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