![]() |
|
||
Opinions are the author's and are not necessarily shared by Blogger, SDF, my employer or my family, but they should be.
Blogs and such
e-mail lists
Other Results of 2 Nov 2004 General Election (winners in bold; click on office for more detail)
Tools |
2004-06-10
Explaining the Hitler Explainers
I discovered that my thinking about Hitler — what little of it I've done — has been rather superficial. The quandry, it seems to me, is that to the extent we explain Hitler, we open the possibility of letting him off the hook, at least to some extent. Most people don't want to let him entirely off the hook; I certainly don't. Is letting him off the hook the same as forgiving him? Despite my natural impulse to assert that everyone deserves forgiveness, I hesitate when it comes to Hitler (and Stalin, too). But how much off the hook is okay? Was it his childhood and upbringing? Was it his alleged physical deformity? His alleged Jewish ancestry? Was it genetic? Was the Shoah inherent in the German nation and Hitler only the — my goodness, I hate using this word, even in quotes — "right" person at the "right" time? But the only way to explain him besides saying he was off the scale of "normal" human evil is to try to explain him in terms that derive from our own experience of the evil within "normal" human beings. Some say this is not appropriate. Again, my natural impulse is to assert that Hitler was the extreme end of a spectrum of good and evil, that "there but for the grace of God go I." Again, though, I hesitate when it comes to Hitler (and Stalin). The enormity of what these two men did so overwhelms me that I have trouble getting started on questions like this. And if Hitler (and perhaps Stalin) was off the human scale, was a true aberration, might there have been others of whom I'm not aware or less aware? What about Goebbels, Göring, Heydrich, Himmler (Beria) and others? Rosenbaum ends with a thought about how we might legitimately feel about Hitler.
Justice (Civil Liberties, so-called Intellectual Property, Privacy & Secrecy); Politics & Government (International, National, State, Local); Humor (Irony & the Funny or Unusual); Science & Technology (Astronomy, Computers, the Internet, e-Voting, Crypto, Physics & Space); Communication (Books, Film, Media, Music & the English Language); Economics (Corporatism & Consumerism); and Items of Purely Personal Note (including Genealogy, Photography, Religion & Spirituality). |