RODNEY HIDE: Should You Have Killed Hitler?

Here’s a simple question. If you had known what was coming, and you had the chance, should you have killed Hitler?

Most people, after a moment’s honesty, answer yes. The industrial murder of six million Jews, the war that killed tens of millions more, the deliberate machinery of extermination — once you know the scale, the moral arithmetic changes. Pre-emptive violence against that particular evil becomes thinkable.

Now watch how the contemporary Left uses exactly this logic.

Last week in Parliament, Green MP Steve Abel reached for Adolf Eichmann and Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil.” He told the House that today’s corporate bosses and “complicit politicians” are a truer form of that evil than Eichmann himself. Why? Because, in Abel’s words, “though they will never personally come so close, as Eichmann did, to transporting human souls to the gas chambers, collectively their actions are far more consequential. They are gassing our whole planet towards an inconceivable human and animal death.”

Read that carefully. Business leaders and elected MPs who decline to deindustrialise on the Greens’ timetable are not merely wrong. They are worse than the organisers of the Holocaust. Their ordinary commercial and political decisions are framed as the functional equivalent of the gas chambers, only on a larger scale. Millions of future deaths are asserted as certain. The chain of causation is presented as unbroken and obvious.

Once you accept that framing, the Hitler question stops being hypothetical. If your opponents are literally engaged in a form of mass killing more consequential than Eichmann’s, then the moral permission structure for extreme measures is already in place. You are no longer dealing with democratic disagreement. You are dealing with existential evil that must be stopped.

Abel will of course insist he is a peace-loving Green. He will say he is merely “speaking truth to power.” The same people who chant “from the river to the sea” and casually label this government Nazi will claim they reject violence. Yet the language does the preparatory work. It collapses the distinction between policy error and genocide. It trains supporters to see ordinary democratic opponents as agents of mass death. History shows what follows when that mental step is taken and repeated.

This is not an accident of overheated rhetoric. It is a pattern. Climate non-compliance is genocide. Immigration enforcement is fascism. Disagreement on sex and gender is existential erasure. Each time, the opponent is placed in the Hitler box. And once someone is in the Hitler box, the old restraining question — “are we still talking about politics?” — loses its force.

Thomas Sowell observed long ago that the most dangerous people are those who believe their cause is so righteous that ordinary moral limits no longer apply. Abel’s speech is a textbook illustration. He has told Parliament that the people sitting opposite him, and the business leaders outside, are engaged in something worse than the Holocaust. He means it. His supporters hear it. The ground is prepared.

Political violence does not begin with the first thrown punch or the first shot. It begins when a critical mass of people are taught that their opponents are not merely mistaken, but evil on a civilisational scale. New Zealand is not immune. The language is already here. There will be political violence. Over and over we are having political leaders declare the Hitler test is met -- and there is no push back or censure. It just needs time. And the spark.

Rodney Hide is a former Minister and ACT leader