Making Villains

How the media determines for us our villains

Photo by lpatterton from unsplash

The Causes and Costs of the Coronavirus

An austere man from a time of civil war once said: a house divided in two shall stand if the Democrats and Republicans stay on their side of the aisle and social distance.

Listen, hear me out! if we social distance forever, we may keep our unity as a country.

That word. Unity. That sounds familiar. Where have I heard it before? Ameri . . . States . . . The United States of America! Should we drop the obsolete “The United States of” and just call us “America?”

That seems more fitting for the current times.

Okay, that’s enough of these terrible jokes, what am I? A media pundit?

Today, I will explain to you why Americans think those on the other side of the aisle from them are evil demonic villains.

Who’s Evil?

Our journey back to the past shall begin, you guessed it, in the 1940s. For those people who know things about the past: What happened in the 1940s?

The Second World War is one, slightly big, thing that happened. The forces that led to that war and the forces that spawned from the aftermath of it still affect the world today.

But I won’t bore you about what led to the war. We, supposedly, know all we need to know about World War II. America won the war; America is the good guy and, therefore, everything America did was good, and everything that will do in the future will also be good. Germany lost the war — The Nazi’s must be evil.

Alright, before I attract the wrong types of America critics and Nazi sympathizers, I must pivot. America, I believe, justly fought the war for a good cause. The Nazi’s, as a whole, were actually evil. The problem, though, is calling the Nazi’s evil and not thoroughly explaining why.

After the war, and during the trial of the Nazi party during the Nuremberg trials, the allies did not go far enough. It’s not so much that those trials should have presented more evidence of the horrors of Germany — the videos of concentration camps were enough — instead, it is that they did not fully explain why those horrors happened.