On Thursday, 25th of September, 1986 The New York Times published the story of a man, one of the most famous men ever to live https://s1.nyt.com/timesmachine/pages/1/1986/06/20/front_page_360W.png?quality=75&auto=webp&disable=upscale
This man was born in Austria on the 20th of April 1889 and started his career as an artist, painting architectural scenes in 1913.
At the age of 24, Hitler wished to do more with his life, he wanted to join the Austrian Army but …. he failed his physical exam in February of 1914.
In august of 1914 when Austria-Hungary and the German Empire entered the First World War, however, Adolf Hitler manipulated his way into the army.
At age 25, Hitler had started building a foundation for World War 2.
He became Germany’s chancellor on 30th, January 1933, and started building concentration camps that would end up killing 3,218,000 Jews just 50 days after he got into power.
Hitler killed another 3 million Jews and other nationals in different other ways and started World War 2 on September 1st, 1939, the war that killed about 75 MILLION PEOPLE
But there’s a part of Hitler’s story that’s not given the attention it deserves……. his childhood.
And that’s what this article is all about.
I want to talk about his childhood and how as much as 61% of us had been abused and billions of lives ruined, even before we know what being humans means.
For those of you who are already angry that someone says divorce should be a crime…….. calm down…… we’ll have a few things to agree on before the end of this article.
Death Before Life
In the year 1995, The America Centers for Disease Control and Prevention started A study about the Adverse Childhood Experiences https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/about.html
About 17,500 people were followed for more than 15 years and this is what the study found; every adult is the manifestation of his childhood…… or at least most of us are.
According to this study, people who experience violence, abuse, or neglect or those who witness violence in the home or community or have a family member attempt or die by suicide may not have a normal adult life.
This study also found that children raised during instability due to parental separation, or DIVORCE could have a rough adulthood https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fviolenceprevention%2Facestudy%2Ffastfact.html
A study by Kristi Williams and Brian Finch of the University of Southern California found that the more trauma women were exposed to as children, the more likely they were to have an early first birth (before age 25) or a first child outside of marriage, which in turn were strongly related to poorer health by around age 40 https://www.prb.org/resources/childhood-trauma-has-lifelong-health-consequences-for-women/
According to the CDC, traumatic childhood could lead to chronic health problems, mental illness, substance use problems and billions of unhappy, miserable, and frustrated humans.
According to data from the 2005 Canadian Community Health Survey, https://www.statcan.gc.ca/eng/survey/household/3226 , experiences of traumatic events in childhood can have long-term consequences, even for health in adulthood.
For example, this 2015 study found that 75.6% of the chronically depressed adults reported having gone through traumatic experiences in their childhood https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4677006/
While this study found that 21 MILLION depression cases in the United States can be traced to childhood trauma https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/fastfact.html?CDC_AA_refVal=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.cdc.gov%2Fviolenceprevention%2Facestudy%2Ffastfact.html
Another study found that 1.9 MILLION cases of heart disease in the United States can be traced to childhood trauma.
Other studies have found that diabetes, cancer, and mental illness in adulthood can have a relationship with childhood trauma.
Now think about that.
The lives of billions of people all over the world have been ruined, just because we don’t talk enough about the importance of the first 17 years of life or come up with legislation to protect children.
The simple truth about our life as adults is that it has been determined long before we have control over it and this makes me emotional.
I mean, I was born in Nigeria by this poor woman about 35 years ago; https://photos.google.com/u/1/search/_cAF1QipPcY2XFhwIkMJ8tQEz2kp9yUaPXaIOu4-0_/photo/AF1QipNczONG7XQh3ptoYjjzrM7UVee4fSydvuDvbDGS
Yes, we lived in poverty and I had a disease which I’ll tell you about in the future.
But for every one thing I lacked physically, I got 10 back emotionally.
My mother is the best human God ever created.
She raised me with love and made me believe in myself.
She cherished me and told me that I’m important.
As a child, I always thought about myself as a worthy, strong, and important being because that’s what my mother made me believe.
My mother would carry me on her lap and tell me how beautiful I was (even though my mates at school told me that I was ugly).
All my first decade, my mother lied to me that I was a genius and I believed that lie until I became a genius.
At the age of 17, I walked around with unbelievable confidence.
I believed in myself, dreamed big, and dared those dreams with healthy self-esteem.
Today at 35 with two children, I have no choice but to pass on the love and kindness my mother raised me with.
Not only is it that I have to raise my kids with the similar love I was raised in, but I also have no strength to hurt other humans, except, of course, if you punch me in the face.
I’ve been told by people that I’m weak and gentle but it’s probably called empathy and love and that’s simply because I was lucky to have parents who gave me positive childhood experiences.
This guy wasn’t lucky https://historiek.net/wp-content/uploads-phistor1/2015/04/a62p8snm6gcg-e1429192356276.jpg
He was raised by this demon-looking man; https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e8/Alois_Hitler_in_his_last_years.jpg
Alois Hitler gave Adolf a dreadful childhood.
In his 1983 book, ”For Your Good,” the Swiss psychoanalyst Alice Miller, wrote about how Alois Hitler destroyed the childhood of his son.
At the same time, Hitler’s mother, Klara was helplessly depressed after the loss of her three children who had died of diphtheria.
Hitler’s father beat and humiliated him every day and taught him to hate Jews.
The boy got used to nightmares, torture, and hate and the result of that is what the world saw 40 years later.
This man too wasn’t lucky; https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/9fafc86a-0001-0004-0000-000000158640_w1200_r1_fpx48.96_fpy63.14.jpg
Saddam Hussein’s struggles began even before he was born.
His father left the family about 6 months before his birth.
This exacerbated his mother Subha’s already fairly serious depression.
While she was pregnant with Saddam, her mother would pull out clumps of her hair and tried to commit suicide on more than one occasion.
She also continuously tried to give herself an abortion by beating on her pregnant stomach.
Shortly thereafter, Subha’s eldest son died of cancer at just 12 years of age, plunging her into an ever-deeper hole.
Saddam was sent to live with his uncle, Khairallah until the age of 3 and was sent back to live with his mother when she remarried. Her new husband was a man named Ibrahim al-Hassan.
He routinely physically and psychologically abused the young Saddam.
Al-Hassan would also make Saddam steal for the deeply impoverished family.
Saddam became so fed up with his horrible situation that, at only 10 years of age, he ran away from home.
But the evil had been built in him already and we all know how that ended.
This guy wasn’t a bad human at birth https://www.biography.com/.image/ar_1:1%2Cc_fill%2Ccs_srgb%2Cfl_progressive%2Cq_auto:good%2Cw_1200/MTY2NjgyOTkyNTMyNTMwMjMx/gettyimages-2637237.jpg
And this man was an innocent child; https://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=https%3A%2F%2Fm.media-amazon.com%2Fimages%2FM%2FMV5BNDE3ZTcyNWYtNjVlMS00ZmQ3LWFlMGMtNzZhNWIxMTVkYmEwXkEyXkFqcGdeQXVyMjkzMTg5MjA%40._V1_.jpg&imgrefurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.imdb.com%2Ftitle%2Ftt8729068%2F&tbnid=U3ainILrRMo2yM&vet=12ahUKEwjC1Zvp17LzAhUIqXIEHWdhDh4QMygpegUIARC1Ag..i&docid=YvhNN3NRkR7MgM&w=1920&h=1080&q=idi%20amin&client=opera&ved=2ahUKEwjC1Zvp17LzAhUIqXIEHWdhDh4QMygpegUIARC1Ag%20this%20man%20https://cdn.prod.www.spiegel.de/images/9fafc86a-0001-0004-0000-000000158640_w1200_r1_fpx48.96_fpy63.14.jpg
61% of adults who have been abused in any way as children weren’t born evil.
Our world made them who they are and we ought to take responsibility and stop the stealing.
Now let me make something clear;
This article is NOT really about divorce.
This article is about everything that destroys people’s childhood and divorce just happens to be one of them.
We have to stop producing children if we won’t provide a positive environment that’ll make them humans.
We have to stop producing humans who would end up becoming useless souls, depressed and miserable beings.
We have to stop producing babies that would end up being emotionless beasts.
Maybe we should regulate who can give birth and who can’t…….. I know this is a bad idea.
Maybe we should take collective responsibility for the care and love of every child…….. Another difficult idea.
Maybe we should pinpoint and stop all the madness which traumatizes children and make them useless adults.
Maybe people should be more careful before they get married so the rate of divorce will reduce so children could grow up with their two parents and have better childhood as result.
Maybe we should make divorce a crime for whoever has young children.
I know my ideas are terrible……. but I think we should stop destroying the childhood of billions of people because a childhood destroyed is a life destroyed or even generations of lives destroyed.
Thanks for reading.
I’m Steve Courage and I love you.