The Godwin Veto

He alone who owns the youth gains the future.

A certain Fuhrer proffered the above statement in 1935.

It was quoted by a chapter of Moms for Liberty, a political activist group that has grown to national prominence in just three years, as a caution against the growing intrusion of Big Government and progressivist ideologies into educational curricula.

Der Fuhrer's observation is not original. A certain V.I. Lenin offered similar thoughts a couple decades earlier:

Give us the child for 8 years and it will be a Bolshevik forever.

Give me a child for the first 5 years of his life and he will be mine forever.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

Lenin quite possibly picked it up from Aristotle, or perhaps St. Ignatius Loyola:

Give me a child until he is 7 and I will show you the man.

The quoters caused quite an imbroglio in daring to repeat AH's words, no matter the cautionary context, and no matter the validity of the alarm they sought to raise. Context was added, and an apology was issued.

The former, in my opinion, was unnecessary, and the latter was a mistake. I agree with Christian Ziegler's thoughts in this piece from The Free Press - being unjustly goaded into going on defense is a mistake, and hands a victory to the graders.

This brings me to the big question: why is it that we can quote Lenin (or Mao) in a cautionary fashion, but not Hitler?

Yes, it's rhetorical, after a fashion. The answer is the misapplication of Godwin's Law.

Godwin's Law is "an Internet adage asserting that as an online discussion grows longer (regardless of topic or scope), the probability of a comparison to Nazis or Adolf Hitler approaches 100%."

Thing is, "going Godwin" is usually a massive and inapt exaggeration of a point of disagreement. Increasingly, it's also a point of derision. The Left had no qualms about comparing George W. Bush to AH back when he was President, only to walk back their smear when Trump came along, because Trump was now "literally Hitler" and miles worse than Dubya.

Hitler was one of the great monsters of human history. We all know this. But, so were Lenin and Mao. The latter two each racked up a bigger body count than the Bohemian Corporal, and their destructive ideologies persevere and are evenh admired today, whereas Nazism has been relegated to the fringe-asshole crowd.

I get that any mention of AH risks derailing the point being made, because detractors will pounce as they did on the Indiana chapter of Moms For Liberty. That's the reality of public discourse today, for better or worse. Deflections and ad hominem attacks, which such pounces often are, should not be met with acquiescence or allowed to derail the arguments. Sadly, there's also "friendly fire" to deal with, such as conservative columnist David French siding against MFL.

George Santayana's warning, "those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it," should urge us to recall all aspects of past horrors, and that includes the state inculcation of the young. The Red Chinese, the Bolsheviks, and yes, the Nazis all embraced it, with horrific outcome. Quoting one of the great architects of evil should not be out of bounds in arguing against the practice.

Does arguing that the state rather than parents should decide what kids learn make one a Nazi? No, but when the ideology being advanced is what we see today, a comparison with Lenin or Mao would not draw anywhere near the ire that the AH analogy did. In part because those monsters haven't been elevated nearly as high as AH in history's rogue's gallery (even though they deserve to) and in part because the statists like* what Lenin believed and taught. Sixty-two million dead is, as Stalin (apocryphally) observed, merely a statistic.