19 ms·

Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it. People act. Sometimes they do things that hurt other people. But they are not "evil

Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it. People act. Sometimes they do things that hurt other people. But they are not "evil". Including serial killers: they can be mentally ill (physiologically), or have severe psychological problems because of childhood abuse and such. Hitler, for example, was the elected leader of a huge country, with a grassroots following for years. Millions of people agreed with his actions, and thousands in upper echelons helped him execute his ideas. From the persecution of the Jews to the invasion to other countries, all of those ideas were quite popular in German thinking and public dialogue for decades before Hitler. It's not as if he was some evil creature emerged from nowhere and fooled everybody. More to the point, nobody calls the leaders of the allies evil, despite they having done equally abominable actions, like killing 250.000 civillians (men, women, elderly, children, babies, kittens et al) with two nuclear bombs, or bombing hundreds of thousands of civillians in Dresden to shreds. But they are not called "evil", because they were on "our" side, and because they won and so official history (never far away from state sponsoring) accepted their justifications. How about the bloodshed that was the colonial era? European powers killed, enslaved and exploited a BILLION people, in their countries that they invaded and conquerer. Were they "evil"? That would make every leader of those countries at the time to be equal to Hitler * 10. Not to mention socially established wrong-doing, like people in the South having millions of blacks as slaves, abducted from their villages in Africa. Were the thousands of South slave owners "evil"? Stalin and Mao are another kind of thing. Their rule led to millions of deaths, but it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil'). Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution (or regime change) -- the same way that 50.000 people were executed in the French Revolution.

Dylan16807 14y ago
So you can be objectively 'ill' but not 'evil'? Sounds like you're handling your own pile of BS. 'severe psychological problems' that cause people to deeply hurt others for their own happiness is within spitting distance of a definition of evil. Also I'm not going to get deep into your halfassed retelling of history but (per capita) genocide is worse than murder is worse than bombing cities is worse than bombing armies is worse than enslaving people is worse than exploiting people. So stop trying to fucking godwin with incomparable numbers. Some of those people were evil but I am not going to go point-by-point with that mess.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >So you can be objectively 'ill' but not 'evil'? Yes. Mental illness is something that can be objectively examined and testified by medical experts. "Evil" is a BS non medical pulp journalism term that takes us back to the witch-hunting days... >'severe psychological problems' that cause people to deeply hurt others for their own happiness is within spitting distance of a definition of evil. Only one is a SPECIFIC case of an actual mental evaluation by a professional and the other is a word that can used to mean anything. >Also I'm not going to get deep into your halfassed retelling of history but (per capita) genocide is worse than murder is worse than bombing cities is worse than bombing armies is worse than enslaving people is worse than exploiting people. So stop trying to fucking godwin with incomparable numbers. Really? Do you want to go tell the victims of slavery that they were better off than the victims of German's genocide? Including the tens of millions of people that died under slavery? And that their suffering is somewhat "not comparable" to Germany's victims. Let's see how they'll take your fair and balanced ordering of what's better and what's worse. Oh, and that "per capita genocide"? Plenty of it in the hands of European powers too. Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    I meant that everything was per capita, sorry for being unclear there. As in: kill two million people as part of genocide and it's worse than having two million slaves. And yes I'll tell standard slaves they have it better than far worse treatment combined with starvation and followed by execution. You really think they'll disagree? Slavery may kill you early but it's no death camp. Also I don't know why you're acting like giving more examples of evil acts is going to make me decide the word evil is useless.
    - pretoriusB 14y ago
      >I meant that everything was per capita, sorry for being unclear there. As in: kill two million people as part of genocide and it's worse than having two million slaves. OK, got it now. In that case, European colonialism has killed far more people than Hitler's camps. Heck, the death toll for the native populations of the Americas alone is in the tens of millions. And execution, mass killins, genocide and starvation was not at all of the table for colonial powers either. Here's an example: http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_RC_Leopold.htm http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_RC_Leopold.htm >Also I don't know why you're acting like giving more examples of evil acts is going to make me decide the word evil is useless. What I said is that "evil" is useless in the sense that it doesn't have any explanatory power. That is, "Why did he do that? Because he was evil" is BS. Perhaps this book might convince you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem In it Hannah Arendt describes how what we perceive as "the great evils in history" like the Holocaust, were not executed by "evil" people (fanatics, etc), but by ordinary folks who "accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal". So, even some of the greatest of evils, like the Holocaust, can be explained by observing their underlying mechanisms, the societal pressure, ideology and such, and not by some mystical "evil" quality in people. In the same vein there is the Milgram experiment, which showed how anyone can be a torturer without having any "evil" quality in them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
Roybatty 14y ago
Stalin and Mao are another kind of thing. Their rule led to millions of deaths, but it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil'). Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution (or regime change) -- the same way that 50.000 people were executed in the French Revolution. It's sickening watch leftists like you defend Mao and Stalin...and yes, you are.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  lef...tist? Are you just trying to make things worse now
pretoriusB 14y ago
>It's sickening watch leftists like you defend Mao and Stalin...and yes, you are. Emm, who told you I'm a leftist in the first place? The fact that I "defended" Hitler against the same accusation of ebing "Evil", shouldn't have rang a few alarm bells that I'm actually NOT a leftist? Or is it because I wrote that Mao and Stalin wasn't "evil"? That just makes me a realist -- or if you want it somebody that refuses to use religious terminology for historical affairs. My guess is, your understanding of Mao and Stalin (or Hitler, for that matter and non-US history in general) cames from pulp books, popular documentaries, some internet articles and a couple of movies. Maybe the high school history class. Am I close? Please, share your sources with us, because you'll find that you can substantiate what I wrote by reading almost all scholarly sources and definitive academic biographies of said historical figures.
- neumann_alfred 14y ago
  Or is it because I wrote that Mao and Stalin wasn't "evil"? That just makes me a realist If you respond to my claim that they are evil in my subjective opinion, which I clearly labeled as such, that they're not "objectively, absolutely evil", that doesn't make you a realist, that makes someone who is talking to himself and his strawmen. You say you wished people would drop a notion you introduced into all of this to begin with. Stop being a clown.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    You keep using this word, "strawmen". I don't think it means what you think it means. The thing is, we're describing historical figures. Our "subjective opinions" are not really helpful guides. Or, to be more accurate, they don't matter at all. You keep repeating it's your "subjective opinion" as if that somehow makes it OK. A subjective opinion can be wrong. It's not like one can get away with saying "In my subjective opinion gravity doesn't exist". Or, to be more accurate, it's one thing to say that you find what Hitler DID was evil or that he was an evil-doer (as a substitute for "bad") and leave it at that. And it's totally another thing to say "Hitler was evil", as if that is some kind of explanation of his actions. The first is mighty fine. The second is not. And I'm concerned with the latter mistake here which is a BS non explanation, analogous to "cargo cult programming", and it doesn't matter if one means it as his subjective opinion or as an objective observation. In both cases, it hinders further and real understanding. To get to why Hitler was like that and why he did what he did you go for the underlying causes. For the person it's his history, his ideological influences, experiences, mental issues, abuses, etc. For the German society in general the causes are historical, sociological, economical, cultural, etc. Nowhere in those cases does "evil" come into play at all.
domador 14y ago
I'd be interested in knowing what your definition of "evil" is, to better understand why you consider it BS. To me it seems like your argue that the label "evil" has been applied inconsistently, which is a different matter (though a valid point, I believe).
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >I'd be interested in knowing what your definition of "evil" is, to better understand why you consider it BS. Evil doesn't mean anything. It's just a label which amounts to "enjoys to doing bad things", which is a non-explanation. If anything, it's just a quick condemnation, without wanting to _understand_ or hear more on the issue. As such, it acts as stop sign: it stops examination of what actually went on (which, besides hurting our understanding of history, it also hurts our chances of fixing it in the future). E.g: "Hitler did so and so because he was evil". Err, no. For one, he didn't do it alone, second, lots of leaders all around the world did equally bad things (e.g Japan and Manchuria), third, the motivations and reasons behind Germany's actions are long, historical and sociological (you could find precursors to Nazi ideology 50 and 100 years before they appeared). Second, "evil" has theological origin and connotations (whereas good and bad, harmful and beneficial and such are well known in any kind of society, including civic ones). I think the "evil" tag is popular in the US, because of the countries long theological tradition and huge influence of religion on culture. Nobody is content to call even Hitler or a serial killer "evil" in Europe and leave it at that. We always want to go deeper into the root of the issues.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    "evil" isn't an explanation, it's a label given in disgust to someone that is beyond redemption. To focus on something smaller and simpler, I would say that most serial killers, as in separate premeditated incidents over an extended period, are "evil". The reason why is probably some warped mentality likely tied into mental illness, but mental illness is not an excuse either. And it's possible you could cure them, make then a fundamentally different person, and they would no longer be evil. But in the end the word evil is a label, not a reason to stop analysing.
neumann_alfred 14y ago
Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it. You can call it by other names, and you do; mentally ill for example. Yet, there is no rational objective reason to declare anything wrong, evil or whatever; not even the extinction of all life in the universe, or torture for all. There is no "objective evil" any human could declare, it boils down to opinions; so I make up my own mind. Deal with that, not with strawmen. More to the point, nobody calls the leaders of the allies evil, despite they having done equally abominable actions, like killing 250.000 civillians (men, women, elderly, children, babies, kittens et al) with two nuclear bombs, or bombing hundreds of thousands of civillians in Dresden to shreds. But they are not called "evil", because they were on "our" side No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe (let's ignore the death camps and whatnot for a moment). I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden. All things considered, Germany was treated a thousand times better than it deserved during and after the war. You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing? Anyone who murdered and ultimately defeated Nazis was on my side, no quotes needed. I know the allies were and are full of crap as well, and did and do plenty of evil (my subjective idea of it, get it?) things, but in the case of the Nazis, no response could have been too brutal. I would not say this about other dictators, but "as a German" that's how I feel about the Nazis, who weren't just horrible to Germans and German Jews, but to all of Europe. But that doesn't mean I buy into any dichotomy making the Allies holy or something. Just that I'm glad they were stopped somehow, seeing how shamefully Germany handled herself. it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil') No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough. Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution Let's grant that; what about the other parts? The personality cults? How convenient to tell me what I think and then refute it.. and I feel kinda bad because all of this is off-topic to begin, but I couldn't let this slide.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  >There is no "objective evil" any human could declare, it boils down to opinions; so I make up my own mind. Deal with that, not with strawmen. People don't have to stand for anybody "making up his own mind", the same way that people don't have to respect your opinion if you believe in creationism for example. Even if you are in the majority, there is one correct way to look at the thing, and there are no two ways about it. Especially since the words and notions we opt to use has consequences to what we perceive and how we treat other people. It's important to choose the correct ones, or the less wrong ones. The notion of harm (and the common-sense ethical notion of good) are well understood. The notion of evil, OTOH, is theological bullshit, and only helps to obscure the matters at hand (by making it difficult to get to the actual reasoning and motivations of the person, for example). >No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe And Hitler's rise to power and actions was a response to the "treaty of Versailles", which was considered unfair, humiliating and suffocating the Germans. See how it works both ways? And who said that killing civillians with nuclear bombs is an acceptable "response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe"? >I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden. You might, but millions of other people, German or not German, would not. Civillians are civillians and people killed by bombs are still people, whether German or not. And I'm talking as a citizen of a country that suffered much under German rule in WWII. >You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing? Well, you guys have bombed my city, destroyed some of it's more important monuments, --and killed my grandmother's brother. I don't have to visit "a lot of historical museums". Which I have, plus read tons of books on the matter. >No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough. Well, fact is Truman didn't mind dropping two big bombs on civillians either. Or France didn't mind slaughtering 50.000 Algerians protesting to get their freedom back. Just two examples...
powertower 14y ago
> Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it. History is written by the victors. This is a plain-and-simple fact, and the only fact you'll find in History. Everything gets re-written to fit the winner's point-of-view. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#History_as_propaganda:_Is_history_always_written_by_the_victors.3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#History_a...
bokonist 14y ago
Evil is a BS theological notion. The origin of the term evil is theological. But the word and concept of "evil" still is useful in a secular world. My definition of evil: "A person is evil if they repeatedly cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering to innocent people, as a result of a correctable character deficiency." If someone repeatedly causes net increases in suffering due to greed, pride, vanity, callousness, self-serving ignorance, desire for power, lust, sadism, then I think that person can be accurately characterized as evil. Hitler was evil because he caused a tremendous amount of suffering that would not have happened otherwise, due to his greed and lust for power. Large numbers of the German population at the time were also evil because they supported Hitler out of greed or self-serving ignorance. Harry Truman was not evil. He dropped the A-Bomb on Japan because he honestly believed that it would bring the war to a conclusion in the fastest way possible. Even if he may have been incorrect in this analysis, from my knowledge of Truman's thought process, the mistake would have been an honest, tragic mistake, not a mistake due to a severe deficiency in character. Also, Japanese civilians were not innocents, World War II was a total war in which all rules of war had been violated and all parts of Japanese society were active contributors to the machinery of war. If Truman's generals had presented alternative military options for ending the war that would not have cost vast numbers American lives, and Truman had ignored these options due to callousness to the lives of the Japanese, then I would agree that Truman was evil. But I do not think this was the case. Stalin and Mao were evil because they created vast amounts of suffering due to a combination of pride, will to power, and willful ignorance. They had a desire to rewrite the nature of society whole-cloth and did not make the effort to discover how their experiments were actually turning out in practice. The captain of a slave ship enslaving Africans in the 17th century was certainly evil. He was creating enormous net suffering due to his own greed. A Rhodesian settler who wiped out the natives and stole their land would also classify as evil. Was the Governor-General of the Belgian Congo in 1955 evil? And by proxy, were the Belgian politicians the people who elected them evil? I do not think so. He did not enslave the native or wage violent war against innocents. The colonial situation was inherited from his ancestors, and from what I have read, he did his best to make the situation quite a bit better. Andrew Jackson was evil. He stole land from the Cherokee out of greed and will to dominate, and sent them on the trail of tears. Was George Washington evil for being a slaveholder? That's an interesting question. I would argue no. His plantation was inherited, he did not net increase the suffering from slavery via his own character flaws. Instead, his virtues helped set in motion events which would ultimately rid I might concede that he was evil relative to the average American of modern times, but that he should still be celebrated for being so much less evil than the average person of his time period. Was the average American colonial settler evil for stealing land from the Indians? That's also tricky. The vast majority of the deaths to the Indians were due to old world disease, and cannot be reasonable blamed on settlers. At the time, the new world was incredibly underpopulated, and meanwhile the old world was quite overpopulated with most people living in poverty and deprivation. So I don't think that the settlers were evil for settling the new world. I think the situation is more tragic that the two populations could not find a way to share the land. (And contrary to the politically correct histories, this failure to share was not just the fault of the white settlers, the violence was a two-way street with fault going both ways).
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

Dylan16807 14y ago

So you can be objectively 'ill' but not 'evil'? Sounds like you're handling your own pile of BS. 'severe psychological problems' that cause people to deeply hurt others for their own happiness is within spitting distance of a definition of evil. Also I'm not going to get deep into your halfassed retelling of history but (per capita) genocide is worse than murder is worse than bombing cities is worse than bombing armies is worse than enslaving people is worse than exploiting people. So stop trying to fucking godwin with incomparable numbers. Some of those people were evil but I am not going to go point-by-point with that mess.

pretoriusB 14y ago
>So you can be objectively 'ill' but not 'evil'? Yes. Mental illness is something that can be objectively examined and testified by medical experts. "Evil" is a BS non medical pulp journalism term that takes us back to the witch-hunting days... >'severe psychological problems' that cause people to deeply hurt others for their own happiness is within spitting distance of a definition of evil. Only one is a SPECIFIC case of an actual mental evaluation by a professional and the other is a word that can used to mean anything. >Also I'm not going to get deep into your halfassed retelling of history but (per capita) genocide is worse than murder is worse than bombing cities is worse than bombing armies is worse than enslaving people is worse than exploiting people. So stop trying to fucking godwin with incomparable numbers. Really? Do you want to go tell the victims of slavery that they were better off than the victims of German's genocide? Including the tens of millions of people that died under slavery? And that their suffering is somewhat "not comparable" to Germany's victims. Let's see how they'll take your fair and balanced ordering of what's better and what's worse. Oh, and that "per capita genocide"? Plenty of it in the hands of European powers too. Check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocides_in_history
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  I meant that everything was per capita, sorry for being unclear there. As in: kill two million people as part of genocide and it's worse than having two million slaves. And yes I'll tell standard slaves they have it better than far worse treatment combined with starvation and followed by execution. You really think they'll disagree? Slavery may kill you early but it's no death camp. Also I don't know why you're acting like giving more examples of evil acts is going to make me decide the word evil is useless.
  - pretoriusB 14y ago
    >I meant that everything was per capita, sorry for being unclear there. As in: kill two million people as part of genocide and it's worse than having two million slaves. OK, got it now. In that case, European colonialism has killed far more people than Hitler's camps. Heck, the death toll for the native populations of the Americas alone is in the tens of millions. And execution, mass killins, genocide and starvation was not at all of the table for colonial powers either. Here's an example: http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_RC_Leopold.htm http://www.thehobgoblin.co.uk/journal/h32002_RC_Leopold.htm >Also I don't know why you're acting like giving more examples of evil acts is going to make me decide the word evil is useless. What I said is that "evil" is useless in the sense that it doesn't have any explanatory power. That is, "Why did he do that? Because he was evil" is BS. Perhaps this book might convince you: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem In it Hannah Arendt describes how what we perceive as "the great evils in history" like the Holocaust, were not executed by "evil" people (fanatics, etc), but by ordinary folks who "accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal". So, even some of the greatest of evils, like the Holocaust, can be explained by observing their underlying mechanisms, the societal pressure, ideology and such, and not by some mystical "evil" quality in people. In the same vein there is the Milgram experiment, which showed how anyone can be a torturer without having any "evil" quality in them: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

Roybatty 14y ago

Stalin and Mao are another kind of thing. Their rule led to millions of deaths, but it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil'). Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution (or regime change) -- the same way that 50.000 people were executed in the French Revolution. It's sickening watch leftists like you defend Mao and Stalin...and yes, you are.

Dylan16807 14y ago
lef...tist? Are you just trying to make things worse now

pretoriusB 14y ago

>It's sickening watch leftists like you defend Mao and Stalin...and yes, you are. Emm, who told you I'm a leftist in the first place? The fact that I "defended" Hitler against the same accusation of ebing "Evil", shouldn't have rang a few alarm bells that I'm actually NOT a leftist? Or is it because I wrote that Mao and Stalin wasn't "evil"? That just makes me a realist -- or if you want it somebody that refuses to use religious terminology for historical affairs. My guess is, your understanding of Mao and Stalin (or Hitler, for that matter and non-US history in general) cames from pulp books, popular documentaries, some internet articles and a couple of movies. Maybe the high school history class. Am I close? Please, share your sources with us, because you'll find that you can substantiate what I wrote by reading almost all scholarly sources and definitive academic biographies of said historical figures.

neumann_alfred 14y ago
Or is it because I wrote that Mao and Stalin wasn't "evil"? That just makes me a realist If you respond to my claim that they are evil in my subjective opinion, which I clearly labeled as such, that they're not "objectively, absolutely evil", that doesn't make you a realist, that makes someone who is talking to himself and his strawmen. You say you wished people would drop a notion you introduced into all of this to begin with. Stop being a clown.
- pretoriusB 14y ago
  You keep using this word, "strawmen". I don't think it means what you think it means. The thing is, we're describing historical figures. Our "subjective opinions" are not really helpful guides. Or, to be more accurate, they don't matter at all. You keep repeating it's your "subjective opinion" as if that somehow makes it OK. A subjective opinion can be wrong. It's not like one can get away with saying "In my subjective opinion gravity doesn't exist". Or, to be more accurate, it's one thing to say that you find what Hitler DID was evil or that he was an evil-doer (as a substitute for "bad") and leave it at that. And it's totally another thing to say "Hitler was evil", as if that is some kind of explanation of his actions. The first is mighty fine. The second is not. And I'm concerned with the latter mistake here which is a BS non explanation, analogous to "cargo cult programming", and it doesn't matter if one means it as his subjective opinion or as an objective observation. In both cases, it hinders further and real understanding. To get to why Hitler was like that and why he did what he did you go for the underlying causes. For the person it's his history, his ideological influences, experiences, mental issues, abuses, etc. For the German society in general the causes are historical, sociological, economical, cultural, etc. Nowhere in those cases does "evil" come into play at all.

domador 14y ago

I'd be interested in knowing what your definition of "evil" is, to better understand why you consider it BS. To me it seems like your argue that the label "evil" has been applied inconsistently, which is a different matter (though a valid point, I believe).

pretoriusB 14y ago
>I'd be interested in knowing what your definition of "evil" is, to better understand why you consider it BS. Evil doesn't mean anything. It's just a label which amounts to "enjoys to doing bad things", which is a non-explanation. If anything, it's just a quick condemnation, without wanting to _understand_ or hear more on the issue. As such, it acts as stop sign: it stops examination of what actually went on (which, besides hurting our understanding of history, it also hurts our chances of fixing it in the future). E.g: "Hitler did so and so because he was evil". Err, no. For one, he didn't do it alone, second, lots of leaders all around the world did equally bad things (e.g Japan and Manchuria), third, the motivations and reasons behind Germany's actions are long, historical and sociological (you could find precursors to Nazi ideology 50 and 100 years before they appeared). Second, "evil" has theological origin and connotations (whereas good and bad, harmful and beneficial and such are well known in any kind of society, including civic ones). I think the "evil" tag is popular in the US, because of the countries long theological tradition and huge influence of religion on culture. Nobody is content to call even Hitler or a serial killer "evil" in Europe and leave it at that. We always want to go deeper into the root of the issues.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  "evil" isn't an explanation, it's a label given in disgust to someone that is beyond redemption. To focus on something smaller and simpler, I would say that most serial killers, as in separate premeditated incidents over an extended period, are "evil". The reason why is probably some warped mentality likely tied into mental illness, but mental illness is not an excuse either. And it's possible you could cure them, make then a fundamentally different person, and they would no longer be evil. But in the end the word evil is a label, not a reason to stop analysing.

neumann_alfred 14y ago

Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it. You can call it by other names, and you do; mentally ill for example. Yet, there is no rational objective reason to declare anything wrong, evil or whatever; not even the extinction of all life in the universe, or torture for all. There is no "objective evil" any human could declare, it boils down to opinions; so I make up my own mind. Deal with that, not with strawmen. More to the point, nobody calls the leaders of the allies evil, despite they having done equally abominable actions, like killing 250.000 civillians (men, women, elderly, children, babies, kittens et al) with two nuclear bombs, or bombing hundreds of thousands of civillians in Dresden to shreds. But they are not called "evil", because they were on "our" side No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe (let's ignore the death camps and whatnot for a moment). I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden. All things considered, Germany was treated a thousand times better than it deserved during and after the war. You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing? Anyone who murdered and ultimately defeated Nazis was on my side, no quotes needed. I know the allies were and are full of crap as well, and did and do plenty of evil (my subjective idea of it, get it?) things, but in the case of the Nazis, no response could have been too brutal. I would not say this about other dictators, but "as a German" that's how I feel about the Nazis, who weren't just horrible to Germans and German Jews, but to all of Europe. But that doesn't mean I buy into any dichotomy making the Allies holy or something. Just that I'm glad they were stopped somehow, seeing how shamefully Germany handled herself. it's not like they enjoyed killing people (as is probably the understanding of naive people calling them 'evil') No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough. Part of the massacres were result of the inevitable power plays in huge countries with hundreds of millions population under a revolution Let's grant that; what about the other parts? The personality cults? How convenient to tell me what I think and then refute it.. and I feel kinda bad because all of this is off-topic to begin, but I couldn't let this slide.

pretoriusB 14y ago
>There is no "objective evil" any human could declare, it boils down to opinions; so I make up my own mind. Deal with that, not with strawmen. People don't have to stand for anybody "making up his own mind", the same way that people don't have to respect your opinion if you believe in creationism for example. Even if you are in the majority, there is one correct way to look at the thing, and there are no two ways about it. Especially since the words and notions we opt to use has consequences to what we perceive and how we treat other people. It's important to choose the correct ones, or the less wrong ones. The notion of harm (and the common-sense ethical notion of good) are well understood. The notion of evil, OTOH, is theological bullshit, and only helps to obscure the matters at hand (by making it difficult to get to the actual reasoning and motivations of the person, for example). >No, because that was in response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe And Hitler's rise to power and actions was a response to the "treaty of Versailles", which was considered unfair, humiliating and suffocating the Germans. See how it works both ways? And who said that killing civillians with nuclear bombs is an acceptable "response to a huge campaign to conquer Europe"? >I am German, and I would laugh into the face of any German crying about Dresden. You might, but millions of other people, German or not German, would not. Civillians are civillians and people killed by bombs are still people, whether German or not. And I'm talking as a citizen of a country that suffered much under German rule in WWII. >You haven't been to a whole lot of historical museums dealing with the topic, have you? Or seen movies, that kind of thing? Well, you guys have bombed my city, destroyed some of it's more important monuments, --and killed my grandmother's brother. I don't have to visit "a lot of historical museums". Which I have, plus read tons of books on the matter. >No, that's just a strawman. Fact is, they didn't mind. In my books that's enough. Well, fact is Truman didn't mind dropping two big bombs on civillians either. Or France didn't mind slaughtering 50.000 Algerians protesting to get their freedom back. Just two examples...

powertower 14y ago

> Evil is a BS theological notion. I wish people would stop perpetuating it. History is written by the victors. This is a plain-and-simple fact, and the only fact you'll find in History. Everything gets re-written to fit the winner's point-of-view. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#History_as_propaganda:_Is_history_always_written_by_the_victors.3F http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophy_of_history#History_a...

bokonist 14y ago

Evil is a BS theological notion. The origin of the term evil is theological. But the word and concept of "evil" still is useful in a secular world. My definition of evil: "A person is evil if they repeatedly cause large amounts of unnecessary suffering to innocent people, as a result of a correctable character deficiency." If someone repeatedly causes net increases in suffering due to greed, pride, vanity, callousness, self-serving ignorance, desire for power, lust, sadism, then I think that person can be accurately characterized as evil. Hitler was evil because he caused a tremendous amount of suffering that would not have happened otherwise, due to his greed and lust for power. Large numbers of the German population at the time were also evil because they supported Hitler out of greed or self-serving ignorance. Harry Truman was not evil. He dropped the A-Bomb on Japan because he honestly believed that it would bring the war to a conclusion in the fastest way possible. Even if he may have been incorrect in this analysis, from my knowledge of Truman's thought process, the mistake would have been an honest, tragic mistake, not a mistake due to a severe deficiency in character. Also, Japanese civilians were not innocents, World War II was a total war in which all rules of war had been violated and all parts of Japanese society were active contributors to the machinery of war. If Truman's generals had presented alternative military options for ending the war that would not have cost vast numbers American lives, and Truman had ignored these options due to callousness to the lives of the Japanese, then I would agree that Truman was evil. But I do not think this was the case. Stalin and Mao were evil because they created vast amounts of suffering due to a combination of pride, will to power, and willful ignorance. They had a desire to rewrite the nature of society whole-cloth and did not make the effort to discover how their experiments were actually turning out in practice. The captain of a slave ship enslaving Africans in the 17th century was certainly evil. He was creating enormous net suffering due to his own greed. A Rhodesian settler who wiped out the natives and stole their land would also classify as evil. Was the Governor-General of the Belgian Congo in 1955 evil? And by proxy, were the Belgian politicians the people who elected them evil? I do not think so. He did not enslave the native or wage violent war against innocents. The colonial situation was inherited from his ancestors, and from what I have read, he did his best to make the situation quite a bit better. Andrew Jackson was evil. He stole land from the Cherokee out of greed and will to dominate, and sent them on the trail of tears. Was George Washington evil for being a slaveholder? That's an interesting question. I would argue no. His plantation was inherited, he did not net increase the suffering from slavery via his own character flaws. Instead, his virtues helped set in motion events which would ultimately rid I might concede that he was evil relative to the average American of modern times, but that he should still be celebrated for being so much less evil than the average person of his time period. Was the average American colonial settler evil for stealing land from the Indians? That's also tricky. The vast majority of the deaths to the Indians were due to old world disease, and cannot be reasonable blamed on settlers. At the time, the new world was incredibly underpopulated, and meanwhile the old world was quite overpopulated with most people living in poverty and deprivation. So I don't think that the settlers were evil for settling the new world. I think the situation is more tragic that the two populations could not find a way to share the land. (And contrary to the politically correct histories, this failure to share was not just the fault of the white settlers, the violence was a two-way street with fault going both ways).

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]