In response to the gentiles posting about the humanity of Hitler and the Nazis on Yom Hashoah

[attackfish]

If we’re going to be humanizing Hitler and the Nazis, okay, let’s do that. Let’s talk about how they had friends, and families, and flirted, and didn’t stop doing all the things humans do just because they started becoming monsters. Okay, that’s nice. Let’s talk about how when it was all over, they managed to put all that death and murder, and hate, and cruelty back in a box and keep doing all those nice human things. Let’s talk about how many of them were nice to their kids and loved their families. Let’s talk about how entire nations grew up telling themselves: “not my parents. Yes my dad was a member of the party, but he didn’t know. My mom worked for a company that used slave labor, but she didn’t know. Not my aunt, not my uncle, not the people who I love and love me. They didn’t know.” Let’s talk about how “no one” knew. Let’s talk about how that is absolute bullshit. Let’s talk about the lies that people have been telling themselves for thousands of years, that they are still telling themselves, that made this possible, about the greedy parasitic Jew, and the thieving, cheating dirty G*psy. Let’s talk about how at the start of WWII, more Americans were worried about how much power Jews had than how much power Hitler had, while Jews didn’t even have the power to keep themselves alive. Let’s talk about how antisemitism and anti-Romani racism are alive and well in Europe and the Americas today. Let’s talk about how maybe, just maybe you should look at your mother’s favorite great uncle, and your grandmother who made you cookies, and your friends’ grandparents and the way they look so human, and ask yourself: “Did they really not know?”

And maybe then we can talk about all those dead human beings they “didn’t know” about.

 

Comments

[ljwrites]

Oh good, you've put it here too. Humanizing killers and onlookers is all well and good, but my problem is that these stories tell an incomplete and therefore misleading truth. In my mind a good humanizing story should be, "Look at these people who are totally not monsters but people who could be you. And look at the awful things they did to these other people who are also all too human, just like you. See? You are not immune. You, too, have the capacity for evil within you." A proper villain-humanization story should make people uncomfortable, it should make people examine what they believe and what they do.

Instead, all too often the story is "Look at these people who are totally not monsters but people who could be you. And look at the awful things they did to... oh, these interchangeable stereotypes that are totally not like you. Why are we so hard on these poor dears, anyway? They're just people, not monsters! The evil must have happened like a flash flood or an earthquake, who knows. But let's not blame these totally-people for what happened to these not-quite-people, because that's awful to call people bad names like Nazis." These stories soothe where they should sting, and uphold the status quo while giving creators and viewers alike a totally undeserved sense that they are somehow brave and moral.

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. And guess which kind of story sells better and gets more acclaims. Sometimes I hate people.

[attackfish]

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.