Adolph Hitler began recruiting his “Hitler Youth” about the time I was born in 1926. He organized the children because he saw in them the future – if he got to them as the Catholic Church claimed, “Just give us these children until the age of four or five and we will have them for life”. He did not copy the Church in giving children faith and loyalty. He gave boys’ military training and unquestioning follower-ship and girls the perfect role for womanhood, working for their men and their country.
Daughter Karenne gave us this book and I read it in little more than a day. It is a Scholastic production written by Susan Campbell Bartoletti and is a scholarly and well written work recapitulating the history of the period of Hitler’s rise to power. It should be in all school libraries for it gives an unvarnished look into the minds of the youth who followed Hitler blindly. While reading I thought about the obvious quest of groups to claim the souls of children when they are too young to think for themselves and then to use them in the battle for control of policies, programs, politics and countries as well as religious beliefs.
Right now, we see the battleground between the left and right in America and the adulation of Mr. Ford in his attempt to define the middle ground between excesses at either end of the political spectrum. Liberalism need not be the opposite of Conservatism. What we find however is, adding into the mix the power of belief of the evangelicals, who want very badly to control the behavior of the people of this country – and perhaps, the world.
It starts early and in school. The power of America lay in its public schools where there was no ideology practiced except for commonly held ideas that democracy was good and going out to vote your conscience, not how you were sold on platitudes which sounded good. You were taught HOW to think not WHAT to think. This has been a constant struggle since the idea of a free, universal and compulsory education system was imagined and brought into being first in America.
Look at the other side of the world where our soldiers should not be laying down their lives. There are other examples where religious fanaticism drives people a lot like us to kill each other over partisan religious beliefs. These are fostered by Mullahs and schools where adherence to a 1400 year old Quran is the sole text needed to get on with life. Yet, Shiites and Sunnis murder each other over differences between claimants wishing to be the heirs of Muhammad.
Mr. Hitler and Mr. Hussein and other dictators try to get our young and train them up to be the cannon fodder for the their wars to rule the world.