Most religions have saints for looking up to — and sinners for scaring children. The psychological need is still there so society has built a more secular pantheon. But like most myths, they’re problematic at best. I think the biggest saint from the Temple of Modernity is Mother Teresa, who “dedicated her life to the poorest of the poor”. Actually, she didn’t just lack goodness but was positively evil. I’ve written a bit about her before so two links should suffice. I’d like to talk instead about the biggest sinner from the same pantheon. Without question, this is Hitler.
It’s rare to hear a discussion on extreme evil without him popping up. Hitler is so overused in argument that there’s a new fallacy. Reductio ad hitlerum: attempting to make a tenuous connection to Hitler. Also, Godwin’s law states that as the length of an internet discussion increases, the probability of someone making a comparison to Hitler approaches 100%. (When it does the discussion is usually over.)
But there’s something terribly wrong with this picture. Hitler clearly lies at the centre of all the genocides of WWII. I think his role still wasn’t that great. He made a few speeches and signed a few orders. But the killings were carried out by others. Often by the public. Often by civilians who weren’t even compelled by the Nazis. In the Ukraine, Nazis used the Final Solution as marketing to secure the goodwill of the population — thousands of whom got to work eagerly and killed almost a million Jews .
There’s almost something supernatural about the modern mythology of Hitler. He’s the secularist’s Satan. But it’s a very convenient allocation of blame. It’s much easier to believe that one sociopath was almost single-handedly responsible for genocide. In reality, genocide more often than not has civilians lend a hand. It happened to the Armenians, Tutsis, Jews/Romani/homosexuals; and Hindus/Muslims/Sikhs during Partition.
Most people avoid reductio ad hitlerum or playing the Hitler card. But I think they still have an iconography in their head about it. To prevent future genocides we need to see the blame as usually coming from ordinary people and ordinary culture. And for that to happen, our view of genocide as being committed chiefly by their masterminds needs to change. Killing “even” 10,000 (small potatoes in genocide terms) requires lots of cooperation from others.
9 comments ↓
So you’re saying Hitler was a committe?
Sorry but I’ve never heard of the word committe before — and neither has Google or dictionary.com!
Deepest apologies – Committee.
Have you heard the word pedant?
I ignored that reading because I thought it didn’t make sense — do you mean because he made speeches and signed orders?
Well I guess so — after all the Final Solution was decided in a very commitee-like manner
No, because awful decisions were made by several people, with all the crap falling on the head of the guy in charge. Not so different from any committee today, other than the mass death, etc.
Well a lot of events do seem to have been driven by his personality so he obviously wasn’t just a figurehead. But yes, it is similar to the way that today if there’s some scandal it’s often expected that the “head” will simply resign and that will be it.
The other part is that when the civilians were involved there wasn’t even much of an organised process of decision-making.
The small pox bestowed upon the Native Americans was a much greater genocide, and much more efficient, than anything Hitler could have devised. Not to compare monsters, but the Brits were worse.
Anyone read Mein Kampf? Had a quick look through it, it is basically Keynesian economics, followed by “and it’s all the Jews fault.” Wonder what he’d make of the current banking crisis?
with native american smallpox deaths i’m pretty sure there’s a legitimate open question amongst historians about the degree to which it was deliberate — with the 20th century genocides it’s not.
a better historical genocide to rival hitler would be genghis khan’s invasions which killed at least 30 million directly (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_and_disasters_by_death_toll)
[...] death tolls from most genocides. Unsurprising since a lot of genocides are constructed bottom-up, by the civilian masses themselves. For instance as far as I know the Rwandan genocide wasn’t the direct result of a clear chain [...]
Leave a Comment