ITT: Look at the parents, this kid was just rebelling!
Press X to doubt
Or… He was a conservative that saw MAGA as the existential crisis that it is. He decided that he had nothing left to lose. He went for it.
Let’s be real here. The only shame was that he missed.
I think he died for a cause. But that could just be my bias showing.
I just want to go back in history and ask at what point people would’ve considered it appropriate to use political violence against someone like Hitler, or was it never okay? Like was it post first coup? Post second coup? After invading Poland? Did they need to wait for gas chambers? I’m curious when public sentiment shifted.
Well people tried to kill Hitler loads of times. 42 times according to Wikipedia. First was in 1932, before he became dictator.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assassination_attempts_on_Adolf_Hitler?wprov=sfla1
There are some absolutely cunning and insane stories in here. Fascinating.
In a last-ditch attempt, Fabian von Schlabrendorff gave a time bomb camouflaged as a package of two liqueur bottles to an officer in Hitler’s entourage, as a supposed gift to a friend in Germany. The bomb was supposed to explode on the return flight over Poland. The package was placed in the hold of the aircraft, where it iced up, causing the detonator to fail. Realizing the failure, Schlabrendorff immediately flew to Germany and recovered the package before it was discovered.
For much of the populace, sentiment only began to shift when life got harder for them personally. For some, that was when their children were killed in the war, for others it was when food shortages started to hurt, and still others would fully support the reich until it inevitably turned against them. Most personal impact that people felt was brushed off as “patriotic sacrifice” for the greater good. It was a bunch of small things that just piled up over time. Different people had different breaking points. But some people went through the whole war remaining fully supportive of the government.
You have to remember that propaganda was also much more effective then, when the government could fully control all media. Many Nazi supporters at the time had no idea what Hitler was really like or what was going on at concentration camps. The guards for those camps and other SS soldiers were chosen because they met certain loyalty criteria and would not go against orders. But everyone else was either oblivious to the cruelty, fearful of what would happen to their families if they went against the government, or just blissfully unaware and brainwashed by propaganda.
With the Internet today, it should be harder for people to fall for propaganda. The Internet really changes things now. You can see the disinformation influence everywhere but it’s much harder to silence all the dissenters now. There will always be people who refuse to seek answers or listen to opposing viewpoints and there’s not much to be done about that except teach open mindedness to children when they’re young. It’s why the fascists try to hard to simultaneously control and hamstring the education system. Unfortunately, they’ve been at it so long that there’s now a large portion of the population that grew up with poor education and are now easily influenced by the media sources that the fascists control. The propaganda today must focus more on convincing people that there is an existential threat in the form of a group, person, or ideology that only they can stop. They just need to convince enough people that doing evil things for “good” reasons is justified. They’re beginning to reach critical mass of supporters to where they can brazenly try to seize control of the government now, laws be damned. You see them pushing on those legal boundaries much more frequently these days. If they succeed, things will get worse for everyone (including their supporters) when they decide to fully drop their facades and begin doing evil things without any justification besides “because I felt like it”. Leopards will always eat faces, but for some reason people never learn that lesson.
Thanks for the response.
I think the internet is now a double-edged sword, and I can speak to this coming from a former Republican household in the 2000s.
Back then, pre-Facebook (and to at least the very early stages when it was a College-oriented platform), the internet was far less segregated into marketing platforms. You really would be exposed to anything and everything and that, combined with my parents’ upbringing in the 60s really had an impact on our family’s perception of events, including the Iraq War.
Nowadays, marketing algorithms are fine-tuned to preach to the choir and simply create massive echo-chambers. You can see this if you just create a new YouTube account and see the default content that shows up, like Joe Rogan… Just watch let alone like one of his videos, and next you’ll have Jordan Peterson clips filling your feed and as this happens any contrarian viewpoint gets marginalized.
If we had the internet of today back then, I’m not sure my family would break our rural right-wing religious pro-life bubble. It is VERY hard today unless you’re already well-versed in critical-thinking, have a major dose of introspection and humility, and are internet-savvy.
That is a fantastic question. Pretty much everyone agrees that Hitler should have killed in the cradle given hindsight.
When is it moral to kill the motherfucker without having a crystal ball?
Earlier than most people will openly condone given the nature of their State and society.
However, what if that creates a big dumb Hitler martyr that a more effective fascist can wave as a bloody flag and things get worse due to better managed evil?
However, what if that creates a big dumb Hitler martyr that a more effective fascist can wave as a bloody flag and things get worse due to better managed evil?
Yeah I agree, which is why I’m actually in the camp that I’m glad the_dumbass lived. If we can’t defeat this buffoon, then shit, we couldn’t defeat anyone.
Moreover I’d rather see him rot in prison. In order to set this country straight again, he has to be brought down by the Justice system.
I just want to go back in history and ask at what point people would’ve considered it appropriate to use political violence against someone like Hitler, or was it never okay?
Depends on the country
In Germany:
Communists and Anarchists: Around 1920, when the SA was founded
Social democrats: Depends on the „type“ of social democrat. The Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold, the social democratic militia, expected their leaders to start a coup in 1933
Conservatives: 1939, when the war started (at least those, that still were conservatives and didn‘t join the Nazis)
Monarchists: 1942, when it became visible, that Hitler couldn‘t win the war (at least those, that still were monarchists and didn‘t join the Nazis)
Just as a little addendum here is a list of assassination attempts on hitler
Seriously. It might not have been political at all.
When John Hinckley Jr took a shot at Reagan, he was trying to impress Jodie Foster…
Or… He was a conservative that saw MAGA as the existential crisis that it is.
Or he was a conservative and thought that Trump wasn’t racist enough.
Or seen the Epstein stuff, and felt incredibly betrayed.
Former rightist here, I not only got my face eaten by the Fidesz leopards (gutted health-care, gutted job security, gutted disability benefits that are now also harder to get, etc), and I remember the day when I’ve read that Fidesz lowered the age of consent to 12 in case both parties are under 18. I thought a “conservative” party would do the opposite, and raise it to 18 with some exceptions. I remember being so angry I couldn’t sleep that night at all, seen the sun rising, and my luck was that I didn’t have school on that day. And after the whole cHiLd prOteCTion fiasco, one of their politician even married an 18 year old he groomed since she was 14. Many claim the low age of consent of my country is only for close-in-age relationships, but it doesn’t stop much greater age differences, which are dangerously popular, because “boys at my age are stupid and don’t have cars” as some of those teen girls would say, others are being groomed with “but age differences are natural” if they were skeptical and didn’t want to run into such a relationship.
I took the whole “child protection” thing seriously. I knew victims. Many of them were my age. However when I had to realize some was just using it as an issue to get me to vote for them, while they themselves were doing it, often way more publicly than how Trump did it.
According to reports from classmates he failed to make the school rifle team because he was a poor shot - but also the instructor noted that he made “crass jokes” and FWIW got a poor impression of Crooks. I mention that tangentially it could apply to racism or who knows what or who he made the crass jokes about while shooting. Was he joking about shooting minorities or something?
