On monsters....

[conuly]

It's time for this rant again.

I keep hearing that Hitler was a monster. No, don't do anything to attempt to understand what went on in the Holocaust, Hitler was simply a monster.

As nice, pat answers go, it's pretty good - bad things happen because of monsters. As explanations go... not so much. Yup, millions of people died because one person was a monster. No reason, he just was. It happens, let's move on.

Huh?

As I see it, there are two problems with this argument. By calling him a monster, we've effectively removed him from humanity (we couldn't be like that, we couldn't harm people like that, we're not monsters) and absolved him, to an extent, of his crimes (oh, he was a monster. Yes, it was evil, but he was a monster. What could be done?). He's not a person who was responsible for monstrous things, he's just not human at all.

But that can't be true. If we are to accept the proposition that Hitler was simply a monster, we either have to believe that he was born evil, at which point we're treading very close to our own bits of racism (Hitler was born evil, some people can be born evil, maybe that can be predicted, maybe certain groups are more prone to being evil....) or else we're saying that there was some point at which we can clearly say "Hitler isn't a person anymore, he's just a monster". Like, what? One day he was a good guy, bit of a crap artist, and the next he wakes up and says "Just for fun, I'm going to start killing people, see how many I can get away with!"? I don't think so.

The man was a person, just like the rest of us, though we would like to distance ourselves from that. He made choices every day which led him, in the end, to be responsible for atrocities.

And there's the other thing. So we say "Hitler was a monster". Okay. Well, what about all the other high-ranking Nazis? They were monsters too, right? And what about the people who actually got their hands dirty doing the work? They were monsters - how could they not be? And now that we've said that, what about those responsible for other genocides, the ones that happen with depressing regularity in this world of ours?

How many monsters can humanity have?

We can keep by this arbitrary standard - those who do a certain amount of harm are monsters, perhaps? - but that doesn't do anything to actually stop the harm. Why do atrocities happen? "Well, some people are monsters. Hitler was a monster, and so are the people responsible for Darfur, and...."

No.

The nice, pat answer isn't the good answer. It's the answer that absolves us (and to an extent, the guilty) for any responsibility in these crimes. The Holocaust - couldn't be stopped, Hitler was a monster. Yeah - a monster who got 10% of the German population to listen to him, and others to follow along. I don't buy that answer. I can't - maybe if we'd paid more attention to the conditions in Germany at the time, maybe if we paid more attention in the rest of the world now, maybe we could stop breeding these "monsters", stop these problems before they start.

But you can't do that if you attribute problems to the fact that some people (who are nothing like you or yours could ever be, which, given the sheer amount of genocide I know about, I *highly* doubt) are inexplicably monsters.

I don't know the conditions that would lead people to participate in genocide. I don't know the conditions that would even lead people to participate in other forms of bigotry. I don't know how to stop this. I *do* know that stopping it means understanding it - and understanding it means standing up and saying "Look, genocide? Monstrous, but it's still the act of human beings. Any act of bigotry you can imagine, big or small? It's all the work of humans." It means coming to the situation with the attitude that the people involved are, in fact, people - their motivations can be understood, they can stop harming others, they can change.

You can't change monsters, can't stop monsters. But you can change humans. Not sure how, yet - give me some time - but you can change the prejudices of ordinary humans *before* they reach the point where they're harming others.

Comments

[raleighj.livejournal.com]

It's the answer that absolves us (and to an extent, the guilty) for any responsibility in these crimes...maybe if we'd paid more attention to the conditions in Germany at the time, maybe if we paid more attention in the rest of the world now, maybe we could stop breeding these "monsters", stop these problems before they start.

It's reminding me of Brothers Karamazov, actually -- my friend and I were puzzling the other day over what on earth Father Zosima meant by "every man must realize he is responsible for the sins of the world." (or something like that...can't find the exact quote).

The Hitler thing gets to me, too, from time to time -- I often just want to say, "Dammit -- he was a human being, with the same limitations and finiteness and biases we're all prone to -- and there but for the grace of God (or better social conditioning or whatever) are YOU."

(Though the conservative in me goes "eek! danger!" at the "you can change humans" part. To some degree, certainly...but new us/them categorizations (and rationalizations of harm) seem to always spring up in the place of old ones, and I don't see much of a way past them. ::sigh:: And the Christian in me says, "we're all broken icons, and there's fault running through the very heart of creation that won't be fixed till the eschaton").

[conuly]

You're right. I think that dividing the world into us/them is an integral part of being a (mostly) social species.

However, I also think that we can divide the world up more or less fuzzily, and with more or less negative reactions - dividing the world doesn't have to always end in genocide.