Come to the dark side, Luke- Noah Welch

          I do not think anyone is completely good or evil. No one ever on the face of this earth has led a life of complete goodness or complete wickedness.  I believe that people’s actions can be defined as good or evil or neutral but that brings us to a problem. What is good and what is evil? How do we as a society determine who is evil or who is good? These questions can’t and won’t be easily answered but I will give my honest opinion of what I think.

        In my opinion history is written by the winners and our U.S history, obviously, has a western bias. However, I think, even people who are generally regarded as ultimate villains and the embodiment of pure evil were just people. People look at men like Hitler, Mussolini and Genghis Khan and talk about all the horrors they caused. I do not deny these men committed millions of atrocities and made millions of evil decisions. However, let us look at some of the good qualities of these men. Hitler, Mussolini and Genghis Khan were all heroes in their countries. They led their countries out of debt, shame, and failure. All of these men made their countries superpowers.  It was said in Italy, when Mussolini was in power, that for the first and only time ever, the trains ran on time. Hitler led his country out of a depression and gave some of his people hope. Genghis Khan helped revitalize trade and culture and connected the known world. It was said a man could walk from one end of the Mongol empire to another with a gold plate on his head without the fear of being robbed.

      Before we, as Americans, call someone completely evil, we need to look at ourselves. We, as Americans, have imperialistic tendencies. Look at all the islands in the Pacific we conquered. We, as Americans, committed genocide. Countless Native American tribes were slaughtered by land grubbing expansionists. We, as Americans, oppressed, restricted and held back many people who weren't rich white land owning males. We, as Americans, enslaved millions of Africans and committed untold atrocities towards them.

       Do these paragraphs sound extreme to you? This is what happens when people only look at one aspect of actions.  Characteristics become blown completely out of proportion. Who knows what people will say about the U.S or Nazi Germany in a thousand years?

      My point is what we regard as good and bad is completely subjective. It differs for different people.  History is written by the winners and the winners like to hide their dirty laundry. People generally want their good actions presented and want to hide their bad. Also people see what they want to see. It’s easy to call people pure evil or pure good but the reality is quite different. People commit evil, good, and gray actions and no one can really judge their actions fairly.  

I apology for my verbosity but I enjoy discussing this topic.