To relish in the nature of things 

I think this might be my favorite #Banksy piece. Dude took a boring landscape from a thrift sore and added a Nazi, turning the cheap painting into an expensive one because of his reputation, even though he added a Nazi. Also, this is an interesting statement due to the logic that seems to say there is a Nazi in everyone (and a bit of everyone in even a Nazi). We’re all the same.

This painting also forces me to recall my former naivety that led me to engage in a silly brewhaha on G+ with Google’s Yonatan Zunger and the journalist Jeff Jarvis over whether Jewish people were equally capable of doing what the Nazi’s did.

It’s also interesting in the way that both New Yorkers with indirect links to 9-11 victims and Jewish people with family links to holocaust victims use their somewhat distanced perspectives on these tragedies as badges of honor that they tend to relish and purposely prolong out of a sense of superiority over those less fortunate individuals that are not as fortunate to have a connection to some of the least fortunate aspects of humanity.

This is of course, not something such individuals appreciate confronting, even though it’s a purely natural reaction that most of us would display, given the chance.

I guess you could make the same argument for a family member who was unfortunate enough to have been born to Nazi. The only difference being this is not something society necessarily accepts, were these individuals to publicize and relish in their unfortunate indirect connection to the same tragedies because of the way they’ll be viewed, as if the child, niece or nephew of a Nazi war criminal somehow deserves their own misfortune. Or as if their genetic relation means they’re potentially a Nazi too.

Not to be an apologist for Nazis or their relatives, or to claim to know how they generally came to be, but it seems like this line of reasoning illustrates at least one specific example of a lack of empathy and generalizing which might reveal an unfortunate universal dilemma that I suspect exists equally in everyone.