Good Intentions
Dave Price
Will Smith is getting a lot of heat over some too-nuanced words about the greatest symbol of evil from the 20th Century:
Smith told a Scottish paper that 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.'"I've been a big fan of Will Smith from way back in his Fresh Prince of Bel Air days, when I told people he was a good actor (although the show was forgettable) and would be in movies someday. Today it's hard to name a bigger star, and as such everything he says is parsed to death. But that's the price of success in a free society.
He has said some truly cringe-inducing things before; I remember seeing him on Letterman, maybe ten years ago, saying he believed AIDS came from a government laboratory (he cringed himself when he said it, so maybe he understood that statement was a little out there). He was pretty young at the time, so maybe chalk that up to youth and the life of an entertainer.
Let's be clear on what this is not: this is not anti-Semitism or sympathy for anything Adolf Hitler did. Smith is a nice, well-meaning, fairly bright guy; this isn't an drunken rant about Jews or telling a new mother she shouldn't take antidepressants, but rather just a somewhat naive philosophical statement to the effect of "everyone thinks they're doing good even when they're not," the theme of I Am Legend, the screen adaptation of which he is starring in, in which
(spoiler)
Will does apparently have some connection to Scientology, at least according to his wikipedia entry, so that probably is where the "reprogramming" reference comes from. Still, it's hard to find anything disturbing in Will's statement; it's just some amateur philosophizing with a poorly chosen example, sensationalized by the tabloid media into more than it really is.
Of course it is very easy to recognize that the very talented Mr. Smith is not particularly serious.
Specifically, I would say that Hollywood recognizes that the classic concept of a "villain" is alien to human nature. Nobody in the real world sits around twirling his greasy moustache and going "Nya-ah-ahhhh" and thinking of what ill he can do his fellow man. No—a bad guy in the real world is a guy who thinks he's doing good; and that's why those are the characters that make the most effective antagonists in movies. The most memorable villains in fiction might be the over-the-top ones, the cartoons of humanity; but the ones that really seem evil are the ones whose motives, while they might seem repugnant to the rest of us, are perfectly rational in their own humanistic minds.
Will Smith might know this from experience with scripts and screenwriters, more than we have experience of in real life, because all we've ever seen for ourselves are the real-life kinds of villains, the ones with rationales for what they do. He's probably quicker than we would be to point out that Hitler, for all his evil, was a real person with the same kinds of basic motivations as the rest of us, because he sees the more over-the-top kinds of characters more often in his work, and compared to them Hitler's a lot more subtle a character.
That may be the smartest thing I think I"ve seen you say!
There's real evil in the world, and the worst of it IS cloaked in rags of virtue, clung to by the very perpetrators OF that evil-and Hitler thought his evil WAS justified-it wasn't, of course, but that applies equally to a "Holy Man" who feeds his flock cyanide-flavoured Kool-Aid to prevent their capture, or another "Holy Man" who pays children's families $20,000 a pop to use their kids as guided antipersonnel mines aimed at shopping markets and school buses. The point is, the villains in real life very RARELY think they're doing evil-they believe so completely in their aims that any means is acceptable. "By Any Means Necessary" is pretty scary.
I actually agree with Will.
But I’d go further and say that a < 1 cent .22 caliber bullet placed deep into Hitler’ brain could have saved the world from some terrible, terrible events. Even if he was a nice guy.
Merry Christmas, ya’ll!
State sponsored islamic terrorism (Hezbollah via Iran) should be stopped by via the use of any means necessary.
Oh, wait, that's scary. Therefore let us publicly announce our intention to solve this via diplomacy, and ONLY diplomacy. I'm sure the mullahs of Iran will think to themselves "Why what a wonderful and civilized policy the American's have chosen, let us reciprocate and give up our nuclear program and sponsorship of Hezbollah, then perhaps afterwards we and the Americans and Israelis can all dance around the campfire and sing koombiya"
I used to believe this, too, Josh. I don't any longer. For the United States (or all of Western civilization) to mean anything, we need to stand by our principles, no matter how painful or costly that may be. We can find other solutions that follows our most important philosophies.
"Any means..." would simply make us as bad as they are, as cliched as that may be. I want to continue being damned proud of my nation and culture. I don't want to be the villain.
Hmmm, and what do you suggest? Ask them nicely to not hate us and not wish us death?
Do you have any "other solutions" that could of avoided the use of nuclear weapons against Japan?
If we're alive and they're dead, I'd consider us to be in a superior position.
Superior is subjective. Victor? Yes. Better? That's for history to decide.
The murderer is superior to his victim if all that matters is that he lived through the encounter and his victim did not.
The soldier is superior to his enemies if all that matters is that he lived through the encounter and his enemy did not. Wow, all of a sudden that sounds much better doesn't it?
I'd rather be a piece of sh*t who is alive than dead and honorable, especially if I don't believe in an afterlife. And absolutely especially if my enemy thinks that his evil will result in him going to heaven with 72 virgins just waiting to be raped.
There are also people who actively enjoy the suffering of others, or who let greed or lust or anger drive them to hurt others.
To say that the latter class of people think they are doing good is foolish and naive. All they're thinking about is their own desires and pleasures. To deny that these people exist is equally foolish and naive. And they're not necessarily sociopaths, either, though sociopaths are the extreme case. They're simply petty, selfish, vain, or cruel people.
Persecution? Six million to the ovens is merely persecution? This shows why many view journalists as ignorant twits, to say the least
If we were just talking about soldiers, than we wouldn't be arguing. But, of course, we're not. We're talking about civilians, also. Though they might be brainwashed by their culture into hating us, that doesn't mean they deserve to die. In fact, that would simply be confirming their beliefs!
As Kevin pointed out, being the 'victor' doesn't make you superior. It only means you were more powerful. Certainly, right now we have the ability to end Islamofascism and its threat to us once and for all: We could nuke all of the Middle East and all that would be left of our enemies is cinders. But while we would be the 'victor' of this cultural battle we would have only proven that we were unworthy of the win.
Becoming what you hate in order to 'win' is no victory.
Bet it would burn an awful lot like a straw man.
We are better, by any rational, objective measure. Part of what you are missing is that "any means necessary" also implies any means effective. Nuking the Middle East would not make all of our enemies into cinders. But destabilizing their regimes, preventing them from gaining the power to threaten or enact similar destruction on our cities, and using the power we have to place pressure on them to reform, increases the number of our enemies in the short term, while dropping their long-term survival to near zero. If it comes to total war, we should fight as has been most successful to us in the past, fight unrestrained and then rebuild afterwards.
It is less humane to lull them into false hope of success, to give them the feeling of equality with our strengths, because in the end, it'll make the death toll over there far far worse.
He may have odd ideas and meet poor guides along the way but that often gets sorted out. We can hope so.
My take on Hitler? He believed the universe dictated that struggle and conflict were the proper means for all life. So in his mind he too was just following orders.
Here's a specific scenario: If we bomb Iranian targets such as the rector, enrichment facilities, power plants, bridges, and ports... And they respond with poison gas attacks in our cities, then I'd say we're justified in carpet bombing a few of their cities including the use of air-fuel explosives.
In that scenario, I don't see us as being just as bad as them because they targeted civilians first.
There are people who argue quite forcefully that the United States had no moral superiority in WWII because we dropped two atomic bombs on Japan. Arguing with people who take such an absolutist position on morality during warfare is pointless, all they hear is justification of mass murder.
If you read the quotations of the great leaders of nations during total war, they all say the same thing. War is hell. War makes good people do evil things. But the victors will also say that the only thing worse than war is total surrender.
I'll just use a simple analogy. If I'm in a street fight with a man with a knife, I have no problem whatsoever using a gun on him. Period. End of discussion. I could not care less what people think of the morality of it, it's a fight to the death and I'm going to do what it takes to be the one to win the fight.
What matters from a moral perspective is not what I did to win the fight, it's what I did with my life before and after the fight. If I routinely mugged and murdered people and that's how I ended up in a deadly knife-fight, then I suck as a person. If I got a job, raised a family and obeyed the law, then I lived a "good life".
The same is true of nations. The "West" is not "better" because we won World War II, we are better because we believe in the concepts of freedom and liberty and we do what we can to promote them over time and around the world.
This isn't hard.
It's a common mistake.
They cut that out of the film. Yeah, I know, the whole point of the original story. They cut it out. Nothing about him being a monster to the monsters, etc. He finds a cure and sacrifices himself. Everything having to do with "doing evil though intending to do good" is totally lost in WS's version.
I wonder if it was a late re-write. I bet the original ending doesn't test well.
I like Mr. Smith, this kerfuffle notwithstanding. And "likable" is one of his biggest characteristics. The man just oozes charisma and ease, and you just know he'd be fun to hang around with. So I'll bet that, even in an unintentional way like the original story, audiences just weren't ready for him to be the villain. Vincent Price could play the unintentional monster; but Will Smith is no Vincent Price.
Of course we all lose our tempers now and then. Dean freely admits to being imperfect in this regard, which is why regulars to this establishment will generally be cut more slack than people who we don't know very well.
Still: behave like an adult, or go find somewhere else to play. Thanks.