Will Smith, Hitler and the Holocaust's Unanswerable Question
Will Smith found himself in hot water last week after making a statement to a Scottish newspaper that Adolph 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."
Smith's quote was preceded by the interviewer's gratuitous observation, "Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good." So websites pounced on Smith for allegedly believing that Hitler was "a good person," even though Smith said no such thing.
The Jewish Defense League said Smith's words "spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis" and called on theaters to boycott Smith's new movie. It looked like another Mel Gibson moment in the making.
But what was lost in the controversy is that Smith's actual statement -- not that Hitler was a good person, but that Hitler thought he was a good person -- lies at the heart of one of the most baffling questions about Hitler that historians and philosophers have grappled with since the Holocaust.
The most cogent discussion of that question is laid out in Ron Rosenbaum's brilliant book Explaining Hitler, which ought to be required reading for anyone interested in deciphering the worst villainy in modern history.
Rosenbaum examines various attempts by historians and philosophers to explain "what made Hitler Hitler." And one of Rosenbaum's most interesting discussions centers on the very issue Will Smith addressed:
Did Hitler, Rosenbaun asks, "believe in some deeply deluded way that he was doing good?" In other words, was he "convinced of his own rectitude," as Hitler biographer Hugh Trevor-Roper and many other scholars have argued? Or was Hitler "deeply aware of his own criminality," as philosophers such as Berel Lang and others maintain?
To frame this discussion, Rosenbaum points to a tradition in Western philosophy going back to Plato that draws a distinction between two concepts: "evil" and "wicked."
In this tradition, "evil" can describe people who do terrible things but who think, in their own deluded way, that they are actually doing good. "Wickedness," on the other hand, is reserved for people who do terrible things "knowing they are doing wrong."
In the case of Hitler, the question of whether he knew he was doing wrong and just did it anyway, or whether he actually thought he was doing good despite his horrific acts, bedevil all attempts to understand the worst crime of the twentieth century.
And interestingly, lots of scholars come down on the side of Will Smith, arguing that Hitler was "convinced of his own rectitude."
Not all of these people are philosophical hairsplitters, either. Rosenbaum finds, for example, an "unexpected echo of this rectitude argument" in Israel's chief Nazi hunter, Efraim Zuroff of the Simon Wisenthal Center.
"When I asked Zuroff....whether Hitler was conscious of doing wrong, he was even more emphatic than Trevor-Roper. 'Of course not!' he practically yelled at me. 'Hitler thought he was a doctor! Killing germs!...He believed he was doing good, not evil.'"
Rosenbaum himself is not convinced. Later in his book he writes that he is "more inclined to see Hitler as a vicious, cold-blooded hater who fabricated, counterfeited a mask of rectitude for the sake of history and expediency."
But while many agree with Rosenbaum, many principled scholars, biographers, philosophers -- even Nazi hunters -- do not.
In fact, when you look at Will Smith's actual quote, he describes the "rectitude" argument rather concisely. Hitler, he said, did not use logic but rather "a twisted, backwards logic" to do not good but "what he thought was good." Zuroff could hardly have put it more succinctly.
As soon as the controversy erupted, Will Smith issued a statement clarifying his belief that Hitler was "a vile, heinous vicious killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet."
Abraham Foxman of the Anti-Defamation League accepted the clarification. "We welcome and accept Will Smith's statement that Hitler was a 'vicious killer,'" Foxman said, "and that he did not mean for his remarks about the Nazi leader to be mistaken as praise."
Foxman pointed out that words "can be twisted by those with hate and bigotry in their hearts. This is why all celebrities bear a special responsibility to weigh their words carefully, and an obligation to speak out against racism and bigotry whenever even a whiff of it appears, as Will Smith has done in this instance."
Well said. But journalists, bloggers and anti-hate groups also have a responsibility to weigh their words carefully, and not to stifle or demonize attempts to understand the nature of Nazi evil.
That evil stands at the center of modern history -- and modern life. Did Hitler represent, as Emil Fackenheim has said, a unique "eruption of demonism into history" -- in which case he stands at a comfortable remove from the rest of us? Or was Hitler simply a more extreme version of something much more familiar -- a person who thought he was doing good, even if it had to be accomplished by terrible means? In which case his misdeeds are much more troubling, because they are at least somewhat recognizable.
Will Smith may not be a scholar, historian or philosopher, but he was expressing a widely-held and respected side of that question. It's a question that can never be answered. But merely asking it, merely pondering it, represents a small step in humanity's struggle to assure that what Hitler did, for whatever reasons he did it, is less likely to happen again.
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Much ado about nothing
All "evil" people think they're doing the right thing--just look at Bush, Cheney, and the Israeli war criminals who are perpetrating so much death and destruction on the Palestinians. The Jewish Defense League ought to clean its own house.
'The Jewish Defense League said Smith's words "spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis" and called on theaters to boycott Smith's new movie.'
Hmm... where was the Jewish Defense League when Ann Coulter said this? : "That is what Christians consider themselves: perfected Jews."
I'd be interested if they responded by suggesting that Coulter should be boycotted.
Here is why I liked Smith's comment. I mean, duh! the comment before it was taken out of context. It tends to draw a parallel between our current descent into fascism and what occurred in Germany before WWII. I believe Coulter is part of this current descent. Here is a perfect example of why this Jewish Defense League and other organizations purporting to protect the Jewish people actually do a great disservice to Jewish people.
(BTW, Smith's comment wasn't merely taken out of context, it was turned upside down on it's head -- Orwellian style)
The Media is out to make a profit. They need eyeballs. Controversy brings eyeballs. Therefore they will always twist and selectively edit the facts in order to brew controversy where none exists.
That Scottish reporter must have plotz in his pants with glee when Smith made his statement. I doubt he was stupid enough to actually believe that Smith was saying Hitler was a good guy. But that didn't matter. He put in his opening comment to spin the reader before he provided Smith's quote.
That's why multiple sources of information are so important. And that's why the FCC's hardon for media consolidation is so deadly to democracy.
I'm in the middle of reading the Rise and Fall of the Third Reich. One of the key chapters in the book deals with the philosophical, mythical, historical, cultural, and political roots that lay behind the thoughts of Hitler. William Shirer reminds us that nothing Hitler proposed in Mein Kampf was new but was the culmination of much thinking and ideology that had gone before. Hitler was of course a mad genius who in his twisted mind took various strands of the 'blood and iron' thinking before him and literally enacted it.
Those who would make Hitler out to be some kind of apparition like demon who suddenly appeared do us all a dis-service. Hitler is not an 'other.' Hitler is a product of the human race. He is one of us. He is the shadow that reminds us how twisted the mind of leaders can become in their ideology and certainty. Hitler exists today in Rwanda and Darfur. He existed in Cambodia under the guise of Pol Pot. The main difference is that these people neither have the technology nor the military to destroy 65 million people. Do they believe they are achieving some higher good? I believe they think their vision, cause, and they themselves are the higher good. The object of all history. They are us and it's why we should have scrutiny and oversight of any leader who comes to power. A fact that sorely escapes many in our Congress today.
I need to make one crucial clarification regarding my saying that evil and wickedness are one. They are with the following caveat from the Summa theologiae I-II, q 34, a 2 of St. Thomas Aquinas: When an evil is reasonably expected to bring some good, like for instance a bitter medicine or a spanking "this pain (evil) it is no longer evil, but good! It is good for the leper [or a rebel], to [eat] [get] things that are poisonous or painful for the sake of his health, [...] for in such cases, the bitterness of the medicine is the lesser pain, than the evil that would result otherwise.
It is known that Hitler recovered from a gas attack (presumably chlorine, the most widely used gas) during World War 1 and spent a while in the military hospital at Pasewalk. He was temporarily blinded. I am not a medical doctor but one has to wonder what the effect of gassing could have been on his mental state.
Hitler lived at a time when eugenics was "en vogue" in the Western World. Even Winston Churchill believed for a while that bad genetic apples might have to be eugenized.
Hitler was a habitual liar. Did he lie to himself? Konrad Heiden, his first biographer, thinks that he did.
Did Hitler think that he did good when he participated in the wanton murder of the SA leaders in the "night of the long knives"? His false excuse for that atrocity was that these leaders were all homosexuals (some were but not all). Yet Hitler once told a friend that he did not care whether a person was gay as long as that person was totally loyal to him (I cannot repeat here what Hitler actually said).
In sum, I think that Hitler was much more complicated than the simple "he thought that he did good".
What's missed here, is the fact that people don't listen. Obviously someone took Mr. Smith's words out of context. Perhaps if we were all a little more careful and listened fully there wouldn't be so much misunderstandings and hatred. The MSM seems to always pick bits and pieces, never the whole picture.
This is one of the most thought-provoking articles that I have read, and I have read quite a few. The article brings to mind not so much the question of difference between evil and wickedness (there is none), as the question of difference between evil and earthly power! Some people are called selfless because they renounce all claim on power, except the ability to serve God in freedom. Other people, and these are the absolute majority, are called selfless because they, like Benazir Bhutto, risk their own lives for more power. What is interesting, both people insist that "their only aim is to do greater good"! And here comes Hitler. Those who know history, know that Hitler worshipped not the Power of the Almighty, but the Power of Nature. Any "Force" in Nature, was a manifestation of deity, for Hitler! This was not evil in itself, but it became evil the instant Hitler decided to annihilate one people, to increase the power of another - the German people! The moral is: if we worship the Almighty, we use power for the good of all! If however we worship Nature or some other idols, we end up doing evil to some, and good ... to ourselves and to those who worship us!
Regardless of Hitler's upbringing or his educational and philosophical prowess, he nevertheless decided what he was doing was right imo. His desire to create a great "Fatherland" did not rest on his moral fortitude, what ever that might be, but on his greediness to become the NEW leader of the World. Greed is a bad emotion. It creates monsters that most often rely on twisted backwards logic, justified in their own head, to achieve their goals, whatever that might be. The fact that Hitler may have become enthralled with the idea of being a New World Leader and didn't stop to think about his own method of achieving his goal, namely genocide, only points to a psychological deficiency. This means that it is likely that Hitler had a disease, a disease history knows he had that can affect senility, namely Syphilis, that had caused him to use twisted backwards logic. Whatever Hitler thought of his own methods and techniques to achieve his desired goal, he might not of been able to see the big picture of it.
This makes it an inconvenient truth for the rest of us, to realize that the disease warping his brain was principally what made him do it. We will never know if it was the overriding motivation for his thought processes or whether it was his own ideological feelings that guided his ill begotten aim or not. For history, a crazy Hitler or an ideological Hitler in charge, it will be impossible to discern which was more "in charge" in his head. But it's safe to say, Will Smith was right. It's a question we can not fully answer because of a disease of the brain creating a motivation only Hitler understood. So he probably thought he was doing good, but didn't, or couldn't understand the evil of his ways.
In Herr Hitler's millenial view of the world he was trying to create, the ends justified the means. Good or evil in the details didn't concern him. Civilization had already cracked up back in 1914. He was just trying to rectify the "Crime of Versailles" and purify his thousand year Reich.
Do not compare it with Bush peops!
Gabriel, you missed out the point COMPLETELY.
It's not about agree/disagree. It's just as if you missed the point of learning history in the 1st place. Sorry :(
Will Smith couldn't have been more correct. Hitler thought he was doing good. This doesn't mean Hitler was good. Why do people have such a hard time understanding nuance?
You couldn't find a more perfect argument for critical thinking than Hitler. He should remind everyone that the greatest atrocities in history have been committed not by people uncertain about about their beliefs but by the morally unconfused.
This is the most important thing Americans today need to learn about their civic responsibilities. Elect someone who is certain about principle and you are asking for trouble. Elect someone who is capable of questioning themselves, and you might avoid a war.
'Acting on principle' is only a virtue if your principles are correct ones. It is only through rigorous thinking that one will not assent to wrong principles
when will the pots tire of calling the kettles black.the pile of bones piled up by america while murdering the native americans and inflicting the african holecaust on enslaved blacks and numerous minor genocides like east timor and vietnam...
There are people who will deliberately
misinterpret something so that they can
listen to themselves and get others to
listen. Smith didn't even have to
apologize but in the face of hysteria
he was better off.
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