Vader and Kylo Ren - The difference between Christian and Jewish view of evil
A lot of the complaints about Kylo Ren as a villain is that he lacks Vader’s larger than life evil, he’s too common, too human to be evil. Traits that are used by his stans to argue why he will/must be redeemed.
I would like to point out that both camps, those who hate Kylo Ren for his humaness and those who use it for his defense, has missed the point JJ and Lawrence were trying to make.
When Christians think of Evil, not the smaller, everyday evil but the one that commits genocide and other atrocities they tend think of people like this:
Or if we stick to the Star Wars universe, this:
But from a Jewish standpoint neither Hitler, Vader or the Emperor is the true face of evil. Evil isn’t some epic, outside force, or some larger than life villain.
Instead it looks something like this:
These are private photos of the social life of the secretary staff, the SS officers and guards of Auschwitz, taken between May and December 1944. These are the people who while singing, laughing, sunning themselves and celebrating as we see in the pictures, oversaw and carried out the genocide of the Jewish people and other assorted atrocities committed in the camp.
Complete ordinary looking people. People, men and women, born to good families and proper bloodlines (in the Aryan sense anyway), with good Christian raising, believing in good Christian values. Well mannered, well educated, usually erudite. And the direct committers of genocide.
To Jewish people there are no difference between Evil and evil, they are one and the same. A Jewish woman, Hannah Arendt, coined the phrase “the banality of evil” and I have yet to see a single goy use it properly, because this is what it means.
This is why JJ and Lawrence made the First Order an obvious, punch in the face parallel to the Nazis, in every single conceivable way that one can in a fantasy universe with no actual Germany. That is why they made Hux such on open and overt parallel to Hitler, and then went and made him a secondary, one note villain. Neither Hux nor Hitler symbolizes the true face of evil, or the banality of it.
Which is why Kylo looks like this:
He’s a young man, from a good family, with (from the First Order’s or at least Snoke’s pov) “proper” bloodline. And he’s evil. Not in the epic, over the top, Christian variety like Vader or the Emperor, but the kind of evil that oversaw Auschwitz and ordered and carried out the atrocities there.
No Kylo isn’t cool, or awesome, or epic in his evil, he’s human. But because people are either incapable or unwilling to follow the Jewish understanding of evil many take that humanity Kylo Ren as a sign of goodness and the guarantee of his redemption, instead of as the source of his evil.
So the people who say that Kylo Ren isn’t space Hitler as absolutely right, they just miss the point. He’s something much, much worse.
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