The Lack of Self-Deception

And also, "brutal honesty" is fairly often euphemism for "exaggerated and emotionally laden claims". These things are not factually true nor honest, they are said and phrased for maximum negative impact.

None of those are mutually exclusive options (or the only options).

He could be wrong about him preferred means being instrumental to creating a utopia (e.g. utopia could also be achieved with different means), but still manage to create a utopia using those means (e.g. he manages to steal land and resources and create a strong big country with a stable regime that lasts 1000 years, whose citizens eventually becomes very prosperous and happy, even if tens of millions were murdered).

In any case, achieving one's own goal and that goal being worthy and the means to achieve it being justified are different matters.

The first is about being effective. The latter needs a framework of justification, and that is usually morality/ethics. And that would be subjective (the victims, their friends and families, sympathizers to their cause, etc. would have another opinion).

How can you say such a thing? Do you not recoil in horror when innocent people are murdered?

A system founded on genocide and tyranny will necessarily continue to use those means to ensure its survival in the face of any threat to its survival.

Hitler was necessarily, categorically unable to establish any utopia because of the nature of the authority he claimed and used en route.

The question isn't whether the ends could have justified the means. The reality is that the means used utterly shut out any good ends from even being possible as long as he remained in power.

Now, about your "evil = wrongness * certainty * power" argument - this assumes that all people are fundamentally good, but potentially misguided. This view is incompatible with the foundations of law (intent to commit a crime is a basic part of penal law in virtually every legal system), and with the most basic intuitions of most people, so I find it very hard to defend. To many people, the end that justifies their means is simply their own well-being.

When someone breaks into a home to steal a TV, they aren't doing so because they strongly believe the TV belongs to them. They do so because they believe this is a good way for them to get a TV (or the equivalent in money). They are often very right about that fact. That does not make them any less evil for taking my TV.

Why do you believe that Hitler honestly believed this?

Why is not much more plausible that Hitler saw that many around him had a historical suspicion or even hatred of Jewish people, and that many Jewish people were very wealthy, and believed that he could get that wealth for himself and enormous power by convincing people that he will strengthen the country by hurting these people?

The argument is made in the form of an analogy though. And what's more the parent insists that the main difference is "scale".

I don't think the main difference is scale. I think the difference is one is a legitimate action in defense, and the other is not.

That's objectively so, regarless of if Hitler believed in a conspiracy or not.

And even if he did legitimately believe in a Jewish conspiracy, still killing non-participating Jews (like babies and regular folk) would not be in defence even then, it would be proactive. One could legitimately believe a whole class of people are in a vast conspiracy, and still find killing them that way abhorent and not wanting to do it.

That would be like the cop killing a guy who thinks might attack someone with a knife in the future, or who thinks their kid will.

As a complete side note, claiming that NATO is not a threat to Russia is also somewhat deluded, but that still doesn't justify anything about the war. What is clear is that invading another country is a morally evil act and that it has essentially never prevented more suffering than it has caused on balance, even in some of the most benevolent scenarios (like Kosovo).

Perhaps. He did "achieve" a few other things before that point either way.

> That's a certain way of viewing history that I dislike. It robs past people of all agency and we never trust anything anyone says. That's way too cynical. It also has no explanatory power.

The thing is, we know for a fact that historical writings were highly motivated by propaganda purposes, and/or highly colored by the biases of the writer's culture.

Very very few historical sources, especially going back to the middle ages or before, were writing from some intention of having objective history remembered. They were writing for some emperor or another, disparaging their enemies and deifying their families and reigns. Even personal letters, to the extent that we find them, tend to do the same thing.

And even looking at more modern sources, you'll often find flagrant bias in reporting, and extraordinary levels of praise or disparagement of the characters involved depending on the source.

It is then important to realize that we simply don't have access to the real characters of the people written about, ever. We at best get an idea of what they actually did, but we don't have any idea of their real personalities or intentions or beliefs. We barely know who the worse abuser was between Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, and we got to see a whole trial with plenty of clear evidence from both of them. We simply don't have any chance of judging what Charlemagne actually believed about virtually anything, or what kind of a guy he was.