Nazis and the Nature of Evil

[Madner Kami]

Hitler bullied kids at school into playing with him and was generally a disruptive student in the classroom.

Citation needed. The only account of a classmate of his that I am aware of, is a memoire of August Kubizek, a close friend and a room-mate and that was well into his time into secondary school in Vienna, at the age of about 17-19. Hitler himself describes his elementary school experience as if he was a well-liked center-stage personality, but we only know of one account of him being found smoking at the age of 8, by one of his teachers and a rather infamous photography, where he was placed in the center of the back-row, appearing as the largest in his class with a stern look. That photography strikes me as someone who wants to be the tough guy in the center-stage, but lacks that position and friends. But hey, YMMV.

He was extremely argumentative and condescending, well past the point of being verbally abusive.

He may have shot at or pulled a gun on people during WW1.

He definitely took part in street fights and riots in the early years of the Nazi Party, and at the very least assaulted people- he stopped soon after his own head got split open, but he continued to deliberately incite them and sent his goons to start fights with the Communists.

He certainly threatened people with violence to get his way on numerous occasions.

He is suspected of murdering his niece but that is unlikely.

He absolutely ordered millions of assaults, tortures and murders in his lifetime. This wasn't just during WW2, but innumerable instances starting at even before he came to power. He had zero compunctions about ordering violence and he encouraged and approved of his underlings committing it and being ready to commit it.

He was also known to sometimes bring in officers and foreign diplomats for a private meeting and spend hours shouting at them, screaming at them, berating them, threatening them, blaming him for any number of terrible actions that they "forced" him to take (like, say, "how brutal do you want our pending invasion of your country to be?" sort of actions) if they didn't give him what he wanted...and then he would go of and joke and laugh about how absolutely terrified he just left them, as if it were all a big gag.

DragonBallFan is reaching, but Hitler is hardly a good person just because he wasn't personally physically violent with others. He certainly wasn't like that because he lacked the stomach for it, and he was extremely abusive and mean spirited in other ways. That is a weak line or reasoning.

His niece murdered himself (thanks to Hitler's overbearing, obsession-like and suffocating influence), a soldier is not a killer and everything else you mentioned is past his World War I experience and thus well into and after his phase of (self-)radicalisation. My point is not, that Hitler didn't become a monstrous human being, he undeniably was, but that Hitler is neither a born monster, nor a complete monster with no positive traits, as outlined in this previous post:

and maybe I do have some negative aspects in common with Hitler and other historical monsters but my point was that those monsters did not have any positive traits in common with normal human beings.

You do realize that, in order to disprove your absolutely silly point, all one has to do is, find one trait about "Hitler and other historical monsters" that is a good thing about them?

Oh and Hitler's shouting? That is quite literally performance art. He trained himself to do that as a means to an end after World War I, during his time as a spy for the internal/political security section of the military. Argueably, it became part of his personality later in life, as it was so deeply ingrained in him to perform like that at will. But it certainly wasn't part of his personality before the 1920s.

Also, Riedquat gets it. Demonizing Hitler is only serving one goal, to distance yourself from him and what he did. It does not explain why he became the way he was and it certainly does not help in preventing it from happening again, especially if those who demonize him use exactly the same sort of mental gymnastics that Hitler used himself and declare a human being to be an unhuman. That is, unless you are willing to proclaim that every follower of Hitler was and is literally a demon-worshipper and a follower of a black magic practitioner. Yeah, that will work well

[Dragon Ball Fan]

warning - none of this post is intending to be horrifically insulting. The subject matter makes it very hard to not sound like that though. Apologies in advance if it comes across as insulting when I'm just attempting to use this subject to illustrate the points I'm making (and eventually you have to touch on the worst to really get to the bottom of things).

and I am dehumanizing an individual, not an entire people and I try not to do that unless it is clear to me that said individual has absolutely no good in them. if he put no value on human life, I don't have to put value on his.

I don't really give much of a damn about the lives of such people either, but you still need to watch yourself. The emotions you describe sound very similar to what you're condemning. Completely different reasons behind them of course, which is a very important difference, but "there's nothing good in them, I couldn't care less" - be very, very careful there.

humans show compassion and empathy with others who share traits in common with them, how can I do that with someone who is nothing but hate and cruelty? when I talk about empathy, I am not talking about the understanding others motivation part, my sense of empathy is just the part about realizing others suffer when they are hurt and the part related to that that makes me sickened at the thought of doing immoral things.

There's a lot more to empathy than simply realising others suffer. Indeed even those without any empathy know that, they just don't care. As for hating, you're demonstrating it yourself so you can't claim nothing in common. And why do you say "nothing but hate and cruelty?" Sure, those were Hitler's defining characteristics, the ones that mattered, but "nothing but"? Careful of over-simplifying and demonising even the worst people, because no-one's that simple - but it makes it easier to hate them. You're demonstrating some empathy, which is a big, important difference, but not a great deal.

and even if I had the chance to kill such an individual, I would not unless it was in the context of justified homicide. I do not condone going out of your way to kill even monsters like Hitler unless this is in the context of a comic book universe and even then, only for pragmatic reasons.

Is there no temptation, even one you fight down and wouldn't give in to? If so then you know what cruelty is too.

I know people like Hitler had no good in them, I know very much about other historical monsters like H.H. Homes, all my sources talk about how they were so monstrous and "born to kill"

basically, my sense of right and wrong is so strong, the idea of someone else not having the same revoltion at the notion of harming another human being as me is incomprehensible to me.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

Hitler bullied kids at school into playing with him and was generally a disruptive student in the classroom.

Also, Riedquat gets it. Demonizing Hitler is only serving one goal, to distance yourself from him and what he did. It does not explain why he became the way he was and it certainly does not help in preventing it from happening again, especially if those who demonize him use exactly the same sort of mental gymnastics that Hitler used himself and declare a human being to be an unhuman. That is, unless you are willing to proclaim that every follower of Hitler was and is literally a demon-worshipper and a follower of a black magic practitioner. Yeah, that will work well

for lack of a better way to put it, I will give the average German citizen and the ones told to commit horrible acts under threat of death a pass but I am willing to say that literally everyone else who took part in the Holocaust was an inhuman monster.

[Riedquat]

I know people like Hitler had no good in them, I know very much about other historical monsters like H.H. Homes, all my sources talk about how they were so monstrous and "born to kill"

Do you know? How? We mostly hear about their bad stuff. That's no surprise, and it's not as if anything good in them at all makes up for it, but there's no evidence of being totally incapable of anything decent. Even the most one-dimensional seeming person has a little depth to them.

basically, my sense of right and wrong is so strong, the idea of someone else not having the same revoltion at the notion of harming another human being as me is incomprehensible to me.

That sounds rather like you're refusing to look at things in anything other than the very simplest black and white terms. That's an attitude that breeds extremist views. All you need to do is change one or two words and names and you'll sound very much like those you hate. A deep hatred of something you find revolting and an absolute unwillingness to entertain the thought that someone who's on the receiving end of that could possibly have anything worthwhile behind it... Your targets are simply a lot more justified. I'm not saying this to condemn you, to say that I think you're nearly the same, just that we're all human and it's a reflection of what we all are.

If he was standing in front of you now, and you had a gun, would you pull the trigger? Maybe not, but would you claim that you weren't sorely tempted? And then what about those who supported him, helped his rise to power, carried out his orders? Once you've got that far it matters little whether what started you off was based on fact or fiction. The person who looks in the most black and white terms is the most likely to fall - the Hitlers march cheerfully off down that path but they're not the only ones who ever follow it.

Do you read Terry Pratchett? If you start looking at anyone in that sort of light you need the Sam Vimes reaction to deal with it - constantly watching himself.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

I know people like Hitler had no good in them, I know very much about other historical monsters like H.H. Homes, all my sources talk about how they were so monstrous and "born to kill"

Do you know? How? We mostly hear about their bad stuff. That's no surprise, and it's not as if anything good in them at all makes up for it, but there's no evidence of being totally incapable of anything decent. Even the most one-dimensional seeming person has a little depth to them.

basically, my sense of right and wrong is so strong, the idea of someone else not having the same revoltion at the notion of harming another human being as me is incomprehensible to me.

That sounds rather like you're refusing to look at things in anything other than the very simplest black and white terms. That's an attitude that breeds extremist views. All you need to do is change one or two words and names and you'll sound very much like those you hate. A deep hatred of something you find revolting and an absolute unwillingness to entertain the thought that someone who's on the receiving end of that could possibly have anything worthwhile behind it... Your targets are simply a lot more justified. I'm not saying this to condemn you, to say that I think you're nearly the same, just that we're all human and it's a reflection of what we all are.

If he was standing in front of you now, and you had a gun, would you pull the trigger? Maybe not, but would you claim that you weren't sorely tempted? And then what about those who supported him, helped his rise to power, carried out his orders? Once you've got that far it matters little whether what started you off was based on fact or fiction. The person who looks in the most black and white terms is the most likely to fall - the Hitlers march cheerfully off down that path but they're not the only ones who ever follow it.

Do you read Terry Pratchett? If you start looking at anyone in that sort of light you need the Sam Vimes reaction to deal with it - constantly watching himself.

again, I can see moral gray areas in certain situations. as I said before, if the Jewish people really did ruin Germany, I could comprehend what lead Hitler and his followers to those atrocities but they made all of that up to trick the people into fallowing them and their real reason was just because the Jewish were undesirables.

and there are tons of other examples of individuals who were literally inhuman. Albert Fish. I feel bad describing it this way but to make my point, that letter he sent to that little girl's family basically red as "Wah-ha-ha, I got off to killing and eating your daughter, wa-ha-ha".

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I still don't get why you're so infatuated with empathy as this topic concerns it. For the most part, sadists are essentially empathetic people, just that they derive pleasure from people's pain instead of sorrow. What you're describing of your understanding of Hitler doesn't have anything to do with whether or not he was sadistic, and Jonathan's account of him indicates pretty strongly that he was.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

weather or not I understand what empathy is, I am also talking about compassion and my bafflement at anyone else not feeling the same revultion at doing immoral things that I do.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Yeah true I did kind of figure that way back when when this conversation started.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Finding it disgusting is normal. Why you sustain such a feeling of incredibleness with it though I don't get.

[Yukaphile]

@Dragon Ball Fan Did you know, again, I'll cite this to you specifically, the Soviet soldiers, when they weren't drinking, taking turns in trains raping women and girls, and just generally stealing whatever they could, would pet their horses, coo to them, and showed them a lot more respect than they did to the lives they left permanently ruined? Serial rapists/killers in today's society have pets they adore to death, yet treat humans like trash, or meat, or slime, or shit. It's not uncommon, dude, for evil people, even sickeningly evil people who have crossed the line so far they've gone into another galaxy, to have redeeming qualities. That's human nature.