http://uk.news.yahoo.com/wenn/20071223/ten-smith-hitler-was-a-good-person-c60bd6d_1.html
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Will Smith: "Hitler was essentially a good person"
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Posted 4 years ago by Dee from Tampa #
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Um, Will is getting freaky. I understand what he is trying to say but I think he is wrong.
There are people out there who are truly evil - I don't mean "crazy and did something really, really bad" I mean pure, 100% not-from-concentrate evil and I think that Hitler was right up near the top of that list.
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I think the point Smith was trying to make is that almost nobody sets out with the intent of "doing evil," but that in virtually everybody's own mind, they're the good guy/gal.
If that's what he was trying to say, I think he's actually right. If you find a technically sane person doing what any normal human being would consider evil and ask them "WHY did you do that?" the odds are 99 out of 100 that they'd say, "I was obeying orders," "I had to, the bitch cheated on me," "He was disrespecting me, he was asking for it," "I was defending my country," "They're all terrorists/Viet Cong/traitors to Germany/invaders/occupiers/genetically inferior/the people who have been oppressing mine/whatever," or even "I just want my share."
(That's leaving out the people who are genuinely delusional and think that God told them to, that the person they attacked was threatening them, etc..)
Hitler didn't get the idea of invading other countries or killing off Jews, gays, Roma, people who are mentally retarded, or non-Aryans because it struck him as an _evil thing to do, it struck him as a _good_ thing to do.
That's something that an actor actually has to keep in mind in order to play a convincing villain. Even somebody as two-dimensional as a James Bond villain has some kind of justification going on in his head. For a James Bond villain, for example, the justification for a "take over the world" person would include elements of "EVERY leader is corrupt, I'm just going about it in a more direct way," "Somebody as smart and powerful as me should TAKE power, it's my due," and possibly even a bit of "Hah, as though your average Joe would be any worse off under me."
If I were a directing an actor playing Hitler, I'd make him show different kinds of reactions to the different kinds of deaths: Allied deaths would be necessary war casualties so in some way regrettable, if not a reason for grief, while deaths of the peoples he considered non-human would get the same reaction that a householder would when the exterminator tells him the termites are all dead.
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