Why is it always the Nazis?

But seriously.

Why do we act like the Nazis had a monopoly on evil?

A strange fixation

Every time a movie or TV show – from the Lion King to Supergirl – wants to make someone evil, they start referencing the Nazis. Every time you read a discussion about good and evil – whether in the internet comments section or in a Harvard journal – sooner or later someone will base an entire argument on the premise “the Nazis were evil.” I have even read a very prominent philosopher who insists that we can establish almost no moral facts, but who insists that every moral system must include as a precept “the Nazis were evil.”

People have been going to war, torturing each other, impressing child soldiers, enslaving each other, murdering the innocent and raping the helpless, decimating towns, wiping out populations, attempting genocide, and all the rest for thousands of years. In fact, people are still doing those things. Why, of all the evil in the world, did we single out this society? It wasn’t that long-lasting. It didn’t kill the most people. It wasn’t the only fascist society, or the only racist society, or the only fanatic society. Why do they so fascinate and frighten us?

I think it’s because they remind us of ourselves.

Not like ‘them’?

It’s easy to stay detached thinking about pagan societies burning their children, or xenophobic imperialist societies experimenting on prisoners of war. It’s even relatively easy to stay detached thinking about societies where a certain moral/political philosophy subjugated thousands of people and through assassination or starvation killed more than Hitler ever did. Why? Because those societies and cultures are alien to us. We’re not like that. We would never do those things.

But with Nazi Germany, we’re not looking at some distant, exotic society. We’re looking at ourselves: modern, cultured, civilized, educated, Western, with elected representation and an incredibly rich cultural history. You can’t study philosophy or music or literature or church history without coming to the Germans sooner or later. They weren’t some backwards, benighted nation. They were us. And yet in a matter of years, they morphed into a fascist society that killed millions without blinking an eye.

This brings us face to face with a couple of hard truths.

Hard Truths

First, education, intelligence, and technology are no defense against moral corruption. I distinctly remember being taught about the Nazis in middle school, being told that education would keep us from becoming them. Nonsense. The people at the head of evil are always very smart and very knowledgeable, and that just makes them more dangerous.

I’m sorry, educators, but information, intelligence, and “education” do nothing to stop moral corruption. They are raw material to be used by either side. Without instilling ethics and moral courage in our children – based not on cultural norms of “civilization” or “niceness,” but on grounded truth and passion – we are not guarding them against evil. We may be making them into the most advanced evil generation ever.

Second, Nazi Germany proves that civilized people are very, very good at ignoring systematic murder in their own backyard. As long as it’s hidden away and termed something besides “mass murder,” and there is some pseudo-logical framework that keeps us from calling our victims “people,” we will allow an incredible amount of innocent bloodshed. We don’t see what we don’t want to see, and the human capacity for self-deception is nearly unlimited.

What would we do?

This, I think, is why we want to distance ourselves from Nazism by repeating how evil it is. By making its adherents into inhuman monsters, we allow ourselves to forget that who we’re really talking about is the girl next door and the guy across the hall. We overlook the fact that a society very much like our own combined the ruthless efficiency and clinical precision of modernity with a penchant for pseudo-reason and self-deception, and what resulted was murder on a massive scale – not the ugly, bloody, riotous murder of Rwanda, but a neat-and-tidy genocide that didn’t offend delicate sensibilities.

If we look these truths full in their hideous faces, we are forced to ask: what would we have done?

“Framed” by premasagar is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0