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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34551 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Kanye West famously said "I like Hitler". He also said more:

“I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone. Jewish people are not going to tell me you can love us, and you can love what we’re doing to you with the contracts, and you can love what we’re pushing with the pornography. But this guy that invented highways, invented the very microphone that I use as a musician, you can’t say out loud that this person ever did anything good, and I’m done with that.”

This is, of course, insane. But there is a method to the madness, a signal in the noise. It is this: the implications of never forgiving Hitler are nasty.

Hitler did evil of a particularly noxious sort. It's not just that he aroused the passions of the hearts of millions to serve his purposes, it's also how he bent science and reason into doing so much harm. It's like if someone got it into their head to fully manifest the meaning of the word infernal, an ultimate perversion of ordinarily good things.

We do, however, have to let him go. Because to not do so would be to grant validity to the idea of anger, resentment, outrage, even hatred, because Hitler would always remain a valid target for these sentiments. And to believe these sentiments are good and beautiful is just poison.

We don't, of course, consciously think that of these sorts of emotions. But unconsciously, we do think outrage can be good and proper, else we would just have collectively tut-tutted or smirked at Kanye. Few would attempt to mount a defense of hatred and outrage, so what is the point of allowing them to exist in your soul? Can you really look inside you and call your outrage beautiful, regardless of its cause? What is the point of carrying around ugly things in your head?

To forgive Hitler is not a fundamentally novel idea, but it hasn't sank into the consensus yet. Even so, Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, did it. And in a sense, so did World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan: a segment of the novel features Martians who are hypnotized into invading Earth. Their invasion is pathetic and swiftly crushed, so pathetic that the Earthlings are ashamed of what they did and the memory of the Martians becomes part of a new religion. That is a way forward for forgiving Hitler and the Nazis: not to see them as evil, but as sick and deluded. Because the sick are a target of pity, not of outrage.

Ah, but I say these words, and even as I say this, I sense a smirk in me at what I myself am saying. It is just a smirk: I cannot question it, I cannot reason with it, I can only amplify it and see what it has to say. And here it is:

Oh silly, don't you see? We must have hatred, we must have outrage, or else, where would we be?

And once said, it dissolves. Everything arises and passes away if you will let it. Did you smirk too at what I have said? What did your smirk have to say?

And can you tell me that it was a good thing?

Substack

In Defense of Wrath and Forgiveness

Anger and the rest of its conceptual cluster (wrath, outrage, hatred, etc.) are not in themselves wrong. They are the appropriate, healthy emotional response to a violation of justice. The virtue of anger is that it provides drive, energy, and motivation to correct or avenge a wrong. A passionless man is not moved by injustice, but instead becomes the proverbial "good man" that does nothing, leading to the triumph of evil. The common error in their manifestation is that of anger unchecked (or insufficiently checked) by reason and temperance, which frequently leads to further acts of injustice. Anger is a good servant in its proper context, but a bad master.

Forgiveness is a setting aside, or letting go, of anger that has outlasted its usefulness. It has nothing to do with whether the target of that anger no longer "deserves" condemnation; even the noble act of killing Hitler was insufficient to balance the scales of the tremendous evil he inflicted on the world during his lifetime, and he is no longer available on this earth to pay down that debt. The Holocaust was an event of great and terrible evil, an injustice that beggars the imagination, and for that, anger is the proper emotional response. But what corrective good can that anger serve, most of a century later? With perhaps one or two very minor exceptions, the perpetrators of that evil are long gone.

Anger at historical injustices, where there is no just outlet for that drive, is purely corrosive and--best case--harms only the bearer. "Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof." Forgiveness is therefore necessary to purge the poison of pointless anger, and turn instead to more productive pursuits. Forgiveness is not about denying the evil of past injustice, or forgetting the lessons that may be learned. To the extent that past evils may be educational, they should be heeded to avoid future pitfalls. But if they cannot be corrected or justly avenged, then angry fervor should be set aside.

Forgiveness is also conceptually separate from mercy--the denial or reduction of punishment justly earned. One may forgive and still punish; in fact, forgiveness is often necessary to avoid over-punishing beyond the demands of justice. This is no contradiction--once you are in a position to punish, the zealous drive of anger has most likely accomplished the good uses it can serve. Forgiveness is also healthy at any point in the process--it is a setting aside of anger, not responsibility. Using forgiveness as an excuse to avoid correcting injustice is still wrong.

(this isn't directly about hitler, it's about 'fighting' and 'hate being good sometimes). Does it mean anything to 'forgive' hitler? That makes it sound like animosity towards people is somehow ... innately bad. But present-day animosity towards hitler isn't about hitler, it's (rightly or wrongly) against present-day racism. Crucially, it's possible for this to be justified - if (hypothetically, this isn't anywhere near true ofc) Ye/Fuentes was a serious political movement genuinely threatening jews with a shot at power, then fighting against them and for 'jewish lives', casting them as a born-again hitler, and acting in a manner very inconsistent with 'forgiving hitler' would be justified. And whether you're leading a fiery political campaign for human rights against hitler 2, or doing cold-hearted backroom plotting against hitler 2 ... these are still 'anger', 'resentment', or cold-blooded hatred of hitler. Such things are contingent relations present in human instinct for useful ends, just like hunger, friendship, and bravery. If someone attempts to harm your child, "anger" at that is merely a desire to prevent that harm, or discourage similar harms from happening in the future punitively. Which is valuable! Even today, it's not totally impossible that Hitler 2 will come in 80 years, necessitating the same fight - and if one 'forgives' hitler today, does one ... unforgive him then? So, for most's morals, 'forgetting hitler' is good because hitler isn't relevant to today's politics, the left caring about hitler is borne of specific false claims as opposed to a lack of forgiveness, and 'forgiving hitler' attempts to meld anger with hitler personally, irrelevant as he's dead, and general political distaste using hitler as a vehicle, which isn't in principle wrong.

That makes it sound like animosity towards people is somehow ... innately bad. But present-day animosity towards hitler isn't about hitler, it's (rightly or wrongly) against present-day racism. Crucially, it's possible for this to be justified

Whether or not the hatred is "justified," I think the argument would be that hatred is not conducive to dealing with with the problem in a constructive way. Hatred tends to make irrational actors out of people with rational causes, leading to actions that create more problems rather than solutions. I think we can see this in play in the current anti-racist/BLM movements, wherein a zero-tolerance and aggressively diagnosed approach to "racism" is creating a radicalized sense of white identity in some people who thought of themselves as previously race-blind but who now feel under-attack as a racial group.

Aren't there precious few people left that can claim direct harm from the Nazi regime and all the rest are just LARP-ing as Nazi haters.

I see it with "anti-communists" - 30 years ago it was easy to find victims of the concentration camps. Now - it is grand-grand-fathers.

"anti-communists"

Unlike the Nazis, who are essentially all dead and gone, the world still has e.g., North Korea.

Anticommunists in Post Soviet countries means something like the SJW/anti colonialists and the likes - basically 30 years after the berlin wall fell they still love to blame every bad current thing and failure that happens to them on "communism". Not talking about people trying to overthrow cuba or NK governments.

30 years ain’t that long. I have a close friend who was born shortly before the Iron Curtain crumbled. Granted, she was very young when the entire thing occurred. But her early life was very much influenced by Soviet communism (ie it wasn’t like the shit went away in a day). And she is only in her mid thirties. Her parents clearly remember communism.

Further in the US context there is a very political active group of anti communists — they are called Cubans.

30 years is more than enough for a country to get it's shit together. Lots of historic examples. But most importantly - 30 years is enough to stop blaming the previous guys and to start blaming your own inadequacies.

It’s funny. The complaints I hear from my friend isn’t about how the old country sucks right now (it is in fact growing). Instead, it is worrying that America is going down that path and my friend knows where it leads.

Now you may say BS — why isn’t my friend in the old country if it is so great. Well, she married an American!

Obviously, as a Christian, I agree with Kanye's point that we should try to forgive even the worst of our enemies and nobody is 100% evil. Universal love is good.

But given that he can't manage to make that point without spending the same breath ranting about "Jewish people ... pushing with the pornography", and IIRC was pushing holocaust denial stuff in the same interview, it's hard not to suspect this is less a case of genuine forgiveness and more a case of not seeing anything to forgive; and hard not to doubt whether he really does feel love and forgiveness in his heart for the "Jewish people" he feels wronged him. (Probably correctly in the case of some specific Jewish people in the industry; but extending that to "the Jewish people" as a class is the exact opposite of Christian fellowship.)

For me, what Kanye is doing isn’t forgiving because you cannot forgive a person without acknowledging the fact that the person did something evil. The reverse, seeking forgiveness, absolutely requires that I acknowledge that I have done evil. You can’t really forgive otherwise because there’s not any reason to. If Hitler did nothing wrong, there’s no reason to forgive. If Kanye thinks that Jews deserved it, or that it never happened, why would he then forgive?

Ironically, this is somehing that's missed in the cancel culture discourse. Now, sometimes the person does admit they were wrong, and things continue, but far more, it's person does or says x, people get upset about it, then there's the backlash to the backlash, then the 'why won't group y forgive person x', and usually, person x still thinks they're in the right. Now, that might be fine and dandy, but then, there should be no discourse about forgiveness or group y moving on, even if you think person x is correct, or shouldn't be sanctioned for what they said or did.

For IRL example, take Eddie Murphy. He said what could be considered by a lot of people some terrible jokes about gay people and women in his 80's specials, that were hugely popular. So, why doesn't a Tweet along w/ a video clip of some joke from Raw never get any traction? Because Eddie doesn't do that kind of comedy anymore really and he's admitted that stuff was shitty to say. So, there's nothing to cancel, because Eddie admitted what he said was dumb, and everybody moved on, which pushes against the idea that's pushed that you'll be shamed forrever if you ever do anything wrong.

People just have to actually believe you're sorry for saying or doing what you did.

Those for whom forgiving Hitler would be a real act of forgiveness, should of course aim to forgive him while still acknowledging that his actions were evil. I just very much doubt that many people have the required emotional hatred of Hitler to make the forgiveness meaningful. Any "forgiveness" that I could give Hitler wouldn't mean very much because I don't feel his atrocities with much emotional force, I'd have to watch a few holocaust survivor interviews, read Man's Search For Meaning and watch Schindler's List again in order to really feel his atrocities, and then maybe forgiving him would mean anything.

True Forgiveness is really hard. I recently discovered the youtube channel "Soft White Underbelly" and I watched this interview of a prostitute on Skid Row. The black mark she has on the side of her face is a cover-up tattoo of the name of her former pimp, who forced her to tattoo his name on her face when she was 13 years old. By any metric what Hitler did was much worse than what this one pimp did to this one girl, but I spent 30 full minutes yesterday during meditation trying to forgive the pimp this one act, and I couldn't do it.

To me Hitler is just a symbol for modern people who want social totalitarianism of any sort.

Should I forgive those people?

Maybe in some abstract way while still fighting against what they stand for with all my being?

I believe in redemption and all that.

But if you've sold your personal identity to an ideology I want eliminated, I still want the thing you're calling "yourself" erased.

It's shallow consolation to you that I wish your body well and only want the death of your identity.

Perhaps more to the point, many family members of Dylann Roof's victims rather famously forgave him, for some of the same reasons you cite.

What did your smirk have to say?

It said, “Oh great. Now we’re going to get a reputation as that forum which wants to forgive Hitler.”

(My other response in this thread shows my true thoughts on the matter, but you asked for my smirk.)

so did World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan: a segment of the novel features Martians who are hypnotized into invading Earth. Their invasion is pathetic and swiftly crushed, so pathetic that the Earthlings are ashamed of what they did and the memory of the Martians becomes part of a new religion. That is a way forward for forgiving Hitler and the Nazis: not to see them as evil, but as sick and deluded. Because the sick are a target of pity, not of outrage.

This is a damnation greater, not lesser, than the regular sort, for it denies even the dignity normally afforded to a true enemy. The idea that Nazis were sick and deluded is mainstream – very competitive with the theory that they were sane thugs whose philosophy or innate inclinations led them to pick on the weak. The question of whether they belonged to that special category of mentally unwell evildoers who remain irredeemable may be interesting to some (e.g. Christians coming to terms with the fact that «Judeo-Christianity» isn't a coherent moral framework), but really it's just shades of dehumanization. There is no authentic human agency in an outburst of pathetic insanity, and no one to forgive. As civilized men, we do not begrudge man-eating tigers their addiction to human flesh, we shoot them on sight.

...There are essentially two paths to forgiveness. The easy one, the false one, adjacent to your method, is spinning a comfortable story where the core of the evil impulse will be something you find intrinsically excusable, even a mere accident or a misunderstanding. They were just following orders, they weren't loved by their fathers, they got traumatized by WWI, yada yada. Or just gesture in that direction, like Orwell, in the refreshing manner of an upper-class leftie British journo sniggering at a country bumpkin with a big attitude:

Suppose that Hitler's programme could be put into effect. What he envisages, a hundred years hence, is a continuous state of 250 million Germans with plenty of "living room" (i.e. stretching to Afghanistan or thereabouts), a horrible brainless empire in which, essentially, nothing ever happens except the training of young men for war and the endless breeding of fresh cannon-fodder. How was it that he was able to put this monstrous vision across? [...] I should like to put it on record that I have never been able to dislike Hitler. Ever since he came to power—till then, like nearly everyone, I had been deceived into thinking that he did not matter—I have reflected that I would certainly kill him if I could get within reach of him, but that I could feel no personal animosity. The fact is that there is something deeply appealing about him. One feels it again when one sees his photographs—and I recommend especially the photograph at the beginning of Hurst and Blackett's edition, which shows Hitler in his early Brownshirt days. It is a pathetic, dog-like face, the face of a man suffering under intolerable wrongs. In a rather more manly way it reproduces the expression of innumerable pictures of Christ crucified, and there is little doubt that that is how Hitler sees himself. The initial, personal cause of his grievance against the universe can only be guessed at; but at any rate the grievance is here. He is the martyr, the victim, Prometheus chained to the rock, the self-sacrificing hero who fights single-handed against impossible odds. If he were killing a mouse he would know how to make it seem like a dragon. One feels, as with Napoleon, that he is fighting against destiny, that he can't win, and yet that he somehow deserves to. The attraction of such a pose is of course enormous; half the films that one sees turn upon some such theme.

The hard path to forgiveness is trying the evildoer's perspective for size, and understanding how it is not obviously insane, and learning that you can hate the sin even when you're no longer able to look down on the sinner. But that's risky, of course: look into the abyss and all that.

With regard to Nazis, one nifty trick is to check out some of their self-appointed antipodes. I pick Ozy Brennan. Says Ozy:

The Iron Dream does a fantastic job of capturing what it’s like to be a Nazi. (I asked a few of my friends who have studied this more in depth than I am and they confirmed.) The worldview of Alternate Universe Adolf Hitler is grim. There is no simple joy described in the novel: pleasure at a flower, or a good meal, or a child’s smile. Sexuality and eroticism are absent; sex exists solely for the preservation of the race, and even that is eventually abolished. In a lovely detail, while characters laugh, they never actually tell a joke that’s funny.

What The Iron Dream has instead of joy is dominance. The ceaseless victories of Your Team over Their Team. The fierce jubilation at the torture and violence you unleash upon those weaker than you, purely to flaunt that they can’t stop you. The endless parade of identical soldiers, marching in unison: the thud of their feet which means strength, power, triumph.

...then I observe that this is an easy trade for me to make, because I like beauty and humor and sex and all the rest, but I have no dominance instinct. My status-related desires run towards admiration, which can’t be coerced with a gun. [...] But perhaps, to someone with a stronger dominance or competitive instinct, Naziism is appealing. Perhaps they would be a Nazi, at reflective equilibrium, at least if sufficiently assured that they’re not a Jew.

Ozy fancies herself an original thinker. I assume the attentive (and primed!) reader has noticed that her idea of the ethos of Nazism is riffing off Orwell, in fact from the most iconic passage:

The old civilizations claimed that they were founded on love or justice. Ours is founded upon hatred. In our world there will be no emotions except fear, rage, triumph, and self-abasement. [...] We have cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman. No one dares trust a wife or a child or a friend any longer. But in the future there will be no wives and no friends. Children will be taken from their mothers at birth, as one takes eggs from a hen. The sex instinct will be eradicated. Procreation will be an annual formality like the renewal of a ration card. &We shall abolish the orgasm.* Our neurologists are at work upon it now. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty towards the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science. When we are omnipotent we shall have no more need of science. There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always — do not forget this, Winston — always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — for ever.’

1984 is cool. But what about 14/88, both versions – the «our children« and «Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth»? Is it really isomorphic to that nightmare vision from the Iron Dream? To some people it might be.

And, speaking of, what does Ozy zerself mean by beauty?

One could very reasonably make the case that the natural human aesthetic sense prefers realistic paintings of beautiful landscapes with water, trees, large animals, beautiful women, children, and well-known historical figures [...] However, art of this sort leaves me cold. The art I find most heartbreakingly, exquisitely beautiful looks like this... Is there, perhaps, some deep evolutionary wisdom I am missing in why trees are prettier than abstract shades of grey? Of course not. I like what I like; the things that give me pleasure are the things that give me pleasure. ... I talk about the beauty of Serrano’s Piss Christ; my strongest criticism is that I feel it’s bad form to court controversy when your art cannot stand on its own.

Ah, but Nazis would have called that Entartete Kunst. Is it beauty when the crux of an art piece is humiliation of a faith? Or is it more Orwellian will to power?

From their perspective, I don’t simply have different values, I actively rejoice in evil. I tell cute childhood stories about replacing “Respect Authority” with “Question Authority” in the Girl Scout Law. I urge people with all the eloquence I can muster not to prioritize their ingroups over other groups of people. [...] my read of the psychological evidence is that, from my value system, about half the country is evil and it is in my self-interest to shame the expression of their values, indoctrinate their children, and work for a future where their values are no longer represented on this Earth.

As they say in xianxia, out by the roots! Not even the original justifications of those values shall survive. And words will mean whatever. Spooky!

«The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?»

I don't think that forgiveness is a clear moral good. Jews pride themselves on the unwillingness to forget and forgive, and it works for them. Tolerance for real moral aliens, with their reasonable fear of The Other, though – that could help.

The hard path to forgiveness is trying the evildoer's perspective for size, and understanding how it is not obviously insane, and learning that you can hate the sin even when you're no longer able to look down on the sinner. But that's risky, of course: look into the abyss and all that.

The irony is that today's most-fervent anti-Nazi already understands the perspective of the Nazi, they just aren't aware of it: They've singled out a group of people upon whom they blame the ills of modern society, and wish to eradicate them via a spectrum of solutions that includes violence. While the anti-Nazi's accepted modes of violence might not reach the evil extremes of Nazism's violence, Nazism's violence was limited to groups defined by relatively hard boundaries, whereas the anti-Nazi has empowered themselves to forever broaden their definitions, giving their milder violence potentially unlimited scope, so which is worse is a question for debate.

Excellent as always, but I must say something of this comparison:

As civilized men, we do not begrudge man-eating tigers their addiction to human flesh, we shoot them on sight.

Jim Corbett, a famed hunter of man-eaters in British India (and later famed conservationist of Bengal Tigers), did not enjoy killing tigers. He knew it was necessary and that was enough, but he also knew what caused an animal to turn man-eater. Corbett wrote of villagers harvesting tall grass where a tiger might be hidden steps away but be no danger to them, tigers fear man. We killed fear into them.

Corbett knew the man-eater is bad luck and imprudence. The fight with particularly aggressive prey that maims the beast, or the shot that permanently weakens but does not kill, from the poor hunter who fails to track down and follow through. The beast lives, but he can no longer catch his natural prey. Even in desperate hunger he still fears man, for the rest of his however shortened life he might, never turning man-eater. Until for some, all at once they lose their fear. The starving tiger surprised in tall grass whose one swipe is still enough to kill. Then his fear is gone. Then he will continue, sometimes to horrific extents. All because of bad luck, imprudence. Because the man-eater is most often made, not born.

I don't think holding a passionate hatred of Hitler where just thinking of him makes you angry and raises your blood pressure is healthy. I do think that holding a strong belief that genocidal authoritarians are evil and should never be allowed back in power is healthy. Often people misidentify who's actually likely to become a genocidal authoritarian, and launch inappropriate "literally Hitler!" attacks, but I think the flaw there always lies in some other point in the logic train, not at the original "I hate genocidal authoritarians" part.

this is a month old, and obligatory archive link https://archive.is/UsKhi

I am still surprised he got banned from Twitter. It's like if there was a line to be drawn under Elon's ownership, he crossed it. Alex Jones also still banned. Oh..Nick Fuentes gone too.

Even so, Eva Kor, an Auschwitz survivor, did it. And in a sense, so did World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut in The Sirens of Titan

Talk is cheap. Hitler is dead so there are no stakes to saying “I forgive him.” You put Eva Kor in a room with living Hitler and the power to kill him and we would see if he was really forgiven. Outside of that this is just virtue signaling

Can you not kill someone and forgive them at the same time? I guess if you take a more Catholic view could you not feel ok seeing Hitler in heaven after say 500 million years in purgatory.

I rarely believe in executions but a few cases I do - treason at a high level and murderers in prison. For prison true solitary seems to mean to me but you can’t keep a person alive who you know will kill again even in a secure environment. Leaving only execution as an option. For Hitler you can believe in murdering him because alive he’s still a threat to society. Same reason Rome would still do things like planning to execute Cleopatra in a public triumph if she hadn’t committed suicide. You can still forgive and kill at the same time because the killing serves another purpose.

How does that even mean anything? If you stop 'hating' someone, but still carry out the entire process of judgements and actions that anger refers to, you haven't actually done anything. "I hate black people, yet I support affirmative action and equal rights, and have many black friends - but I still hate them"?

When I kill a cow do I hate it or do I just want to eat a hamburger and have no judgement on the cow? Forgiveness is a mental state. Violence can be from a mental state of hate/revenge or it can be logical and for your benefit.

'A mental state of hate/revenge' is just an evolved set of ideas intended to serve your interest, though? So if I kill someone 'out of revenge', or kill someone 'because I logically want to maintain incentives against intentionally doing harm to society', they're both doing the same thing.

Is that because 'revenge' is the same as logically 'wanting to maintain incentives against intentionally doing harm to society' or are you just discounting motivation and looking at the act itself?

If it's the first I disagree with equating the two as revenge can be justified irrationally without concern for the harm to society. I might fully agree with the idea that the legal punishment for an offender is sufficient to disincentivise him and deter others from doing the harm he did again, yet still chafe against the fact that the law is holding me back from doing worse to him than prison can.

I don't think there's that much difference between 'revenge, irrationally, with bad outcomes' and 'attempting to do harm to someone in a rational way, but you mess up the reasoning, with bad outcomes'. So that revenge can be 'irrational' doesn't separate the two. Even if they are different, if you're not 'hating' someone but you're still game-theoretically punishing them, that's not 'forgiveness' in a meaningful sense.

Yeah it's a tough thing to distinguish and you may be right. What about game theoretically punishing someone out of a sense of duty without the personal aspect of revenge? Like 'there but for the grace of God go I', I'm a soldier and you're a soldier on the opposing side who I hold no personal animus towards but who I'm going to try and kill for what your country did to mine.

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Well regardless even in your model one is still evolved which is different. It still seems different to do something out of an emotional state versus doing something for tactical reasons.

For the cow example example a butcher kills a cow out of greed, he wants to sell the cows meat, not out of hate that the cow is a cow.

Can you not kill someone and forgive them at the same time?

Heinrich Heine — 'We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged'

I don't see how it's any more implausible than white people who want to see 'whiteness' go away, such people do exist.

What's the point in forgiving someone who is dead? We're not going to forget mass murder, and we're not going to prosecute anyone for it either (now that they are all dead or prosecuted). So why forgive? What does it even mean to forgive someone you don't - and can't - know personally?

IMO it's not about forgiving Hitler — and by extension the Nazis — but about forgiving the conservatively four in ten people around you who, like the 1930s Germans, would support the othering, de-statusing, disenfranchising, detaining, deporting, and even destroying of a weak outrgoup minority. (Really I think it's more like eight in ten, but they have different outgroups they'd attack.)

It's psychologically devastating to know people are like that. Finding a way to forgive and integrate this and other sordid parts of human nature is the only way to go back to being happy, once you know.

I would ask, instead of ‘what is the point of forgiving’- what is the point of holding a grudge against a man who has been dead for 80 years?

It is not Hitler who benefits; he earned his own death ten million times over, and delivered it with his own hand.

The benefit of forgiveness is to the person who still hates, and thus is ever watchful for a similar fight. Living hatred of the dead makes “conflict theory” inevitable, and peace impossible.

Think of Magneto in X-Men: First Class. He hunts Nazis as a righteous path of vengeance, but once the actual Nazis are gone, he looks for those with a Nazi spirit of ethnic hatred, and he ethnic-hates them right back. Meanwhile Professor X seeks to make peace with all who are still willing to talk, while fighting only those who refuse to.

Or think of the Jedi. The way of the Jedi is misunderstood by a lot of fans, because they don’t know the deeper Buddhist philosophy it is based on. It is not the things which come into our life which bind us, but our attachments, those things we refuse to let go of.

A man asked the market’s monkey-seller how he caught all those monkeys. The monkey-seller said the monkeys catch themselves. All he had to do was put a monkey snack in a jar tightly tied to a tree. The monkey smells the snack and reaches into the jar, grasps the snack, and tries to pull it out. But the neck of the jar, while big enough for a monkey’s hand, is smaller than its fist. He can walk up and collar the monkey without chasing it.

thus is ever watchful for a similar fight

The universal goodness of forgiveness requires 'similar fights' to never exist - if hitler really was bad, then being 'ever watchful' for similar fights is good'! Like, if you eat a poorly sealed preserve and get botulism, you're going to have a significant distaste for poorly-sealed preserves, and be ever watchful for similar situations - which is good, to avoid botulism. It's the same effect. This clearly doesn't make 'peace impossible' - it makes 'guaranteed peace' impossible ... but guaranteed peace is bad because genuine enemies exist sometimes.

What forgiveness enables is an unbiased and self-aware eternal vigilance, instead of a resentful and paranoid anxiety which feeds into knee-jerk witchhunts.

Hitler hid his infernal intentions with soaring patriotic rhetoric; thereafter, every people hunted and harmed by the Nazis have looked at every patriot with suspicion, with an accusation of “Nazi! Fascist!” ready to spew forth at any hint of national pride.

That's a motte/bailey, though. OP claimed "The benefit of forgiveness is to the person who still hates, and thus is ever watchful for a similar fight. Living hatred of the dead makes “conflict theory” inevitable, and peace impossible" - and I do not think this statement is, in any way, true. Being watchful for similar fight: potentially good. And "peace impossible" isn't true either, we have peace now, very few people angry at racism because of their anger at hitler, it's more things like "black/jewish americans today are threatened". Can you provide examples of the difference between "unbiased eternal vigilance" and "resentful eternal vigilance"? I'm having trouble believing that this thing called "forgiveness" would enable the Left to ... still be eternally vigilant for nazis on the right, but this time in a way that doesn't hurt any Real American Patriots. That is something that should happen, but the way for it to happen is for them to actually understand the difference, the good parts of patriotism and why they aren't naziism, not 'forgive'.

Hitler hid his infernal intentions with soaring patriotic rhetoric; thereafter, every people hunted and harmed by the Nazis have looked at every patriot with suspicion, with an accusation of “Nazi! Fascist!” ready to spew forth at any hint of national pride.

This, as stated, is plainly untrue. There's clearly something to the idea that anti-fascism is used against patriotism and naziism. But many holocaust survivors, or descendants of holocaust survivors, were/are patriotic Americans. I think you're mixing in the Christian idea of forgiveness where it just doesn't fit.

Can you provide examples of the difference between "unbiased eternal vigilance" and "resentful eternal vigilance"? I'm having trouble believing that this thing called "forgiveness" would enable the Left to ... still be eternally vigilant for nazis on the right, but this time in a way that doesn't hurt any Real American Patriots.

Certainly. It would enable them to also be eternally vigilant for nazis on the left, instead of believing the right is the only ground from which nazis spring.

For those of us on the right who are vigilant against anti-freedom totalitarianism, we’ve seen the use of quarantine camps in Australia and vaccine regulations throughout the Western world as a requirement for having gainful employment, with vax compliance tribal-coded as globalist and noncompliance coded as nationalist.

At the same time a violent militia with the implicit backing of the state is terrorizing communities small and large, but their shirts are black, not brown. Children are being, from our point of view, indoctrinated in Federally funded State schools with State-approved ethnic and sexual dogma: straight bad, white bad. And we’re going into more debt to send long-range missiles built on von Braun’s tech to people on the Russian front who literally claim to be Nazis.

If comparisons with Nazis were not verboten by partisan unforgiveness, if the left did not look only to the right for emergence of Nazis, those two paragraphs would be merely odd coincidences between current politics and history. As it is, I assume those paragraphs were absolutely infuriating for anyone who identifies as centrist or left of center.

Forgiveness is what keeps us from becoming the people who hurt us.

Can you, uh, make an argument that "forgiving hitler" <-> "enabling you to think the left are nazis"? This is mostly an unrelated political polemic. Which is entirely fine, that's kinda what the site's for, I do that too sometimes, but the original proposition hasn't actually been justified.

In particular, the whole "jeremy corbyn is antisemitic" or "capitalism is fascism in decay" are counterexamples where the left does look for nazis on the left.

Nazis aren't motivated by 'wanting their enemies to die because they are enemies', they hate for concrete, bad (they don't realize the reasons are bad) reasons. If jews really were leading civilization to destruction, which would soon culminate in everything you care about ruined and billions of deaths, (again, hypothetical) violently fighting back would be justified. For the same reason that 'if someone's trying to kill you, you kill them first' is. And it is bad to 'not become the people who hate us' in the sense of 'never fighting back against bad things', because some things are that bad. Maybe it's AI, maybe it's leftism, maybe it's aging, maybe it was slavery, maybe it was the nazis. So 'forgiveness' can't, and shouldn't, save you from the general logic of 'kill people who are actively killing you' ... and then there isn't room for it anymore as a fundamental orientation.

on your unrelated rant:

Vaccine mandates aren't totalitarianism, they're one facet of society, childhood vaccine mandates have existed for a long time and 2012 wasn't 1984. Children aren't being indoctrinated, wokeness is earnestly believed and normally spread by social interactions online and on the internet. "built on von braun's tech" and "claim to literally be nazis" are MASSIVE non-sequiturs that have nothing to do with us being nazis. The US has funded plenty of communist rebels of varying stripes, and use plenty of soviet technology, this doesn't make us soviets. Kinda feels like you're pulling in any argument that vaguely feels 'us ~ nazi' there. The left doesn't think they're nazis not because they haven't forgiven hitler, it's because they're ... on the left, and think those policies are good.

Can you, uh, make an argument that "forgiving hitler" <-> "enabling you to think the left are nazis"?

I’m not sure what that notation means, so I can’t answer that question.

And it is bad to 'not become the people who hate us' in the sense of 'never fighting back against bad things', because some things are that bad.

I think half of my message is getting muddled. The forgiveness is not Christian forgiveness, either the real kind or the strawman kind. It’s the forgiveness of recovery culture, of Twelve Step groups, of Buddhism (and Jedi, and Vulcan) paths. It’s the forgiveness of “you, by hurting me, have caused me to resent you after I escaped you, but that resentment now hurts me more than it helps me, so I let go of the resentment, with or without your consent.”

This kind of forgiveness does not preclude self-defense nor invite future harm. It only frees people from obsession and the harms driven by obsession.

Totalitarianism has been around a long time. Something being around a long time doesn't make it not totalitarian.

The user said quarantine camps and vaccine mandates. Not either or, but you're picking out one to attack. Even if not, this sort of compartmentalization where you take individual pieces which fit into a totalitarian system, instead of the whole it typically fits into and fundamentally represents, is just playing definition games with your preferred definition (which likely requires more than one facet of life to be controlled). By this definition, pretty much any individual facet of a larger totalitarian system could be looked at individually and claimed to not be totalitarian.

You could argue a system with vaccine mandates is, ceterus paribus, the same level of "totalitarian" as one without them, but that's nonsense.

A system which claims ownership over the bodies of individuals to the point where they claim the right to use violence to inject whatever products into that person's body by the mere fact of existence is a totalitarian system. It fundamentally represents an all encompassing ideology; it requires the subservience of the individual's very being, their bodily integrity, to be subservient to the state.

Children aren't being indoctrinated, wokeness is earnestly believed and normally spread by social interactions online and on the internet

Even if this were true, this is fundamentally the definition of indoctrination as children grow up in water without critically thinking the water even exists let alone careful examination of any of its tenets.

Secondly, this is nonsense; the majority of people would likely not agree to many aspects of "wokeness." The reason it's causing such conflict is because a small number of people with institutional control are pushing it onto the population who doesn't want it.

More comments

What exactly do you mean "forgive Hitler"? You did say:

have to let him go

but I'm still not clear on what you mean.

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