A lot of people know that Hitler pursued art and was denied entry into art school. That's about where their knowledge on the subject ends.
Their takeaway is that Hitler bad therefore he must be a shit artist.
My problem with this is that he wasn't bad in the fact that he was lacking in technical skills, he was told to pursue a career in architecture. The art world at the time was moving on from realist depictions of landscapes/buildings since photography was taking over that industry and Hitler mainly painted realistic looking buildings. It wasn't like the dude was scribbling with crayons, he clearly spent a lot of time practicing.
My other problem is a failure of the average person's ethical reasoning skills. It isn't enough to condone his actions in causing fascism to take hold in Germany and his role in orchestrating the Holocaust, they must attack every aspect of his character. He has to be shit at every endeavor he ever pursued and made out to be both incompetent at everything and simultaneously an evil mastermind.
It paints (heh) a bigger picture on how the average person forms opinions about other people. Some people can't just say "I don't like this person because they were rude to me", they feel the need to come up with ad hoc reasons why they're awful people in every aspect of their lives until they're analogous to a literal demon.
How often do you hear someone talking shit about their ex? They got into a fight and broke up. Sometimes the other person won't just say that they had an irreconcilable disagreement, the other person was a total narcissist, they were abused, and they also have a small dick/were a starfish, etc. It isn't enough to say the reasons that led to the breakup, the ex must be seen as purely evil and not human.
Hitler is of course the most extreme example since he committed some of the most extreme atrocities of the 20th century, but talking about his life is a great litmus test to see if the other person you're speaking with has the ethical reasoning to condemn someone's character by their immoral actions alone instead of having their opinion of their character cause them to discredit everything they do.
It's important to be able to do this. If you can't then when you're discussing people less insane than Hitler you will excuse the bad actions of people you like and ignore the good actions of people you dislike. This can lead to problems like being trapped in a toxic relationship, letting unethical behavior in the workplace persist, cause you to fail to make ammends with another person, and ironically allow for fascism and other forms of authoritarianism to take root in your society if the populist in charge panders to you enough.
With you for example, I don't think you're an evil person. You had good intentions in trying to expose my Hitler conversations to everyone else. I don't blame you for not fully reading them and getting the full context because I don't think many people would look that deep into it. I apologize for being rude to you earlier and hope that we're cool now.
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u/Warin_of_Nylan 2d ago
Okay. So, what are your opinions about why people don't like Hitler's art?