Tim_Buoy said:
so this is my first time creating a thread be gentle and didn't turn anything up on the search bar
so anyway i was walking through my college campus a few days back when i heard a heated debate between two people one of them was insisting that hitler was a good leader despite the whole mass genocide thing and the other person considered his opinion was worth as much as the cigarette but i had just crushed under my foot and refused to discuss it with him
saying that he cant talk to people that blind to reality. so anyway what do you think
Hitler was a genius and one of the best leaders the world has ever seen. He was right about 99.9% of everything he said, and managed to turn Germany from the huge mess it was after World War I, into a power that almost conquered the world. He was hugely charismatic, and contrary to Hollywood, most of the nations he conquered actually wound up providing manpower for him. The Nazis were not a tiny group of people oppressing the masses, quite the opposite actually.
the problem with Hitler is that you had to watch out for that .1%, where he went quite overboard on a lot of things.
You also have to understand that when it came to the genocide Hitler was not really going "gee, I want to be really evil today", he actually believed that was for the best,
and was able to convince a lot of people who were already anti-semitic that he was right.
The way I learned things was that "The Holocaust" went from dealing with groups of racist Jewish crime/slum lords and loansharks, to a general purge of everything and everyone Jewish irregardless of any involvement with those things, wealth, or anything else. People didn't just decide "boo yah, let's go kill Jews to a man", the hatred was fueled by long lost art treasures and religious relics being pulled out of Synagogues and such, not to mention that you were dealing with Jewish syndicates that operated very much like the mob. The end result was sort of like dropping an A-bomb on Jersey to kill Tony Soprano and his crew. Hitler was very charismatic though, he took the grains of truth that were there (some of which were very ugly) and wove it into something truely terrible.... insane, but he really did believe in what he was doing and had a talent for making others believe it to.
Overall it's a good thing we stopped him, he was a bad guy, though the situation is nowhere near as one sided as most history and movies make it out to be. Reality never is.
As odd as it sounds I think the Harry Potter books summarized Hitler fairly well when they were speaking about Voldemort "He did great things, TERRIBLE things, but great none the less".
One of the reasons why I speak on this subject as much as I do, is because I feel that the general portrayal of Hitler, and the fact that people refuse to see him as anything less than the epitome of pure evil, prevents us from learning the lessons we should be taking away from World War II. I find it very annoying when people insult unpopular leaders with strong positions by comparing them to Hitler when they disagree with them. People tend to miss the entire point that it's not the leader you hate that is likely to wind up being like Hitler, it's the one you love and WANT to believe in who has insanity lingering behind what he's doing right. The nation is too divided right now for any analogy to be made like this in complete certainy, but to put things into perspective Bush and the criticism he received makes him very much unlike Hitler. Obama who is loved by the majority of the media and portrayed almost always in a positive light, yet has things like ACTA hidden behind his
back (or so it would seem) comes a bit closer.
