Or how you make violent black swans
I may try to do this as a legitimate science fiction story for patrons, in the vein of my other “schizophrenia simulator” stories (Voices of the Void, Eyes in the Walls, Demon Ex Machina, etc.), but fiction has a different effect from what I want to do with this small article.
I want you to imagine that you’ve been sucked away with a time machine to Germany in 1930. When you arrive, you find that you are able to speak fluent German (if you don’t already) and are already integrated into German Society. You find that you have housing, a job, and people seem to know you. You quickly realize the specifics of the time and place you now find yourself, and understand the destined events in your (now) near future, and as a given, you know the narratives of how World War II proceeded to be true.
Given this, would it be moral or reasonable to pursue a way to kill Adolf Hitler? Would you consider it not only morally permissible, but obligatory to act in some way to stop the war and the Holocaust? What if you can’t get to Hitler for practical reasons? What about Himmler? What other targets are permissible? Which ones, if you can reach them, are you obligated to try to kill?
Understand that there are many Americans living a shade of this scenario right now. The frequent use of words like fascist and nazi, independent of their historical and ideological realities, by members of the media and the many users of social media, is not merely the political equivalent of the playground “poopyhead.” They are part of the information haze designed to convince people (or brainwash, if you prefer) that designated political targets are the equivalent of real, literal devils.
The evil of the National Socialists need not be debated; and, in fact, the point is to never debate or have any nuanced view of the German state prior to the end of the war. The same goes for Italy (the real fascist regime), and to a lesser extent, Spain. This is part of a technique that I call “scaffolding,” which is necessary when teaching concepts and useful when executing rhetoric efficiently. In order to explain a new concept, you have to use concepts the audience already understands. In rhetoric, you can quickly draw connections and communicate relationships through analogy.
Republicans are bad guys because they have the bad guy label. This can be a very effective technique, as the typical dialectic response is to either deny the relationship (“we aren’t fascists”) or to dig out the pre-existing bias (“fascism wasn’t all bad, actually”). But neither of these works in practice because, on the one hand, you are on the defensive and showing vulnerability, and on the other hand, committing the equivalent of heresy or blasphemy to the leftist. There is no debate there and no room for debate by design, because it’s not about convincing anyone of anything.
Remember the three purposes of propaganda: to boost morale of the base, demoralize opponents, and, more distantly, to persuade people. Calling Republicans nazis is merely the Democrat party affirming their base while (ideally, not always) demoralizing their opponents. Democrats need to feel like the good guys, and the easiest way to do that is to make their enemies demons and to elevate the struggle to something existential.
They are nazis. They want to kill you.
The point is to get many people to play out the scenario above in their head and draw conclusions about what they ought to do about things. Not everyone need draw the same conclusions. Most liberals really believed they outvoted Hitler in 2020. As odd as that might sound, the dissonance is tolerable when viewing it as an analogy. However, there are undoubtedly some who view it as more than an analogy and are going to come to the more severe conclusion: they need to kill the nazis.
You can call these people crazy, and it would be accurate, but part of being mad is being driven mad, and the non-stop propagandizing of the left, along with the internal struggle sessions and two minutes of hate facilitated by social media and things like Discord groups, has broken many, many people. Some of those people, predictably, are going to attempt the worst, and as I said before, the difference between their current targets and you is prominence, not position. If you have five million followers listening to your thoughts, you would be a target, too.
Now, the big question is whether the operators of the Democratic party machinery and their allies in the media know that these tail cases would arise from their propagandizing. I believe they must, because they have witnessed them multiple times. If they really had an objection to men like Charlie Kirk being murdered, they would stop what they are doing, and they haven’t. They are, I believe, buying assassins in a very roundabout and clever way, by persuading the vulnerable to play out a time travel scenario in their head.
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Back in Uni, I had a politology professor, who gave us a similar scenario. However, his intention was for us to have a good faith debate and defend our position. It quickly devolved into a shouting match between a handful of students, who nearly came to blows. Unable to control their feelings and have a rational discussion, our professor send them away.
For the next two hours, we had a mostly civil chat, each presenting their point, trying to convince the professor and other students that this idea was the best way to avert war and death.
Perhaps the most intriguing was the position of a foreign student from Italy. He said he would join the party, become a close functionary of Hitler, befriend Himmler, and gradually affect their thinking in a somewhat positive way, using compelling argumentation. He would make his best attempt to guide them into waging economic warfare, building Germany into a financial juggernaut, thus having too much to lose in case of a war. The guy was a pacifist and stated that no matter what, he would not commit one wrong (murder) to right another wrong.
The significance of Hitler is highly overrated. If he was assassinated, someone else would take control and do basically the same. German officers, even the likes of Stauffenberg, were enthusiastic murderers, as long as they were winning. His letters home from 1939 front state it clearly.
The same is true of Putin today. There is a long bench of Russian imperialists waiting for their turn.
I don’t have any idea how WW2 could be prevented. You’d need a miracle. Germans were humiliated but not really defeated in WW1. It was only a matter of time until the largest economy on the continent will execute a revenge.
The realities of history don’t matter much to this scenario because BELIEF is what is central. WWII is highly mythologized, but for the hypnotized Hitlerite it is hard fact, and any discussion of nuance is viewed as unapproachable heresy. Thus they come to the conclusion that killing Hitler would save six million lives.