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This is a damnation greater, not lesser, than the regular sort, for it denies even the dignity normally afforded to a true enemy. The idea that Nazis were sick and deluded is mainstream – very competitive with the theory that they were sane thugs whose philosophy or innate inclinations led them to pick on the weak. The question of whether they belonged to that special category of mentally unwell evildoers who remain irredeemable may be interesting to some (e.g. Christians coming to terms with the fact that «Judeo-Christianity» isn't a coherent moral framework), but really it's just shades of dehumanization. There is no authentic human agency in an outburst of pathetic insanity, and no one to forgive. As civilized men, we do not begrudge man-eating tigers their addiction to human flesh, we shoot them on sight.
...There are essentially two paths to forgiveness. The easy one, the false one, adjacent to your method, is spinning a comfortable story where the core of the evil impulse will be something you find intrinsically excusable, even a mere accident or a misunderstanding. They were just following orders, they weren't loved by their fathers, they got traumatized by WWI, yada yada. Or just gesture in that direction, like Orwell, in the refreshing manner of an upper-class leftie British journo sniggering at a country bumpkin with a big attitude:
The hard path to forgiveness is trying the evildoer's perspective for size, and understanding how it is not obviously insane, and learning that you can hate the sin even when you're no longer able to look down on the sinner. But that's risky, of course: look into the abyss and all that.
With regard to Nazis, one nifty trick is to check out some of their self-appointed antipodes. I pick Ozy Brennan. Says Ozy:
Ozy fancies herself an original thinker. I assume the attentive (and primed!) reader has noticed that her idea of the ethos of Nazism is riffing off Orwell, in fact from the most iconic passage:
1984 is cool. But what about 14/88, both versions – the «our children« and «Because the beauty of the White Aryan woman must not perish from the Earth»? Is it really isomorphic to that nightmare vision from the Iron Dream? To some people it might be.
And, speaking of, what does Ozy zerself mean by beauty?
Ah, but Nazis would have called that Entartete Kunst. Is it beauty when the crux of an art piece is humiliation of a faith? Or is it more Orwellian will to power?
As they say in xianxia, out by the roots! Not even the original justifications of those values shall survive. And words will mean whatever. Spooky!
«The object of power is power. Now do you begin to understand me?»
I don't think that forgiveness is a clear moral good. Jews pride themselves on the unwillingness to forget and forgive, and it works for them. Tolerance for real moral aliens, with their reasonable fear of The Other, though – that could help.
The irony is that today's most-fervent anti-Nazi already understands the perspective of the Nazi, they just aren't aware of it: They've singled out a group of people upon whom they blame the ills of modern society, and wish to eradicate them via a spectrum of solutions that includes violence. While the anti-Nazi's accepted modes of violence might not reach the evil extremes of Nazism's violence, Nazism's violence was limited to groups defined by relatively hard boundaries, whereas the anti-Nazi has empowered themselves to forever broaden their definitions, giving their milder violence potentially unlimited scope, so which is worse is a question for debate.
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Excellent as always, but I must say something of this comparison:
Jim Corbett, a famed hunter of man-eaters in British India (and later famed conservationist of Bengal Tigers), did not enjoy killing tigers. He knew it was necessary and that was enough, but he also knew what caused an animal to turn man-eater. Corbett wrote of villagers harvesting tall grass where a tiger might be hidden steps away but be no danger to them, tigers fear man. We killed fear into them.
Corbett knew the man-eater is bad luck and imprudence. The fight with particularly aggressive prey that maims the beast, or the shot that permanently weakens but does not kill, from the poor hunter who fails to track down and follow through. The beast lives, but he can no longer catch his natural prey. Even in desperate hunger he still fears man, for the rest of his however shortened life he might, never turning man-eater. Until for some, all at once they lose their fear. The starving tiger surprised in tall grass whose one swipe is still enough to kill. Then his fear is gone. Then he will continue, sometimes to horrific extents. All because of bad luck, imprudence. Because the man-eater is most often made, not born.
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