Will Smith Was Right about Hitler
Jack Engelhard
Sometimes it is not good to be the king.
Will Smith, the world's leading man at the box office, currently starring in I Am Legend, was all over the blogosphere, and not in a good way, after stating that "Hitler set out to do what he thought was good." Gossipmongers have tarred him as being sympathetic to Hitler, which teaches us, and certainly Smith, that fame is both a blessing and a curse.
Let's get to Smith's short but flammable quote, as it appeared in Scotland's Daily Record, before we get added to the list of his defamers: "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, backward logic, he set out to do what he thought was good."
That's what happens when actors go forth unscripted – but was Smith wrong? No, he was right.Name the tyrants and there they are, doing not evil but "good."
Adolph Hitler intended to blitz and burn every man and woman on this earth for the "good" of Nazism and racial purity, Aryan-style. Ditto Joseph Stalin for the good of communism – and the numbers are still coming in for China's Mao Zedong, Cambodia's Pol Pot and Cuba's Fidel Castro for the millions murdered in the name of the glorious Revolution.
Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is another advocate for peace in our time. (First, though, kill the Christians and the Jews.)
The assassin of Benazir Bhutto was surely a “Shahid With A Cause.” Bhutto's mourners decided against dignified remembrance (that is so old hat) and instead took to a spree of burning and killing throughout Pakistan as a means to express their love for their fallen leader. (That line from Cool Hand Luke keeps coming back: "Some men you just can't reach.")
Duck, for love like this does make the world go round – even closer to home.
Homegrown malcontents who profess universal love seldom testify at their weekly meetings, "My name is Bob and I'm an America hater." Rather, they proclaim their self-loathing sideways, by injecting subliminal codes such as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo and waterboarding. Those key words do the selling.
(Memo to self-appointed moralists: We should be better than our enemies? Maybe we should be worse once in a while and then they'd leave us alone.)
Isaiah prophesied against the day when bitter will be called sweet and evil will be called good. Welcome. That day has arrived, and it is global. Orwell (as I've said before) only got the date wrong. The words "peace" and "love" now serve as antonyms. I run and hide when someone is introduced as a "humanitarian." In 1949, Chairman Mao established his "people's democratic dictatorship," a wonderful play upon words, and people.
Yasser Arafat, the founding father of modern up-to-the-minute terrorism, the media darling who inspired a generation of fanatics, was invited to the Clinton White House and awarded the Nobel Prize for Peace AFTER Leon Klinghoffer and the Munich Olympics. Arafat's fingerprints are on virtually everything that goes boom. When he died, the UN ran its flag at half-staff for the world's pioneering suicide bomber Mon Amour. (How useful are those 72 virgins when you're gay?)
Obviously, he must have been a "good man.”
Hitler's lieutenants meeting at the Wannssee Conference, January 20, 1942, were also “good men.” After all, they were only seeking "a final solution to the Jewish question." To their way of thinking, where's the harm in that? In fact, the minutes of that meeting reveal hardly any anti-Semitic outbursts, and the word genocide cannot be found. (Not on my search.)
No, it was all about TRAIN SCHEDULES. They weren't doing evil. They were doing BUSINESS.
Hannah Arendt, on Eichmann, already told us about the "banality of evil." I am sure that this is exactly what Smith had in mind. Smith later clarified himself for being so misrepresented: "Hitler was a vile, heinous killer responsible for one of the greatest acts of evil committed on this planet."
Consider, then, his original remarks as a forgivable first draft.
