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Yes, all this black-or-white talk about genocide misses a lot of the subtleties. How about a nuanced analysis of the Jewish Holocaust? Nobody brings up enough t
by themilkmandan 17y ago
Yes, all this black-or-white talk about genocide misses a lot of the subtleties. How about a nuanced analysis of the Jewish Holocaust? Nobody brings up enough the fact that Hitler built some damn good roads.
- seldo 17y agoYou're missing the point. It's not that genocide is sometimes good, it's that civilizations that commit genocide also do good things. The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science, which indirectly led us to the space program, satellites, and a big chunk of our modern communications network. Does this excuse genocide? No. Does it make it difficult to label German civilization as "all good" or "all bad"? It absolutely does.
- tfh 17y ago>The Germany that produced the Jewish holocaust also invented rocket science.. You get into trouble by saying that in Germany my friend :)
- mahmud 17y agoToday's Germany is a fictitious entity, a comedic prop setup by a philosophe prankster.
- oconnor0 17y agoTrue, and the article is a little simplistic on that front, but a modern communications network does not morally justifies the holocaust. Neither does making lots of money & whatever else the Unobtainium was going to do justify wholesale slaughter & genocide of the Na'vi.
- seldo 17y agoBut that's exactly what I said. It doesn't excuse the holocaust. But it also makes it hard to say that Germany in the 1940s was an evil regime that contributed nothing to the world. Both are true: they were evil bastards, and they gave us rocket science. The real world is tricky like that.
- borism 17y agoAnd I thought rocket science was invented by chinese (like pretty much everything else).
- ippisl 17y agoI would label those technological advances in a different dimensions than moral acts. And usually the meaning of bad and good regards morals , not other fields of human behaviour. And since as a nation their positive moral acts was so little relative to their negative moral actions you can call them "bad".
- IsaacSchlueter 17y agoYou missed the point, and then made exactly the error I was pointing at. And you did so in a way that gets very close to Godwin's Law without quite invoking it. Nicely done. I'm not suggesting that Hitler's good roads made the holocaust less bad. I'm suggesting that the Holocaust didn't make the good roads less good. Things aren't either all good or all bad. That includes the Conquistadors, Hitler, the Nazis, your children, a puppy, the Na'vi, the Native Americans, and everyone else.
- bobbyi 17y agoCan you quote the portion of the article that you interpret as saying that Western civilization has never done anything good?
- catzaa 17y agoThe world is a lot more complex than that. Germany was not treated well after the First World War. It was almost certain that there will be another war and a dictator would come to power (the only question was when, and what the dictator's name would be). This does not mean that everything the German army did was good or justified (e.g. the Holocaust). And neither was the allies knights in shining armour (firebombing of Dresden and Tokyo comes to mind). My grandparents (although not German citizens) were fiercely supportive of Germany in WW2, as where many people. This stemmed mostly from the UK’s treatment of people in its colonies.
- billswift 17y agoYou mean after the First World War. That's why I argued elsewhere that Woodrow Wilson deserves a big chunk of the blame for the rise of Nazi Germany, maybe even more than Hitler, since without his meddling in Europe during the Great War Hitler quite possibly would never have gotten anywhere.