I'll start off with the requisite disclaimers.  Hitler was evil.  Hitler did direct the Holocaust, which was an actual historical event.  Many Jews unfortunately died during the Holocaust.  If Hell exists, Hitler is surely in it.

That having been said, I have some news for everyone: Hitler never killed six million Jews.  I am perfectly serious.  In fact, Hitler probably never killed any Jews, unless he accidentally hit one with his Mercedes.  This might sound dubious after years of government programming that "Hitler killed six million Jews."  But ask yourself, did Hitler personally steal Jews out of their homes and send them to Auschwitz ?  Did Hitler shoot Jews who would not conform to his commands in work camps?  Did Hitler personally pile Jews into gas chambers?    

Some might say that I am merely playing a game of semantics.  Of course Hitler could not have possibly killed six million Jews by himself, but so what?  He was still responsible for their deaths because as head of the state he ordered others to carry out their deaths.

I will go further then.  Not only did Hitler never kill six million Jews, but he was not even directly responsible for their deaths.  That is right.  The conventional wisdom is that Hitler the dictator was the greatest monster ever, and that the world would be a better place if he had never been born.

I am going to set the conventional wisdom straight.  The Nazi pogrom was surely an atrocity, and it is important to discover who was responsible for its execution.  But such a monstrous operation was too large for one man.  When people say, "Hitler killed six million Jews" they are placing the blame entirely on a single individual.  But what of the millions of Germans who actually did pull the trigger on Jews?  What of the millions of Germans who called the Gestapo to report their neighbors?  What of the millions of Germans who used the electoral process to secure themselves a national socialist police state?  The Holocaust indeed resulted from much more than the actions of one man; it was the combined result of millions of people who directly or indirectly used the state to aggress upon, enslave, and kill others.  Hitler was not the root of the problem.  He was merely the symptom of a larger disease inflicting a great many of people.  That disease was statism.

When people say that Hitler killed six million Jews, we are meant to think that if Hitler had never been born, those Jews would have been spared.  There would have been no Holocaust and even no World War II.  However, this is flawed reasoning.  The fact is that the problem was not that Hitler had control of the government, the problem was that there existed a government that had so much control.  If it had not been Hitler, it would have been someone else.  There is no shortage of men who seek to control the lives of others, and wherever there exists an apparatus of coercion and compulsion, those men will naturally be attracted to such positions.

The general thought behind the statement "Hitler killed six million Jews" is that there is nothing illegitimate about state power.  This is the basis of democracy, that ethics and law are not inherent in nature but rather are to be devised by majority rule.  With the democratic mindset, the historian would point to Hitler as a reason why the people must be careful to pick the right leaders.  Perhaps they will say that power corrupts.  But the correct formulation is that power attracts the corrupted.

Many people, especially among academia, treat the government as a proper and pure institution.  The concept of government to them is perfectly fine; it is the way the people guide society.  The task for the people then is to guard against those who would make government impure.  Never does it occur to these professors and pundits that government itself is illegitimate, that it is merely organized crime, its purpose for one group of people to steal from and control the lives of others.

This line of reasoning, that government is a legitimate means for organizing society and that people must only be wary of those who would corrupt it, is seen not just in historical analysis but also in contemporary issues.  The justification for campaign finance reform, for example, is that big businesses corrupt politicians by campaign donations.  Politicians are seen as the guardians of peace and justice, representing the people from their respective districts.  The evil corporate interests stand in the way of what is right though, buying off Congressmen and thus swaying them from the Will of the people.  Well, some corporate interests are evil.  But it is only through the state that they can infringe upon anybody's rights.  The problem, again, is not that the wrong people are in control of power, the problem is that the illegitimate power exists in the first place.

Details of history would surely be different if Hitler never existed.  But so long as the conditions existed that created Hitler, someone else would have stood in as dictator.  The lesson we are supposed to learn from this history is that "we" must never again let someone like Hitler come to power.  But the real lesson is not that we must choose good leaders or even that power corrupts, it is that wherever there exists an institutionalized means of aggression, aggression will be used.  No matter what the ideals are of those who create it or how limited the state seems at first, once the notion is accepted that any aggression is legitimate, there is no boundary on the aggression that can and will be eventually committed.            

November 19, 2002