This week’s optional discussion topic: How do you handle “evil” figures in history? As those in the PT have no doubt seen, I just finished rereading Eichmann in Jerusalem which famously bases its argument around the concept of “the banality of evil.” While I think Hannah Arendt’s take on the issue is a bit more nuanced than the pop culture slug line version (namely, she doesn’t really view Adolf Eichmann as non-ideological, so much as someone who subsumed his identity so much to ideology that doing evil was second nature) it’s definitely controversial both in a practical and a philosophical sense.
In historical discourse it becomes an issue of how you tackle figures, from the obvious like Hitler, Stalin, etc. to the evil middle managers and executors of policy – and more specifically, how do you portray them as human without diminishing their evil actions? How much is it worth humanizing such a figure, and does doing so lessen the impact of their evil? Is making a man or woman seem “normal” counterproductive, by making them so sympathetic? On the other hand, if you portray someone like Hitler as a purely one-dimensional monster, does it make it harder to accept that average, everyday people can commit evil acts?
It’s a difficult question to answer, not least because we live in an age of poor media literacy, where anyone with a mildly sympathetic backstory inspires an “X Did Nothing Wrong!” contrarian fan base. Which is annoying enough with purely fictional characters, but it’s worse when you have TV Tropes having a “Jerkass Has a Point” entry on a page about Nazi Germany.