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Would You Kill Hitler?
Why, despite what you may believe, the answer is invariably “no”
It’s a common parlor game (even for those who don’t have parlors): if you could be alive back in 1936, would you kill Hitler? If you’ve ever opened a history book you can play the same game with a bit of variety by asking if you’d have killed Lenin back in 1916 when he was still easily found most days sitting in a Viennese tea room. Would you have killed Mao back in 1938?
Between them, Hitler, Lenin, and Mao were directly responsible for the deaths of nearly 100,000,000 people. Yes, that’s right: one hundred million human beings. People just like you and me who were gassed, starved, beaten, tortured, raped, strangled, burned, and shot simply because men like Hitler, Lenin, and Mao lived.
So: would you kill Hitler?
Some people who’ve had charmingly comfortable lives in which the greatest personal trauma they’ve dealt with is a parking ticket, claim that by killing Hitler one would “descend to his level” and therefore such an action would be morally illegitimate.
Let’s examine this amusing notion for a moment.
Imagine we’re at home and we have a small daughter playing happily nearby. Suddenly the door bursts open and a man enters brandishing a knife. He begins disemboweling our daughter, who is screaming with terror…
