theblackelf:

I think we need to shelve the concept of whether or not someone’s nice to people and instead make judgements on how exclusive someone is or isn’t with kindness.

I remember that one post that went around showing an old film of Hitler chatting casually, kindly with a young girl, and the polarized responses tended to be in relation to how footage and narratives of “But look, the monster has a soft side” serve to humanize and normalize really, really bad people. Corrupt and murderous politicians constantly use baby-kissing narratives of their down-home chumminess- often to children- to offset any judgments about them being a bad person, and I’d like to say they should be entirely irrelevant. Not just because that’s a cheap emotional appeal but because I strongly believe we need to understand that niceness is neutral to symptomatic and not at all ‘good’ on its own.

The issue here, while I have other things to say about niceness, is that it shouldn’t matter that the monstrous person is *gasp!* seen doing a nice thing, because the issue should never have been that anyone believed they were 100% evil all the time. The issue is how big or little their sphere of niceness is.

Of course The Bad Person is nice to someone. But whatever warmth they’re showing is simply exemplary of how many people they see as like them. As human.

If the only time the person in question shows kindness is to people superficially just like them then their sphere of humanity is too fucking small. They see more people as ‘other’ than ‘like them’ and THAT is the issue.

Every bearer of poisonous idealogy has someone they like, someone they reward for being like them or suiting their ideals. The issue is how many other people in the world they don’t think are fucking human, or worth recognition and support.