Will Smith and the Good Guys/Bad Guys Myth

Many Americans cling to a belief in comic book villains -- 'Bad Guys' who actually identify with 'Evil'. A few nuts may like to dramatize themselves this way, but the evil they actually manage to accomplish is peanuts compared to what people who think of themselves as 'Good Guys' achieve. The Crusades, the Inquisition, the Holocaust, the slaughters of Protestants by Catholics and vice versa, of Sunnis by Shiites and vice versa, the death squads employed by Latin American dictators -- all these atrocities were committed by people who thought they were ridding the world of evil.

The current Pope thinks atheism is the main source of evil in the world, which is laughable. When Godfroi de Bouillon, the 'heroic' crusader, slaughtered the entire Muslim and Jewish population of Jerusalem, including children and mothers with infants, herding Jews into the synagogue and burning them alive, he called it a "solemn sacrifice to Jesus".

Of course religion isn't the only source of atrocity -- Stalin and Pol Pot demonstrated that non-religious ideologues can hold their own against the religious sort when it comes to crimes against humanity. As Laurens van der Post once said, "Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." Blind faith of any kind is the first step toward atrocity.

The real motive behind the flap over Will Smith's remark about Hitler was the deeply embedded need of anxiety-ridden humans to cling to this belief in Good Guys and Bad Guys. Smith merely observed that Hitler didn't go around saying "I'm going to do something evil today", but thought of himself as doing good. Of course he did. As do the overwhelming majority of people who commit atrocities.

Will Smith was deliberately misquoted (as saying "people are basically good", and even that "Hitler was good") to both ridicule him and negate the obvious truth he stated. Americans don't want to face up to the fact that they themselves are capable of atrocity, given the right 'cause' and the encouragement of authorities. They want to believe that they're somehow immune. Dream on. How about "the only good Injun is a dead Injun"? And which was the only nation to drop the atom bomb on a civilian population?

Two things make atrocities inevitable. The first is war. A declaration of war today is a declaration of intent to commit atrocities, for all modern wars involve the mass slaughter of civilians, including children. Our military tries to sanitize this by calling it 'collateral damage', referring to the fact that any time you drop a bomb or fire a shell, or plant a land mine in a populated area, you're going to kill children. But of course with modern weapons you never have to face up to the atrocities you commit. If Truman had ordered our troops to enter Hiroshima and Nagasaki and personally hack to death every man, woman, and child living in them, no one could have denied that it was a crime against humanity. Yet the difference is only that the perpetrators never had to face their victims. (There were probably hundreds of pregnant women killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the way, but right-to-lifers don't seem to be concerned about fetuses extinguished by war. After all, in the Bible the Israelites often slaughtered the inhabitants of entire villages, including pregnant women, supposedly on orders from God, which, I guess, makes it O.K.)

The second inevitable source of atrocity is the concentration of power into too few hands. People have always felt free to commit every conceivable brutality if their king, dictator, Pope, or Imam has told them their enemies were evil, or less than human. It's virtually impossible to find a major atrocity in history that didn't have the explicit support or implicit permission of some authoritarian leader. Power automatically corrupts, sooner or later, without exception; and the more concentrated it is, the more evil it tends to produce. We don't have to look far for contemporary examples.

Comments

[ch4r1iegr1]

[As Laurens van der Post once said, "Human beings are perhaps never more frightening than when they are convinced beyond doubt that they are right." Blind faith of any kind is the first step toward atrocity.]

I went vegan when I learned about the atrocities committed in factory farms and slaughter houses. I stopped having "blind faith" in the myth that meat is necessary food. The more I research, the more I realize that humans have never eaten so much meat as people do today, let alone been SO CONVINCED that meat is the ultimate sustaining nutrition for humans (which couldn't be further from the truth). People find it SOOOOO hard to believe that the ultimate nutritious diet consists of nuts, seeds, berries, fruits and vegetables and grains. WHAT! No violence? We must eat violence! But I'm a good person. I just like a big bucket of KFC wings to fatten my ass. But I'm not hurting anyone... UM, yes, you are.

Here's what some of the greatest philosophers had to say about violence against animals and its intoxicating power to make humans feel justified in committing violence upon other 'sentient' beings which they deem 'less.'

"For as long as men massacre animals, they will kill each other. Indeed, he who sows the seed of murder and pain cannot reap joy and love."
- Pythagoras

"I for my part do much wonder in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds."
- Plutarch

http://www.vegetarianimage.com/Quotes.htm

[LoRiseAntlers]

My father,who served in WW II,gaveme my first true lesson in this phenomenon.I remeber coming home from school the day we began to learn about the Holocaust.I was so freaked out abou,i had to talk to Dad about it.After confirming the gory facts,and expanding on them,Dad told me about the millions Stalin murdered,and the million or so civilians killed by the "Strategic Bombing Campaign" the Allies carried out,including the fire-bombing in Dresden.He told me more than i had even imagined about the genocide the white man had carried out against my people for centuries.

We talked about these things for hours.My head was filled with horror.I felt as bitter as a fourteen year old boy can possibly be.But my6 father was teaching me what i view as the single most important thing I have ever learned,and that is the world is full of evil bastards doing god's work.You can insert any god or any ideology you want,but it's all the same.This species will always manage to find reasons to slaughter one another.

[Cathexis]

Melinda: I suggest that it is not necessary to BE evil in order to DO evil. It I spossible to be incredibly misguided, but believe in something with such zeal that it is never questioned. Acting on that zeal can result in evil.

It is not justification of their actions, it is an explanation of the mechanisms. Even if Hitler *thaought* he was doing good, it doesn't make what he did less evil. (And just because George W Bush *thinks* what he is doing is good, and I'm sure he does, it doesn't make it less evil, either.)

[Cathexis]

Will Smith was exactly right and too many people have such rigid perceptions of what constitutes "Justice" that they can't stand the possibility that someone who does things they don't like might escape their well-deserved vilification and punishment.

It also excuses *them* because they can tell themselves that if they THINK they are doing "good," then they can't be doing "evil."

A lot of them are wrong.

[MelindaPost]

The reason for the flap is that his comment was an example of the "don't be judgmental" culture in which anything goes because morality becomes relative. If he could view Hitler as good in relation to Hitler's own value system, then we really are lost. As Elie Weisel recently sadly said, "The world has learned nothing" from the Holocaust given the various ethnic cleansings and other horrors in the world. And Mr. Smith's moral relativity is a miserable way to think about the world and history.

[Idytme]

After reading all about this controversy, I think everyone is responding to it through their own lens. The most important part of his quote is rarely mentioned. "stuff like that just needs to be reprogrammed". Will Smith was promoting Scientology, and suggesting if the Scientologist could only have reprogrammed Hitler, all of it could have been stopped. I am sure all the Scietologists believe this.