I always post here. I have it set to crosspost to livejournal.
The other thing humanizing villain-humanizing story should do is tell you that not only are you capable of evil, but also that the people most likely to give cruelty and murder form, to give the orders and shape the justifications, the ones who not only look away, but take advantage, look a lot like not only you, but your friends and neighbors. Not only do we have to guard against our own potential to do evil, which is the easiest task here really, but we have to learn not to look away when other people do evil, just because they look like us, and they are nice to us. So much of our visual vocabulary of what evil looks like has been shaped by the Nazis, so in retrospect, it looks even more like they were wearing signs around their necks proclaiming their villainy. It's important to realize that this is a retrospective view, and a lot of people, a lot of people managed to convince themselves that the Nazis were doing the right thing.
Humanization should mean acknowledging that humans, all humans, are capable of evil. Instead it's often used as a device to cut out the evil from the wrongdoers' lives while dehumanizing the victims, as though there's only so much humanity to go around.
Exactly. I read these kind of "pity the poor Nazi" posts and I ask myself is it really so hard to empathize with people who died in terror and pain, who were tortured and enslaved, who survived but lost their whole families, who were starved, who died of disease and overcrowding, without any medical care, whose bodies were taken from them and used for whatever the Nazis thought they could gain, sometimes in that order and sometimes not? Is it really that hard to empathize with dying children?
I think we see the same process with abuse apologia, and bully apologia, and rape apologia, and all of those much smaller scale evils. So many people find it more palatable to empathize with the victimizers than with their victims.
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branchandroot
no subject
Date: 2015-04-18 01:35 pm (UTC)The other thing humanizing villain-humanizing story should do is tell you that not only are you capable of evil, but also that the people most likely to give cruelty and murder form, to give the orders and shape the justifications, the ones who not only look away, but take advantage, look a lot like not only you, but your friends and neighbors. Not only do we have to guard against our own potential to do evil, which is the easiest task here really, but we have to learn not to look away when other people do evil, just because they look like us, and they are nice to us. So much of our visual vocabulary of what evil looks like has been shaped by the Nazis, so in retrospect, it looks even more like they were wearing signs around their necks proclaiming their villainy. It's important to realize that this is a retrospective view, and a lot of people, a lot of people managed to convince themselves that the Nazis were doing the right thing.
Humanization should mean acknowledging that humans, all humans, are capable of evil. Instead it's often used as a device to cut out the evil from the wrongdoers' lives while dehumanizing the victims, as though there's only so much humanity to go around.
Exactly. I read these kind of "pity the poor Nazi" posts and I ask myself is it really so hard to empathize with people who died in terror and pain, who were tortured and enslaved, who survived but lost their whole families, who were starved, who died of disease and overcrowding, without any medical care, whose bodies were taken from them and used for whatever the Nazis thought they could gain, sometimes in that order and sometimes not? Is it really that hard to empathize with dying children?
I think we see the same process with abuse apologia, and bully apologia, and rape apologia, and all of those much smaller scale evils. So many people find it more palatable to empathize with the victimizers than with their victims.