Uncharted Thoughts.

AI FREE ZONE

“That’s a Bingo”

Daily writing prompt

What villain actually had a good point?

View all responses

I wonder how many of you clicked this in fury… well, I gotcha, you won’t find Nazi love among these words.

I remember watching some talk show interview with the legendary actor Christoph Waltz. The interviewer asked him something along the lines of “How did you play SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa so well? How did you embody the evil of this character?”.

Christoph looks at the interviewer confused, and said something along the lines of “He wasn’t evil?”

Now a lot of you will be shocked by this revelation. How can anyone think that a Nazi isn’t evil? How dare he suggest anything different. Is Christoph a Nazi sympathizer? Has he turned coat and run for the side of the Furher? No… far from it.

Well, it isn’t that Christoph thought SS-Standartenführer Hans Landa wasn’t evil, he was making the point that no one thinks that they themselves are evil.

SS soldiers in the Second World War thought they were the line between a Glorious Germany, and a world of Jewish control and conspiracy.

Christopher Columbus was convinced that he was a messenger for Christ, and that the ‘savages’ of the Americas were in need of spiritual saving.

Alexander the Great, was Great for Europe, for the West and Greece, but would a Persian son or daughter consider his conquest just, and free from evil? as he butchered his way through the Persian Empire?

General Zod, from Man of Steel, looked to enslave the human race in an attempt to bring back Krypton and create his people, who were on the verge of destruction.

I read a book earlier this year called ‘Ordinary Men reserve police battalion 101’. Its a long, historical study about the men who were ordered by Hitler and Himmler to round up Jews and kill them. Although they knew what they were doing was inherently wrong, they made excuses for their actions.

One man described how he and his friend would kill mothers and children. He would always shoot the child, and his friend the mother. The mother would be shot, so that she did not have to witness the murder of her child. The child would be shot, because how could to child survive without its mother?

Evil is not a set marker on a level playing field. It is forever in the eyes of the beholder.

So to answer the question, every single villain has a good point in their own minds eye.