When did I say that, all I said by looking at history it is easy to see that most of us would not have done anything. You can't deny that can you?Originally Posted by Mutatis-Mutandi
When did I say that, all I said by looking at history it is easy to see that most of us would not have done anything. You can't deny that can you?
No, I don't deny that. I was asking because it is what you said, though. Thanks for clarifying.
"Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred."
–Vaclav Havel
I think those who are horrible people because they came from a terrible background are probaly weak minded. If your common psychopath is that way because they had a terrible life, then they must be very feeble.
I believe that is true of some... those who mindlessly follow a charismatic leader or movement because it gives them a sense of power that they lack in real life. A great many of the Nazis were but pathetic individuals... petty thugs at best... before the rise of the party placed untold power within their hands. At the same time, there were those who most certainly knew what they were doing... who might even be called "brilliant" in their field. Surely Hitler, Himmler, Mengele, etc... were not stupid or weak-minded by most standards.
Painting them as something less or different from ourselves is where the danger lies. It leads us to believe the fantasy that it cannot happen here (where ever "here" may be). Speaking just of the US, we undoubtedly have more than a few individuals who are racist enough, and more than a few who are ready to mindlessly follow the first charismatic leader who promises them the right thing. Undoubtedly, we have any number of individuals who are at once highly intelligent and yet sociopaths. The "sociopath", you might do well to remember, does not imagine himself as inferior, but rather sees other human beings (even those above him in wealth and power) as being inferior.
"Hate has a lot in common with love, chiefly with that self-transcending aspect of love, the fixation on others, the dependence on them, and in fact the delegation of a piece of one's own identity to them… the hater longs for the object of his hatred."
–Vaclav Havel
It would seem to me that perhaps Vaclav has confused "lust" and "obsession" with "love".
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This is a wonderfully lucid and articulate description of the situation.
I agree. And I think it's more than a "perhaps."
OK, where did Vaclav get it wrong? Are you just worried that some dim people will take it that he's saying love and hate are the same?
I don't see how the quote does much for the debate (maybe it's meant to point to an irrational aspect of hatred, or was an attempt to make sense of hatred he and others in similar position were made to suffer for), but it doesn't seem to me like he got the quote wrong as far as it went.
If I couldn't find a way to get my family out of the country I would do all I could to sabotage the genocide machine. Or I would just commit suicide. There were men of conscience in Germany at the time. And I take back what I said earlier about how I might possibly have supported Hitler if I'd lived in Germany then. I would have to be an entirely different person, my beliefs and feelings and personality all radically and unrecognizably transformed, for me to look upon Hitler as anything but a dangerous raving demagogue. Every sentence in every speech reeks with an imbecile militarism and nationalism. Nietzsche gagged on the foul fumes of such rotten ilk decades before Hitler came to the fore. No doubt we hear little of those who opposed him due to the fact that they were either intimidated into silence or were shipped off to die in concentration camps.
Evil is not time relative. Ghengis and Attila are typically perceived as harsh brutal men. Many people acknowledge the profound iniquities of Julius Caesar. The centuries-bygone slave-trade is regarded as a gross abhorrence. And as long as there is any small amount of good in this world its existence will serve as a contrast to the evil of men like Hitler. Evil perhaps seems cartoonish on an internet forum, but I doubt it seems so when one stares it in the face, down the barrel of a gun, in the form of a white phosphorus munition, as a simple spear or sword back many centuries past, taking the lives of the those around you and threatening to take yours. I don't think evil seemed cartoonish to those Jews fated to die by the gas, along with their loved ones, their wives or husbands, their children.
You get really good when you pickup speed. Excellent discourse. I don't care much about the word "evil" but what the heck? Along with some use, might make a lot of sense.
I agree too- lust and obsession is not love.
I don't think it's out of bounds to consider a loved one to be a person that you would "depend on", and "delegate a piece of one's identity to them" (i.e. soulmate, better half, etc.). This lust and obsession business seems to be being shoe-horned into what Vaclav Havel was saying. "Longing" might be a bit of a stretch, a bit poetic for "hate" I think--but that focus and desire for interaction (negative, in this case) seems roughly analogous to the focus and desire to connect we can feel for someone we love.
(But, to be clear, although it seems beside the point to me: I think lust and obsession aren't love.)
Holy crap. My thread exploded! O_O
I just listened to two more files of Mein Kampf today on the train. Every time I listen to it in public I get paranoid people around me are going to hear it and get hostile and physically violent with me.
In the two files hitler was talking about syphillis & how he hated modern art. He called modern art a sign of cultural decay.
Btw i have an Ian Kershaw biography of Hitler at college. I haven't read it yet. But I've also read another book about hitler called The Fall of the Third Reich and I have a book on my bookshelf written by someone that knew hitler when they were children together. The biography of hitler and the book about his childhood, i have not yet read. They should be good though.
Last edited by ScribbleScribe; 03-02-2012 at 07:09 PM.
I care much for the word evil. Nowadays our hearts bleed and our minds understand when they ought to unequivocally condemn. People fight the death penalty because they deem it too harsh. I am against it because of the chance an innocent man might be put to death, but if I had before me evidence conclusively incriminating a man for grave atrocities or otherwise evil deeds, I as judge wouldn't think twice about sentencing that man to death or torture. Its too bad Hitler took the matter into his own hands. Would've been nice if they could have gotten footage of him being hanged.
I didn't know that, but it makes sense. Actually, with what I know about myself, I completely believe that in the same situation I would have chose suicide. If you don't follow orders you end up in there with them, don't you? Yeah, I'll just take care of that myself thanks. Death really is preferable to some things, being forced to torture children is one of them.
I don't know about capital punishment, I'm undecided. I think that maybe law should be emotionless, because it must be fair above all things, and once you bring emotions into something it might tip the scales in one direction or the other. I always thought they should dish out penectomies for particulalrly cruel and/or repeat-offending rapists though.
Last edited by JuniperWoolf; 03-03-2012 at 03:09 AM.
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I think you are confusing two things here. Actions being evil and people being evil. I never said those people were not responsible, indeed they were punished and rightly so, but I would go with Alexander III when he sketches the situation. There was something wrong in the mind of Mengele, but had he not been taught by a professor who conducted the same kinds of experiments on Namibia (I think) and had he not been handed absolute freedom to do what he liked, would he have done it in his private doctor's practice?
Of course his acts were evil, but was he evil himself, though? Clearly there was something wrong with him because he always kept on saying that he was the victim of a mistake of identity, but what did his uni professor, also obsessed with twins, genetics, etc. have to do with his experiments?
I for one am not defending anyone here, I have never denied their responsibility, but only said that calling all of those people evil is a bit rich and that that is profoundly black and white. That has no place in this.
Come to think of it, that Nuremberg exhibition was quite adept in pointing out the process of indoctrination: you go through the whole thing and only once there is where the stones for the rally grounds came from. Then only at the end, you get the Endlösung and then images of murdered people, on a lower level than you are. It makes it all a bit burried and shoved under the carpet. While you were in that exhibition you have not thought about that, and you have grown accustomed to progressive confiscation of freedom and cruelty. It shows you how easily you yourself could have been taken in. Whether you were in the army or a mere citizen.
Oh, you would have, would you? Admittedly, there were a few who did try to sabotage or to save people - Schindler, I don't know how much of the film was actually true, but he did exist; and the guy of the Kindertransport, but if I am not mistaken he was safely in England - but they were in a unique situation: Schindler was the head of a factory and the guy of the Kindertransport had money to spare apparently and could maybe protect his people there. I find that heroic, but at the same time, I think in your dreams were the majority of SS people or any Germans whatsoever in that position.
And what about your wife and children? If you committed suicide she would have had to fend for herself. Admittedly she would maybe have got a handsome pension (although I don't know whether suicide qualified for that), but otherwise...
Suicide takes guts.
In all likelihood you would have been as blinded as all the rest and your wife would have been the naïve arm decoration she was supposed to be. Your children would have been the model Aryan children: the nice blonde boy and the girl with the golder tresses and you would not have had the courage to leave them.
That is the problem with capital punishment and why we have done away with it since long on the continent: there are very few cases where the murderer firstly had the clear intention to kill (so not only a motive) and secondly that it is absolutely 100% certain that he/she did kill. There have been cases where it seemed 100% and after years and years they are acquitted because a new element emerges. Where are you then with your capital punishment? Things can seem absolutely certain now, but can you be 100% sure that that is going to be the same in 10 to 20 years?
The fact that one were to get pleasure from seeing someone hanged is worrying, certainly in modern society. In the past, humanity may have been a bit weird (maybe because they had so much contact with death that it didn't really matter how it happened), but nowadays, I find that profoundly strange and even slightly twisted.
I even found it an outrage that the Polish bungled the Sobibor camp commander's hanging three times. Only the fourth time it worked. In medieval times they would have considered it a sign that this person was not to be hanged, but that's modern times for you... I do not say he was not rsponsible or cruel (he was particularly twisted), but doing it in such a way shows your own cruel streak and in that case you are no better than the one you are hanging. Then you are motivated by revenge which makes you no better than the first Germanic tribes and the maffia now.
One has to laugh before being happy, because otherwise one risks to die before having laughed.
"Je crains [...] que l'âme ne se vide à ces passe-temps vains, et que le fin du fin ne soit la fin des fins." (Edmond Rostand, Cyrano de Bergerac, Acte III, Scène VII)
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