This is a thought experiment, which Matt Ford, writing in The Atlantic, launches by citing a New York Times Magazine poll that asked people if they would kill the infant Adolf Hitler given the opportunity. (I won’t keep you in suspense; 42% said yes, 30% no, and 28% not sure.) Framing this conundrum as a question of ethics, he then segues into speculating how removing Hitler from history might have changed things.
It’s a setup. Ford’s answers take two forms: Bad things that would have happened anyway, and bad things that would have happened if things didn’t turn out the way they did.
In the first category, he argues “I strongly doubt that Hitler’s nonexistence would have prevented World War II or the Holocaust,” because these events were products of undercurrents that existed in German society before Hitler came along, and that he only parlayed them into political power. He notes, “Hitler did not invent fascism, militarism, or anti-Semitism …. He also was not the first German political figure to adopt the irredentist position that another country’s territory rightfully belonged to the German people.” And while he acknowledges that “the exact mechanisms” of the Holocaust bear Hitler’s imprint, he argues the Holocaust was preceded by “social and political forces,” was carried out by thousands of people, and it’s “not impossible” that another German leader in Hitler’s absence would have moved toward the same genocidal ends.
His second-category conclusions are likely to be more controversial because they imply that Hitler was unwittingly a good thing. Basically, his argument goes like this: “But the implicit argument that his removal would improve history must also consider that his removal could make it worse.” Here, Ford catalogs the things that might have gone awry if Hitler hadn’t disrupted history in the ways he did: Would Britain and France have been better positioned to prevent decolonization? Would a Soviet Union not weakened by World War 2 have become an even more aggressive and dangerous world power? Would Imperial Japan have retained its possessions and been more successful in its war against China? And, “perhaps most crucially,” Hitler’s rise to power drove many of the scientists who developed the A-bomb to emigrate to the U.S.; otherwise the Bomb might have been developed in Europe, and the question then becomes, “What if atomic bombs had been first deployed not to end a war, but to begin one?”
Ford calls up recent experience to illustrate his thesis that tinkering with history can be dangerous: “The Bush administration naively claimed that toppling Saddam Hussein in 2003 would produce a vibrant liberal democracy in the largely illiberal Middle East. Instead it brought about regional instability, ethnic cleansing, civil war, and ISIS.” It’s a valid point; if you haven’t thought about it (I have), getting rid of Saddam may not have been such a hot idea, because it opened a Pandora’s Box — mainly, it reiterates the lesson of all history is that wars can’t be controlled and have unintended consequences.
He tries to cinch his argument by pointing out the things that have gone right in the aftermath of World War 2 and Hitler’s horrors: “We live in cynical times, which masks the fact that we live in extraordinary times. Atrocities still occur, but human rights are now a normative value throughout most of the world, even if their enforcement is imperfect. Conflicts are still fought, but the great powers have avoided another world war for seven decades. Racism and anti-Semitism still exist, but pre-war forms of colonialism and pogroms have largely disappeared.” What is mainly good about Hitler’s impact on history, he says, is “He lost.” In other words, the world is a better place because the evil that Hitler represented was defeated.
Ford is duly open-minded about what he’s proposing here. He wraps up his thought experiment by saying, “I could be wrong about all of this,” and invites readers to email him with their thoughts.
For most of us, just getting past the emotions evoked by the provocative headline I wrote for this piece will be intensely difficult (it is for me, too), because the damage that Hitler did to the world and to so many human lives was so terrible. We are repulsed by any suggestion that anything good could come from it. But Hitlerism, at the very least, is a warning of what we humans are capable of. And therein may lie its ultimate value to humanity, because in a nuclear-armed world, we ought to be afraid of what we might do to each other. The Third Reich isn’t hypothetical; it happened. The lesson is that something like it could happen again if we’re not careful. If Matt Ford is right, that this history wasn’t created solely by the pathology of one man, but grew from seeds of human nature that inchoately exist in all of us, the realization that we need to be afraid of ourselves should give us all profound pause.
Read Matt Ford’s article here. Update: Mother Jones is also weighing in on this topic. Read their article here.
Photo: Matt Ford, National Editor of Atlantic Magazine, posing somewhere in Europe