Out of the mouths of babes
Bookworm on Mar 20 2009 at 4:47 pm | Filed under: Barack Obama
My 9 year old son was looking at his book about fighter planes through history. That triggered this question and answer session:
Son: Why were the Germans so bad?
Me: Humans have always fought. It’s part of the human condition. They’ve also always killed their enemies, including destroying whole villages, or cities, or even countries, and then enslaving and killing all the people. The Germans, however, did this on a bigger scale than ever before. Also, the Germans were the only people in history who decided in advance that whole groups of people needed to be exterminated, hunted these people down everywhere they could reach, and built huge factories to kill them. They took evil to a level never seen before.
Son: Why did the Germans do that?
Me: That’s one of the big questions. Up until the Nazis, the Germans had been considered the most civilized nation in the world. They had the smartest scientists, their people composed the best music, they wrote poetry (Beethoven and Mozart came from Germanic countries), and their towns and cities were beautiful. Yet they abandoned all that civilization to become the most evil people in the world.
Son (after a moment’s contemplation): Was Hitler crazy that he did all this?
Me: Another good question, but it wasn’t just Hitler. Hitler’s ideas were evil, but he didn’t act alone. After all, did the German and Austrian people lock him up in an insane asylum or did they make him leader of their countries?
Son: They made him leader? But why did they do that?
Me: That’s another good….
Son: Maybe he was like Obama. He gave really good speeches, and the people who listened to him stopped thinking.
My son scares me sometimes. He’s smarter than the whole Democratic party put together.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News
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28 Responses to “Out of the mouths of babes”
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An Art Linkletter moment magnified a million times.
Your son’s response scared you, but impressed me.
Umm! Hmm!
The Marin County school system must be lagging in their obligation to indoctrinate your son.
In addition, Obama and his crew, like Hitler, realized that a country’s crisis is your opportunity.
Guard (but do not shield) your son carefully.
He may be our only hope.
How did your son perceive this? Does he read books outside of what he is assigned in school? Or do you talk with him about politics?
I guess I’m just surprised that a kid would have that kind of perception without some kind of intervention. Surely they are not teaching this kind of thing in school right now!
Not in the Marin County I knew.
I don’t know where it came from. He knows I don’t like Obama, but he also knows his father does. He told me that when, at school, he says he doesn’t like Obama, the other kids verbally attack him — but he seems able to handle it. I sometimes think my son picks things up from me by osmosis. We were playing Apples to Apples (an incredibly fun game). Part of the game involves voting on cards people submit. Without knowing who submitted what card, my son consistently voted for my card.
When I was 7, a new kid named Jimmy entered our second grade class.
I don’t know why things happened the way they did, but Jimmy immediately became somebody that everybody in class decided to persecute. Maybe it was because he was small or seemed too eager to please.
That first day after school a mob of us chased Jimmy all the way home, taunting and insulting him. The look of fear in his eyes goaded us on. But when he was finally able to slam the front door of his house to us, I became haunted by that look.
I went home and confessed to my mother what I had done. I knew it was wrong. I asked her what I should do.
“Protect him,” she said.
“But how?” I said. “There’s only one of me. And besides, you don’t like me fighting.”
“Protect him,” she said. “Even if you must fight and even if you get hurt.”
Whatta mom!
The next day I made friends with Jimmy and said that I would walk home with him.
Which I did, followed by the same mob as the day before—minus one.
With just the tiny bit of boost I gave him Jimmy faced the mob. We got chased and yelled at, but we stood our ground and refused to run or hide. Finally the mob dissolved.
The next day, Jimmy walked home with all of us.
The moral to me was obvious: Stand up and be counted. Most times, other people will take heart.
Stand up, all of us. Our country is in peril and needs good men and women to stand for her against the mob.
That’s a haunting comment to me, Charles. It brings back unpleasant memories.
In fourth grade, I was part of a similar mob that chased a very eccentric boy home, taunting him, for three straight days. I don’t remember if there were any leaders, but there sure were a lot of followers, and I was one. The mother confronted us and I believe it stopped.
In sixth grade – different school and different kids – a group taunted a girl and her family as they sat in their car waiting for the school doors to open. Pounding on the hood of the car, yelling their unusual ethnic last name “Mugerdiechen!”. That kept up for several days as well. I didn’t participate, but I watched, sitting on a low wall, and said nothing. I’d been friendly towards her and she came up to me on one of those days and asked me why I was saying nothing, not helping. I remember the burning sense of shame, and yet I still did nothing.
In tenth grade, I and two friends taunted another guy in our class for stuttering – and I too was a stutterer! I’ll still never understand this last one.
It’s not as though I didn’t have a chance to understand it. I was well bullied in sixth and seventh grade. I’d had plenty of chances to understand it and not participate – yet I did. I can’t figure out what that kid I was was *thinking*. He seems a stranger to me.
Your mom was a helluva mom, and you were a helluva kid!
It’s a relief to know that I’m not the only one haunted by childhood memories of picking on kids. I remember doing that twice, although I have to admit that, as a 4th grader, I picked on the boy because I had a crush on him and was stupid enough to think that was how to get his attention. I still feel tremendously guilty, though, about they way my friends and I bullied that poor boy.
The horrible irony of my attempts at bullying is that I, small, bookish and wearing glasses, was usually on the receiving end. You’d think that I would have had compassion and refrained from doing the same to others. But with typical child’s logic, rather than feeling compassion, I was simply delighted, finally, to be on the “right” side of the gang, giving, rather than receiving.
I didn’t do right then, but I try to teach my kids to do right now. I’ve told them about my childhood acts, and the guilt that haunts me to this day. I’ve told them about the need to do the right thing. And maybe my son has learned something after all.
I moved to a new school in the middle of the first grade. Same thing. Found out much later, while helping out in the Principal’s office, that the gang leader had an IQ of 77. I forgave him.
In the seventh grade I was a target of the school bully. He went on the bus with the high school hockey team to an away game – his big brother was the goalie. They stopped for food, he got food poisoning and died. I wasn’t the only one who was glad that son of a bitch was dead.
Out of the mouths of babes…
My 9 year old son was looking at his book about fighter planes through history. That triggered this question and answer session: Son: Why were the Germans so bad? Me: Humans have always fought. It’s part of the human condition…….
One of the most worthwhile books about the Nazification of Germany is “Resisting Hitler” by Sebastian Haffner. The author grew up in Germany and was about your son’s age during the First World War…he left in the late 1930s and wrote the book after moving to Britain. It is more social history than political history, covering things like the social impact of the great inflation. (Which, in Haffner’s view, destroyed the credibility of older and more conservative people and empowered youthful speculators and by extension the whole younger generation)
Something your son might be interested in reading in a few years if he’s interested in this issue.
Your son will is a very interesting and perceptive individual that will bear watching as he grows, Book. You seem to keep him very intellectually engaged and well on the road to wisdom.
Many of the techniques promoted by Alinsky were developed and honed by the communists and Nazis as they vied for power during Germany’s Weimar Republic. They, too, knew not only how not to waste crises, but how to create crises to exploit (I, the conspiracy theorist, happen to believe that the bank collapse was timed to coincide with the election). The excuse the Germans may have had was that the 1930s was one of true economic and political disaster and that I could understand how at-least some Germans might want to cling to the straw of hope extended to them by a charismatic demagogue who, for the most part, promised them social and economic talking points not far removed from the Democrat platform today (except for that unpleasantness about the Jews, of course).
All said, Hitler only got elected with about only about 34% of the vote. BO is no Hitler, but Americans today have no such excuse for handing over the reigns of power to a charismatic demagogue who has made no secret for his antipathy of American democracy, capitalism and pretty much everything it stands for and who has no compunction about tarnishing classes of scapegoats to be blamed for all of society’s ills (bank executives, Republicans, Rush Limbaugh…it’s only starting folks). If nothing else, Americans should have been able to look at Obama’s friends and connect the dots. In the end, though, it seems that we couldn’t be bothered so we voted for an American Idol.
Growing up in EUrope as a half-European expat after the War, I always wondered how so many could so easily have fallen under the spell of a very brilliant, very wicked charismatic demagogue. I had been brought to believe that humans were fundamentally rational beings who would, in times of crisis, be expected as a whole to react rationally. What happened in Germany just could not be rationalized, especially for a very rational people.
Your son, Book, hammered the nail on the head. I never, never realized how easily so many people living in the lap of a historically unprecedented privilege and wealth would simply turn their brains and moral compasses off and commit suicide in a fit of pique under the spell of a very incompetent, psychologically tenuous and dangerous man. We are going to pay a very big price for this for a very long time. I fear that far worse is still to come.
correction…the title of the Haffner book is “Defying Hitler,” not “Resisting Hitler”
Speak up, before you lose the right…
Drudge’s latest headline is to the effect that Obama wishes to exert ever tighter controls over American businesses by having the government establish limits on salaries. (Now we know why he was whipping up AIG hysteria, don’t we?) Obama is……
Son: Why were the Germans so bad?
Here’s a simple analogy. Imagine Hitler to be your school’s toughest, biggest, most charismatic clique leader. Now imagine that person suddenly deciding one day that if you want the group he is part of to treat you well, you must follow his lead and help him to torture this weak and strange kid he mentioned. You can choose to obey or disobey.
Most people choose that it is better to belong, and to follow, rather than be singled out for punishment like what “that kid right there is getting”. They stay in the back, and hold their tongues, because they want a Strong Man to make decisions for them, and partially because they fear the same happening to them so they toe the line, not because they like hurting others but because they are not strong enough to make their wishes into reality.
Some others refuse, and those are the ones that contest with the leaders like Hitler for power over the members of the clique and over the power and authority to abuse others that can’t defend themselves. When Stalin and Hitler were picking on Czechoslovakia, British cowards and clique members said “do whatever you want, just don’t mess with me”. Chamberlain was very proud of his “Peace in Our Time”. But others, like Churchill, had the strength to stand up and resist the tyrant’s demands for obedience.
The Germans were so bad because their leader decided one day that a couple of nations and people needed to be “taught a lesson” and if you didn’t join his group and follow his lead, he will make your life a living hell. The Germans were the ones who said “I will obey”. Especially when they were praised as having high self-esteem, social status, and “strength” for doing so. Some became Hitler’s lieutenants, the slaving dogs which you always see following around the “leader” begging him to allow his dog to lick his heels. Others followed him because they were duped and eventually rebelled against his leadership, although Von Stauffenberg’s effort was a forlorn hope.
Your son should ask himself what kind of a person he would like to be. Personally, I like to say that all I ever needed to know about human nature I learned in K-12. That is not strictly true, of course, since true wisdom usually comes after that, but our first confrontations with sadism, cruelty, irresponsibility, guilt, and abuse of power, which comes naturally from the human nature, is usually instilled in us while we are very young. It is what forms the core of our personalities, for good or ill.
Son: Why did the Germans do that?
Partially because they were afraid. Partially because they felt powerless and part of the downtrodden underdogs. Partially because Hitler presented them with Hope and Change for a better Germany.
People, and this is true whether we speak of adults or of children, seek leadership when they are afraid. And if there are no adequate leaders around, then they will take the leadership of the person that made them afraid in the first place.
The horrible irony of my attempts at bullying is that I, small, bookish and wearing glasses, was usually on the receiving end. You’d think that I would have had compassion and refrained from doing the same to others. But with typical child’s logic, rather than feeling compassion, I was simply delighted, finally, to be on the “right” side of the gang, giving, rather than receiving.
That’s exactly how the Germans felt after the Treaty of Versailles. All they needed was a leader that promised them self-respect and status, so long as they would attack the enemies of the Leader, the Fuehrer. Seemed like a great bargain, for those that didn’t know any better. There are many dupes and many ways to dupe em. For example, Bookworm was young and unwise when she first thought that bullying would give both parties a benefit, or at least that bullying is the expected social norm. But what excuse does the Left have for pushing a genocidal and cruel policy on the Iraqis and Vietnamese? Did they believe getting killed by Communist and Islamic terrorists were “good” things? Or only good for the subjects in question, never good enough for the Leftists themselves.
Almost all the cruelties and political dynamos we see in current political life can be translated into children’s analogies. However, when you pair childish behavior with adult power, you get something more than just mistaken and unwise actions.
Take Vietnam, for example. Members of the Left to this day, like Adrian, a commenter at Soob’s blog, are still proud of what was accomplished there. They think they did good. They thump their chests and say, “see, we pushed back a corrupt American war machine and brought, if not prosperity, then at least a better lot for the Vietnamese than would have resulted under an American occupation”. *Thump Thump* We did good.
They don’t have the wits God gave to children. They cannot and will not use empathy. Contrary to Bookworm, who knew what bullying was and could, after getting away from peer pressure, reflect upon the actuality of her actions and how they related to her own experiences, the Left Refuse To Believe that they will ever be put in a position where what they did to those weaker than them could ever be returned on the members of the Left.
*Thump Thump* No way could Obama make me one of those poor wretches that need healthcare which we agree are pitiful wretches in need of our glorious aid.
*Thump Thump* No way would I ever be in need of protection by a foreign military intervention, so I see no need on the behalf of Iraqis or Vietnamese for the US Marines.
If somebody invaded my country, I know I would fight them (or rather, the Marines would fight them in my stead) so it is a natural and righteous thing for Iraqis to kill American invaders. *Thump Thump*
They are proud, you see. They feel no guilt. They have no regrets. They are lost by their own actions. Instead of atoning for their sins, they exacerbate them by saying their victims deserved it. “They were weak, they couldn’t fight back, so why should I have been merciful”, is their train of thought. oh they cloak their actions up in nice lies and illusions. They were “helping” the Iraqis and the Vietnamese by aiding the Vietcong and posing for the NVA propaganda apparatus. They were “helping” the underdogs and the downtrodden. They “were the good guys”, the US military the evil baby killers. Yes, this has Always been True, you see.
Growing up in EUrope as a half-European expat after the War, I always wondered how so many could so easily have fallen under the spell of a very brilliant, very wicked charismatic demagogue.
That was the one question the Left knew should never be raised, let alone answered, in America’s schools.
Very dangerous, that question.
I saw and read a few of Hitler’s speeches. I haven’t studied them in depth, of course (I was far more interested in the battles of WWII and the immediate diplomatic consequences for Poland/Czechoslovakia). They, contrary to the angry and jerk mannerisms of the Hitler you always saw on those historicals, were rather rational.
Some of it sounded like Democrats, if only because all politics are local and the Germans were interested in much the same things Americans would be interested in: reduction of crime, economic prosperity, national security, national pride, etc.
But give it a look, Hitler had plenty of speeches. You will see his charisma there. Freed of the non-comprehensible German,
Paste the text into notepad, if you can’t stand the red background (like me)
He mentioned Hindenburg at the end because Germany respected President Hindenburg, he who headed the Weimar Republic, only for the reins of power to be given to Hitler and the nation destroyed under him.
Source link for quoted speech
Here is a vid example of the dramatic gestures I am referring to. Unless you know the content of the speech, it would seem very “megalomaniacal”, but that’s not the secret to Hitler’s rise
One comment went into spam folder because I put two links in it, I believe.
Here is another example.
I was inspired. Perhaps this is something Rush and I share in common. We both have a certain ear for propaganda and persuasion, perhaps because we both have an interest in studying the arts of propaganda and becoming proficient in them, though for different reasons. I can feel inspired, even as I know Hitler for what he was. This is the divide between having a positive reaction to propaganda while knowing it is false and having a positive reaction to propaganda while believing it is true. (the latter is, of course, the Obamanation).
Great stump speeches, Ymar. Change a word here, change a word there and you have….tomorrow’s recycled stump speech!
Except that, today, it’s called “social justice”.
I really, really have to commend today’s post by neo-neocon…and especially the comments that follow.
The post and comments reinforce much of what Book’s son has picked-up upon.
http://neoneocon.com/2009/03/21/who-is-susceptible-to-obamalove-and-why/
It is nice to see so many coming to know the true face of the Democrat party, Danny.
I remember back in 2001 when many people, commenters at Neo-Neocon and the blogger herself, gave the benefit of the doubt to the Democrats. They tried reason, debate, argument, and the presentation of evidence, all on the assumption that they were trying to find solutions and if you gave them a reasonable argument, they may come over to your side. Oh sure, we all expected our positions to be hardline and unchangeable, at least on the fundamentals, but that was a minority position. There was still hope that, even if the others didn’t agree with you, they would agree with the facts.
But Danny, they didn’t accept the facts, now did ya. They didn’t agree because their reality was not our reality. And this fundamental incompatibility took people a long time to accept. Many people attributed it to one source, liberalism, biased media coverage, lack of good arguments, Democrat partisanship, but they never saw to the core. They never saw the plans of the domestic insurgency right here in America.
Until now.
now did ya
did they.
Speaking of the true face of the Democratic Party, a fellow Marin conservative just sent me this:
An elderly man suffers a massive heart attack. The family drives wildly to get him to the emergency room. After what seems like an eternity, the ER doctor appears, wearing his scrubs and a long face. Sadly, he says, “I’m afraid he is brain-dead. But his heart is still beating.”
“Oh, Dear God,” cries his wife, her hands clasped against her cheeks with shock. “We’ve never had a Democrat in the family before!”
Council speak 03/29/08…
The Council has spoken. The winning entry was My Grandfather, the 14th Amendment, and the AIG Bonuses by The Provocateur, which put last week’s new in a historical and personal context. Runners up were, Bookworm Room’s Out of the Mouths of Babes a di…
Watcher’s Council Results…
Please enjoy all of this weeks winners (and share, share, share!!!!!) Winning Council Submissions First place with 2 1/3 points! – The Provocateur – My Grandfather, the 14th Amendment, and the AIG Bonuses Second place with 1 2/3 points -……