The Gandhi - Hitler Spectrum
Hello, and welcome to Altered Sound. This is your host LuKeTan, and you’re listening to PRA radio, a fine example of portland indie media, streaming live online at praradio.org. Podcasts of this episode and many more are available for free download at alteredsound.com. Today is Thursday, Jan. 4 2007, and we’re broadcasting live from the Bullier Building in inner southwest portland. The title for today’s episode is “the gandhi - hitler spectrum”.
You know these two guys: gandhi, hitler. They are the current personifications of good and evil. They work well as such because they are still in recent memory, their acts still remembered as being real, and they have not yet been deified.
The gandhi - hitler spectrum is what lies between these two human representations of good and evil. As the theory goes, everyone lies somewhere in between the two. Anyone ‘more good’, or better?, then gandhi, would have to be god himself, and of course anyone ‘worse’, or ‘more evil’ than hitler would have to have flames erupting from his fingertips.
A popular bar-game in coastal towns of the baltic sea is for one person to think of someone famous and keep it to themselves. They then tell everyone a spot on the gandhi - hitler spectrum, and everyone guesses who the famous person is.
Of course, it’s hard to pin down exactly what is good and what is evil, but maybe it’s easier to discuss things in terms of violence and non-violence. In typical non-violent fasion, gandhi wrote several letters to his contemporary, hitler, addressing him as ‘friend’ and wishing him well. It would appear that Hitler did not respond to these attempts at correspondence.
Let’s not even worry about violence and non-violence, good or evil. Just listen to these speeches. Let’s abstract everything they represent, abstract good and bad, abstract the words- heck I don’t know what they are saying in these speeches. I don’t understand hindi or german. Yet there is something that anyone can understand about the point each one is trying to get across. Just feel what is being expressed.
Gandhi-
Hitler-
This is Lu-Ke-Tan, and you’re listening to Altered Sound on PRA radio. Get out the headphones, sit back, listen, and enjoy.
