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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
I think the last few Mises Weekends Podcast would appeal to your sensibilities quite a bit.
Also, I love this.
IMO, everything bad can be explained through Keynesianism and the Frankfurt school / cultural Marxism. You could do a lot worse.
Fatherlessness is the single most common factor in most mass murderers
Again
This also explains the massive problem we have with everyday violence in the black community. The estimates are 70% of Black males grow up fatherless. The White population is now at levels that Blacks reached in the 1980’s. The trends are not reassuring.
It’s beginning to sound, @ontheleftcoast, that every totalitarian regime did it. If you were a ruler, it would only make sense.
Spot on. I said similar but you had a nice links.
I appreciate your comment, @catorand. You may not be able to answer this question, but are there signs you would look for indicate wen the threat is becoming serious?
This is not quite accurate. Abundance is not the problem, it’s availability to people who should not have a weapon of any kind in the first place that’s the problem.
As for rapid fire, a semi-automatic rifle only fires as fast as you can pull the trigger. Bump stocks are a way around this, and even the NRA wants them banned.
The term “assault rifle” is used incorrectly by everyone in the media. A true assault rifle is a fully automatic weapon used by the military. Taking the term out of context links fully automatic military weapons with semi-automatic civilian weapons. Anti-gunners also dislike the appearance of the semi-automatic versions of military weapons, and want to ban them based on appearance alone. This is nonsense! I could take an AR-15 and replace all the “scary” components with a wood stock and call it a “hunting rifle”.
I would argue this is also a red herring. The things you cite might affect some individuals, but not society as a whole (IMHO). Besides, violence in art and literature has been around for ages. For example, Goethe’s book The Sorrows of Young Werther caused many young men at the time to commit suicide in the same fashion as the book’s protangonist.
No, I believe your # 2, 3, and 5 are the culprits we have to deal with. I’m not willing to give up my semi-autos or violent video games just because some lunatic goes on a rampage.
@Manny This is a good example of how Austrians comprehensively think about social problems. I can’t find the YouTube that actually goes with it. It might be this. Same topic.
You may not find it persuasive.
Manny, I think you need to keep asking why: In this case, the immediate question is , “What is behind the breakdown of the family?” Until the cause is identified it can’t be restored – and perhaps even then. Now if I were leading a totalitarian state I could fix all this…
Exactly. Austrians see this as a comprehensive problem. Men have crazy sex drives but the economy is so regressive the average guy can’t be a “man” in the head of household sense. (just one tiny-short example, don’t go nuts me, please)
I read this post after having just finished watching a five part documentary on youth organizations in Nazi Germany. On Amazon Prime it’s called “The Hitler Youth”, but on YouTube it’s called “Hitler’s Children”. The five episodes are titled Education, Dedication, Seduction, War, and Sacrifice. They’re ordered differently on Amazon versus YouTube.
Seduction: Travel opportunities, camping, community spirit and identity were offered as incentives for young people to join the Nazi youth organizations. All other youth organizations (including church groups) were phased out, supplanted (sometimes through intimidation and violence), and eventually made illegal.
Education: At the age of 10 children joined the “Jungvolk” movement, at 14 they joined the Hitler Youth, and at 18 they joined the party, the “Wehrmacht”, the SA, or the SS.
Dedication: Concerns the Bund Deutscher Mädel (BDM), the League of German Girls (Maidens), formed in 1930 as the female branch of the Hitler youth movement.
War: Children were put to work on the home front, but as Germany’s fortunes in the war worsened, their roles shifted to manning anti-aircraft batteries and other military deployments.
Sacrifice: Children, fully indoctrinated to the point of fanaticism, were used as cannon fodder by Hitler and his generals in the closing days of the war against the Americans and the Soviets.
Thanks Rufus but I disagree whole heartedly about legalizing drugs, even pot. No conservative tradition would argue that you can promote an immoral activity and think it will have positive benefit. You are substituting one problem for another. That is moral relativism, which is exactly what Libertarianism is.
Well, sure. There are an innumerable reasons.
Well, good luck using more and more government force.
The fiscal math on enforcement is insane. It ends up being more like teacher’s union graft.
really? are you sure they aren’t all subordinate?
In any case, sometimes the root cause for a fatal condition is identifiable, but no cure can be found. Sometimes all we can do is treat the symptoms and make the patient as comfortable as we can. Hospice care.
Pardon my eeyore.
If something is legal, that means the government is promoting it? It’s one hundred percent legal for me to quit my job, go to the liquor store and buy enough booze to drink myself to death providing I drink it fast enough. Does that mean that because the government allows me to do this it is promoting it? It is totalitarian thinking that nothing should be legal unless that activity promotes the public good. It’s not that libertarians think different things are good and bad and that’s why they want things to be legal that you dislike. Many libertarians also things that things are bad which you think are bad. But they believe that individuals should be free to make their own choices rather than the government making them.
If we had a more libertarian / Austrian economy, a million social problems would take care of themselves. People need agency.
OK, so what’s your root cause?
Keynesianism, cultural Marxism, and too much centralized government.
That’s Libertarian thinking. It’s not conservative thinking. There is no reason to legalize drugs other than to escape problems, and thereby creating a host of other social problems that are much more inherently dangerous and unobservable because it is indirect, such as the breakdown of the family. I just argued above that the breakdown of the family is at the root of these young men shooting up people. Legalizing drugs only adds to the breakdown of the family.
And the cartels’ power compounds by the minute. Which keeps the cops employed, accomplishing very little.
If you’re in Oaksterdam and other cities and states heavily taxing cannabis, and have cannabis trade shows…
As a conservative, I don’t want to “promote” drugs. I just want to take away the government’s power to ban them.
If you can’t call that conservative thinking, then call it American thinking. We are allowed to make our own (often terrible) decisions, and face the consequences.
I’m not going to go into it right now, but legalizing hard drugs should have been done first and this is one of the reasons why. Freaking (pejorative name for a prostitute).
More interested in yours. You stated breakdown of the family is behind our current issue. Can you identify a proximate cause? If so how far down that thread can you go?
See #s 47, 49, 55-58, re: military service and maturity…Thanks!, Howdy! & S/F! :-)
So let me ask you, which drugs besides pot would you legalize? Cocaine? Heroin? LSD?
For starters, watch the William F. Buckley youtube on this. 7 minutes.
Yes.
For anyone who wants to see it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTyucBinXnY
I watched it, and I need to think about it. I’m not convinced yet. To me, it’s more than just about the misspent funds.
I’ve got a brain for myself. I don’t need to know what he thinks.