Two Reasons You Shouldn’t Go Back In Time And Kill Baby Hitler

No, you shouldn’t go back in time and kill baby Hitler.

On Friday, Twitter went up in flames after The New York Times Magazine posted the results of an online poll: “Dear Reader: Could You Kill a Baby Hitler?” The answers from the readers: 42 percent said yes, 30 percent said no, and 28 percent said they were unsure (NOTE: Who bothers to take the time to vote “unsure” in an internet poll?).

This alternative history has been considered many times in fiction. It usually ends badly.

Here are two reasons you shouldn’t go back in time and kill baby Hitler if given control of a Delorean with a flux capacitor.

So no, you shouldn’t go back in time and kill baby Hitler. Killing adult Hitler is another story — if you have a shot, take it immediately. For that matter, go ahead and knock off Stalin and Mao and Yassar Arafat as well.

You Are Not God. The fun of counterfactuals is the perfect hindsight of history. We all know Hitler became an emissary of tremendous evil, and so we think that if we had snuffed out his life, all of that would have been prevented. This seems to be the logic behind the eugenic abortion backed by some leftist readers of Freakonomics: the babies will be criminals anyway, so abortion lowers crime rates. (In fact, the left has no reason to agonize over killing Hitler as a baby – they would just go back and abort him as an unborn baby, which would solve all their moral qualms.)

But babies can be shaped and changed. If baby Hitler had been adopted by a Jewish family as a youth, does anyone truly believe his life would have turned out the same way? Sociopaths may be genetically inclined toward evil behavior, but there’s little evidence Hitler was a sociopath. He was a utopian leftist with socially Darwinistic views on race popular among other leftists of the time. Instead of going back in time and killing baby Hitler, how about taking him away from his family and placing him with a childless Jewish family? Or how about directing him toward the literature of Adam Smith or Edmund Burke rather than Karl Marx?

It Wasn’t Just Hitler. Hitler ably channeled German anti-Semitism toward building a powerful movement that culminated in the Holocaust. But he didn’t invent German Jew-hatred. It’s not as if had Hitler been hit in the head by a bullet in World War I, the Germans and Jews would have gotten along famously forever more. Germany was replete with Jew-hatred for decades before Hitler, and his ideas found fertile ground, not just in Germany, but in European countries that participated wholesale in the slaughter of the Jews. Hitler boggles the mind because of the mechanization of the mass murder of the Jews, but people tend to forget that millions of Jews were murdered outside killing centers by Einsatzgruppen engaging in mass shootings – and that foreigners often participated in the killings, including 100,000 Ukrainians who joined forces with the Nazis, for example. Hitler wasn’t alone, and killing him as a baby wouldn’t have ended the threat in any real way.

So no, you shouldn’t go back in time and kill baby Hitler. Killing adult Hitler is another story — if you have a shot, take it immediately. For that matter, go ahead and knock off Stalin and Mao and Yassar Arafat as well.

As long as you’re not busy killing baby Hitler, there are a few other things you should do now to make the world a less Jew-hating place. Unless, that is, you’re too busy theorizing about killing Hitler to bother cancelling your subscription to The New York Times Magazine, which backs all of Israel’s genocidal enemies to the hilt.