Nice People Do a Lot of DamageLeftism and liberalism have virtually nothing in common. Yet millions of nice liberals support the Left. Why?
By Dennis Prager
September 13, 2022
It can be said that gaining wisdom is a process of gaining some dark insights into life.
One such insight is this: A lot of evil has been abetted by nice people.
By “nice,” I am referring to the way people comport themselves in the personal realm. We refer to people as being “nice” if they are friendly to strangers, more or less honest in their dealings with others, take care of their families, support friends and are pleasant to be around. We all want nice neighbors.
To put it another way, “nice” generally refers to the micro, the personal, realm. It does not generally refer to the macro realm—that is, to the views and values people hold about moral and social questions.
The human being is composed of two moral components—the micro and the macro. In a truly good human being—”good” is not the same as “nice”—one is good in both realms. It is therefore quite possible to be nice in the micro and hold awful values for society; and it is quite possible to have excellent macro values and not be a particularly nice person.
Take communism, for example.
Communist regimes killed some 100 million people in the 20th century—none of them combatants in war. Add to that number more than a billion devastated lives: the friends and family of the murdered, the generations deprived of elementary human rights and the countless number of innocent people imprisoned and tortured, and you have as pure an evil as is imaginable.
You might therefore think that no one who supported communism, let alone was a member of a communist party anywhere in the world, was a nice person. But you would be wrong. There were many nice people who supported communism. There were even nice people among the Westerners who provided Josef Stalin with the secrets to making an atom bomb.
The only competitor with communism for pure evil was, of course, Nazism. While the communists murdered far more people, the Nazis’ systematic industrial murder of almost every Jewish man, woman and child in Europe remains the most horrific crime ever committed by a nation.
One would therefore assume, especially given the absence of moral rhetoric that characterized communist rhetoric, that there could hardly have been any nice supporters of Nazism.
But you would be wrong again. There were nice Germans who voted for Hitler and the Nazis in 1932, the last free election in Germany until after World War II. Historians are in general agreement that Germans who voted for the Nazis did so primarily for economic reasons, not because they were Jew-haters, let alone sought the murder of all of Europe’s Jews. In any event, the plans to exterminate European Jewry were not even drawn up for almost another 10 years.
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Source:
https://amgreatness.com/2022/09/13/nice-people-do-a-lot-of-damage/
