Retroactively arbiting "crimes against modernity" - if computed with modern measurement devices/standards -
can be hypocritical. That's because calling the villain evil might ignore the fact that their behavior, being relitigated as evil in the present,
did in a fundamental way depend upon their belief that they were doing something
ethical in the first place. It is not sadism but sadomasochism; they are especially pained at their awareness of the pain they cause, but they see it as their duty - and the symbols of the time is what mediates their gap between their imagined duty and the reality they operate in.
(Referring to parent of this comment chain.) Something Zizek himself says is evil is not what makes bad people do bad things, but instead what makes good people do bad things. People doing something 'evil' will typically be distressed about it personally. But they would always see it like "I must be fully willing to destroy my own humanity so that I can protect the humanity of my people". They preserve their efficiency and ruthlessness in spite of the further fragmentation of their psyche and conscience.
Brutality relies upon limiting the aesthetic dissonance between the aesthetics of the greater good and the ugliness of violence.
> "In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared [Beethoven's Ode To Joy] to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.
> In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood." [0]
But what is there even to conclude from this?
Suppose we are 100% aware that we actively cause harm to people but our moral calculus says we must do it because it is for "the greater good". The more we are uncertain about the uncertainty of net social gain, the more we have reason to avoid doing it.
But this is the opposite of the commonly held belief. People say "we can't judge the people in the past, it's too easy to be certain an idea that was defeated was evil when looking from the future. Before it was defeated they could not have known that the pain they (knew they) were causing for the sake of helping out their own people, wouldn't have triumphed and raised real total benefit instead -- so that it hypothetically was moral".
Here I disagree vehemently. We must, in the strongest terms, condemn any rationalization of the actions of a gambler who bets he'll reach the greater good if he puts his children up for collateral.
edit: forgot link
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...