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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
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.
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