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Dear JDL, please just shut the fuck up.
By Andrew | December 27, 2007
A week or so ago, Will Smith made a comment that was taken out of context:
Remarkably, Will believes everyone is basically good.
“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today’,” said Will. “I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.
Of course the JDL as an organization resembles PETA and godhatesfags.com in that they believe any press is good press so they issue a press release which says, in part:
Smith’s comments are ignorant, detestable and offensive. They spit on the memory of every person murdered by the Nazis. His disgusting words stick a knife in the backs of every veteran who fought so valiantly to save the world from those aspirations of Adolf Hitler. Smith’s comments also cast the perpetrators of the Holocaust as misguided fellows rather than the repulsive villains of history they truly were.
If people do not understand how idiotic and insensitive it was to make such a comment, it is like a Jew saying that James Earl Ray, the assassin of Rev. Martin Luther King, was basically a good person who did a “bad thing.”
The Jewish Defense League is calling on Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama to repudiate the comments made by Smith, his friend and supporter.
Now, I ask you, what’s a better teaching device: The idea that Hitler is almost supernaturally evil, almost transcending humanity, or the idea that Hitler was a deeply flawed hateful human being that managed to get other people to follow him, who was partially insane and partially a product of his environment?
Which one is scarier? Which idea can we learn more from? Which idea allows us to study psychopathic behavior and maybe actually learn something to prevent similar occurrences in the future.
Nobody ever said Hitler was good, you pricks. It was said that he was misguided and his own flawed perception of “good” may have been different than everyone else’s. There are a lot of people (Fred Phelps for one) that could probably commit the same kind of atrocities, given the proper time, place, and audience. The same thing has happened in Africa and the Balkans on a smaller scale. A despot decides he doesn’t like a certain ethnic group, gets a group of followers, and things go to shit. Hitler just happened to be in the right place at the right time to do a shitload of damage. The lesson to be learned about Hitler lies in studying his humanity, not in the supernatural evil that he represents.
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