According to John, only one more thing remains before Western Europe becomes the peaceful, democratic countries that it mostly is by the twenty-first century.1 Isn’t this a little premature? I mean, he and Joy have only prevented the First World War because their creator doesn’t understand historical events. They still haven’t dealt with all the institutionalized racism and classism rampant in Europe at the time. Britain, Germany and France still have colonies, and for as long as they do, they’re foreign policy will be belligerent.
Admittedly, John also thinks this assessment is premature, but not for the reasons I have given. He thinks this because so far, only Joy and the mob have gotten to directly kill anybody, and now he wants a turn. Even though he had earlier been very vocal about not wanting to kill anybody. Make up your mind, man!
Just like how they did it in Mexico, they hire a detective agency to locate their target. He’s living in an “artistic colony”, whatever that is, in Munich, and is supporting himself by painting landmarks.
There were many ways we could eliminate him. I thought the most direct way involved the least risk and greatest possibility of success. We went into the old apartment building and up the dirty stairs to the second floor. The whole place reeked of alcohol, turpentine, paint, and urine. His apartment, #29, was on the right at the top of the stairs. (page 297)
So they’re just gonna walk into someone’s apartment and murder him? Wouldn’t the neighbors suspect something when two people enter and exit a man’s apartment, and he is discovered to be dead by the next day? I cannot wrap my head around the stupidity of this course of action.
The two of them stake out the apartment for some time, and when Joy says that she wants to kill him, John forcefully objects, and says that he should be the one to do it. So much for being the voice of reason, though I suppose he stopped being so long ago. Which is a shame, because in the hands of a competent writer, John could have actually been decent.
We have one line that actually could have been good, namely, Joy telling John that she’s his backup. Nice sentiment, or at least it would have been if Joy were not a sociopath and the two actually looked out for one another. This book really could have benefitted from a revision.
John is about to knock on his quarry’s door. But while he hesitates, images flash through his mind. Images of the Second World War. Poles dying from German aggression and innocents being sent to the gas chambers. As if Rummel needed any more foreshadowing of who John’s victim is.
He opens the door, and holy crap, it’s the Devil! That is actually how Hitler is described in John’s mind’s eye. It reminds me of a certain Captain Planet episode, where Hitler’s hatred is so intense it counts as pollution.
And if you couldn’t figure it out three paragraphs ago that it was Hitler, then you need to work on your reading comprehension. Rummel tries to keep it a mystery, but it’s completely obvious.
Now, Rummel does have John get the image of a demonic Hitler out of his head, and sees him for the human being he was. However, I do think that portraying him as practically supernatural in his evil diminishes it, as it denies that a human being is capable of such atrocity. And if we think that the Nazis were under some demonic influence, then we are less likely to be able to prevent such horrors from happening in the future. Speaking of which, how will the people of the New Universe learn to spot demagogues and avoid being taken in by them?
Also, I would like to remind people that this book is written with the Literary Agent Hypothesis in mind, the idea being that, in-universe, John is writing down these events years after they occurred. Since (spoiler alert) he kills Hitler, his audience would be inherently unable to comprehend how evil the man was, and so wonder why the satanic imagery was used in the first place. So it fails even then.
Hitler asks John what is going on, in what is probably incorrect German, even keeping his Austrian accent in mind. However, I do not speak German, so I can’t tell. But I don’t think that Rummel would do research on languages when he has gotten them wrong before AND has done sloppy research on his own area of expertise.
John asks a few questions to confirm that the man before him is Hitler, and as soon as Hitler affirms his identity, John shoots him between the eyes. That was anticlimactic. Remember, John is standing in the hallway. Lucky no one was there to see him, right? But that would make things harder for the leads, which to Rummel is anathema.
They enter Hitler’s room, and Joy takes some of his teeth. Even though he just killed a man, John vomits when he finds out what Joy has done. This is not because he just killed somebody; he is actually relieved when the deed is done. He outright says,
I had killed another human being and that night I cried with happiness. (page 299)
Doesn’t the fact that he killed someone without remorse make him just like Hitler? At no point do the characters ever take measures to ensure that they don’t Jump Off the Slippery Slope and become as big a threat to civilized society as the people they are killing. I find this worrying.
And with John’s elation at killing Hitler, the chapter ends.
Footnotes
1 Though something tells me that modern Europe is far too socialistic for Rummel’s liking.
Lone Wolf on 11 June 2013, 12:29 said:
Doesn’t the fact that he killed someone without remorse make him just like Hitler?
Eh, ridiculousness aside, I don’t think so. That point of view only makes sense if you assume that all killing is immoral and worth being remorsed over – something that you don’t need to be Hitler to disagree with.
swenson on 11 June 2013, 13:45 said:
Yet again I’d like to know why, exactly, Hitler is even a threat at this point. Without World War I, without Germany spiralling into horrific inflation, would the Nazi party ever have risen to as great of power? Would Hitler have ever become a Nazi? Would World War II have ever happened?
Of course not. Because all of those things were born out of what came before, and if you change what came before, you change what would have happened after.
Could something like WW2 have happened? Certainly. But not in the same way and probably not with the same people. Pretending it would, well, that’s just silly.
Tim on 11 June 2013, 14:12 said:
“I’ve murdered an unremarkable Austrian painter based on something that won’t happen, which other people did, under the orders of a government which was not solely comprised of him, as revenge for a scheme he didn’t think of or implement and only represents in the popular mindset! Go me!”
Apep on 11 June 2013, 15:37 said:
Well, that was… stupid. I mean, without WWI, Hitler’d have remained a struggling artist, or possibly a renowned Science Fiction author. There’s really no point in killing him now.
Rummel didn’t think this plot through at all.
Brendan Rizzo on 11 June 2013, 18:18 said:
I concede this, but I also pointed out that right now it’s John and Joy who have all this power to kill people, yet they don’t really have a contingency for what might happen if they get corrupted… Well, that’s not entirely correct. John does have a contingency plan, at the end of the book as you will see, but it’s really facepalm-inducing.
Pryotra on 11 June 2013, 18:55 said:
That was the best episode of that series. In a bizarre way.
So…yeah. That was kind of anti-climatic, and doesn’t seem to understand how the effects that they’ve made in the timeline would make it so that Hilter wouldn’t have necessarily gained power or even gotten some of his little ideas. For all you know, this Hilter might have ended up being a completely different person.
I’m waiting.
goldedge on 11 June 2013, 21:16 said:
he also had that Fu Manchu Pryotra.
Tim on 12 June 2013, 18:45 said:
As an additional note, nothing here is going to stop any of the civil wars and genocides in Africa since those happened primarily as a result of abitrary, impossible to defend borders created by people drawing lines on maps in Europe. Short of causing a massive series of wars between the central powers over their African holdings that would lead to the borders actually becoming somewhat realistic, there’s no real way to prevent that at this stage.
swenson on 12 June 2013, 22:16 said:
Don’t be silly, Tim. Western Europeans could never be guilty of horrific genocides or obscene violations of human rights. They’re democracies, remember? And democracies could never ever ever do anything evil.
Lone Wolf on 13 June 2013, 06:38 said:
Which brings us to the question of whether a democratic nation that possesses colonies whose population doesn’t have the same political participation rights as the inhabitants of the metropoly is actually a quasi-dictatorship.
Epke on 13 June 2013, 07:42 said:
… What? Why did she do that? That’s sick! Does she keep a box of teeth in her bedside drawer too?
Joy’s rubbing off on him.
Brendan Rizzo on 13 June 2013, 07:59 said:
Rummel at least tries to address this problem… in the second book, which doesn’t mean anything since all later books in the series take place in alternate universes. His way of solving the problem would never work anyway. But I’ll discuss that when the time comes.
Asahel on 13 June 2013, 11:05 said:
The only reason (aside from sadism) that I can think of to remove someone’s teeth after killing them is to prevent them from being identified via dental records. It doesn’t seem like identifying the body would be an issue in this case, so… yeah, I don’t know.
Maxie on 14 June 2013, 01:39 said:
Yeah, I don’t think it’ll be an issue here either. They killed him in his apartment.
I’m actually surprised by how incompetent this book is. He spends the first 2/3rds of it on pointless filler and the last third on the sloppiest historical revisionism I have ever seen. He seems to believe that liberal democratic government is the natural state of all of society, and it’s only the presence of literally one or two people — “bad apples” — that causes it to be anything else. All you have to do is to fix an entire country is kill the one or two people who cause 100% of the problems and everything else will just snap into place.
Not only is this dumb, it’s boring. There’s no suspense, no drama.
Tim on 15 June 2013, 08:20 said:
Yeah, I kind of skimmed the later books after that one what-the-fuck-is-wrong-with-you description near the start of 2 that made me wonder if reading it had got me put on some kind of list.
Also it’s kind of hilarious that Rummel never realised that the alternate universe approach means that the protagonists are just moving from a universe where all the genocide happened to one where it didn’t, and in the process saving absolutely nobody. This is always the problem with this approach, you become aware nothing matters because both the good and bad outcomes are happening to someone no matter what.