Will Smith on Hitler
It seems that Will Smith has caused quite a controversy: in an interview with the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record, Smith said (or was quoted as saying): “Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’,” which sounds correct to me. However, the author of the article in the newspaper twisted what he said saying that “[r]emarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.”
Which is, of course, not what he said at all.
Now, before the illiterates among us start accusing me of saying that Hitler was a “good” human being, let me repeat what Smith said about him after the controversy broke out: “Adolf Hitler was a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet.”
What Smith said - and what I am saying - then, isn’t that Hitler was good, it’s that Hitler thought he was good. That’s not a secret. Everyone who read his writings, listened to his speeches, etc. knows that. He believed that he had to remove evil from this planet. To us, Hitler was evil. To him, however, Jews, Gipsies, etc. were evil.
Trust me when I say that Hitler didn’t think “by God, am I evil! I enjoy being evil! Evil is me.” The only people who think like that are fictional characters. Not real people.
Am I, by pointing out the obvious, defending Hitler somehow?
Of course not.
Well, not if you’re actually capable of nuance and aren’t completely illiterate.
Why anyone takes the political pronouncements of actors and musicians in the least seriously continues to puzzle me.
Why you cannot say a good word anywhere in the vicinity of an evil person without being accused of supporting that person continues to puzzle me.
Bill Maher got his show canceled for saying that the 9/11 hijackers weren’t cowards. He didn’t say they were good, just that they weren’t cowardly. He said it on a show called "Politically Incorrect". You can disagree with the statement, just like you can disagree with Will Smith on this, but the fact remains that some people can’t handle nuance, and will punish YOU for trying to give any.
Actually it was Dinesh D’Souza who said he thought that the 9/11 terrorists weren’t cowards. Maher agreed and also said that the Americans were cowards for lobbing cruise missiles from 2000 miles away.Also, good post.
In the first instance he was being analytical in a nuanced way about Hitler’s motivation; in the second he was responding to the controversy and trying to put it to rest. Just as s0meday history may judge current political figures as heinous villains, even though they believe in what they do. In the context of history, Hitler is a monster.
<<Why anyone takes the political pronouncements of actors and musicians in the least seriously continues to puzzle me.>>Well I think they should probably be taken just as seriously as the pronouncements of anybody else in the world, at least just as seriously as random postings on the internet.