It’s irrelevant if they themselves are in their hearts are evil. People in powerful positions who leverage that power to diminish the historical importance or even existence of a genocide (or, for you, merely an intentional man-made famine directed specifically at a subset of a population deemed undesirable that resulted in millions of deaths) are acting as a force of evil.
Waving your hands and uttering the incantation of “we can’t know if they are evil” doesn’t disappear specific evil actions.
And, good actions don’t “cancel our” the bad ones either. Volunteering at a soup kitchen doesn’t give you a free pass to beat your wife.
I referred to evil as a question about what OP thought of the developer they seemed to have an issue with. I try myself to not see people as such, since I think most people are inherently good and those that are not to be in some way mentally ill, read psycopaths. You bring up a series of events and justifications for why they happened, though that is not something that is easy to say for sure. That does not mean anyone gets a free pass, that means we need to be vigilant when researching the past, when monitoring the present and planning for the future. In particular I would advocate strongly for the need for democratic control and transparancy through all parts of society: politics, business, law enforcement and etc…
It’s irrelevant if they themselves are in their hearts are evil. People in powerful positions who leverage that power to diminish the historical importance or even existence of a genocide (or, for you, merely an intentional man-made famine directed specifically at a subset of a population deemed undesirable that resulted in millions of deaths) are acting as a force of evil.
Waving your hands and uttering the incantation of “we can’t know if they are evil” doesn’t disappear specific evil actions.
And, good actions don’t “cancel our” the bad ones either. Volunteering at a soup kitchen doesn’t give you a free pass to beat your wife.
Each action is evaluated within it’s own context.
I referred to evil as a question about what OP thought of the developer they seemed to have an issue with. I try myself to not see people as such, since I think most people are inherently good and those that are not to be in some way mentally ill, read psycopaths. You bring up a series of events and justifications for why they happened, though that is not something that is easy to say for sure. That does not mean anyone gets a free pass, that means we need to be vigilant when researching the past, when monitoring the present and planning for the future. In particular I would advocate strongly for the need for democratic control and transparancy through all parts of society: politics, business, law enforcement and etc…