this post was submitted on 09 Feb 2024
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Showerthoughts
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Yeah, we shouldn’t judge Hitler. Sure, we know he had millions of people killed, committed genocide and wrote a book detailing his exact motivations, but you cannot look into his heart and don’t know everything he did, so we should not judge him. He might just have been misunderstood and actually a really nice guy.
/s
You don’t need to know everything a person did to judge them. Good deeds do not erase bad ones.
Maybe include the second part of that paragraph i wrote:
But given the example of Hitler. Why is it important to consider the person in his entirety as evil? Aren't the intention and act of genocide by themselves an evil that needs to be condemmend and prevented?
I find Hitler and Fascism are great examples, because the story of the fascists being evil people is a form of "othering". They are the evil people, but we are not the evil people. This can all to easily lead to ignorance to how easily Fascism can spread and infect any people. And we see it in the way Germans wiggled themselves out of responsibility for their crimes after WW2.
To quote the Ausschwitz survivor Karl Stojka:
„Und das haben Menschen gemacht, so wie du, du und ich. Diese Leute kamen nicht von einem anderen Planeten. […] Es waren Menschen, so wie wir. Und nicht Hitler hat mich verhaftet, nicht Göring, nicht Goebbels. Der Greißler, der Hausmeister, der Schneider, der Schuster, der Bäckermeister, die haben auf einmal eine Uniform gekriegt, eine Hakenkreuzbinde, und da waren sie die Herrenrasse…“
Or to say it with a caricature In Nuremberg and other places - "but he had ordered me to it":