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> "People in the '60s believed a lot of false blank-slate claims about regular people being capable of evil behavior in the right situations" Were the atrociti

• Noumenon72 7y ago
  Not according to my third link: > Even in the most brutal of circumstances, people did not have to kill and only some chose to do so. So, far from simply ‘finding themselves’ in inhumane situations or inhumane groups, the murderers actively committed themselves to such groups. They actively created inhumane situations and placed themselves at their epicentre. This was true even of concentration camp regimes: > > Individuals demonstrated commitment by acting, on their own initiative, with greater brutality than their orders called for. Thus excess did not spring from mechanical obedience. On the contrary; its matrix was a group structure where it was expected that members exceed the limits of normal violence. (Sofsky, 1993, p.228) > In short, the true horror of Eichmann and his like is not that their actions were blind. On the contrary, it is that they saw clearly what they did, and believed it to be the right thing to do.
  • ThrowawayR2 7y ago
    Would the same apply to the Imperial Japanese Army in the Nanjing incident (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre#Massacre) or across the rest of Asia? The IJA's acts was so widespread across its conquered territories that it's unlikely that the same reasoning can be applied to them; the total death toll caused by them was nearly triple that of the Holocaust and was not neatly confined to being perpetrated by the staff of concentration camps.