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How Do You Kill 11 Million People? Why The Truth Matters More Than You Think (2011)

by Andy Andrews(Favorite Author)

4.07 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

0849948355 (ISBN13: 9780849948350)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Thomas Nelson

review 1: It's hard to imagine that someone can learn so much from a book that takes less than 45-minutes to read, but that is how I felt after reading this book. In that short span, the author analyzes America's political climate today, how polarized it has become, and asks not only how we got here, but what will be the consequences?"The past is what is real and true, while history is merely what someone recorded." So much of what we believe today, and believe in many cases with a near-religious fervor, is simply false. Yet we believe them because we have been told these things since our youth, and it never occurred to us to verify these things for ourselves.The title of the book is a reference to the number of institutionalized (non-military) killings committed by Hitler's Nazi re... moregime but, as the author notes, we could easily have used other numbers (3 million killed in Cambodia by its government, 62 million dead in the former Soviet Union between 1917-1987 by the government's own count, and tens of millions more dead in North Korea, Mexico, Pakistan, and Communist China).How did more than 100 million deaths occur over the course of the 20th century by a relatively few number of evil people and those that followed them? Why did millions of Jews meekly load their families into rail cars to be transported to their deaths in the gas chambers of Auschwitz and the like? Why did they not fight back? They were guarded by a relative handful of Nazi soldiers!How do you kill 11 million people? You lie to them.In the case of the Jews, Adolf Eichmann, the man charged by Hitler with implementing "The Final Solution", he started by surrounding Jewish neighborhoods with barbed wire fences, and then met with Jewish leaders and assured them that it was a necessity of war, and that those inside the fence would not be harmed. The Nazis then accepted bribes from the Jews in exchange for promises of better living conditions (why would they take bribes if they were not going to follow through?). Eichmann would then come to them and claim that the Russians were advancing on their position, and exhort them to load themselves into the rail-cars where they would be transported to safety with their families. When announcing this, Eichmann would have fewer than thirty armed soldiers with him, which convinced the Jews of his good intentions. After all, if he truly meant them harm, would he not have brought more soldiers with him?And so they packed their families into the rail-cars, which were then padlocked, and not opened again until the Jews were inside the gates of a concentration camp, and their fate was sealed.During his rise to power, Hitler would tailor his speeches to what he knew the audience wanted to hear...to farmers he would promise to protect food prices, and to the poor and middle class he talked about redistribution of wealth, and "attacked the high profits generated by business owners." To business owners he promised to protect them from trade unions?Sound familiar?Hitler once mused that it was "fortunate for leaders that men do not think. Make the lie big, keep it simple, keep saying it, and eventually they will believe it."The peak of the Nazi Party's power in 1945 still only saw 10% of the German people as party members. The rest, with few exceptions, were so stunned by the scope of the atrocities surrounding them that they engaged in a willful self-deception in order to cope with the horror of what they had become a part of. And it wasn't just the Jews that were rounded up and killed. It was gypsies, Catholics, Christians, trade unionists, Freemasons, homosexuals, and others. By that time it was too late to stop them.Understanding and telling the truth alone will not fix the problems in America today. But it is the starting point from which all true reform will flow.While not yet at an existential level as was faced in Nazi Germany, we today face problems that nonetheless causing misery for millions of Americans, and that level of misery will only rise without direct action to reverse our path and return to freedom.Even when we inhabit opposite sides of an issue, we must at the very least be willing to acknowledge truth and start from there.Since the Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade in 1973, more than 55 million unborn children have been slaughtered in the womb in America. Say what you will about "reproductive freedom" and a "woman's right to choose", the fact is that abortion may be legal, but it is certainly not safe nor rare. And by the pro-abortionists own research, less than 6% of all abortions are performed for reasons of rape, incest, or a danger to the life of the mother. Let us be honest about WHY one side demands abortion without restrictions, and then base our policy on the facts.We are watching our energy costs skyrocket because of policies ostensibly enacted to combat "global warming", despite the fact that the Earth has been in a two decade long cooling cycle. Let's be honest about the pros and cons of fossil fuel energy versus "green" energy, and make decisions accordingly.Entitlements now make up the vast majority of all federal spending, and are quickly driving us into bankruptcy as these programs become insolvent and approach the point where the promises it was sold on can no longer be kept. We need to have an honest discussion of what we can afford and how we can best help people achieve independence.Today we have a national debt of nearly $18 TRILLION dollars, a sluggish economy, high unemployment, a record number of Americans on food stamps, a drastic decline in median income, skyrocketing health care costs, bankrupting entitlements, a flood of illegal aliens pouring over our border unchecked, an education system that is failing our children, and chaos around the world.A free people, to remain free, MUST acknowledge the truth, no matter how painful, if they are to solve the problems facing them.Politicians lie. Their primary goal is to get elected and re-elected, and they know that their best chance of achieving that is to tell us what we want to hear. That's how we end up with talk of a "Social Security lock box" that is actually empty, or claims that we can add 30-40 million more people to insurance rolls, give them more coverage, and somehow "bend the cost curve down". That's how we end up being told that we had to abandon free market principles in order to save the free market, or any other number of lies told to keep us ignorant and docile.In the United States we have a tendency to believe that because we have been free for so long that we will always be free, regardless of whether we jealously defend that freedom. Such is not the case. The forces of tyranny will never cease their efforts to erode freedom, bit by bit, until it is gone.We can't fathom that America could ever see the horrors that Nazi Germany saw, but is that true? We now live in an America where the president has "a phone and a pen" and openly declares he will do what he wants, with or without the approval of Congress. We have a government that spies on us, recording every bit and byte of our digital communications, a government that spies on the press (which is easy, since the press is now too often in bed with government), a government that uses the IRS to harass and intimidate political opponents, a government that strips us of our property rights through environmental regulations, and a president that argued he has the authority to kill Americans suspected of terrorism without due process. The list goes on and on.We are fools if we think that it can't happen to us. We are fools to trust our "leaders" implicitly. We are fools to fall for political promises that are not followed up with action.How do you kill 11 million people? You lie to them.
review 2: Andy tries his hand at both history and political science, but fails to treat either with any rigour. His historical argument: Hitler's lying was responsible for the holocaust. His political argument: If Americans elect scrupulously honest leaders they are destined for glory; otherwise they are doomed. The lack of substance could have been partly redeemed with wit or charm, but he writes with a time of self righteous condescension. less

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