The definition of evil...

Once upon a time, when I was in junior high, our class had a unit on propaganda, fallacies, and advertising techniques—ending with the students having a personal project assignment based on what we learned.

Originally, I was just going to run a presidential campaign using my best friend as the candidate—using the propaganda techniques commonly used in real presidential campaigns as the basis. But, then I thought...why not try something a little more ambitious? Instead of my friend as a candidate, why not take someone who would obviously not be an ideal candidate and see what techniques I could use to make him/her appear ideal.

And the obvious candidate...why, Adolf Hitler, of course!

As it turns out, creating the project was simplicity itself--a little research down at the library gave me all the resources I needed. One WWII history book had a picture of Hitler visiting wounded (German) soldiers in a hospital. I immediately copied it out and pasted it on a poster board with the caption: “Hitler: man of compassion” Another book had a cute picture of Hitler talking happily with several smiling (German) children. Copy, paste, caption: “Hitler: He cares about your children’s future” Other pictures went to proclaim Hitler’s undying love of country, his determination, his popularity—you get the idea...

Looking back, it was one of the more bolder things I had ever done, especially with Jewish students in the class, but the point about propaganda and advertising was made and I ended up with the highest grade in the class.

To this day, Hitler—the person—has created some unique and interesting phenomena within our (meaning Western) society, among far more people than just those who were affected directly by the events of World War II.

Examples:
>>> Both political parties this past year have complained bitterly about their candidate being compared to Hitler in some form or another (which, note, both political parties continue to do frequently, anyway…)
>>> Sister Sheri Dew drew much criticism recently for comparing the push for gay marriage with Nazi policies.
>>> A recent movie about Hitler has also drawn much criticism for making him seem somewhat ‘human’ and ‘sympathetic’.
>>> When attempting to create the most offensive play possible in Mel Brooks’s “The Producers”, they come up with…”Springtime for Hitler” of course!
>>> Even among the LDS blogosphere recently, the idea that temple work has been/should be done for Hitler or any former Nazi leader brought out reactions of disgust.

Mere mention of Hitler in any context, in fact, will bring out an instant negative reaction from just about anyone in Western society. Compare that to, say, Mao Tse-Tung—who, as I mentioned in my To Live analysis, is directly responsible for far more deaths than Hitler himself, yet the mention of his name doesn’t produce nearly the same reaction in those that hear it—even among those who have studied Chinese history and have some idea of the happenings of Chairman Mao's China.

This negative reaction to Hitler and Nazism in general seems to have two primary components:
(1) a repudation of the things Hitler stood for—a personal reaction that says “I know the causes Hitler championed are wrong and I won’t stand for them in the society I live in” (this is good).
(2) a distancing of the individual and of society as a whole from Hitler, to the extent that he is treated as something less-than-human: a being of pure evil from which the connection to humanity has been carefully minimized—as if he flew in from outer space one day to do his evil deeds that no ‘real’ Earthling would ever think of doing. This is more problematic, because denying Hitler’s humanness is in a sense denying that the underlying causes behind his reign of terror are related to common human attitudes and desires…and that they don’t, in fact, exist today.

Let’s face it—Hitler was born of a human mother just like everyone else. Treating him as if he was an alien from another planet is basically refusing to deal with the possibility that the personal attributes and circumstances that caused Hitler to be Hitler do not, in fact, exist among humans today and thus Hitler and the Nazis were an aberration—something that can and will never again be repeated in human history. This stick-your-head-in-the-sand attitude of “There will never be another Hitler, because he was markedly ‘different’ than the rest of us” has the consequence of--ironically--making the chance of another Hitler more likely…

For a person to become a ‘Hitler’—which, let’s say, means “someone who deliberately and maliciously causes the death of many, many people for their own gain…”—two things have to be present:
(1) Intent
(2) Opportunity
Intent means they have the strong inner belief that their ideals are correct and also the desire to implement them through any means necessary—including the sacrifice of others who happen to be in the way, and even deliberately targeting people who need to be eliminated for your vision of an ideal society to be reached.

Opportunity, of course, means that you actually have the means to put your beliefs and desires into action. If Hitler had written “Mein Kampf” and remained an obscure painter in Austria or Germany the remainder of his days, the intent would still have been there, but without any opportunity to do anything about it. This would, in fact, have altered world history in the 20th century considerably, and unless you were a scholar of obscure German literature, very few people would have heard of Hitler at all. Hitler himself--the evil monster from another planet, remember--would still be the same person, though...

This raises the important question: how many people today have the same intent as Hitler—yet, fail to catch the attention of society because they don’t happen to have any opportunity to follow through on it? How many people IF they were suddenly given rulership over a country with a large army at their disposal, would start systematically eliminating those that were different from them—blacks, Jews, Mormons, Democrats, country music listeners, etc? I think there would be quite a few…

This leads to an interesting question on how to define and classify ‘evil’ people—by raw totals of dead bodies, or purely by intent? If there was another German in the 1930’s who would have done exactly what Hitler did, had he had the opportunity himself, could we say he was just as ‘evil’ as Hitler, even though technically he wasn’t responsible for any dead bodies? Hitler himself was responsible for more raw deaths than, say, Saddam Hussein—but do you really think that’s because Saddam said to himself, “I’m comfortable with a few hundred thousand deaths to achieve my goals…but several million? That’s just not ethical…” Or is it just a result of Saddam having an inherently smaller level of opportunity—the intent was still there, but he just ‘ran out’ of people to kill within his scope of influence… In this case is he really ‘less evil’ than Hitler, or about the same? As noted above, of course, there are several mass scale slaughters in human history that rank higher than the Holocaust in terms of raw deaths (despite being largely ignored by Western civilization—see China, Cambodia, Russia…) yet are those leaders really ‘more’ evil than Hitler, or still about the same? In other words, if you switched leaders around in any of these circumstances (ignoring language differences, of course) would the corpse totals change too? Or would they be about the same in each case—each corresponding to the opportunity each leader was given, versus any such staggered set of ethics from the leaders themselves?

What’s the point, then: “There’s a little Hitler in all of us”? Well...maybe. Perhaps a better view is recognition that the Holocaust and all the other mass tragedies in human history were caused by natural and common human instincts: selfishness, pride, ethnocentricity, etc… And it’s counterproductive to treat Hitler and those like him as if they were inhuman monsters from another dimension when the characteristics that created them are still present today.

Did Hitler and the Nazis believe in ‘human rights’? Of course, they did... The same way the slave-holders of the 19th century and the abortion-rights activists today believe strongly in human rights—they’re just very selective in who they consider to be ‘human’... No different than the Jews in Jesus’s time believing strongly that they should ‘love their neighbor’…but of course that the Samaritans, among others, did not count as ‘neighbors’. It’s silly to be offended (as in the linked article above) at a movie that presents Hitler as human and (*gasp*) a nice guy (to certain people) when, in fact, virtually everyone in the world is nice...to people they like. (It’s how they treat the people they don’t like that makes the difference...) Ignoring the root causes of evil behavior in everyone (the ‘Hitler in all of us’, if you will) is essentially trying to put the blame for the world’s problems on a convenient scapegoat, without any personal analysis of whether you or I share any of the same evil attributes—regardless of whether you, I, or anyone, ever get the opportunity to put them into practice...