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I get what the author is getting at. Not sure I agree. Many years ago, I read "Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland", w

• fisherjeff 9y ago
  Sounds a lot like Arendt’s “little Eichmanns” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Eichmanns
• frozenport 9y ago
  Perhaps a more apt title would be "Who goes Nazi first?"
  • IntronExon 9y ago
    Or “who inspires/leads the Nazi?” Confusing the rank and file with an obersturmbannfuhrer or someone like Mengele is a mistake.
• Avshalom 9y ago
  While I definitely agree that removing responsibility likely allows/causes people to participate in horrible things it should also be remembered that "at the end of the war" they knew they were on the losing side and probably looking to minimize their own role in that side.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  • gt_ 9y ago
    This sounds like basic opportunism... fits well in line with OPs comment.
    • BookmarkSaver 9y ago
      Yeah, but I don't think most ordinary people are just looking for excuses to murder people. Somewhere along the way, these "ordinary people" were convinced that innocent men, women, and children were enough of a threat to slaughter them. By the end of the war when they realized that they'd lost, they might look to absolve themselves, but that doesn't explain the mechanism causing that behavior in the beginning.
      • gt_ 9y ago
        If you think that’s the only opportunity involved, then OK sure, but authority hierarchies offer much more. A feeling of control is what most people are after, and many other things they don’t want to readily admit. But whatever they want, I agree it’s unlikely to be ‘harming others’ but most people get what they do want from life by flattering authority. Different people want different things but most people get those things the same way, which is what matters here.
      • skrap 9y ago
        I'd really suggest you read the book I mentioned, even just the preview pages available via Amazon. Your intuition doesn't match what is depicted. Their actions were not a reaction to the threat posed by the Jews, nor did they justify their actions in that way.
• nl 9y ago
  I agree with this 100%. I started writing a comment about how the author emphasised all the bad traits of the Nazis-to-be and that’s not really how it worked. I seem to remember something about how lots of “un-American communists” were pretty staunch anti-Nazis. But OTOH this was 1941, and there were still plenty of Nazi sympathisers in the US. The battle of ideas was still live then, and I guess Harpers were fighting it.
  • api 9y ago
    Then? There are loads of sympathizers now. Nazism is having a resurgence.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • im3w1l 9y ago
      Few white people are calling for genocide. And referring to anything less than that as Nazism is just a sleight of hand meant to disparage.
      • Jtsummers 9y ago
        http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ http://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/ Genocide is a characteristic of one major fascist regime. It is not a characteristic of all of them.
        • im3w1l 9y ago
          Fascism and nazism are not synonyms so I don't understand why you bring that up.
          • throwawaymanbot 9y ago
            I think im3wl! knows what he is saying, and that is to say he is being deliberately protective of something he admires. The rest of us know and have no issue saying, The Nazis were a political movement, of the fascist variety.
• rdiddly 9y ago
  There is this... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment
• musage 9y ago
  There was also a LOT of "just doing things" so to speak.. I didn't get that from Kershaw, but in pretty much all I read about the Nazis it's mentioned somewhere, and it does match the anecdotes of survivors I read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Willikens https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Willikens > Ian Kershaw has argued that a speech made by Willikens in 1934, in particular his use of the phrase "working towards the Fuehrer", was important in laying the framework for the Holocaust. Kershaw argued that the speech recognised the aloofness of Hitler's charismatic leadership and thus encouraged officials to second-guess Hitler's wishes and act accordingly. Kershaw suggests that Adolf Eichmann's rise from minor functionary to a leading role in the SS was built on this principle of working towards the Fuehrer". It wasn't that different with Mao or Stalin I guess. They set a quota (or just said something that could be interpreted as a quota even), and people accused each other to survive the round and/or get rid of people they didn't like. > maybe mean people will hand you the gun, but anyone will pull the trigger, if they're told to do so. There's still a spectrum. There's still the White Rose, for example. As youths, the Scholl siblings were quite enthusiastic about the Nazis, to the dismay of their parents. But that's because they didn't know better at that point, and they did pay attention to further information coming in. Yes, people can be deceived and forced. And it's suicidal to say "it can't happen here", or "it can't happen to me". The wars of aggression by the US since so many past decades, and how many people are still actually offended when asked to repent of what they're guilty of whether they live to realize it or not, speaks for itself. Germany fucking insisting on trading arms for a guy captured by Erdogan who doesn't want to be traded for arms, speaks for itself. People excusing Chinese totalitarianism without fear of staining their remembrance or shifting their place in the history to something undesirable, that speaks for itself. But still, individuals still matter, there is still a spectrum that at least influences the probabilities of how people will react, and when. I wouldn't just throw that away as irrelevant, because that's something you can influence on a personal level, and where a little discernment goes a long way. > There can be no doubt that many people live without a firm inner identity. Years ago studies of sensory deprivation demonstrated that people isolated from their social and cultural context became psychotic (Lilli, 1956; Grunebaum, 1960; Heron, 1953). It was not recognized, however, that the outcome depended on the degree of a person's inner coherence. Admiral Byrd's autobiographical report of his months- long isolation in the polar region shows that an inner vitality makes one independent of external sensory stimulation (R. E. Byrd, 1938). The physician Evelyne Bone (1957) spent seven years in solitary confinement in a Hungarian prison. Her rich inner world of experience and thought kept her psyche intact. This possibility does not exist for someone whose inner life has turned into something foreign. That is surely the reason why so many subjects in the deprivation studies had psychotic breakdowns. > Those who have been able to develop an inner coherence and derive a feeling of identity from it do not, even under extreme conditions of frustration and deprivation, lose their self -confidence and their belief in themselves. The kind of identity, typical in our culture (Siirala's 'commonness of the majority') that is based on identifying with fear inspiring authorities is, on the other hand, constantly at risk of dissolution. Such people can consolidate a self only by creating imaginary enemies or by conforming to the prevailing social structures around them. The latter case applies to Hitler's enthusiastic admirers who immediately adapted to the new democratic principles introduced by the victors after the collapse of the Third Reich. There are numerous examples in this century of people who, in spite of having endured the horrifying conditions in extermination camps, preserved their identity. American soldiers who refused to participate in atrocities and the torture of prisoners during the Vietnam War illustrate the same phenomenon (Herman, 1994; Eng, 1988; Werner, 1989) -- Arno Gruen, "The Need to Punish - The Political Consequences of Identifying with the Aggressor" I have not looked at those last footnotes yet, but I read "Defying Hitler: A Memoir" by Sebastian Haffner, and I distinctly recall how he described that many Germans after WW1 "didn't know how to live" (he describes it more in-depth, it's essentially alienation I'd say, he also describes the obsession with sports and numbers and statistics that swept German in the 1920s), and how those seemed more prone to fall for the Nazis. I might look for it and translate a bit just because it'd be on topic for once. I remember how unsettling it was to read that bit, because it reminded me so much of our lost and confused present. If you know who you are, it's by definition really hard to sell you snake oil for solving the problem of not knowing who you are. You can still be threatened or blackmailed or whatever, but the psyche to order and the staff to accomplish that still always hinges on someone's development having been stunted in some way. In short, I'd claim that while you can find sane people in the ranks of Nazis, for some reason and duration or other, you cannot find a Nazi movement without any insane people in it, and that they provide the initial spark, the backbone and the driving force. And while Hannah Arendt, whom I adore and respect like no other, wrote this: > The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together. she also wrote > When confronted with situations for which such routine procedures did not exist, he [Eichmann] was helpless, and his cliché-ridden language produced on the stand, as it had evidently done in his official life, a kind of macabre comedy. Clichés, stock phrases, adherence to conventional, standardized codes of expression and conduct have the socially recognized function of protecting us against reality, that is, against the claim on our thinking attention that all events and facts make by virtue of their existence. and I would ask, how normal is that really? Maybe it's the norm, maybe it's not super rare, maybe it doesn't raise an eyebrow. But isn't that alienation in a nutshell, to have this membrane of abstraction between the constructed personality on one hand and the real self and the world on the other? Hannah Arendt again: > If the ability to tell right from wrong should have anything to do with the ability to think, then we must be able to "demand" its exercise in every sane person no matter how erudite or ignorant. She also pointed out that adults don't have the right to obey. Maybe it's "typical" for people to pretend they have that right is them being obedient to a pathological bigger structure, but that doesn't make themselves not pathological in my eyes. The source of the deformation matters less than the fact of it. > The fact that millions of people share the same vices does not make these vices virtues, the fact that they share so many errors does not make the errors to be truths, and the fact that millions of people share the same form of mental pathology does not make these people sane. -- Erich Fromm Hannah Arendt also wrote this in "Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft", this is my crappy translation: > Though the propaganda of truth does not convince the normal [square] citizen because it is so terrible, it has the more of an effect on those, which know from the possibilities of their own fantasies, that they would be able to do such a thing, and who for this reason are only too happy to believe the reality of the shown [she is referring to videos and photos from concentration camps]. Suddenly it becomes clear that that which human fantasy for millenia put beyond the realm of human possibilities can really be produced. Hell and Limbo and even a shadow of their eternal duration can be constructed by letting people die for an infinite duration with the most modern methods of destruction and healing. What these types, of which there exist more in any big city than we want to accept, realize when they see these films or read these reports, is that the power of humans is bigger than they wanted to admit, and that hellish fantasies can be realized without the sky falling down. and from the English version of that book: > For legends attract the very best in our times, just as ideologies attract the average, and the whispered tales of gruesome secret powers behind the scenes attract the very worst. Do not underestimate the pervasiveness and role of psychopathology. Do not put it all into one big bucket. Anyone could do it, yeah, and losing sight of that and othering is just as dangerous; but not everybody, all the time, regardless of anything.
• motohagiography 9y ago
  This dynamic is significant in the culture wars of today. As part of some work in architecture for some public sector projects, I read "The Nazi Census" which was a description of the technologies and techniques of the 1938 german census which was a basis for the NSDAPs brutal bureaucracy. (https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Census-Identification-Control-Politics/dp/1592132596 https://www.amazon.com/Nazi-Census-Identification-Control-Po...) One of the interesting parts was adding "unused," fields to the Hollerith punch cards for "future use," much like we use extensibility fields in data models today. The book says many of the people recruited to administer it were promoted from the ranks of the disaffected, often far above their level to ensure their loyalty. It was a technique used by the NSDAP, Stalin, and Mao, where they put country "peasant" types in administrative roles over towns and cities to exploit rural resentment of city dwellers. As a result, you can "steelman" the sentiments behind many conservative arguments by summarizing them as questioning the wisdom of handing reins of unimaginably powerful institutions and technologies to people who identify as victims with an implied entitlement to revenge, and who are not bound by the ethical frameworks of the deposed - the ones assumed when those techs and institutions were built. It at least provides a logic beyond evil and hatred. Regardless of whether it's accurate in the context, it's a heuristic for reasoning about the motives and quality of an argument.
  • watwut 9y ago
    What do you mean by "the ones assumed when those techs and institutions were built"? Both Nazi and Communists institutions and techs were built for that exact purpose.
    • usrusr 9y ago
      The origins of almost every "Nazi tech" predate their rise to power.
    • e12e 9y ago
      If you mean designed and built, that's a rather harsh judgement of eg IBM - well beyond "war profiteer". Perhaps supplied for that purpose though. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.highereducation https://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/mar/29/humanities.hig... Somewhat chilling to contemplate what purpose the current "Watson" could be put to, though: "When the Nazis invaded Poland (...) IBM New York established a special new subsidiary called Watson Business Machines," after its then- president, Thomas Watson." "Hello, Watson - is our genocide still on track?"
• watwut 9y ago
  > The men didn't feel they bore a moral duty to disobey, because these things just had to be done, or so they were told. That is how they were raised. That kind of thinking was traditional and Nazi school system and propaganda were designed to produce people like that. It is also not true that anyone would pull the trigger. Even in Germany were many people who having choice participated to the minimum or did not joined groups doing worst things when they could. It is interesting that another popular glib is that "ordinary people who don't fight back are responsible". But people who looked away or were passive should be better off morally then those who could not participate but did (not everyone could avoid such duty).
• golangnews 9y ago
  I think the point of the article is not ‘mean people go nazi’, it’s that ordinary people who surround you today would go nazi, for multiple reasons - because it is the easier way, because it leads to monetary success, because they’ve always felt slighted, because they are outsiders in the current system. The banality of evil does not absolve people from responsibility or mean that anyone will pull the trigger. There are numerous examples of people who refused to participate.
• psergeant 9y ago
  I think the author and you are targeting slightly different things: she identifies who is amongst the vanguard who bring it into power, you are observing that once in a Nazi state, most people will go along with it
• agumonkey 9y ago
  Reminds me of culture shock between Europe and South America. When people came there, sacrifices seemed barbaric. To the aztec/inca ... these were probably a noble gesture. People's emotions toward acts is highly dependant on the reference system they live in. I'm sure it's exceptionally hard to escape this kind of nation wide social pressure. At least for a while. I've read people starting to feel sick and question their duty. But they still agreed at first. Similarly, drone operators started happy, but became overly depressed after "working" for months.
  • humanrebar 9y ago
    > People's emotions toward acts is highly dependant on the reference system they live in. Yes, but let's be careful not to conflate felt nobility with actual good. Sacrificing humans to false gods is pretty awful, no matter the sentiment behind the acts.
    • zeth___ 9y ago
      Lets also not confuse means with ends. A room full of corpses is a room full of corpses. Regardless if they were put there from human sacrifice, nazi genocide, communist collectivization, or capitalist cost cutting (the sweatshop workers that get burned to death). That the people who filled that room wanted a wonderful society filled with everything good doesn't detract from the fact they were monsters.
    • agumonkey 9y ago
      Try to put yourself in their shoes, to the victim it was probably a high desire, his family was probably proud, they may believe he went into heaven and were relieved. If the whole system is strong in its belief and consistent you cannot "understand" their acts as good or bad.
      • humanrebar 9y ago
        I believe there are objectively bad things to do and killing people for a false sacrifice is certainly bad. It's true that people need empathy, though, partly so they can be wary despite their own good intentions and clean consciences.
• throwawaymanbot 9y ago
  I think maybe you misread the article. The Article's premise is that there is something in certain people that makes them more susceptible to being "relieved of the responsibility of their actions". Whereas there are certain other types that will NEVER be prone to being "relieved of the responsibility of their actions" ie.. being a Nazi. What article did you read? btw.. Just "following orders" was not honest, it was used by lawyers in Nuremberg trials to try to get Nazis who had "the courage to murder", to get out of "the responsibility of their actions", and rightfully, had no legal base.