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All They Need Is a Name
Over the last few weeks, I’ve felt ill-at-ease about the shootings at Parkland in a way that went far beyond the deaths and desperation that has followed the episode. I finally put my finger on my perceptions. And it raised great concern for me. Let me summarize first what has been happening nationwide regarding the shootings, students, and protests.
Students are obviously in great emotional pain and are motivated to take action following the traumatic experience of the shootings. They have come together for a primary cause. They have made the National Rifle Association their primary focus/scapegoat, and secondarily the legislature. They are saying to everyone that you are either anti-gun or against their teens. Companies have boycotted the NRA. Those who didn’t support the calls for new legislation are the enemy. Hundreds of students and adults all over the country have organized protests. Millions of dollars have been donated to their cause, including GoFundMe sites, many of which are for the survivors and their families; included with the donors are Oprah Winfrey, George Clooney, and his wife.
Meantime, these young people have been receiving an education that is deeply influenced by Leftist doctrine, hating and demonizing those on the right, and demanding that students be listened to and cared for.
Now I’d like to shift gears and hope that you’ll bear with me. As I describe the following historical period, I’d like you to see if you can identify parallels and whether they stand up to scrutiny.
In Germany in the 1920s Hitler Youth groups were created. By 1933, membership increased to 100,000; by 1936, all other youth organizations were abolished. Although boys and girls were organized separately, both types of groups were highly disciplined. In 1938, Hitler made the following statement:
These boys and girls enter our organizations [at] ten years of age, and often for the first time get a little fresh air; after four years of the Young Folk they go on to the Hitler Youth, where we have them for another four years . . . And even if they are still not complete National Socialists, they go to Labor Service and are smoothed out there for another six, seven months . . . And whatever class consciousness or social status might still be left . . . the Wehrmacht [German armed forces] will take care of that.
The Third Reich looked to the schools to carry out further indoctrination:
Nazi scholars and educators glorified Nordic and other ‘Aryan’ races, while denigrating Jews and other so-called inferior peoples as parasitic ‘bastard races’ incapable of creating culture or civilization. After 1933, the Nazi regime purged the public school system of teachers deemed to be Jews or to be “politically unreliable.’ Most educators, however, remained in their posts and joined the National Socialist Teachers League. 97% of all public school teachers, some 300,000 persons, had joined the League by 1936. In fact, teachers joined the Nazi Party in greater numbers than any other profession.
Indoctrination included new textbooks that lauded the Nazi causes, anti-Semitism, and racism.
Group leaders played an important role, too:
Youth leaders used tightly controlled group activities and staged propaganda events such as mass rallies full of ritual and spectacle to create the illusion of one national community reaching across class and religious divisions that characterized Germany before 1933.
By 1939 the Hitler Youth became the largest youth organization in the world with over 7.3 million strong within its ranks. A new law was issued on March 25, 1939, conscripting any remaining holdouts into the organization amid warnings to parents that unless their children were enrolled they would be forcibly removed and placed in the custody of state run orphanages.
Now I realize that we are a long way from becoming a Germany; our culture does not embrace Prussian discipline, and our youth tend to choose peace, philosophically, instead of war. Yet I’m also observing a great deal of anger that may have as much to do with the times as it does with a school shooting. I see school teachers indoctrinating our young people across the country with Leftists ideas and ideology, as well as the accompanying demonizing of those who are “the enemy.” I see teenagers who are looking for a way to find “a home,” a place where they feel safe and included. I see millions of dollars pouring into their cause, and unidentified people or organizations appearing to guide their activities. The media is intimately engaged, and social media is being exploited to publicize their agendas.
It’s easy to point to other causes that eventually died out: Occupy Wall Street; anti-war protests (Vietnam and Iraq). But today’s activities have a uniform, vulnerable (teen) population with a centralized cause, possibly shadow supporters and millions of dollars. And I see no way to mollify the participants or focus the energy in a constructive way.
Is Germany a cautionary tale? Am I overreacting? What do you think?
Published in Culture
Susan,
You are quite right to point out the obvious abuse. Now that we are getting the full story of the incredible incompetence of the FBI and the Broward Police Dept we see just how manipulative this kind of emotion only politics is. Of course, the Hitler Youth are only one example. Chairman Mao’s Red Guard is more recent but possibly even more effective and thus more frightening.
Regards,
Jim
The movie The Boy in the Striped Pajamas did a great job illustrating the propagandizing of German youth.
You absolutely have to be first in approaching a subject with your kids and revisit it often in an open manner. First in the door is harder to kick out.
Tomorrow belongs to me from Cabaret
Yes, but not part of a formal curriculum. If you do it that way, you just teach students to parrot their teachers.
Aa very thoughtful and insightful view on the situation, @alsparks. Thanks.
And that is why schools find it so important to read Heather Has Two Mommies.
China and Mao are beyond belief. I’ve never been able to get my mind around 80 million dead–and that’s an estimate.
@susanquinn – your invocation of the Hitler Youth program brings you seriously close to violating Godwin’s Law. But as @jamesgawron helpfully points out, there are numerous examples in the Communist world of similar youth-control movements. While the Red Guards flourished under Mao when he sought to use them to solidify his position within the Chinese Politburo, most, if not all, Communist regimes have used the Young Pioneers (those cute little children all dressed alike and attired with a red bandana around their necks) to start the indoctrination early – just like the Hitler Youth. It’s a phenomenon of totalitarian regimes. Such state training serves to mold their little minds during the time when their minds are most susceptible to molding. The Left in this country would like nothing better!
I’ve never heard of Godwin’s Law. (I looked it up.) So perhaps I could have said, “In looking at the many totalitarian regimes, we can look specifically at Hitler’s rule.”
There is a tremendous push to remove children from the home and into state indoctrination centers from an ever earlier age. If you want to be depressed, just google “children in pre-k” and see page after page of glowing endorsements. As of 2016, per Rutgers’ study bewailing the lack of pre-k public indoctrination centers, only 32% of four year olds are enrolled.
Parents are just a problem. They should go to work and let the experts raise their offspring.
You might want to take a look at @paulalynnjohnson‘s post. She’s illustrating just what we’re talking about.
Do you know the difference between a socialist and a communist? A communist has an AK-47 and knows how to use it.
What makes you think that two years of service are going to make up for twenty years of bad home life and twelve years of leftist indoctrination? In former times, a young man who was basically ok but immature could be helped by a term in the military, but there had to be some kind of decent person to start with.
Not to mention who is going to be supervising these people-government employees are overwhelmingly statist. And our military is busy, they have other things to do there than re-animating whiny, Leftist zombie snowflakes. There’s a reason that the military no longer accepts criminals.
Remember, the Nazis and the Soviets both had very effective armies, all thoroughly indoctrinated in their socialist philosophy. The Chinese and the Norks also have armies, and I sincerely doubt that you will find many political conservatives in their ranks. Just as schools cannot compensate for bad home lives, military discipline cannot make up for underlying lack of moral fiber.
It suits me just fine that Lefties disdain the military, the last thing we need is military competence on top of media savvy-that’s exactly what the Hitler youth were about. Lefties in other countries have formed paramilitaries, and if that were to happen here, the Berkeley riots will look like Sunday school.
Given all the things I just wrote, I agree that the Left is using these kids and this issue to whip up hatred against any one who dissents from cultural Marxism. I keep saying it, Leftists hate us and want to kill us. Getting the kids on their side is a time-honored Marxist and Fascist tactic-see the Hitler Youth, the Komsomol, and Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and disarming the populace is the main key to implementing complete statist control. Here, they are killing two birds with one stone, the Second Amendment and conservative dissent from cultural Marxism.
Speaking of schools being used to inculcate…
The Bellamy Salute, devised by the man who wrote the Pledge of Allegiance. The Pledge and Salute were originally introduced in 1895; the Salute was performed while the Pledge was recited. Here it is in 1941:
By that time it was controversial due to its unfortunate associations. My mother remembers putting her hand over her heart in the NYC public schools in the 1930s; in 1942 the hand over the heart officially replaced the salute.
There are many factors that have contributed to the Florida school shooting, along with other mass killings recently. The kids that were murdered, along with Las Vegas, churches, night clubs, and other public places were the result of several things that President Trump is trying to address.
It’s a combination of a modern, open, free society without boundaries and a moral compass.
Thanks for the video of the Red Guards in the Cultural Revolution.
In the early 70s as a grad student, I studied what had happened to the legal institutions in China during the Cultural Revolution. I found that the people with legal training — lawyers and judges — were rooted out and sent to shovel manure in the countryside or worse. Their replacements were by and large political cadres of the PLA — the Peoples Liberation Army. If nothing else, they were politically reliable. (Kind of like the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals).
Scary stuff. When the rule of law is gone, there is no safeguard any longer. In A Man for All Seasons:
More: “Go he should, if he were the Devil, until he broke the law.”
Roper: “Now you give the Devil benefit of law!”
More: “Yes, what would you do? Cut a road through the law to get after the Devil?”
Roper: “Yes. I’d cut down every law in England to do that.”
More: “And when the last law was down, and the Devil turned on you… where would you hide, Roper, the laws all being flat? This country is planted with laws from coast to coast…Man’s laws, not God’s, and if you cut them down…and you’re just the man to do it …do you really think you could stand upright in the wind that would blow then?”
The president can *facilitate* addressing the problem; he can’t “address” this – or anything else – from the top down. At the ‘grassroots’, beginning with the home, has to be where this starts. (We’ve seen where pen-and-phone governance gets us, haven’t we?)
You are right to be scared.
It is not just the content of the politics being infused but the stylistics. People with the shallowest grasp of the complexity of climate and the weakness of the alarmist models preach hatred and exclusion of “denialist.” The failure to endorse any variant of our increasingly absurd identity politics is to be a “racist” or “homophobe”. Reservations about abortion and the larger assault on the nuclear family makes one a “sexist”, “misogynist” or patriarchal oppressor.
Noticing the social cost of illegal immigration is “xenophobia” and a modest tax increase was an apocalyptic tragedy.
The Nazis made an art form out of irrationally and hatred. I am less disturbed about kids having stupid political opinions than I am by the irrationally and bitter tribalism that result from serious cognitive malformation.
To tell you the truth, I’m not sure it would, but it was the only thing I could think of that would be relatively immediate to occupy the time and minds of young men with a hapless future and needed something solid in their lives.
Paging @simontemplar, @bossmongo, @dajoho, and others of the brotherhood (sisterhood, too, for that matter). What say you all?
Great idea, @nandapanjandrum!
I take issue with your first point. There are already restrictions on who can buy guns and where. It isn’t the guns, it’s crazy people. Change involuntary commitment laws, and get rid of gun-free zones where the deranged know that they will have five to twenty minutes to commit mayhem unimpeded. If nothing else, there are way fewer crazies than guns, they are easier to find (their friends and families are begging for help in many cases), and there’s nothing in the Bill of Rights that protects their right to terrorize others.
As for “the capacity to kill many people”, that’s the point. I need effective weapons to defend myself against gangs of criminals, whether they are ordinary criminals or a tyrannical government.
I have several problems with this. First of all, I don’t see how it addresses the problems Susan lays out of the government brainwashing or indoctrinating the youth of the nation to all think as the authorities tell them to. The kids are in 13 years of government schools, and you think making them involuntary servants to the government for two tears will break them out of the forced conformity? Secondly, the military’s primary purpose is to defend the country and it’s allies against foreign invasion. It’s not supposed to be a rehab program. Thirdly, the military brass doesn’t want an army of draftees. They want an army of people who willingly signed up. The logic is pretty clear. Someone who is doing a job willingly is likely to do it far better than someone who is doing it only because the government will send them to prison if they refuse.
Totally agree with all of this, and would add: it is a fantasy to think that only young men would be forced into service. Given the current state of our society, young women would be conscripted too, and then we would have a whole new round of rape and sexual harassment claims. I would lead to more hatred of men, not less. It would cause young men to be even more lost and confused, not less.
Maybe I’ve watched too many movies about how boot camp turned boys into men, and it seems to me we have a lot of young men who surely need that discipline, especially thousands of boys raised without fathers.
I knew it would be controversial. Just trying to find a solution for our youth problems raised in the inner cities by mothers on drugs and no father in sight.
Anne Applebaum’s book on Eastern Europe tells how the new Communist governments found it very important to replace church youth activities and other youth activities with state-sponsored group activities. It was not unlike what the Nazis had been doing 20 years earlier.
Gww, it may well do that, but the armed forces is not a replacement for wholesale neglect by parents to instill self-discipline, initiative, and the ability to think critically; its training is meant to build on those strengths, not necessarily to instill them. Even for those in high-risk groups, there has to be a modicum of self-interest present in the individual in order for him/her to succeed. I look forward to feedback from the gentlemen mentioned above…
I’m sure boot camp does turn boys into men, but they’ve got to be the right kind of boys. No drill sergeant is going to turn an unmotivated burnout into the kind of men who the U.S. military is turning out today. Our military has standards, and for good reason. I expect after a couple hundred years of doing this, they’ve got a fair idea of who can be turned into a competent soldier and who is not worth their time.
Or the cantonist system under the Tsars, or the Ottoman devshirme system…