Quote:
Originally Posted by Zaqarbal
^ Hi, Erica. I've been thinking about this post above, and suddenly a bunch of films related to it have come to mind. I don't know why, but at this moment I feel like Remington Steele (remember Pierce Brosnan mentioning movies all the time?  ).
When I saw that picture of the motherfu**er par excelence (together with Stalin) as a boy, I thought of Come and See (if you haven't seen it, download it right now!; it's an absolutely essential masterpiece to any cinema lover). There is a fantastic scene in it. I think this is one of those cases in which images worth more than a thousand words. Sublime: |
Hi, Zaqarbal (aka Remington)!
Thank you for your comments! I wish I could offer you tea, cookies, and apple slices to welcome you to my MB thread-home.
I will definitely try to find the 2004 movie "Downfall" about Hitler's last days in his bunker. The clip is thought-provoking since it shows how the shooter finally imagines facing Adolf Hitler when Adolf was a baby. The shooter's human compassion prevents him from being able to kill that baby, even though he knows what the baby will grow up to do.
The clip from "Downfall" made me think three things:
(1) Killing a child or perhaps any person because of what he might do never makes sense, because we never know someone's future choices definitively.
(2) You would have had to kill millions and millions of people in order to prevent the Holocaust, since Hitler could not implement this plan without huge numbers of supportive people who wanted to implement it and supported the goals.
(3) This humorous clip I saw about Hitler in his bunker!
Zaqarbal, the videos of Hitler's compassion for the dog and the little children are painful to watch because they do show Hitler was a thinking, caring person, just like us, in much of his life. The face of a friendly dog pressed against his moved him. Little children's sweet personalities touched him. He was a "good man" in many ways. I cannot say, seeing those videos, that he was a "bad" man; he was both good and bad, at the same time.
Another example of this ambivalence in judging people: German soldiers sometimes found it hard emotionally to kill women, men, and children at gunpoint, even though they believed it was the right thing to do in order to shape society according to their eugenics beliefs. This is one reason concentration camps were conceived...to protect German soldiers from the trauma of killing other people face to face, and also to make the killing faster, since the plan was to destroy all Jewish people throughout the world. So some of the soldiers were both compassionate and callous at the same time.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Zaqarbal
I quoted Schopenhauer at the Animal Cruelty thread:
I must say I totally agree with that statement. But this doesn't mean that someone compassionate to animals is necessarily a good person. As philosophers say, that would be a necessary but not sufficient condition. |
Yes, I remember you quoting Schopenhauer in the animal cruelty thread!
After I read it, I thought about whether I agree with this quote or not: "Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man."
I agree with you that someone (like Hitler) who is compassionate to animals may not be a good person overall. However, I feel that many overall good people *are* cruel to animals.
Assuming "good" equals caring for another individual's well-being, rather than just one's own, then I'd say we all are good to a degree. No one is all "good"; no one all "bad." It is a matter of degree.
I realized early on that humans are like wolves and I am one among them. I love them, even as I am horrified by them. They kill so gracefully, so easily, and often the worst things they do stem from their great ability to love.
Ever since I was 5, when a woman at a fishery smashed the head of a fish I picked out thinking it was to be a pet, I realized I was surrounded by people who can be both callously cruel and beautifully loving. Actually, I realized this when I was 4 and saw people beheading chickens to feed other people whom they love.
Humans will do horrible things for love. Love of god. Love of country. Love of concepts. Love of family. Love of children. Love of peace. The Holocaust itself stemmed from love...the German folk loved their people and so wanted genetic "purity" to fulfill their vision of what was best for humankind.
I feel it is one of life's great ironies that most of humanity's worst choices, which often involve hurting others, stem from love. I call this tendency to do awful things in the name of love, "Love gone wrong."