Time travel fantasies often ask the question of whether one should kill Adolf Hitler as a child or young man. What they never ask is: why not get him admitted to art school instead?
Time Machine Assassination Squad
Ted Rall
Ted Rall is a syndicated political cartoonist for Andrews McMeel Syndication, WhoWhatWhy.org and Counterpoint. He is a frequent contributor to The Wall Street Journal, a graphic novelist and author of many books of art and prose, and an occasional war correspondent. He is, recently, the author of the graphic novel "The Stringer."
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Oh. I’d watch this show!!
See “The Sarah Connor Chronicles,” “Continuum,” and “12 Monkeys” …
Maybe I should write up a treatment…
One man rarely makes a difference. Hitler couldn’t have done what he did without simmering resentment towards the Jews and white hot resentment about the Treaty of Versailles.
Sure, go back, kill Hitler and watch WWII happen all over again with a different guy in charge.
For that matter, stopping Hitler didn’t stop the march of Fascism, it just came to America wrapped in the flag and carrying a cross.
One guesses this is totally true, I mean fascism didn’t start in Germany. Not that the Italians were as rabidly anti semitic as the Germans were. And it’s not like there weren’t plenty of dedicated Nazis…
John Maynard Keynes wrote a book in 1920 that spelled out the causes of the really big war, WWII, to come as a consequence of the Treaty of Versailles.
Hitler was an unknown back then.
Austerity is fuel for fascism.
That is indeed the standard explanation for the rise of Nazism in Germany during the 1920s, but it should also be noted that in reality, Germany really never had to pay very many of their reparations to France. While the German economy crashed, it didn’t really have much to do with the burden of reparations.
Germany repaid the war debt with currency printed in excess into worthlessness and Germany was forced to sell the resources they needed to sustain their society. It wasn’t, after all, the German Mark that the Colonial Empires of Britain, France, and the USA thirsted for.
That’s why the reparations experiment was not repeated after WWII. Money was instead used to rebuild Germany under the Marshal Plan.
Kicking the French out of Germany could only be a political positive. Even if the entirety of the reparations were not paid, resistance to the WWI victors had to be a politically unifying act that unified and focused national hatred away from Germany’s government.
That worked in the USA when a president of questionable legitimacy convinced the American idiocracy that only the most extreme action could save the nation from an Iraqi mushroom cloud.
You should read Norman Spinrad’s “Iron Dream.” Hitler goes to America, becomes a sci-fi illustrator and writer. At the conventions, his fans wear the ornate and intricately detailed uniforms of his fictional realm.
Is that where Lafayette Ronald Hubbard came from ?… đŸ˜‰
Henri
“Time travel fantasies often ask the question of whether one should kill Adolf Hitler as a child or young man. What they never ask is: why not get him admitted to art school instead?”
I agree with your premise for a different reason, Ted.
Spending more of the social product on the workers and the young is a great alternative to austerity. It worked for FDR when his WPA employed musicians, artists, writers, actors and directors in large arts, drama, media, and literacy projects.