“When an opponent declares ‘I will not come over to your side,’ I calmly say, ‘Your child belongs to us already…. What are you? You will pass on. Your descendants, however, now stand in the new camp. In a short time they will know nothing else but this new community.’” (Adolph Hitler, November 6, 1933.) Early the next year the fuehrer clarified his statement. “This new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.” Few at that time could have imagined how literally the new supreme leader of Germany meant to be taken. By the time World War II had broken out virtually the whole of German youth from the earliest ages had been conscripted into a vast paramilitary indoctrination system that had little to do with academics and everything to do with molding loyal Aryan Nazis for service to the Reich.

“I’m not going to let parents come into schools and actually take books out and make their own decisions. I don’t think parents should be telling schools what they should teach.” – Terry McAuliffe, former Virginia Governor and this year’s unsuccessful Democrat candidate for Governor of Virginia, July 23, 2021.

McAuliffe was backed by Nikole Hannah-Jones, creator of the “1619 Project,” a “woke” journalistic venture which in collaboration with the New York Times is promoting the canard, now widely taught in our schools, that America’s actual founding took place not in 1776, as once thought, but instead upon the arrival of the first African slaves in the British colony of Virginia. That event—and it should be noted that those Africans were treated as indentured servants and eventually freed—took place 100 years before George Washington was born. “I don’t really understand this idea that parents should decide what’s being taught…” Hannah-Jones opined. “I think we should leave that to the educators.” But then, somewhat incongruously, she admitted, “I’m not a professional educator.” Candidate McAuliffe lost the Virginia governor’s race, Hannah-Jones maintains, because of “the success of a right-wing propaganda campaign that told white parents that they needed to fight against their children being indoctrinated as race—as being called racists.” (Daily Mail, December 26, 2021.) Imagine that!

In previous articles I have attempted to show how the Nazi propaganda apparatus was able to thoroughly brainwash the vast majority of the German people. If the explanations I offered were incomplete, it is because they lacked foundation. The Nazi educational system was that foundation. Before young Germans ever read a newspaper or listened to a radio broadcast they had already been thoroughly imbued with the morbid intricacies of Nazi dogma. If, as I have argued, the German people became “woke” in our current political sense it was because the seeds of their wokeness were planted in the nursery, composted in racial hatred, and pruned in hot houses of the National Socialist educational system.

It all started when a mediocre albeit doctrinaire Nazi by the name of Bernhard Rust was elevated from disgraced former schoolmaster to Reich Minister of Science, Art and Education. As Hitler was nailing his thesis on German youth to the door of the academy, Dr. Rust was able to boast that he had already in that same year (1933) “liquidated the school as an institution of intellectual acrobatics.” What Rust meant, in lay terms, was that he had converted the once esteemed German educational system from a sanctuary where facts meet reason into a vast mind control camp.

The first step in this retrograde maneuver was to replace the text books and curricula. (I wonder if the German parents were aware of this. If they objected, were they labelled “terrorists” as some of our parents recently have been?) Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” was adopted to become what the Nazi teacher’s manual called “our infallible pedagogical guiding star.” This meant in practice that party loyalty was to replace academic competency in schools across the land, that only faithful Nazis could be teachers, and that even they would have to receive extensive training in “National Socialist Principles.” Foremost of those principles was Hitler’s racial doctrine which can be summed up as “Critical Race Theory as applied to Jews, Gypsies and Slavs.”

All teachers were required to join the National Socialist Teachers’ League, which was responsible for “the execution of the ideological and political coordination of all teachers in accordance with the National Socialist Doctrine.” All teachers swore an oath of allegiance to Adolph Hitler personally, and were ultimately required to be members of one or another of the myriad Nazi service organizations. Needless to say, Jews, since they were regarded as genetically inferior and fundamentally evil, were not allowed to teach. Candidates for professorial positions were sent to special “observation camps” where they were even more closely scrutinized for ethnic and ideological purity. Local control of schools was dispensed with by edict, and all educational functions, such as they were, were consolidated under the Reich Ministry of Education.

As doctrine eclipsed critical thinking, academic standards collapsed. Virtually all subject matter was racialized. History was strategically revised to support a narrative of the Aryan as an ubermensch. The hard sciences were replaced by Rassenkunde (“racial science”) through which prism Jews were identified as the source of virtually every evil. “German mathematics” was introduced—a kind of racialized “new math.” (Come to think of it, even our own math is now racialized.) Physics as we know it was abandoned in favor of “German Physics” because, as the head of the Institute of Physics put it, “Modern physics is an instrument of Jewry for the destruction of Nordic Science…. True physics is a creation of the German Spirit.” How can that be, you may ask? Well because, as Professor Philipp Lenard of Heidelberg University put it, “In reality, science, like every other human product, is racial and conditioned by blood.”

Some 3,000 educators were dismissed for failure to meet racial or ideological standards. Not surprisingly, many of the best teachers fled, often taking refuge in America. Among these was Albert Einstein, who had been identified in a book entitled “Jewry and Science,” as the prime mover of an organized Jewish plot to pollute science in order to destroy Western Civilization. Einstein’s theory of relativity, the book’s author argued, was a device to promote “Jewish world rule which was to force down German manhood irrevocably and eternally to the level of the lifeless slave.” As nonsensical as this may sound—and it is hardly more ridiculous than some race and gender doctrines being taught in our own schools today—the vast number of German academics endorsed it with alarming enthusiasm.

One cost of all this was a predictable brain drain in Nazi Germany. Both university enrollment and academic achievement levels dropped so precipitously that, ironically, even war production and the national defense were compromised. Enrollment in technological institutes fell by more than half. There was a shortage of chemists and engineers, and the available graduates were substandard.

But Hitler was not disturbed by this, because by then his Hitler Youth was growing exponentially under the supervision of former Brown Shirt and street brawler Baldur von Schirach, whom he had appointed Youth Leader of the German Reich. Schirach led BLM/Antifa style assaults on the headquarters of various other youth organizations, sending their leadership scrambling for cover and incorporating their stunned members into the Hitler Youth. He then seized the national network of youth hostels. In July of 1936 Hitler issued a decree outlawing all non-Nazi youth organizations. “…All of the German youth in the Reich is organized within the Hitler Youth. The German youth…shall be educated physically, intellectually and morally in the spirit of National Socialism…through the Hitler Youth.”

In keeping with that decree, both boys and girls were effectively drafted into the Hitler Youth complex. Though parents occasionally objected, they were predictably persuaded to see the advantages of government education. Boys from six to ten served as Pimpfs, or apprentices, after which they graduated to the Jungvolk. From fourteen to eighteen they served in the Hitler Youth proper, after which they were promoted into the Labor Service and eventually the army. Activities consisted in physical conditioning, the study of Nazi ideology, and military training. Until the day they died, often as not on the frozen steppe of Russia, many of these young men had not lived a single hour outside the bubble of orthodox Nazi thought.

From the ages of ten to fourteen German girls trained as Jungmaedel (young maidens). At fifteen they graduated to the League of German Maidens, after which many went into a farm labor corps during which service they were housed with local families or set up in camps near the male quarters. Other girls spent a year providing domestic services in the cities. Unwanted pregnancies were as common as such duties might suggest, but that was not regarded as a problem. In William Shirer’s words, “I listened to the women leaders...lecture their young charges on the moral and patriotic duty of bearing children for Hitler’s Reich—within wedlock if possible, but without if necessary.”

By 1939 the Hitler youth counted nearly eight million, and in March of that year universal youth conscription was implemented as a component of the military draft. No religious exemptions! Parents who resisted faced stiff penalties and saw their children placed in orphanages. At this point there remained yet another three tiered ladder of elite indoctrination for German youth, with those elevated to the highest rung destined for prized Nazi Party leadership positions. But then came the war, during which a reported 4.3 million of these young people generously gave their lives for the Reich.

When I was a young man I saw Germans from that era chastised for having participated in the Hitler Youth, and I myself was perplexed by their decision to join. How was I to know that every young German of that era had been forced to participate in one or another of the Hitler Youth organizations? How are we Americans, who dare not resolutely oppose even the mandated and nonsensical covid vaccination of our children, to understand the pressures those young people and their families were subjected to? (According to US News and World Report, August 18, CDC director Rochelle Walensky has now acknowledged that the data shows “the vaccines may not prevent infection” and that there is “an increased risk of severe disease among those vaccinated early.”) How can any of us, having lived until recently with at least some semblance of a free press, presume to judge those who with no alternative media to fall back on were rigorously indoctrinated in falsehoods on a daily basis practically from the moment they were weaned?

We Americans are routinely encouraged by our government-media complex to accept palpable falsehoods. The other night Tucker Carlson offered a short list: Masks will keep you safe; the vaccine will protect you from covid (but the unvaccinated are a threat to the vaccinated); the Ukraine is essential to our national security; Rachel Levine is an admiral… The list went on, but here I should like to insert that Rachel Levine is a so-called transgender doctor who specialized in eating disorders and as Pennsylvania Secretary of Health needlessly forced nursing homes to accept active covid patients. By the summer of 2020 an astonishing 70% of all covid deaths in that state were in nursing homes. Nevertheless, Levine was promoted to become our first four star admiral even though he has never stood over a single body of water larger than his toilet. (I will not participate in the lie that a man becomes a woman by asserting such a claim, even to the extent of using a perversely inaccurate personal pronoun.)

I could easily come up with my own list of preposterous official pronouncements and slogans. Off the top of my head: Islam is a religion of peace; Trump kept kids in cages; our diversity is our strength; the recent Waukesha massacre was not a hate crime or a terrorist act; while Trump’s covid ban against certain middle eastern countries was Islamophobic, Biden’s similar ban against six black African countries is not racist; a biological man currently competing on the Penn women’s swim team, where he has smashed a fistful of Olympic and world records, does not enjoy an unfair advantage; Kyle Rittenhouse murdered three unarmed black men with a gun illegally transported across state lines; Trump colluded with the Russians to steal an election; all Americans need to be vaccinated, but the ceaseless and un-vetted million man march from San Salvador to Laredo poses no covid threat; Ivermectin is a horse medicine promoted by Trump as a covid treatment; Biden left no Americans behind in Afghanistan, and his abandoning of $85 billion of high-tech military equipment to the Taliban was a “planned withdrawal;” Jussie Smollett is a hero who…. Never mind! We all know that one.

The power of manufactured mass delusion cannot be overstated. The Salem witch trials would not have been possible without it, nor that terror wing of the Democrat Party known as the Ku Klux Klan. Likewise, the prosecution and year-long detention of American citizens, placed by our Federal Government in solitary confinement without trial for trespassing in their own capitol in a so-called “revolution” would not have been possible. That revolution, by the way, resulted in only one person killed—an unarmed female veteran unjustifiably shot by capitol police.

In Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” Petruchio gaslights his obstreperous bride Katherina into becoming docile and compliant by subjecting her to a series of petty psychological torments. The “shrew’s” final capitulation is epigraphically distilled in a dispute over the sun, which Petruchio has insisted is really the moon. Katherina eventually agrees that the sun is the moon, whereupon her husband perversely reverses himself. “You lie. It is the blessed sun,” he tells her. “Then God be blessed,” she replies, “it is the blessed sun. But sun it is not when you say it is not, and the moon changes even as your mind.” George Orwell could not have said it better. Winston, his main character in “1984,” finally breaks under torture and confesses that two plus two equals five – or three, or even four depending on the whim of Big Brother. And just as the shrew Katherina has counter-intuitively come to love her tyrannous husband, so Winston comes to love Big Brother.

Will we come to love our tyrant state? As has been said many times, life can be stranger than fiction. It would be a mistake to think that false beliefs cannot change reality. They may not alter the immediate facts, but they can profoundly impact the future reality. Had the German people not come to accept Hitler’s doctrine that Jews are both genetically inferior and inherently evil, the Holocaust would never have been possible.

But the Germans of a century ago were predisposed to that myth, because in point of fact this anti-Semitic socialist doctrine was inherited from Martin Luther, who burned with a religious loathing for the Jews. Luther urged Germans to “set fire to their synagogues or schools and bury and cover with dirt whatever will not burn.” He went on, recommending that “their houses also be raised and destroyed.., their prayer books and Talmudic writings be taken from them..,” and that “rabbis be forbidden to teach henceforth on pain of loss of life and limb.” (Martin Luther, “On the Jews and Their Lies, 1543.)

This malevolent theme was taken up again a century before the rise of Hitler by fellow German Karl Marx, whose 1843 “On the Jewish Question” proposed a “scientific resolving” of the matter in terms so derogatory toward the chosen people as to leave little doubt about what he was insinuating. “In the final analysis, Marx wrote, the solution of “the Jewish question is…the emancipation of mankind from Judaism.”

Ideas have consequences. By persuading his people to accept this demented racial myth and participate in increasingly dehumanizing measures against the Jews, Hitler induced them to implicate themselves in his Final Solution. Even by their silence the German people became Hitler’s accomplices. Under Critical Race Theory as is now being taught in many of our own schools, what is the future of white people in America, now for the first time a minority?

As Lord Acton so famously noted, “absolute power corrupts absolutely.” What power could be more absolute than that of a military style indoctrination program for children backed by the authority of an all-powerful state? My point is not to defend those who conformed with the Nazi propaganda. They have long since faced a more competent judge than myself. What I am trying to emphasize here is how very dangerous it is to turn the children of the nation over to a government run educational system. More prescient Americans have already come to realize at least some of the dangers in this, as they watch their sons and daughters decline in academic performance while regurgitating idiotic race and gender theories and sniveling at the thought that some “bully” might contradict them.

But who will dare to contradict the established orthodoxy? As has been shown, it can get much worse! How will today’s young people resist the lies with which their souls are even now being branded? I have watched our nation’s sexual morality roll back phase by phase since the 1960’s, when “sex ed” was first introduced. To support traditional marriage as Barack Obama did only a few years ago today makes one a “hater.” And yet no single issue ever seems pressing enough to require a stand. No hill is ever important enough to die on. Is it my imagination, or do I even now see the leering eye of state sanctioned pedophilia covetously ogling our children? What would be the harm in dropping the age of consent by just one year? Or two? After all, children should be free to make their own choices. And what right have we to stand in the way of man-boy love? “Sex before eight or else it’s too late!” That’s what NAMBLA (North American Man/Boy Love Association) has been demanding. Would anyone even object?

Martin Luther King Jr. taught that we should judge people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. I sometimes wonder why those who inherited the more just society Dr. King helped to create have not yet torn down his statue, since they openly renounce everything he stood for. But then what is character when no moral absolutes remain? King believed that all lives matter, as do I. But from the jeering crowd I hear a familiar chant. It is the ghost of our children future. Do you hear what they are shouting? Crucify him!

Note: All quotations, other than as noted, are taken from William Shirer, “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich,” pp. 248-256.