Prev: The enigma of Hitler (Birthday April 20th)
Next: The Usual Mexican Fifth Column Traitors seek to thwart Arizona's anti-illegal immigration law (before it is signed into law).
From: ? on 20 Apr 2010 10:27
The Necessary Evil?

Why all Adolf Hitler's destructiveness is not enough to make him
Person of the Century

http://205.188.238.181/time/time100/poc/magazine/the_necessary_evil19a.html

By NANCY GIBBS

Monday, Jan. 3, 2000

How can you not pick Hitler, demand the players around the table who
take seriously the rules of TIME's parlor game: Who had the greatest
impact on this century, for better or worse?

It is too easy just to say that he lost, when in doing so he still
changed everything.

It was he who opened the veins of the Bloody Century, an epoch that
has seen mayhem on a scale unimagined for centuries before.

"As a result of Hitler," argued Elie Wiesel in TIME last year, "man is
defined by what makes him inhuman."

And while the Reich lasted 12 years rather than 1,000, its spores
still survive and multiply.

"The essence of Hitlerism — racism, ethnic hatred, extreme
nationalism, state-organized murder — is still alive, still causing
millions of deaths," wrote U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke when he
reluctantly nominated Hitler as the century's dominant character.

"Freedom is the century's most powerful idea, but the struggle is far
from over."

You could ask this of any year, any century: Which has the greater
impact, good or evil, the heroes or the villains, Roosevelt and
Churchill or Hitler and Stalin?

To what extent do they depend on each other, when threats produce
resolve, when terror engenders courage, when an ultimate challenge to
principle has the effect of making principles stronger, forging them
by fire?

Thoughtful people who argue for Hitler as the Person of the Century do
not want to honor him; they want to autopsy him, understand what made
him strong and what finally killed him, and search, perhaps, for a
vaccine for the virus that reappears still in ethnic enclaves, on
websites, in the wilderness camps of skinhead anarchists and in the
halls of Columbine High School, where two boys celebrated Hitler's
birthday with a memorial massacre of children.

If impact were measured only in number of lives lost, one argument
goes, Hitler would fall behind his fellow despots, Stalin and Mao.

There are those who insist that Hitler is not the century's dominant
figure because he was simply the latest in a long line of murderous
figures, stretching back to before Genghis Khan.

The only difference was technology: Hitler went about his cynical
carnage with all the efficiency that modern industry had perfected.

And then there is the problem of impact.

Which matters more, a life lost or a life changed forever?

How many divisions does the Pope have, Stalin asked.

Yet an idea that changes lives can have more power than an army that
takes them--which leaves Gutenberg presiding over the 15th century,
Jefferson over the 18th.

Making body counts the ultimate measure of influence precludes the
possibility of heroic sacrifice, a single death that inspires
countless others to live their lives differently, a young man in front
of a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square.

"Five hundred years from now, it won't be Hitler we remember," says
theologian Martin Marty.

"Hitler may have set the century's agenda; he was a sort of vortex of
negative energy that sucked everything else in. But I think God takes
fallible human beings like Roosevelt or Churchill and carves them for
his purposes. In five centuries, we'll look back and say the story of
the century was not Hitler or Stalin; it was the survival of the human
spirit in the face of genocide."

If all Hitler had done was kill people in vast numbers more
efficiently than anyone else ever did, the debate over his lasting
importance might end there.

But Hitler's impact went beyond his willingness to kill without
mercy.

He did something civilization had not seen before.

Genghis Khan operated in the context of the nomadic steppe, where
pillaging villages was the norm.

Hitler came out of the most civilized society on Earth, the land of
Beethoven and Goethe and Schiller.

He set out to kill people not for what they did but for who they were.
Even Mao and Stalin were killing their "class enemies." Hitler killed
a million Jewish babies just for existing.

It is this distinction that pulls us right into the heart of the
question.

And that is our long, modern conversation over the nature of evil.

The debate goes back to Socrates, who argued that anyone who was
acquainted with good could not intentionally choose evil instead.

Enlightenment thinkers went further, pushing concepts of good and evil
into the realm of superstition.

But Hitler changed that.

It was he, perhaps more than any other figure, who demanded a whole
rethinking about good, evil, God and man.

"Before Hitler, we thought we had sounded the depths of human nature,"
argues Ron Rosenbaum, author of "Explaining Hitler."

"He showed how much lower we could go, and that's what was so
horrifying. It gets us wondering not just at the depths he showed us
but whether there is worse to come."

The power of Hitler was to confound the modernist notion that
judgments about good and evil were little more than matters of taste,
reflections of social class and power and status.

Although some modern scholars drive past the notion of evil and
instead explain Hitler's conduct as a reflection of his childhood and
self-esteem issues, for most survivors of the 20th century he is
confirmation of our instinctive sense that evil does exist.

It moves among us; it leads us astray and deploys powerful, subtle
weapons against even the sturdiest souls.

There is a more nuanced, even insidious, argument for Hitler's pre-
eminence: that good and evil are dependent on one another.

It is a fundamental tenet to many religions that evil, while
mysterious, may clear the way for good, that the soul is perfected
only in battle, that pain and ecstasy are somehow twins, that only a
soul — or a century — that has truly suffered can truly realize joy.

Again we sense this instinctively — the pleasure we feel when a tooth
stops hurting reminds us that we live our life in contexts and
contrasts, and so perhaps you can argue that only by witnessing, and
confronting, great evil were the forces of light able to burn most
bright.

There are theologians and historians who have made this point.

Most explicit are those who have called him God's punishment of
European Jews for their secularization, then gone on to argue that it
was mainly because of Hitler and the Holocaust that the biblical
prophecy was fulfilled and the state of Israel born — only Western
guilt on so massive a scale could have cleared the way to the Promised
Land.

There is a political version of this equation: that at the beginning
of the century, the West was ruled mainly by thin-blooded despots,
with the exception of the more entrenched democracies of England and
the U.S.
Hitler did not believe the Western democracies capable of defending
the principles they espoused — and as they wavered and appeased and
betrayed in the face of his expansion, Hitler appeared to be right.

It was Churchill first, and then Roosevelt, who reawakened the West to
its core values: freedom, civility, common decency in the face of
evil, destructive forces of hate.

The challenge that Hitler presented became the occasion for Churchill
and Roosevelt and the lovers of freedom to battle the great diseases
of the century: nihilism and defeatism.

Churchill's apostles argue for him as the century's titan on these
grounds.

It was by no means obvious, in the dark days of 1940, that the Western
Allies could prevail against the Axis.

His optimism about victory and his conviction that there were truths
worth defending to the death were as important as his identifying the
threat and standing up to it.

Forty years later, when Ronald Reagan approached the cold war as a
battle to be not only fought but also won, he was following a
Churchillian strategy.

So did it take a Hitler, a mortal threat, to move the Allied
democracies from complacent enclaves to the global powerhouses that by
century's end would embrace most of the world's people?

Here is a place to draw the line. "It may be true that we've got great
medical breakthroughs, radar, sonar because of war," says theologian
Marty, "but I don't like to make a theology out of that; it's an
accidental product."

Rosenbaum agrees that to focus on the benefits is to risk trivializing
the tragedy itself.

"There are a lot of people who want to say God was teaching us a
lesson — evil is there so that we can learn by struggling against it.
I find it kind of barbaric to envision a God who needs to slaughter a
million babies in order to perhaps improve our character. I'm
irritated by people who try to find some happy-ever-after improving
lesson from this."

However much stronger the Western democracies were after the war, as
they went on to discredit not only fascism but communism as well, that
strength still came at a terrible cost.

"How much happier a world it would be if one did not have to mount
crusades against racism, segregation, a Holocaust, the extermination
of 'inferior peoples,'" notes presidential historian Robert Dallek.

"We don't need evil. We'd do fine without Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot.
Think of the amount of money and energy used in World War II — if only
they could have been used in constructive ways. Good doesn't need
evil. We'd be just as well rid of it."

If we must place the century in a time capsule, there are better
candidates for Person of the Century than its greatest criminal.

The large characters, heroes and villains alike, do set the scales on
which we balance progress.

Evil may be a powerful force, a seductive idea, but is it more
powerful than genius, creativity, courage or generosity?

The century has offered characters who stretched our understanding and
faith in those qualities as well.

The heroes not only defeated Hitler; they provided our lasting
inspiration as well.

"Just as Hitler made us believe we hadn't yet sounded the depths,"
notes Rosenbaum, "maybe Martin Luther King Jr. and the great artists
of the century, like Nabokov, help us believe there are still heights
we haven't found."










































From: BrianNZ on 20 Apr 2010 16:52
? wrote:
> On Apr 20, 9:55 am, climber <coledenk...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>> Utter nonsense. Suitable for schoolmarms, preachers, faggots, and
>> maggots.
>
> Of course the referenced article was based upon bi-polar philosophy,
> which is the notion that every quality has its opposite, that "good"
> is always balanced by "evil,"
> yet "good" must finally prevail, or why bother to struggle to stay
> alive?
>
> There is, however, an instinct to *survive* and to pass on one's
> accumulated wealth, whether treasure of land, to one's posterity.
>
> Adolf Hitler wrote that history is the record of violent struggles
> between peoples, and the survival of the fittest is is proven in the
> fact that the stronger has prevailed and that the weaker whines if he
> has survived at all.
>


Not necessarily. The fittest people who become outnumbered and/or out
gunned (financially?) will die.

I'd put my money on Putin in a punch-up against Obama. :)
From: Road Glidin' Don on 20 Apr 2010 17:22
On Apr 20, 12:49 pm, "?" <breoganmacbr...(a)yahoo.com> wrote:

> Adolf Hitler wrote that history is the record of violent struggles
> between peoples, and the survival of the fittest is is proven in the
> fact that the stronger has prevailed and that the weaker whines if he
> has survived at all.

The last part sums you up very well.



From: mayner on 20 Apr 2010 18:44
On Wed, 21 Apr 2010 08:52:58 +1200, BrianNZ <brian(a)itnz.co.nz> wrote:

>? wrote:
>> On Apr 20, 9:55 am, climber <coledenk...(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>> Utter nonsense. Suitable for schoolmarms, preachers, faggots, and
>>> maggots.
>>
>> Of course the referenced article was based upon bi-polar philosophy,
>> which is the notion that every quality has its opposite, that "good"
>> is always balanced by "evil,"
>> yet "good" must finally prevail, or why bother to struggle to stay
>> alive?
>>
>> There is, however, an instinct to *survive* and to pass on one's
>> accumulated wealth, whether treasure of land, to one's posterity.
>>
>> Adolf Hitler wrote that history is the record of violent struggles
>> between peoples, and the survival of the fittest is is proven in the
>> fact that the stronger has prevailed and that the weaker whines if he
>> has survived at all.
>>
>
>
>Not necessarily. The fittest people who become outnumbered and/or out
>gunned (financially?) will die.
>
>I'd put my money on Putin in a punch-up against Obama. :)


That ain't fair. Obama was a basketball player and everybody knows
basketball players can't fight, except maybe for Calvin Murphy. :-)
From: ? on 20 Apr 2010 19:09
On Apr 20, 11:56 am, "Datesfat Chicks" <datesfat.chi...(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
> "?" <breoganmacbr...(a)yahoo.com> wrote in message

> >To what extent do they depend on each other, when threats produce
> >resolve, when terror engenders courage, when an ultimate challenge to
> >principle has the effect of making principles stronger, forging them
> >by fire?
>
> Regrettably, I somewhat agree with that logic.  Probably every fire code
> regulation, for example, probably has a story behind it involving loss of
> life.

I agree that a challenge which does not kill me makes me stronger, but
are the challenges inherently "evil"?

 |  Next  |  Last
Pages: 1 2 3
Prev: The enigma of Hitler (Birthday April 20th)
Next: The Usual Mexican Fifth Column Traitors seek to thwart Arizona's anti-illegal immigration law (before it is signed into law).