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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
Godwin’s law is a propaganda tool of the left, specifically to hide the intimate ideological connections between our progressive movement and both Italian Fascism and German National Socialists. Of similar utility as the vile slander that Fascism is a right-wing phenomenon. Any who attempt to invoke Godwin’s “law” should have the facts thrown in their face.
I’m not clear why the NRA is in this discussion, but the NRA gun control crowd has no one to blame but themselves for their quisling policies. They have been around for over a hundred years and have done nothing substantive for gun rights and have ignored so many threats to our gun rights. Where were they for the Miller case? Where were they in 1934 and 1968 for the NFA and the GCA? They had to be dragged kicking and screaming to support the Heller case. They backed the instant check system. They caved on the Brady Bill. And most recently they support banning the bump stock. The bump stock is a stupid device for silly people, but it’s also stupid to ban it. But the NRA is all for banning the bump stock.
The NRA exists solely to provide money to the board of directors by siphoning money from well-meaning members through creating fear from legislators, and using legislators to promote that fear.
So if the NRA is the target, they have no one to blame but themselves, and in fact they revel in it because that gives them more reason to scare their members.
I recommend the GOA.
I do too, but it’s not everyone’s cup of tea. The NRA isn’t completely useless and they do have some clout. When Aaron Zelman was still with us, JPFO was pretty good.
You want controversial? Try this on for size.
Repeal the 26th amendment.
We no longer draft 18-year-olds (the proximate case for reducing the voting age to 18). 26-year-olds are now deemed “children” when it comes to staying on their parents’ insurance. Even several so-called “Republicans” are warming to the idea of prohibiting purchasing a rifle until age 21.
Granted, this wouldn’t address the problem of undisciplined “youths” doing violence to their communities, but it would at least reduce them doing violence to our polity.
Repeal the 26th amendment, and watch leftist heads explode.
I’m going to go one step further:
Voting age should be tied to the minimum age for purchasing a firearm, of any common type (handgun, shotgun, “assault weapon”, whatever). If you’re not mature enough to defend yourself and your community, you’re not mature enough to vote.
Ditto for the drinking age.
1776?
Just kidding. I don’t think we’ve ever had that kind of Israeli-style system, before or after Independence, except in time of war.
As others have said, there are a lot of problems with the idea.
Unfortunately, the pro-American faction will have to conduct our own takeover of our schools, and other institutions. It will take generations.
I had the opportunity to take up this issue with Mr. Godwin himself on Twitter a few years back.
I want to quibble with some of this but in the main you’re bang on.
I’ve seen this truncated before. It’s nice to see a transcript.
One age, one line; welcome to adulthood. It’s now on you.
The Minnesota teachers union and the Democrat party talk about this and all kinds of stuff related to it like it’s totally normal. K through 12 in Minnesota is for government graft and communist indoctrination.
It’s impossible to do anything about this. How do you outlaw dependable semi automatic rifles that accept magazines, and have barrel shrouds? If you are Republican and you can’t figure this out you need to just shut up about guns. Also ,realistically, some stuff in gun policy is difficult to follow and learn. If you don’t want to put the effort in, there is no shame in that.
What is the question?
And? You’re not allowed @thereticulator to just drop that and not say more. There are rules, after all.
I think the Law as originally stated was as an argument on Usenet continues, the chance that someone will call someone else a Nazi who objectively is not a Nazi approaches unity.
I didn’t save the twitter thread, but I might be able to reconstruct some of it from memory. Still scratching the dust off the old memory banks.
Count me with those (few?) who think, yes, you are overreacting.
I think you are over reacting. Not that you are wrong, just over generalizing. This is a huge diverse country and while we undoubtedly have a leftward drift in the culture, we have nothing like the kind of menacing, intimidation of the Wiemar and early Nazi period pushing everyone in the same direction at the point of a baton. Yes, some children are brainwashed at the hands of leftist teachers and a leftist media, but I see no sign that it’s anything near universal. There is massive resistance to it and whole swathes of the country where it’s well nigh unheard of. What you posit is a real threat, but as yet it is largely unrealized.
As to the Florida children, I forgive them all this nonsense. They are going through the stages of grief. They are traumatized. Their childlike sense of safety and protection has been violently shattered. They are doing what we all naturally do in such circumstances – reaching for some simple answer that will make it all better again. This too shall pass. Grief fades. Trauma gets dealt with. And perhaps most importantly, ratings for 24/7 “two minutes hates” on cable news channels start to drop when the public gets bored with them.
In my opinion what’s at the heart of all this is the break down of the family. In this case, the father died of a heart attack. It was not a typical broken home. Nonetheless like quite a few of these shooters, the boy – and I believe 100% of the time it’s been a male – have come from fatherless homes. There have always been at risk kids, but there are more of them today. One in three boys grow up without a father in the home. All children need fathers, but especially boys.
The GOP and the libertarians need to figure out how to pitch what the the fundamental structure of human capital development looks like. All we do now is try to stomp out sociological fires with government.
Minnesota has tons of wealth and progressive power and it’s still notorious for a bad “achievement gap”. It’s the worst state in the nation for blacks in this sense. There is all kinds of theft and graft surrounding NGO “solutions”. People get thrown in jail. It’s crazy.
That may be true, but what makes you think the Libertarians have a fight in this? The Libertarian mentality is partly to blame for the break down of the family.
The Austrian school is very concerned about human capital development. IMO, the wider, more comprehensive way Austrians explain things makes more sense than just “property rights” and”non-aggression principle” stated over and over ad nauseam.
So the Austrian School would agree to limits on divorce and support through legislation religious orientation of children in the public square and other family based legislation?
They wouldn’t ever think of it in a piecemeal sense like that.
The thing that I’ve never understood about Libertarianism is why would something that makes some sense as economic policy translate to the same efficacy in cultural matters? They are not analogous. Culture requires proactive exertion to prevent it from degenerating, especially in a multicultural world, and that proactive exertion comes from a learned tradition based on communal wisdom. That at its heart is what conservatism is.
Which is why I made the distinction.
OK, then I need to learn a little more about the Austrian School. Thanks.