David McElroy

What you believe about this picture is determined by what you’ve been told about Adolph Hitler. There are very few people left alive today who can personally tell you their experiences with him, so why are you so sure that you know enough about him to have an opinion about the man?

Almost everybody today knows that Hitler was a monster. That’s what I believe. That’s almost certainly what you believe. We’ve seen all the pictures from concentration camp victims and we’ve heard his hateful rhetoric about Jews. We’ve been told that he was responsible for millions and millions of deaths. So that’s what we believe.

But why did the Germans in the picture above adore the man? Why did they see him as their hero, not as a monster? The difference is that their narrative was very different from the one we’ve been given. Because they believed a different story, they saw him as a hero.

What is a narrative? It’s just a story. When you think about what you believe — about anything — you probably tend to assume that you’ve carefully looked at all the facts and come to a rational decision. The truth, though, is that you know a tiny fraction of the facts regarding anything, even things very close to you.

Keep Reading

I might have found the person who most strongly represents the kind of thinking that leads people to support really bad government action. Cindy Vinson is a San Jose, Calif., woman who calls herself a big supporter of ObamaCare. But after she found out what it’s going to cost her money, she whined about it to a newspaper.

Although she wants other people to have health care, she found out last week that changes brought about by the law mean her policy will cost $1,800 more per year than before.

“I want people to have health care,” Vinson said. “I just didn’t realize I would be the one who was going to pay for it personally.”

Seriously. She said that. It’s not satire.

And that is the idiocy and the hypocrisy of supporters of these “social programs.” People such as Vinson are happy to vote for benefits for certain people — as long as they can demand that other people pay for their “generosity.”

This is the core moral problem with the system we have today. People can consider themselves kind-hearted and generous, but demand that “the rich” pay for what they want other people to have.

Keep Reading

I grew up believing that war was glorious. I read a lot of history and loved what I read. It was about strategy and bravery. It was about men taking risks to do great things for great causes.

For part of my childhood, the Vietnam war was also raging, but I was too wrapped up in my patriotic “war is glorious” narrative to look at the evidence that was becoming available. As a little boy, I cared about the United States winning that war and “stopping communism.” If some people had to die along the way, that was just a price to be paid to achieve a necessary victory.

I didn’t know anything about 9-year-old Kim Phuc Phan Thi, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me if I had. I was sure that the cause of national greatness was more important than the lives of any individuals. In 1972, Kim was a victim of a napalm attack in Vietnam by U.S.-trained and equipped South Vietnamese aircraft.

The pilot saw some people coming out of a temple and he assumed they were North Vietnamese or Viet Cong soldiers and he dropped this terrible chemical on them. Instead, he killed and maimed innocent people, including Kim. She’s the naked one in the famous photo above, running away with her family after she had stripped off her burning clothes. The use of napalm to drop on human beings was a standard operating procedure for Americans and their South Vietnamese allies.

I’ve been thinking a lot about war recently. We like to think of ourselves as living in an enlightened age, yet we still believe that it’s moral and legal for people from one country to kill masses of people in another country, even if many of those murdered people are completely innocent. That’s nothing short of barbaric.

Keep Reading