Hitler didn't do it alone

Darkness isn't external

The other day on a group text, my husband - who is Jewish - said that the world would have been a better place without Hitler. I don’t agree with him.

Of course I don’t think that Hitler made the world a better place! [If that’s where your brain went then you need to get your head straight.] What I mean is that we are all much closer to falling in any given moment than we believe. Than we want to believe.

For the last year or so or so I’ve been thinking about Christian concepts of good and evil. I’ve always found this problematic, and not alone because good things can come from bad choices if only because we learned from them. [But ONLY if we learn from them.]

My childhood was filled with fiery sermons about going to hell if I did something bad. The problem being, some of the things that were framed as bad seemed like they would be good, and some of the things my Mennonite babysitter said were good, my mother said were bad. Contradiction abounded. As the only child of a single parent, I didn’t have much to lean on. My mother was somewhat lacking in social skills. I suspect now she might be a little autistic. I’m not, but I learned my social skills from her. [None of that of course was her fault.]

Because Pagans don’t believe in the devil, or Satan, [whatever you wanna call him] we don’t see evil as an external nasty god who tries to get people to hurt each other. Pagans lean into virtue ethics and a libertarian ideology of “do unto others.” Judy Harrow, in her essay in the book Magical Religion and Modern Witchcraft, describes the end of her search to understand evil as ‘a rip in the fabric of empathy.’

However, virtue ethics doesn’t offer a satisfactory explanation for why people behave badly, and ‘torn empathy’ is wholly inadequate to describe Hitler, or Stalin, or Mao, or Pol Pot, let alone Genghis Kahn. All of these people thought they were doing the right thing, or in case of Genghis Kahn, that they had a mandate from god.

While Satan is barely mentioned in either the old or New Testament, there is extensive literature from later Christianity. And the idea of an external agent who tempted one into bad behavior was stock when I was growing up. Although it was much less mentioned at my mother‘s Presbyterian Church than it was at my babysitter’s Mennonite Church. The Presbyterian Church was all about the loving kindness of Jesus.

This became somewhat more problematic as I matured. We learned about the Holocaust, but it was just a story in the past rather than a cautionary tail for a kid in the 70s, World War II was literally more than a lifetime ago.

We learned absolutely nothing about communism or the millions killed in the name of that ideology.

This can perhaps be forgiven. The Gulag Archipelago the book which thoroughly documented the evils of Marx’s ideology, wasn’t published until 1973. By that time, ideologues were already taking over teaching schools and universities. When I got to college, The Communist Manifesto was required reading.

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People who believed communism/marxism was a good idea killed 100 million people, far more than Hitler, and even more than Genghis Kahn.

Yet when we talk about Hitler, or even Lenin, Stalin, or Mao, it is THEY who are blamed for all the deaths. But did they personally execute millions? Of course not! Even their leading generals and secret service couldn’t account for 100 million.

The Gulag Archipelago demonstrated in painful detail how a system could be built on in human failings and the outcome of a belief system based on envy and resentment, heavily salted with willful blindness.

Hitler could not have killed millions without the cooperation of thousands. Mao, Pol Pot, Amin, Stalin, or Lenin could not have orchestrated the death of millions without the help of thousands. If Hitler had been successfully assassinated - as was attempted - does anyone think that would have been the end of the war? Because surely Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, or any of Hitler’s confidants would have been happy to step up and take his place.

But it’s even worse than that, because the numbers still don’t make sense unless most of the population accepted their leader’s ideas as truth and complied, or did their best to ignore, the bad things that were happening around them. Many turned in their neighbors for gain, or because they thought doing so might save them. Certainly some enjoyed the process. This was the true darkness demonstrated in The Gulag Archipelago.

It is a darkness that’s not explained by the idea of an external evil constantly tempting humanity. As Solzynichin said, the line between good and evil cuts across every human heart.

However, Solzynichin also said that there is no one who is totally evil. I haven’t finished reading The Gulag Archipelago, and so far there’s nothing that he’s written about to justify that particular opinion. So I don’t know if it is an idea that was necessary for his sanity in the face of terrible darkness or if he saw people who were fallen changing direction. The latter I hope. If he saw people who had descended into the worst of what humanity can do, change and start reaching upward, that would indeed make me feel hopeful. But getting the rest of the way through that two volume, 2000-page story may take me another ten years. [I will finish it, I feel like I owe to the author who risked everything to get it written and published.]

Was there something in Hitler, Stalin, or Mao that was redeemable? Before that could happen, they would have to see what they were doing as wrong. None of them did.

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Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; three boyz. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition, and The Storytellers: a Journey of Discovery.