When the Hitler-Youth Woke Up, They Found They Were Not Only Being Mesmerized, But They Were Also Being Starved to Death

Apparently one of the latest crazes is a song-and-dance piece being spread via TikTok called “They’re eating the dogs, they’re eating the cats”. Probably one of the main reasons this seems to resonate so well with today’s youth is the very bleak outlook today’s younger folks have on life (which I attempted to describe a little in last week’s post — see “Voiding and Avoiding the Void”).

During Hitler’s reign (i.e., Nazi Germany), there was a program called “Hitler Youth”, in which the next generation were “taught” all sorts of things, including propaganda. [1]

The Hitler-Youth youth was by no means overweight couch-potatoes. These children were being trained day in and day out to become active participants for Hitler’s cause. There was a regular regimen of group activities, to promote not only physical fitness but also group cohesion. Some such kids were so mesmerized by the Nazi propaganda that they would report their own parents to the authorities — who would then pick up the parents and send them off to concentration camps.

At the same time there was increasingly severe rationing. The entire population was increasingly being starved in order to support the troops — the troops, after all, were the ones putting their lives on the line to support the fatherland. Most of us know how this story ends. The soldiers were dying and being replaced with new soldiers. The new soldiers were becoming younger and younger, and in the very end even pre-pubescent children were sent off to fight in the war. Post-war Germany was peculiarly characterized by the lack of an entire generation of men.

What made the propaganda so successful (from Hitler’s point of view) was that it was a repetitive program ritualized day by day over the long haul. Luckily, the long haul only lasted a little more than a decade. Who knows what kind of world we might be living in today, had it lasted very much longer.

I wonder what happens these days, as children, adolescents and young adults grow up typing words into a search engine that spits out answers like there is no tomorrow. Last week (see “Voiding and Avoiding the Void“), I alluded to the extremely odd result which was given by a so-called “leading” search engine a few years ago during the CoViD pandemic — it basically said:

We are noticing you are asking our machine to answer a very strange question. This will now be investigated by our authorities.
Translation of Gobbledygook text (see below)

“This is just a load of crap” [ https://podcasts.video.blog/2022/01/08/this-is-just-a-load-of-crap ]

If this were to happen often, would people stop using the machine? Or would they stop asking questions? Would they accept that this is anything like a normal world?

I have a little thought experiment for you to try at home. Think of a query for your favorite search engine that is so nonsensical and completely ridiculous, that a rational person would not be at all surprized if the machine responded with something like:

Are you a moron? This is simply gobbledygook! Please try again.
If search engines and artificial-intelligence algorithms could recognize Gobbledygook, they ought to show this as a result.

In case you can’t think of such a query [2], I suggest trying “Google-Youth”. [3]