A Historian Who Fled the Nazis and Still Wants Us to Read Hitler
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
Until you understand that anyone can be Hitler, you don't understand.
Hitler's narrative was utterly disconnected from reality, but utterly reasonable to him and the millions that followed, as a comfortable illusion is preferable to a miserable reality - to most.
Have you ever listened to his speeches, man? As in like, really listened?
Go ahead, try it sometime. Claw your soul and your beating heart out through your very eardrums, he will.
His talents in that realm were clearly from another plane. Lots of people (perhaps millions) have wanted to "be" the next Hitler. But in terms of sheer charisma and persuasiveness, they just didn't have the juice.
The new foreign policy book from 1942 looks really interesting to me, foreseeing the US war, as the US industrials were major Hitler backers before the war and just had to back down when Hitler started attacking Great Britain. Also the ally Japan threatening Singapore didn't help winning the war. Would be interesting to see how he thought of holding "his friends", the US out of the war. Even Hitler knew that this would not be winnable in the long end.
After each of the recent mass shootings, I've been wondering more and more about whether we aren't doing anything about it because it's so easy to just label the shooters as evil, as if they aren't people. It's tough to accept that real people, with identities and feelings just like you and me, can do terrible things. Understanding tragedy and history is key to not repeating it.
Hitler thought he was good. Those who followed him thought he was good. In the narrative and perceptive reality of nazi Germany he was good. My grandmother waxes lyrical about the wonderful and charismatic Herr Hitler (she's Austrian, was a hitlerjugendherberge), and listening to her makes oh so clear the dreams and glory that hitler successfully sold to the very disillusioned masses.
He wasn't evil. He just served a moral code so alien and repulsive to us today that we write it off as "evil". In fact, at the time, his politics were aligned with those of the US, UK, and other allied powers - eugenics, fascism, and antisemitism were rife in all - but it was their expansionist policy which ultimately led to the branding as evil and ww2.
Don't get me wrong - I'm no apologist - but I do try to understand events from a contemporaneous and empathic perspective.
Actually, "do unto others as you would have done unto you" is a pretty damn near universal law of morality. It doesn't encompass things like when to punish bad actors, but it covers a huge range of situations that we encounter every day.
However, what most people never recognize is that apathy is the mechanism that allows small evils to persist long enough to turn into great evils. Often even a few individuals standing up at the beginning can thwart a rising tide that will be impossible to resist once it gets going.
With re: apathy - "all that is necessary for evil to triumph is that good men do nothing" - sure, but this still relies on a fixed idea of good and evil, and that you can recognise "evil" at its inception. The issue there is that tragic consequences tend to only become apparent in hindsight.
I do personally agree with "do as you would be done by", but you can't apply it as a universal law without the complete homogenisation of global culture - and even then folks will develop their own ideas of what constitutes good and evil.
Ultimately, it's all about societal consensus, which these days (since bernays in particular) is media led.
I think the point is this--if the skull collector became the source of a skull, or the burner became a heretic, they would probably stop thinking those were "good" practices (due to the suffering and death and such), so those acts wouldn't satisfy the "do as you would be done by" rule. Even when those deemed heretics were part of the culture at the time, it's doubtful they thought "oh well, I guess this is the right thing to do".
The problem with it is that you don't know whether you are the brave person speaking out against injustice or the lunatic that stands against obvious progress.
It's insidiously evil. Many of the root versions (and in particular, the early Zoroastrian version, which I think might predate others and was influential in religions that followed) were to not do to others that which is abhorrent to you, but this corruption of it turns it into something else entirely.
"It's unfortunate we have to persecute these even the women and children, but it's required to make a more fair and just world."
"It's unfortunate we have to go to war in Iraq, but it's required to defend peace in the region, from the threat of mass weapons of destruction."
Of course, "the ends" are never achieved, because the "means" they use will cause even more problems to be solved.
Persecuting Jews to achieve justice and fairness for the German people => Destruction of Germany.
War in Iraq to remove dictatorship and mass weapons of destruction => Rogue terrorist group governing by coercion and hundreds and thousands of civilian deaths.
I ask you. What other examples of evil can you see in our world, today? What other evil things are people are doing in the name of good?
Most important to remember: Evil is stopped by being persistently good ourselves, even when pressured and coerced to do otherwise, and that's all that we have to do.
Granted, some of the things the Nazis did were evil, in the sense they were selfish. Valuing their own race and country above others, for example.
Also, true - going back to my grandmother, she's a raving anti-Semite, but has a Jewish daughter in law - and (now deceased) husband. The cognitive dissonance required is incredible, but common. She'll rant over the dinner table about "the Jews" who are ruining the world - always followed up with a "not you, dear".
For example, there are plenty of example you can point to of an American conspiracy to overthrow governments, but it is not not cognitive dissonance to believe that a particular American was not involved in it.
The only reason that this logic does not apply to Jews is that their is no central hierarchy to Judaism, however it is still possible to believe that there is a shadow organization that is running the world and happens to be Jewish.
No, as far as she is concerned all Jews are part of the conspiracy, all are a drain on society.
She gets around this not with "you're one of the good ones", but rather, "I like you, so you can't really be Jewish.".
You sound like a nihilist. As another poster pointed out, "do to unto others as you would have them do unto you" is a good baseline for determining whether an action is good or evil.
I'm an atheist and I even realize this.
You don't need complete accurate information to do any of that - just go to your local Wal-Mart, and count the number of pickups with gun racks.
Or check the local gun store's tax returns.
There are a scary number of parallels. How differently would we view the Third Reich minus the atrocities of the Einsatzgruppen, Buchenwald, Auschwitz and their ilk?
And if they don't agree with you, so rather than respond with a refutation they'll just downvote you instead.