Evil is a religious idea. Hitler was a man, not some devil.
Those kind of after-the-fact statements are just cargo-cult that tend to obscure real historical understanding. Even if one means it well ("if we all repugned by such evil, we will avoid it") it doesn't work that way in actual life, for it tends to stick to some people and events and ignore others.
One has to understand "evil" (historically) not just loath it, in order to avoid it. And he has to place it in it's context and consider whether his side was just as "evil".
Fact 1: Before there was an official war Hitler was quite beloved in the West (including the USA), both as an ally against the communists and as an example of a strong "man of the state" against the "enemy within" (leftists, unions, liberals, etc). And they did know how he got in power and what his beliefs were.
Fact 2: Hitler wasn't some lone evil guy who brainwashed a nation. Similar ideas about the historical role of Germany, of the German people, etc, including anti-semitism were held by many German people even before Hitler became known, including prominent philosophers like Heidegger and Carl Smitt, artists and so on.
Fact 3: Anti-semitism was ripe in the US too, as was tons of other kinds of racism (not just against blacks. KKK was also against Hispanic, balkan, etc immigrants). Hitler himself wrote that he took the idea of the concentration camps from the US confinement of Native Americans ( http://www.issuesandalibis.org/campsa.html -- random reference to the first link I found, there are tons of works on those camps you can look up).
Fact 4: Focusing just on some historical events (the Holocaust) misses the bigger picture, of western powers holding BILLION of people as slaves in their colonies, including millions of deaths, lynchings, official executions, maimings and the like. The US didn't have colonies at the time, but they had millions of blacks they brought to serve them.
Fact 5: People who consider Hitler evil (and why not!), leave the people who dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities -- on men, women, chidren, babies, elderly etc -- scot free. They even ignore that the Japanese were already destitute and surrendering, and revert to their BS patriotically edited "history" to justify something which was merely a live test for the weapon and a "message" for the post-war times. Just an example -- one can find equally horrible acts by the English, Belgian, French, etc, including the Japanese themselves in China and Korea.
These are all straw-men. "Hitler was evil" is an absolute judgement of Hitler, and not in any way of the events and people surrounding him. His blame doesn't absolve anyone of any of their responsibilities for the Holocaust or any other incident in history. It is but a singular example to make my point.
Evil is not a purely religious construct. For it to be, so then would morality - but it's not. Do you believe that, in general, murder and rape are wrong? If you do, you have defined a moral compass - even if you're staunchly atheist. It's true that religion often comes with a pre-defined morality that is expected to be adopted, but as humans, we define morality and what that means to us all the time outside the context of religion.
>These are all straw-men. "Hitler was evil" is an absolute judgement of Hitler
He was a human -- even likable when you get to know him they say (he sure made millions of Germans like him). What was "evil", if you want, was his ideals and more especially them put in practice (the war, the holocaust, the S.S. etc).
To say he was evil implies he was something different than the next person. But ordinary people, the kind that would have been a friendly librarian or baker, when caught up in some historical dynamics can end up doing monstrous acts (e.g. in Nazi Germany, in Cambodia, in Nigeria, etc). Hanna Arendt wrote compellingly about how the most "evil" man in the camps was in fact a banal bureucrat.
I also dislike how we selectively call some people evil. How many call Truman, the guy who gave the OK to bomb to oblivion two civilian towns, evil? Or maybe if Hitler had only killed 200.000 civilians in the course of the war it would have been OK?
History tends to spend less effort condemning the actions of those who don't start off with dramatic televised speeches about the people they want to eliminate and sign off with a World War involving almost every country worldwide.
Still, at the time, the actions of Leopold's men in the Congo were considered so evil that Leopold was forced to relinquish control of the Congo by his own government, and you won't find anyone willing to argue with a straight face[1] that the Congo Free State represented anything other than the worst excesses of colonialism.... even at the time[2]. If you'd released an info graphic depicting black people with their hands severed and white people counting cash 100 years ago, educated viewers would have got the reference. And probably written to complain that the administration of the Congo Free State was a far more complex and nuanced issue than simply "good guys" and "bad guys".
[1]Mark Twain did so with heavy irony.
[2]Leopold was even condemned by the British, whose monarch was a close relative and whose government was a Belgian ally with imperial possessions of their own covering half the globe, and an army fresh from conducting policies of mass-internment of civilians in the Boer War
Because we don't rank evilness based on the casualties, we rank it by how close it is to us. The holocaust impacted modern western civilization (there still are people today who lived the thing), so it is regarded as the most horrible thing ever in the west.
Evil is a religious idea. Hitler was a man, not some devil.
Those kind of after-the-fact statements are just cargo-cult that tend to obscure real historical understanding. Even if one means it well ("if we all repugned by such evil, we will avoid it") it doesn't work that way in actual life, for it tends to stick to some people and events and ignore others.
One has to understand "evil" (historically) not just loath it, in order to avoid it. And he has to place it in it's context and consider whether his side was just as "evil".
Fact 1: Before there was an official war Hitler was quite beloved in the West (including the USA), both as an ally against the communists and as an example of a strong "man of the state" against the "enemy within" (leftists, unions, liberals, etc). And they did know how he got in power and what his beliefs were.
Fact 2: Hitler wasn't some lone evil guy who brainwashed a nation. Similar ideas about the historical role of Germany, of the German people, etc, including anti-semitism were held by many German people even before Hitler became known, including prominent philosophers like Heidegger and Carl Smitt, artists and so on.
Fact 3: Anti-semitism was ripe in the US too, as was tons of other kinds of racism (not just against blacks. KKK was also against Hispanic, balkan, etc immigrants). Hitler himself wrote that he took the idea of the concentration camps from the US confinement of Native Americans ( http://www.issuesandalibis.org/campsa.html -- random reference to the first link I found, there are tons of works on those camps you can look up).
Fact 4: Focusing just on some historical events (the Holocaust) misses the bigger picture, of western powers holding BILLION of people as slaves in their colonies, including millions of deaths, lynchings, official executions, maimings and the like. The US didn't have colonies at the time, but they had millions of blacks they brought to serve them.
Fact 5: People who consider Hitler evil (and why not!), leave the people who dropped two atomic bombs on civilian cities -- on men, women, chidren, babies, elderly etc -- scot free. They even ignore that the Japanese were already destitute and surrendering, and revert to their BS patriotically edited "history" to justify something which was merely a live test for the weapon and a "message" for the post-war times. Just an example -- one can find equally horrible acts by the English, Belgian, French, etc, including the Japanese themselves in China and Korea.