ills not attributed to the USA can almost certainly be attributed to that colonial power, about whom it was once said “the sun never sets.” There seems to be an expectation that the “New World” would have continued unmolested in perpetuity, but there were other colonial powers and peoples, who were actively circumnavigating the globe and laying claim to foreign lands: France, Spain, Portugal, etc. Is the expectation that one of these other powers would not have filled the void in the absence of Great Britain and the USA? The domestic peoples today may speak Dutch, French, or Spanish, but would life have been appreciably different or demonstrably better? If we look to the eventual fates of the colonial states under those other European nations, I do not see (m)any peoples, who are “better off” than the United States.

Is the expectation that the New World would today continue in a pristine state with the aboriginal “first peoples” continuing in a blissful coexistence riding their horses across the wide open western plains? Oh, there is so much wrong in those collective assumptions. First, horses are not native to this continent. The horses, which were ridden by the “Native Americans,” were the offspring of animals introduced to America from Europe by the Spanish Conquistadors.

Second, let’s acknowledge that no person is “native” to the New World. Every human being on the continent(s) came from somewhere else. So, who was first — who has “dibs”? If we cannot identify that person, tribe, or people, then who has the most senior claim? Do we assume it is those peoples who “possessed” the land at the time of the first European settlers?

Finally, do we perpetuate the myth of the “noble savage,” or do we acknowledge millennia of tribal conflicts and cyclical histories of revenge, retaliation, and retribution? How are we to consider or to account for prior conflicts and “takings”? How do we account for “future” takings that might have happened absent the arrival of European settlers? So, if the settlement by Europeans were delayed a century, or so, and the lands changed hands in the interim, who then would be the “rightful” possessor?

This gets really complicated very quickly.

So, is the problem just “Western Civilization” and its inherent disregard for the “rights” of others? Well, there is always Russia to consider. It already had a considerable stake in North America via what is now Alaska beginning in the 18th Century (1700’s). Given its extensive history of oppression (which continues to this day), I am not sure that Russia would have been any more considerate of a colonial power than were the more “progressive” Western Europeans.

Perhaps, an aggressive Japanese empire eventually would have settled the New World. Or, what if the Moors had held onto their foothold in Europe, and the continent had become a bastion for Islam rather than Christianity? What if the Roman Empire had not fallen thereby plunging humanity into the Dark Ages — back to its intellectual infancy? How far back do we turn the clock? How many wrongs must we right in order to secure the “perfection” that we so crave?

It is unreasonable to believe that the nations of the world would have been “hands off” of the New World. It was inevitable that it would have been settled, overrun, conquered, or invaded by foreign powers. The only issues related to, “Which power?” and “When?” Today, the question should not be, “How do we rewrite the past?” Instead, we should ask, “What can each of us do personally to make the most of the future that we are afforded?”

History should inspire us to great successes and serve as a cautionary tale so that we may avoid catastrophic failures. However, our history is a unified collection, and no chapter, section, or element should be read or applied in isolation. We cannot go back to Eden, and you cannot put the genie back into the bottle. Sons should not be charged with the sins of their fathers. We can only give penance for our own sins, and we best honor those, who came before us, by replicating their accomplishments, learning from their mistakes, and making the most of opportunities that we are given here and now.

He, who wishes to change the course of history, must be prepared to rewrite an alternate history in its entirety. He must be capable of scripting a future, which is better than the past that we know or the future that we will otherwise come to know. In rewriting history and endeavoring to script the future, we make ourselves responsible for any of the resulting wrongs and all of the certain tragedies, which will befall humankind. Only one, who is overcome by delusion or compelled by fits of hubris, would believe himself capable of writing the perfect history for an all too imperfect humanity. The expectation that it is even possible is a sign of madness.