Would You Kill Baby Hitler?

Watching the new PBS series about World War II, World on Fire, I asked myself, would I kill Baby Hitler?

The New York Times Magazine asked the question as well.

We asked @nytmag readers: If you could go back and kill Hitler as a baby, would you do it? (What's your response?) pic.twitter.com/daatm12NZC

— NYT Magazine (@NYTmag) October 23, 2015

Responses were 30% no, 28% not sure, and 42% yes.

The failure of humanity isn’t in the actions of Adolph Hitler. The failure is in the lives of the millions of Germans who were willing to pull the trigger and kill innocent children.

Hitler in Germany. Pol Pot in Cambodia. Stalin in the Soviet Union. Mao Zedong in China. A dozen people in history didn’t cause the deaths of tens of millions of innocent people.

Millions of soldiers, investigators, detectives, and other government employees murdered millions of people throughout history one bullet, one victim, at a time.

Moral failure in an individual doesn’t lead to the decimation of a civilization. Moral failures in a civilization lead to the decimation of a civilization.

“All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.” – Edmund Burke

People don’t need Hitler or Stalin to murder millions of people, they simply need the opportunity.

History has demonstrated repeatedly that genocides aren’t the work of tyrannical dictators. Mass murders are carried out by ordinary people who calmly and coldly kill their neighbors because of differences in race, color, ethnicity or religion.

When people fail to see the divine image of God in the face of their neighbor, they are already on the path to becoming murderers.

When government policies put children in cages and political leaders use language to dehumanize others, the society is already on the way to murdering for the sake of murder.

When human lives become so cheap that people entertain the idea that the economy is more important than thousands of lives, then mass murder isn’t far behind.

What good would it do to kill Baby Hitler, when there’s a potential mass murderer in too many of us, already?

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The debut novel of author Jim Meisner, Jr. will be published in June. Follow the link to learn more. www.FaithHopeandBaseball.com