Ironic Nazi Environmentalists

While listening to the NPR Science Friday podcast today about The Zookeeper's Wife , Diane Ackerman author of the book by that name, used ironic. It was a heart warming story of Polish Catholics using their position at the Warsaw zoo (which the Nazi's liked) to help rescue Jewish people during WWII. When talking about animals and the environment, Ackerman said, "It's ironic, the Nazi's were actually environmentalists". It only took me a few seconds to realize exactly why she used the term irony here, in what I am going to call "shades of gray" irony.

When people look at the Nazis, it is difficult to imagine how an entire race of people could commit such awful acts. Even today, 60 years later, we shudder at the evil. It is easy to imagine there being absolute goods and evils. It's easy to look at the Nazis and say there were pure evil, and the Americans were pure good. It's hard to realize that Nazis loved their mothers, their wives, and their children. Nazis treated their pets well, enjoyed art and music (by Germans), made scientific advances, and in the end, were not too different from any one else. We all like to think that if we were Germans at that time, we would have fought the Nazis, attempted to assassinate Hitler, and not gone along with it. But the truth of the matter is that we can't say what we would have done. There were only a courageous few who stood up to the Nazis, and even that in secret, like Arthur Schindler. T

So the Nazis weren't inhuman monsters, and the allied forces weren't paragons of virtue. The bombing of Dresden is one example, Hiroshima is another. We justify these things as necessary to save lives and win the war, and I think rightly so. But had Hitler one, Germans would have similarly justified their actions. To be able to sleep at night, it is necessary to dehumanize your enemies. It is comforting to think, "They are purely evil inhuman monsters, and I am a good virtuous person, and there is a solid line between us that can never be crossed". However, this just isn't the case. Nothing in this world is black and white, everything is a shade of Gray.

So when you hear what is generally a good thing about a Nazi (like being environmentalists), you say, "how ironic", instead of actually thinking through the consequences of that statement.

Verdict: Not Ironic

Types of Irony: That's not ironic, it's coincidental

In the Futurama episode "The Devils Hands are Idle Playthings" , Fry makes a deal with the Robot Devil to exchange his hands with that of a random robot. A massive wheel is spun to decide on the unlucky robot. In the end, it comes lands on the Robot Devil, who says "Oh what an appallingly ironic outcome." Bender replies, "That's not ironic, it's coincidental." Indeed, it isn't ironic, it is just a cruel coincidence. The Robot Devil is happy to screw over any other robot, but ends up screwing himself over. My friend SmickD considers this the "car dealer who sells cars with bad breaks getting run over by one of these cars" kind of irony, which I call "Comeuppance".

Most people have an inherent concept of karma. The feeling that bad people should get what is coming to them. The previous post about the astrology magazine has a good bit of this. The Robot Devil is an evil character who gets screwed over by random chance, and this makes people think all is right with the world. Anyone could have died when the car's breaks stopped working, but it happened to kill the dirty car salesman, meaning that bad things do happen to bad people, and all is right with the world. Of course, if you said, "that's great, I enjoy vengeance", it would sound bad, so you say, "how ironic".

This is what I call Karmatic irony. Tomorrow we'll examine the slightly different type of irony which I call "Coincidental", or attempting to apply sense to random events.