Has anyone else read Mein Kampf?

[Darcy88]

You find that response a travesty because it makes more sense than yours will ever do and it even took your arguments and quotes on board and showed you that you did not know what you are in fact talking about and quoting.

Other way around bud.

'Good' in this way does not equal 'doing good', but is a parameter of quality. I think I still know when I can use the adjectives I use. Or were you arguing catharsis (if that is at all possible)?

I can think of really good people who in moments of weakness did wrong things, not evil things but wrong things. According to your standard of good and evil these people fall short of being good.I made this point earlier but you conveniently ignored it. You can't call anyone good. Its absurd, simply absurd.

It fits your quote like a tee that 'in no culture anywhere at anytime has it been the status quo for the average person to go about raping, killing and enslaving indiscriminately and not receive condemnation.' I showed you clearly that that is not at all the case.

I said right after that sentence that one culture will do it to another culture but not within their own culture in a gross indiscriminate manner. You ignored that inconvenient addendum though, of course. And THE EXCEPTIONS PROVE THE RULE. Or is that too nuanced for you?

I merely repeat what critics have pointed out. Don't get angry about it. Fact is, Alexander killed his friend in a fit of rage. Thus he is evil according to your own definition. That is true, period, according to you. As evil as Hitler. Oh, no, wait that is not what you meant, right. Of course that is not what you meant but still it is what you are in effect arguing at this very moment.

Yes Kiki, committing a crime of passion puts you on the same level as a genocidal tyrant with the blood of six million innocents on his hands. Good sound logic you have there. My, a lot of horses must be going hungry for all the straw you gathered together to construct that straw man. How evil of you to cause such widespread horse famine.

Think of me as a Socrates and you as a Meno and we might get somewhere.

If Socrates adhered to your manner of thinking Western culture never would have made it out of the dark ages. The Platonic dialogues would have been used by the monks as toilet paper. The Muslims would have used them to start fires.

[kiki1982]

I have a standard by which I distinguish an evil act from a bad act and therefore an evil person from a bad person. While the young Japanese soldier was raping the 13 year old Chinese girl and while he slitted her throat and then turned his malevolent gaze upon her sister or her mother, he was evil. I do believe in redemption. Heck, if Hitler had lived, spent the rest of his life in prison, perhaps he'd have experienced growth personally and morally and become something less of a monster.

I think the film Downfall might help you there.

Very, very, very good film. Hammered it home.

[Darcy88]

I think the film Downfall might help you there.

Very, very, very good film. Hammered it home.

Yes it did. It showed that Hitler was a hateful coward to the very end. He wound up resenting the German people and doing all within his power to make defeat as horrible for them as possible.

[Darcy88]

A veritable Socratically spirited person would never liken themselves to Socrates.

[kiki1982]

Other way around bud.

I think not, my friend. Why do you got enraged then? Because you were rejoycing?

I can think of really good people who in moments of weakness did wrong things, not evil things but wrong things. According to your standard of good and evil these people fall short of being good.I made this point earlier but you conveniently denied it. You can't call anyone good. Its absurd, simply absurd.

And you are chaning your beliefs as we speak. Now suddenly there are evil things and wrong things. I have always maintained that no-one is perfect. That goes for good and evil. I thought I told you that.

That is not absurd.

I said there is a difference between a play that is good and a person who is deemed 'good'. Or I asked, are you arguing catharsis? (something which you clearly did not get)

I said right after that sentence that one culture will do it to another culture but not within their own culture in a gross indiscriminate manner. You ignored that inconvenient addendum though, of course. And THE EXCEPTIONS PROVE THE RULE. Or is that too nuanced for you?

No, one culture to another then. And still the Christians killed their own as in the Cathars. The Muslims are killing each other as we speak. The Syrians as well. And the Lybians. Not to mention the maffia and drugs gangs on a smaller scale. Not to mention that riots broke out between monks in Jerusalem last year I think. Henry VIII did his best to kill and frighten away the Catholics because the pope did not want to divorce him. And those nuns and priests were English into the bargain. The English civil war saw Roundheads against Cavaliers. Both English. They did not agree about the king... Oh, the Irish fought a civil war and the ensuing IRA. Not to mention the ETA in Spain. That is indiscriminate killing, isn't it, of your own people and culture?
So I guess now indiscriminate killing is alright between cultures, so Hitler's killing was OK, then. He did not consider the Jews German after all.

Yes Kiki, committing a crime of passion puts you on the same level as a genocidal tyrant with the blood of six million innocents on his hands. Good sound logic you have there. My, a lot of horses must be going hungry for all the straw you gathered together to construct that straw man. How evil of you to cause such widespread horse famine.

And your point being exactly? I merely took your definition and applied it. If there is something wrong with the result, then there is something wrong with the definition. Not my fault.

If Socrates adhered to your manner of thinking Western culture never would have made it out of the dark ages. The Platonic dialogues would have been used by the monks as toilet paper. The Muslims would have used them to start fires.

And he did adhere to it. Go on, if you know better, what does that quote mean, that 'No man desires evil.' In the Dark Ages, he was forgotten as he was stuck in the East with the Muslims. It was only in the Renaissance he cropped up again.

Essentially he argues that man will want something and use the means to get it. Naturally, for that man, those ends can never be evil. Locke thought the same and so did Hobbes. And of course, if the end turns out to be bad in itself, the consequences will return to haunt the perpetrator, however he cannot have thought the end was evil when he did it, because man, nor animal is so stupid to do something to harm himself if he knows that from the start. I know it is hard to imagine, but it is simple and a truth that stands like a house as they say in Dutch.

Wrongdoing = ignorance. And there is your cause.

[stlukesguild]

Again, empathy does not equal compassion. Although it has several definitions (maybe we should also here find a functioning one ), its primary idea consists of being able to recognise the feelings of someone else, maybe experiencing them too. I may point out that psychopaths have a notorious lack of that, in anything and to anyone. Why do you get so enraged about something that does not suit you?

So everyone who has a normal sense of "right" and "wrong"... who takes a moral stance upon something as clear-cut as the Holocaust, as opposed to espousing the morality of a Nazi sympathizer, offering up endless excuses, or a mindless moral relativist who believes that "good" and "evil" are but meaningless terms as its all one and the same can be equated with a psychopath? And who is getting enraged?

Because you can find no means to make me do what you like?

I doubt Darcy has the least thought of changing your mind. That would demand both the ability to think logically and humanely as well as the ability to change, neither of which you seem to have in any great abundance. I suspect, however, that he, like myself, continues posting rebuttals to your inane comments so as to offer some alternative to your repeated apologies and excuses for the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler for others who frequent this site to consider.

Again, I am not at all denying any of his responsibility...

Really? It seems to me that you have repeatedly attempted to deny responsibility by laying equal blame upon his upbringing, his childhood, his experiences in WWI, the French, the English, the whole history of antisemitism, and indeed the whole of society... going on to suggest that anyone of us might have become as he had we been placed in the same circumstances. It is indeed important that we seek out experiences and elements that have contributed to the creation of a figure such as Adolf Hitler or an event such as the Holocaust so as to be aware and alert to the possibility of history repeating itself... but this in no way absolves Hitler (or Himmler or Mengele) from one iota of responsibility for their actions and their actions were of such unmitigated evil that one can only call the individuals responsible for the same "evil".

I can call him bad, but I cannot call him the embodiment of evil. Why do you wish to turn that around in sympathy or even compassion? Because it does not suit your black-and-white view of everything or what? Tough sh*t. Deal with it.

"A Black and White view of the world?" Did you really say that? It seems to me that even accepting that there are endless variations of gray when it comes to the questions of morality and "good" and "evil" Hitler comes about as close to black on the spectrum as possible. You, it would seem, would have us all believe that he falls into some neutral range of gray along with the rest of the majority of humanity. You systematically kill millions of innocent human beings and we place you in the same ring in Dante's Inferno as the guy who once cheated on his taxes.

It is not I who need to splash water in my face. I just do what most Third Reich historians have done: try to understand, not condemn and stop. Condemn and stop is cowardish.

No one has suggested that it is not important to come to some sense of understanding as to the elements that helped trigger historical events, however, a sense of understanding does not exclude taking a moral stance, including the condemnations of genocide and the individuals who carried out such widespread and wholesale acts of murder. The only cowardice apparent here is the cowardice in refusing to take such a moral stance. Edmund Burke fully understood this when he stated, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

[Darcy88]

Ok Kiki, I concede. You are right. Your examples of immorality prove that it was as normal to kill and rape as it was to knead dough and to defecate, since that is what I obviously, throughout many posts, meant.

You can't call anyone "good" though Kiki. Maybe I'm weird but that seems absurd to me.

Wrongdoing comes from ignorance but it does not in itself equate to ignorance. Wrongdoing is wrongdoing. A good person is a person who does good things, an evil person one who does evil things. This is the point on which we will never agree. I still don't understand why. Your standard of perfection is not one used in most other instances. Why you apply it to evil I do not know.

[Darcy88]

Kiki you've populated this thread with more straw men than were carved soldiers in Qin Shi Huang's terracotta army.

[kiki1982]

Yes it did. It showed that Hitler was a hateful coward to the very end. He wound up resenting the German people and doing all within his power to make defeat as horrible for them as possible.

I knew that was where the problem lay. No, my friend, that was not the meaning of the film according. The meaning of the film was to show viewers Hitler as a man who could be kind to his secretaries and who was afraid by the end, and not as a kind of mythical 'evil' figure like you term him. That way, his acts become even more gruesome because they are acts induced by a human being who could be kind to the one, yet ruthless to the other.

A veritable Socratically spirited person would never liken themselves to Socrates.

No? And why not pray? Because 'no man is wiser than Socrates'?

[castleteachings]

I have recently bought a copy with the intention of reading, but haven't got round to it yet. I have a long list of other stuff to read. Should I read it through a gap in my fingers?

[Alexander III]

Again, empathy does not equal compassion. Although it has several definitions (maybe we should also here find a functioning one ), its primary idea consists of being able to recognise the feelings of someone else, maybe experiencing them too. I may point out that psychopaths have a notorious lack of that, in anything and to anyone. Why do you get so enraged about something that does not suit you?

So everyone who has a normal sense of "right" and "wrong"... who takes a moral stance upon something as clear-cut as the Holocaust, as opposed to espousing the morality of a Nazi sympathizer, offering up endless excuses, or a mindless moral relativist who believes that "good" and "evil" are but meaningless terms as its all one and the same can be equated with a psychopath? And who is getting enraged?

Because you can find no means to make me do what you like?

I doubt Darcy has the least thought of changing your mind. That would demand both the ability to think logically and humanely as well as the ability to change, neither of which you seem to have in any great abundance. I suspect, however, that he, like myself, continues posting rebuttals to your inane comments so as to offer some alternative to your repeated apologies and excuses for the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler for others who frequent this site to consider.

Again, I am not at all denying any of his responsibility...

Really? It seems to me that you have repeatedly attempted to deny responsibility by laying equal blame upon his upbringing, his childhood, his experiences in WWI, the French, the English, the whole history of antisemitism, and indeed the whole of society... going on to suggest that anyone of us might have become as he had we been placed in the same circumstances. It is indeed important that we seek out experiences and elements that have contributed to the creation of a figure such as Adolf Hitler or an event such as the Holocaust so as to be aware and alert to the possibility of history repeating itself... but this in no way absolves Hitler (or Himmler or Mengele) from one iota of responsibility for their actions and their actions were of such unmitigated evil that one can only call the individuals responsible for the same "evil".

I can call him bad, but I cannot call him the embodiment of evil. Why do you wish to turn that around in sympathy or even compassion? Because it does not suit your black-and-white view of everything or what? Tough sh*t. Deal with it.

"A Black and White view of the world?" Did you really say that? It seems to me that even accepting that there are endless variations of gray when it comes to the questions of morality and "good" and "evil" Hitler comes about as close to black on the spectrum as possible. You, it would seem, would have us all believe that he falls into some neutral range of gray along with the rest of the majority of humanity. You systematically kill millions of innocent human beings and we place you in the same ring in Dante's Inferno as the guy who once cheated on his taxes.

It is not I who need to splash water in my face. I just do what most Third Reich historians have done: try to understand, not condemn and stop. Condemn and stop is cowardish.

No one has suggested that it is not important to come to some sense of understanding as to the elements that helped trigger historical events, however, a sense of understanding does not exclude taking a moral stance, including the condemnations of genocide and the individuals who carried out such widespread and wholesale acts of murder. The only cowardice apparent here is the cowardice in refusing to take such a moral stance. Edmund Burke fully understood this when he stated, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

Once again st.lukes, you like darcy have completley misunderstood what Kiki was saying.

First of we are not saying that Hitler was not responsible, neither are we denying the monstrosity of his acts. But saying Hitler was evil and did evil things is not enough. It is a shallow view of the way thing were, and it is that same shallow view which will lead to other Hitlers in the future, because instead of trying to understand what is arguably one of the most schocking and complex moments of history you are trying to blanket it under a simple "hitler was evil.. the end". I aplogize but that view on things is usless.

Firstly do you think Hitler did everything by himself? I hope not. Because there was an entire system, thousands if not millions of men who were all equally part of it. SO laying the entire blame on hitler is at once narrow minded, and also clouding our view. It is very easy to say it was all Hitler, it is a bit more complex once we realize that Hitler was just a charcater in a very long tradgedy, there were many men worst than Hitler, and the modern historical view is that Hitler was pushed into may things.

Now, let me make a modern anology. All the republicans in america look at the economy and say look, this is all Obamas fault. To all of us this seems a very biased and limited view. Because we know that this econimical collapse is not obamas fault, but the fault of the last 30 odd years of national zeitgesit and political and financial systems which would inevitably lead to the finacial collapse.

Saying the Holocaust was all Hitler is to me as narrow minded as saying the bad economy is all obama. There was a system before it which was leading towards that inevitable moment that was the holocaust. Hitler was just a pawn in the scheme of things, a big pawn, but nonethless just part of a cultural and political ziestgeist which was moving towards its natural conclusion, namley the holocaust. To all the men who knew what The Kaisser and his army and scientists were doing to the Herero and Namaqua people in their affircan colonies at the begining of the 20th century, the holocuats 40 odd years later would have come as no suprise. But everyone was suprised. Because most people behaved like you and Darcy in this situation and instead of choosing to examine the complexity of history and scrutinize, they just chose to lay out uninformed blanket statements to make history more ordered and simpler to understand, which leads to ignorance and the mistakes of the past being repeated.


Here read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_...maqua_Genocide

And then try telling me about the "uniquness of Hitler" and how no one saw it coming, and how the holocaust was hitlers sole creation.


I appologize if I come of as bitter and personaly attacking you (darcy and st.lukes) but this subject gets me heated up, as in your attitudes I see the ingoring of history and obscuring of truth, just so that the world can be ordered in a more simple and satifying manner. And it is this very attitude which will lead to the horrors of the past being repeated in the future, because the truth of the past remains unknwon and everyone is there waving flags and cheering because this new guy, he is nothing at all like the evil men of before. truth is, that when this "new savior" comes and you shall be cheering him on, he shall appear to you nothign like the mosneters of the past, because your image of the monsters of the past is mainly fictitious and is disjointed from the truth. What you guys preach is the benefit of ignorance, and it is this ignorance which shall damn us some day.

[kiki1982]

So everyone who has a normal sense of "right" and "wrong"... who takes a moral stance upon something as clear-cut as the Holocaust, as opposed to espousing the morality of a Nazi sympathizer, offering up endless excuses, or a mindless moral relativist who believes that "good" and "evil" are but meaningless terms as its all one and the same can be equated with a psychopath? And who is getting enraged?

And you are a teacher? Can you actually teach anything else than what you approve of? I would say, 'no', as you keep twisting what I say and deliberately misunderstand.
Because I merely asked that we do not stop at condemnation which is what condemnation mostly leads to: nothing, and again, that is what we have done for the past 60 years. Has it helped? No.

Instead we keep on ignoring the signs of such regimes and keep on ignoring the solutions to such regimes. A regime does rarely stand with a dictator on its own, it stands with a whole culture behind it and a whole lot of supporters. And yet what do we usually do if we depose dictators? We hope everything will be alright again. That is what has been learned from the calamity in 1945. Sure, call him evil and Hitler takes on mythical proportions and that is what Der Untergang tried to hammer home. Hitler is not an evil daemon, but a man of flesh-and-blood who happened to have bad ideas and unleashed them on the world together with a few followers and with massive support. That makes the Holocaust so much more than the wacky plan of an evil man. But no. We consider him evil and thus, the Holocaust is merely the act of an evil man, as if a devil had come onto the world. But Pol Pot did the very same! Even announced it on the radio. Ok, not in camps, he just left them to die of starvation. He killed his own people, up to a quarter of them (estimates vary).

I doubt Darcy has the least thought of changing your mind. That would demand both the ability to think logically and humanely as well as the ability to change, neither of which you seem to have in any great abundance. I suspect, however, that he, like myself, continues posting rebuttals to your inane comments so as to offer some alternative to your repeated apologies and excuses for the Holocaust and Adolf Hitler for others who frequent this site to consider.

Once again - I do believe people refuse to listen and read - I have never made excuses nor apologies for it. I merely said that this was not only his idea, but the idea of a whole society, culture and century even. That is what made his ideas catch on. Are you denying that they caught on or what?
That is all. If you ask me, that is worse in fact than only citing Hitler as responsible for it. But there you go: not fashionable, so no good.

All of those rebuttals only show the fact that the two of you are after a moral stance which everyone frankly knows and takes (apart from the minority) and holds and that you are not interested in anything else. We know all of it, we know what those people did, that that was despicable and so on, yet the world lets the same happen as we speak because we have failed to understand that the only means to eradicate such excesses is to understand and not condemn.

Really? It seems to me that you have repeatedly attempted to deny responsibility by laying equal blame upon his upbringing, his childhood, his experiences in WWI, the French, the English, the whole history of antisemitism, and indeed the whole of society... going on to suggest that anyone of us might have become as he had we been placed in the same circumstances. It is indeed important that we seek out experiences and elements that have contributed to the creation of a figure such as Adolf Hitler or an event such as the Holocaust so as to be aware and alert to the possibility of history repeating itself... but this in no way absolves Hitler (or Himmler or Mengele) from one iota of responsibility for their actions and their actions were of such unmitigated evil that one can only call the individuals responsible for the same "evil".

No, I have named many causes apart from Hitler's own bad ideas (and causes for those ideas) which make it more logical if you will that he emerged. I never said it absolved them of anything. I merely named those reasons and facts and said that if all those circumstances together had not occurred, this would never have happened. But it did. You see, look back, I said it again, it did. It did. The Holocaust did happen. Sad but true. Still, condemning and stopping is in no way beneficial to examination whatsoever. You deliberately misinterpret my words as if you are out to make me a Nazi. It is just not true and you know it. So stop with it.

"A Black and White view of the world?" Did you really say that? It seems to me that even accepting that there are endless variations of gray when it comes to the questions of morality and "good" and "evil" Hitler comes about as close to black on the spectrum as possible. You, it would seem, would have us all believe that he falls into some neutral range of gray along with the rest of the majority of humanity. You systematically kill millions of innocent human beings and we place you in the same ring in Dante's Inferno as the guy who once cheated on his taxes.

What is this absolute desire of yours to call him 'evil'? Why? Because you think it is easy or because they taught you in school?

No one has suggested that it is not important to come to some sense of understanding as to the elements that helped trigger historical events, however, a sense of understanding does not exclude taking a moral stance, including the condemnations of genocide and the individuals who carried out such widespread and wholesale acts of murder. The only cowardice apparent here is the cowardice in refusing to take such a moral stance. Edmund Burke fully understood this when he stated, "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing."

I said I could call his acts evil not him as a person. So, what are you arguing about exactly? I must call him evil? Because I am your student and you say so? "All that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." is indeed true. And that is what usually happens after condemnation. It is not the moral stance that should be taken, that is easy, it is action that should be taken and that is mostly missing after the moral stance. People have repeatedly condemed various states for doing so and so and then? Nothing. And in the meantime the people who took that same moral stance watch how the same people they called 'evil' and 'bad' kill others.
Moral stances have no meaning if they do not lead to action.

[kiki1982]

Once again st.lukes, you like darcy have completley misunderstood what Kiki was saying.

First of we are not saying that Hitler was not responsible, neither are we denying the monstrosity of his acts. But saying Hitler was evil and did evil things is not enough. It is a shallow view of the way thing were, and it is that same shallow view which will lead to other Hitlers in the future, because instead of trying to understand what is arguably one of the most schocking and complex moments of history you are trying to blanket it under a simple "hitler was evil.. the end". I aplogize but that view on things is usless.

Firstly do you think Hitler did everything by himself? I hope not. Because there was an entire system, thousands if not millions of men who were all equally part of it. SO laying the entire blame on hitler is at once narrow minded, and also clouding our view. It is very easy to say it was all Hitler, it is a bit more complex once we realize that Hitler was just a charcater in a very long tradgedy, there were many men worst than Hitler, and the modern historical view is that Hitler was pushed into may things.

Now, let me make a modern anology. All the republicans in america look at the economy and say look, this is all Obamas fault. To all of us this seems a very biased and limited view. Because we know that this econimical collapse is not obamas fault, but the fault of the last 30 odd years of national zeitgesit and political and financial systems which would inevitably lead to the finacial collapse.

Saying the Holocaust was all Hitler is to me as narrow minded as saying the bad economy is all obama. There was a system before it which was leading towards that inevitable moment that was the holocaust. Hitler was just a pawn in the scheme of things, a big pawn, but nonethless just part of a cultural and political ziestgeist which was moving towards its natural conclusion, namley the holocaust. To all the men who knew what The Kaisser and his army and scientists were doing to the Herero and Namaqua people in their affircan colonies at the begining of the 20th century, the holocuats 40 odd years later would have come as no suprise. But everyone was suprised. Because most people behaved like you and Darcy in this situation and instead of choosing to examine the complexity of history and scrutinize, they just chose to lay out uninformed blanket statements to make history more ordered and simpler to understand, which leads to ignorance and the mistakes of the past being repeated.


Here read this http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herero_...maqua_Genocide

And then try telling me about the "uniquness of Hitler" and how no one saw it coming, and how the holocaust was hitlers sole creation.


I appologize if I come of as bitter and personaly attacking you (darcy and st.lukes) but this subject gets me heated up, as in your attitudes I see the ingoring of history and obscuring of truth, just so that the world can be ordered in a more simple and satifying manner. And it is this very attitude which will lead to the horrors of the past being repeated in the future, because the truth of the past remains unknwon and everyone is there waving flags and cheering because this new guy, he is nothing at all like the evil men of before. truth is, that when this "new savior" comes and you shall be cheering him on, he shall appear to you nothign like the mosneters of the past, because your image of the monsters of the past is mainly fictitious and is disjointed from the truth. What you guys preach is the benefit of ignorance, and it is this ignorance which shall damn us some day.

My friend, you have a mind.

[Mr.lucifer]

Personally, my visions of evil is a bit complex.

[KCurtis]

Apart from the fact that his writing does not make sense, it was a nice metaphor yes. Now still the contents.

oh, you flatterer, you

But see that is your opinion. He makes perfect sense.