Killing baby Hitler
Advocates of killing baby Hitler included Florida governor Jeb Bush and film actor Tom Hanks, while comedian Stephen Colbert and pundit Ben Shapiro were counted among the opponents of the policy.
[2] In a 2000 essay on consequentialism, British philosopher James Lenman posited a German bandit in 100 BCE sparing the life of one of Hitler's distant ancestors.
[13] In a psychoanalysis of Hitler's infancy, Austrian psychiatrist Frederick Redlich found that he was "a fairly normal child" and showed few signs of the genocidal intent or dictatorial tendencies that would characterise his adulthood.
[13] In a refutation of the great man theory,[14] it can be argued that killing baby Hitler would not eliminate this cultural environment, which would still result in other people growing up to pursue far-right politics and genocidal policies.
[8] The moral justification for killing baby Hitler usually rests on the question of whether a child can be held responsible for their future actions, before they had yet committed any crimes against humanity.
[17] The question of where the line ends was brought up by American activist Shaun King, who argued that the logic for killing baby Hitler could just as easily be applied to a newborn Christopher Columbus, infant slave-owners or a young Dylann Roof.
[31] Stories of this kind date as far back as World War II itself, with publications in Weird Tales (1941)[32] and Astounding Science Fiction (1942) including the trope.
But in the place of Adolf Hitler, a different and more effective Nazi dictator takes power, defeats the Soviet Union with nuclear weapons, conquers Europe and exterminates the Jewish people.
[39] In order to avoid the "Hitler-murder paradox", some science fiction stories follow the Novikov self-consistency principle, which holds that if time travel is possible, then changing the past cannot meaningfully alter the future.
In the 1977 novella The Primal Solution, an elderly Holocaust survivor travels through time and attempts to kill a young Hitler, but he survives and is set down the path of antisemitism by the experience.
[40] In Juliusz Machulski's 2013 film AmbaSSada, the protagonists get transported back in time and meet Hitler due to a coincidence, only spontaneously deciding to kill him.
[36] During the campaign for the 2016 Republican Party presidential primaries, when the question of killing baby Hitler was posed by journalists of HuffPost to Florida governor Jeb Bush, he responded "Hell Yeah, I Would!".
"[45] American engineer Paul J. Nahin commented that Bush had responded in this way in order to demonstrate "the toughness of his character", while pointing out that the Republican candidate also opposed abortion.
[47] American actor Tom Hanks responded to the political debate by declaring that he would vote for a presidential candidate that supported killing baby Hitler.
[50] In a 2018 interview with The Washington Post, American actor John C. Reilly responded similarly, calling for empathy with baby Hitler as an apolitical alternative.
