Hey America!

Americans!

Cast your minds back, if you will, to the 1920s and 1930s. In a country called Germany at that time there was a man called Adolf Hitler, and he made all sorts of promises that Germany would be great again. He said that the country’s problems were the fault of traitors inside Germany, horrible foreigners outside it, and particularly some people called “Jews”. Herr Hitler said that these were the most horrible of the lot and that they shouldn’t even be allowed inside the country.

“Don’t worry, Germans,” said Herr Hitler, “I will sort everything out and make sure that all is OK again: just leave it to me!”

A lot of people liked the promises Herr Hitler made. They were all about having more jobs and being able to defend the country and so on. And because times were hard and they were angry and scared and felt hard done by, a lot of them thought, “I know, let’s give him a chance! He can’t be worse than the current lot, and at least he speaks his mind, and he's promised to defeat all the horrible people who have been so nasty to us – and to make our wonderful country great again like we all know it should be!”

So Herr Hitler became very popular with many people in Germany, and as things got worse and worse they started to vote for him in large numbers. Then things got really bad, and everyone was arguing and shouting and fighting each other and even killing each other quite a lot, and Herr Hitler’s political party, which was called the Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (or "Nazis", because it was a very long name to remember) became the largest party in Germany’s parliament. But it still didn’t have a majority of the seats, so this meant all sorts of problems and the government just couldn’t function.

So one day some crafty German politicians said, “Why don’t we make Herr Hitler leader! Then he will bring all his supporters’ votes with him and we will at last have a government that works. But we are craftier than him, so we will only give him the leadership and a couple of ministers, and the government will really be controlled by us.”

And that’s what they did. But within a year Herr Hitler, who was not quite as nice a man as many people thought he was, had taken complete control of the country and had put his enemies in prison – or even had them killed! He made everyone in Germany do what exactly what he said, including the police and the judges and teachers and even people who wrote books and painted pictures and things like that!

Now that Herr Hitler ruled Germany, he kept many of his promises, but he also had ideas of his own that he hadn’t been so honest about.

Unfortunately this meant lots of invasions and fighting and wars and death and misery and destruction all over the world. In the end, after millions and millions of deaths, Germany and several other countries were almost completely destroyed and Herr Hitler killed himself. It took the whole World ages to put things back together again, and it nearly didn’t manage it.

Of course, Herr Hitler lived in the middle of Europe. The same piece of land reaches halfway round the world to both the east and south, and this is where a lot of Herr Hitler’s wars were fought. Far across the ocean to the west, the continents of America were safe from Germany at that time. The USA had big problems of its own but a more genuinely nice man called Mr Roosevelt, who was President, didn’t tell Americans that they could only survive by hating people and taking their anger out on them.

Instead, Mr Roosevelt tried to put the country back together again by pulling together, and what’s more he helped the Europeans and Asians fight people like Herr Hitler and his friends the leaders of Japan, who were also not very nice. Many people, especially in Europe, think that this was a fine thing to do and is one of the things that make America a great country.

Anyway, this story is meant to make people think carefully about politicians who make huge promises, don’t worry about the detail or leave it to later, tell us that we should be scared of other people, and say that everything will be OK if we put all our trust in them so they can take all the anger away from us and turn it on our enemies. They might not be quite as bad as Herr Hitler – though it’s always hard to tell before they get power, isn’t it? But then again, the world is a much smaller place than it was in the 1930s, and a few big mistakes could lead to terrible consequences just like back then.

The funny thing is that a majority of the German people never actually voted for the Nazis. Wouldn’t it be embarrassing – or perhaps even worse – if someone in America made the same kinds of promises as Herr Hitler, and raised the same kind of anger, and then a majority of Americans did!