breakfast euphemisms

View the Original News Story Here.

The Jewish Defence League has come out against actor Will Smith for saying
“Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘Let me do the most evil thing I can do today, I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good.’”

The JDL condemned the remarks as “ignorant, detestable and offensive” and urged theaters to pull Mr. Smith’s new movie, I Am Legend. The article cited above says that “he was quoted in the Scottish newspaper the Daily Record as opining that the Nazi dictator wasn’t all bad” which is entirely untrue. The subjectivity of the statement and the subjectivity of historical knowledge of the Holocaust prevents such a statement.

Will Smith has come back swinging, saying that “it is an awful and disgusting lie. It speaks to the dangerous power of an ignorant person with a pen. I am incensed and infuriated to have to respond to such ludicrous misinterpretation.” I have to say, I’ve never thought much about Will Smith’s intellectual prowess, but neither have I ever been forced to confront it as a subject. I’m glad he didn’t come back and say ‘No I was misquoted’ but stood behind his quote with such furore.

Forty years ago, Hannah Arendt wrote Eichmann in Jerusalem which talks about her theory of the banality of evil. Which Smith (albeit perhaps unknowingly - we cannot tell from our standpoint) is referencing. That Hitler starts out as an ordinary human being and progresses into evil actions. As Smith was quoted to say, he justified himself “using a twisted, backwards logic”. Arendt’s book also discusses ideas to do with the superfluous nature of the German Bureaucracy throughout the Nazi regime, which lead people into a system that saw great racism as a normative act. In this situation, Hitler does think he is doing what is best for the future of Germany. He was not purely racist in his intent, for there is nothing but self-satisfaction to gain from that. When Arendt released her book, she was criticised heavily for her views but in the many years to follow they have come to be well regarded. Suddenly, an actor (not an academic) references such a theory and he’s anti-Semitic.

I’m all for cultural history and reparations but in this regard, the Jewish People and the media have been ignorant of what he was implying. To say that Will Smith thinks that Hitler is a ‘good’ person is a complete misunderstanding.

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