It’s been a good-news, bad-news kind of month for Will Smith. I Am Legend just passed $150,000,000 at the box office, considerably outdistancing Blonde Ambition. Plus, next Monday he and Jada Pinkett Smith will celebrate their tenth anniversary. On the minus side, Smith is now widely seen as a Hitler fan.
Smith’s troubles with Der Fhrer started with this interview in the Daily Record. Accurately or not (and the Record has never been accused of a fetishistic lust for accuracy), Smith was quoted as making this comment about Hitler:
Even Hitler didn’t wake up going, ‘let me do the most evil thing I can do today.’ I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was ‘good’. Stuff like that just needs reprogramming.
Godwin’s Law (don’t compare people to Hitler) now has Smith’s Corollary: just don’t talk about Hitler, period. The offhand remark led to calls for a boycott and some awesomely acrobatic spinning and backpedaling by Smith and his people. At this point, the trouble seems to have been smoothed over. In the same interview, Smith was quoted as saying he’d never go into politics because he would hate to be unpopular. Right now, he’s probably thinking that remark was very accurate indeed.
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I don’t quite understand what it is that Smith is saying he didn’t say. Did he not say any of it? Or did he merely not say that there was good in everybody? If his only point was that even villains don’t think of themselves as villains…well, thanks for that profound insight, chief, but I think we were all apprised of that fact.
At least he didn’t say that at least Hitler meant well, in contrast to the eeeeviiiil Bush, like Seinfeld producer Peter Mehlman did last summer. Strangely, I can’t find anything on ADL’s web site about that incident.
I think this remark was probably well-intentioned, and I don’t think indicates at all that Will Smith thinks Hitler was a swell guy.
It does, however, indicate a certain level of naivete regarding people who are just plain bad. To suggest that Hitler could just be “reprogrammed” displays several faulty thought patterns:
1) Can we really be sure that Hitler was somehow… misinformed about the danger that Jews posed to Europe, and that he just needed the proper information? Or was it more that he conspired to kill people he didn’t like? Either way it’s unclear to me that either of these things could have been fixed by anyone.
2) The more important point of the two: who will do this “reprogramming” and under what authority? That seems an awful lot like “re-education”, which was a favorite staple of Communist takeovers. We don’t go in for that sort of thing in our society, and neither did Weimar Germany, where Hitler started his political ascent. Nazi Germany certainly did though. Those who resisted “reprogramming” got sent off for a more permanent adjustment.
But I realize that Will Smith is an actor, and he probably was not considering all these things when he made those statements about Hitler. Which supports my frequently-made observation that celebrities should (almost without exception) keep their mouths shut about politics, because they will only embarrass themselves.
I was likewise confused when I couldn’t find any record or assertion of his actual statement.
Surely, Tom Cruise did not enjoy hearing of his fellow Scientologist’s idiotic disclosure (of whatever nature) concering the Fuhrer.
Actually in the context of Scientology what he said makes sense. But it’s incredibly arrogant that these people think they can “fix” people like Adolf Hitler, if that is actually what they think.
Actually, you’re right. I can totally see the Scientologists thinking that a few vitamins would cure that anti-Semitism right away.
Smith’s comment was basically a dumb statement from a decent, well-intentioned guy (which is more than I could say for Peter Mehlman’s remark). But for a celebrity to say anything about Hitler is more or less stepping on the third rail; if he’d made the same comment about Pol Pot, Smith would have gotten a pass.
In Modern Times, Paul Johnson had a quote from Hitler’s last days in the bunker. Adolf said, “In the end, you find yourself regretting that you were so kind.”
Atoz: I never heard that quote before but I’ve studied Nazi Germany quite a bit and that sounds very much in character with Hitler, even in the final days. He died bitter and disillusioned, as if Germany had failed him rather than the other way around.
As for the Scientologists, it’s a shame you can’t ask one of them. They never seem willing to discuss their beliefs. Not to imply that it’s a cult or anything. Ahem.