So the March for Life happened recently, and Ben Shapiro did a live show where he used a thought experiment about going back in a time machine to kill baby Hitler to make a pro-life argument. His argument was that you shouldn’t kill baby Hitler; instead, you should raise baby Hitler in a more loving home so that he doesn’t grow up to be Hitler. In other words, you shouldn’t kill baby Hitler because babies are always innocent, and killing babies is wrong. Fair enough.
But the left immediately went crazy over this argument, calling Shapiro a nazi for defending Hitler, or just making fun of him for coming up with such a ridiculous idea. Never mind that it’s a thought experiment. Never mind that it raises valid moral and ethical questions, which those on the far left refuses to address.
Everything you need to know about this controversy is basically summed up in the video above, where Sargon of Akkad does a point-by-point critique of The Young Turk’s cringeworthy reaction. At this point, Sargon’s video has more views than TYT’s original video, and YouTube is deleting downvotes on the original.
I think Sargon is right. I think that Ben really hit a sore spot on the left, because they’d all kill baby Hitler if given a chance, and they don’t want to admit it. Not only is it bad optics, but it also points out the lack of moral foundation or principles on the far left. After all, if they’d go so far as to kill a baby, simply because of what that baby might turn out to be, what else are they going to do?
For the left, Nazis aren’t merely on the extreme end of the scale of good and evil; they are the scale. This is what gets to me. Black Pigeon Speaks put out a video on YouTube that has since been taken down, because it is true, and because it gets to the heart of this issue. Civilizations always have founding myths, which accomplish three things:
- they tell the civilization’s origin story,
- they define, in cultural terms, the difference between good and evil, and
- they describe what the civilization holds to be sacred.
For example, traditionally in the United States, our founding myth has to do with the founding fathers, the Constitution, and the Revolutionary War. Our civilization was founded by pilgrims and pioneers, who lived under British rule until the King became tyrannical and we rose up to declare our independence. In cultural terms, good and evil are set out clearly in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights. The thing we hold most sacred is our liberty.
You can also see this reflected in our coinage:
- E Pluribus Unum — “from one, many,” harkening back to the Revolutionary War and our civilization’s origin story.
- In God We Trust — recognizing the Judeo-Christian values that informed our founding documents, including the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
- Liberty — the thing that American civilization holds most sacred.
In the Black Pigeon Speaks video which has since been taken down, he argues that Western civilization adopted a new founding myth after World War II, and that this new founding myth is responsible for much of the cultural and moral decay we’ve experienced in subsequent decades. In this new myth:
- our civilization was born out of the horror and devastation of the world wars,
- Nazism became the definition of evil, and
- the Holocaust became the most sacred aspect of our civilization.
The Nazis were clearly evil. I’m not disputing that, or the reality of the holocaust. Killing six million Jews, Roma, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissidents, and mentally and physically handicapped in gas chambers designed specifically as engines of mass genocide is incredibly heinous, on a scale that is difficult to comprehend. There is no downplaying or excusing that kind of horror.
But without defending the Nazis in the slightest, that doesn’t make them the most evil regime in history, or even the most evil regime of the 20th century. Stalin was just as genocidal, possibly even more so, and I would argue that he was worse than Hitler. Mao was arguably worse than both of them.
Hitler wasn’t just a monster: he was a man, like any of us. Jordan Peterson is right: we should never make the mistake of thinking that we’re morally superior to the Nazis, because if we were in similar circumstances, we’d probably make similar choices. That’s simply the reality. Hitler isn’t the boogeyman, and the Nazis are not the definition of evil. They fall on an extreme end of the scale of good and evil, but we should never mistake the Nazis for the scale.
Which brings us back full circle to the pro-life argument. How do we know that we aren’t more evil than the Nazis? The Nazis exterminated the Jews out of fear and hatred, but we’re killing our own babies in many cases out of nothing more than apathy. The Nazis at least believed that the Jews were behind the collapse of German civilization, and used that argument to justify their argument that Jews were non-people. What argument do we use to justify treating the unborn as non-people? Certainly not a scientific argument. And we’ve aborted ten times as many victims of the Holocaust, so it’s not like the Nazis were worse in terms of scale.
I genuinely believe that future generations will look back on us with the same horror and revulsion that we look back on the Nazis. And honestly, I can’t say they’ll be wrong.
So would you kill baby Hitler? It’s a valid question that raises some very important points. Not only would I not kill baby Hitler, but I wrote a short story about a time traveler who stopped Hitler not by killing him, but by altering the course of history in a very different way. If you haven’t already, you should check it out: “Killing Mister Wilson.”
Anyways, those are my thoughts on the subject. Also, TYT has hit a new low for cringe. I suppose that’s par for the course when your network is named after a genocidal regime.
