The Most Dangerous Animal by David Livingstone Smith

Author:David Livingstone Smith
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780312537449
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

7

MORAL PASSIONS

He is the only one who remained true to himself, who did not cheaply sell his faith and his ideals, who always and without doubt followed his straight path toward his goal.

—JOSEF GOEBBELS, SPEECH ON HITLER’S

FIFTY-SIXTH BIRTHDAY

WAR IS A MORAL ISSUE. Arguably, it is the moral issue because it is difficult to envisage any activity that is of greater human consequence than war. From ancient times to the present, people have agonized over the question of whether war can ever be ethically justified, and there have always been conscientious objectors: men for whom war is so irredeemably base that they prefer opprobrium, prison, torture, and even death to participating in it. However, there is another, darker dimension of the relationship between war and morality. Aggressors are often inspired by moral feelings. They conceive of war primarily as a moral campaign and a religious, or quasi-religious, mission. Consider Adolf Hitler. In the minds of many people, he represents the very model of evil. But Hitler did not set out to do evil, but to deliver the world from depravity. “Theater, art, literature, cinema, press, posters and window displays,” he righteously declared, “must be cleansed of all manifestations of our rotting world and placed in the service of a moral, political and cultural idea.”1 Strange as it may seem, the extermination of European Jewry represented the culmination of these deeply felt aspirations. According to historian Lucy Dawidowitz:

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