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Notes -
Kanye West famously said "I like Hitler". He also said more:
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:
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
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.
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Heinrich Heine — 'We should forgive our enemies, but not before they are hanged'
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I don't see how it's any more implausible than white people who want to see 'whiteness' go away, such people do exist.
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