If you Condemn Hitler, then Condemn Washington
Often when discussing historical figures, I hear a defense that never ceases to surprise me: You can't say Person X is bad because Belief A was common at the time - everyone was doing it.
Sigh...Really? Are we going to say that simply because a belief was common at the time, a belief later proved horribly immoral, Person X should not be condemned nor partially vilified? Here's why this reasoning is a very bad idea.
Take George Washington (or most other Founding Fathers): he owned slaves, used slaves, and never made an attempt to abolish or decrease the presence of slavery. Awful guy? I would say so. He was engaging in a practice that most people at the time thought was alright. But, obviously (and somewhat intuitively), we now hold slavery as something atrocious and objectively wrong. Was slavery wrong then or only right now? Both! The slavery they were practicing was wrong, morally. Any slavery we practice today is wrong, morally. So then why do people always want to defend Washington by saying that it was alright in his era, so we can't condemn him?I won't argue this way, but I could remind Washington defenders that he said himself slavery was morally wrong, and so did a host of other contemporaries. But again, I won't argue this way.
And what are we saying when we say Hitler is wrong, anyways? Are we saying that killing innocent people is wrong? Certainly. Most rational people would agree that, under unexceptional circumstances, killing innocent people is wrong - right now, and 2000 years ago. External to the Washington example, I would bet highly that most rational people would also agree that, under unexceptional circumstances, enslaving human beings is wrong - right now, and 2000 years ago. So again, I repeat the refrain: why defend Washington? Or Jefferson? Or any of the celebrities of the revolution?
If you do not condemn Washington, you do not condemn Hitler. That's logic, bitches.
