*Blog originally from my original page here*
I’ve wanted to write this blog pretty much since I started almost 2 years ago, and for some reason, never quite got around to it.
Hopefully, it was worth the wait.
Let me ask you this?
Who was the most evil person of the 20th century?
Hitler? Sure, he’s got to be up there right?
Mao? Strong contender surely?
Stalin? Certainly has a strong claim you’d think.
Pol Pot? Everyone’s favourite evil dark-horse.
If I was to ask you why, you chose any of these people, you’d probably retort with something along the lines of
“Well they killed x number millions of people”
The fact of course is….they didn’t. They didn’t kill millions of people. Hitler never laid eyes on Auschwitz. Stalin most likely never came within miles of a gulag. Mao never beat dissenters to death with the butt of a rifle while a village looked on.
The fact is that the actual crimes attributed to these leaders were actually carried out by “regular” people.
The person who flicked the switch at the gas chambers? Do we know his name? In all likelihood, he was a low ranking officer. If he survived the war, he most likely went back to Germany and lived out his days in regular employment.
Those that worked people to death at gulags, those that shipped people to collectivised farms in Cambodia for “re-education”, those that saw to it that Mao’s “great leap forward” policies were implemented, and which led to famine…you’ll find it hard to find their names in any history book.
We don’t like to think about this. We don’t like to think that those people who murdered, raped, stole and tortured were in all likelihood, men in their early 20s, no more naturally “evil” than anyone else.
No, we need a face to pin it on.
The point is this. We, as society, like to attribute evil to individual leaders. It makes us feel better about ourselves and our fellow man. We don’t want to admit the truth.
The truth is that regular people, like you or I, were duped into believing murderous ideologies, because of their need to believe in a leader.
Hitler was never a threat to anyone until people started imagining the fact that he had authority and that his words should be carried out.
In reality he was a small, middle aged man with health problems. On his own, he was absolutely no threat to anyone. It’s unlikely he even held a gun throughout WWII.
Regular people followed his orders, and committed heinous crimes because they were told to.
They sacrificed their individual morality, for some notion of collective greatness.
They allowed themselves to become cogs in a death machine.
It is this mentality that always leads to the greatest evil. The belief in the collective allows the individual to cast aside their own morality. Those in charge of the collective legitimise their orders as being “For the greater good”.Individuals will carry out those violent orders believing that there is some higher good they are achieving.
They’re no longer committing murder. They’re fighting for the good of their country/government or their political ideology.
Whenever we cast off our individualism, we allow ourselves to become part of a collective that we have no power over. In essence; we are casting aside what makes us human.
We wave flags not really ever thinking what they mean, or sing anthems whose words we never really think about. We too, have been brainwashed into believing that we’re not individuals, so much as part of a collective.
This idea, taken to its most extreme, makes humans little more than robots, programmed by the leadership of whatever collective they’re a part of.
The great evils of the 20th century, fascism and communism, relied on this belief. YOU are not important, only the nation, or race, or party, or proletariat etc is important.
However, this doesn’t have to be the way.
There is no collective. At least not one that you can be forced to be a part of. There’s just people, giving orders. People like you and I.
The fact is, Hitler DIDN’T have special powers. He was just a man, as where all the famous names mentioned herein. Just people, flesh and blood. The only power they had was the power that other people allowed themselves to believe in.
If at any point, the members of the NAZI army had thrown down their weapons, en mass, there was nothing Hitler or the other members of the NAZI party could have done about it.
There is always the choice to regain your humanity.
You are not now, nor were you ever meant to be a faceless entity in someone else’s great plan.
“I’m not scared of the Maos and the Stalins and the Hitlers.
I’m scared of the thousands of millions of people that hallucinate them to be “authority”, and so do their bidding, and pay for their empires, and carry out their orders.
I don’t care if there’s one looney with a stupid moustache. He’s not a threat if the people do not believe in “authority”.”
― Larken Rose