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I like to think if I were alive during the Nazi era, I wouldn't have become a Nazi. But I know, chances are, I would have most likely ended up as one of those

I like to think if I were alive during the Nazi era, I wouldn't have become a Nazi. But I know, chances are, I would have most likely ended up as one of those German citizens who would have gradually become part of the Nazi machine. I think it's perhaps safer to recognise the line between good and evil runs through every person, and not be presumptive to think of oneself as being part of a select group of virtuous people. I can think of many recent occurrences where people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue.

caiob 5y ago
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trhway 5y ago
Just look at Russia - a real Nazist regime while most Russians conveniently believe they are fighting world Nazism. The truth is actually available to them, yet it is so scary and inconvenient that they instinctively choose to ignore it. Their propagandists on state TV even stated recently discussing Ukraine that Nazism = political nationalism + totalitarism. Which obviously doesn't apply to Ukraine, yet absolutely describes Russia.
- philosopher1234 5y ago
  If you hate something about yourself, maybe it affords some reassurance to see that thing in someone else and then try and destroy them. I wonder if thats what's going on with some of these Russians.
- skissane 5y ago
  I support Ukraine and oppose Putin - but Putin isn’t a Nazi. His ideology, in its details, is quite different from that of Nazism. Russian propaganda that “Ukraine is a Nazi state” is stupid, but you have to understand that “Nazism” means something quite different to Russians than to most Westerners. Most Westerners focus on the Nazis’ genocidal Antisemitism; in Russia, the focus is more on the Nazis’ genocidal Russophobia. That different focus makes the propaganda seem not quite as ludicrous as it does in the West, especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian), which the Russian government paints as Russophobic discrimination.
  - somethingreen 5y ago
    The only difference is that German Nazis believed Jews were themselves evil, and Russian Nazis believe Ukrainians are irreversibly corrupted by evil West. The exact flavors of their victim complex and exceptionalism are irrelevant.
    - watwut 5y ago
      There are more differences tho. Nazism was not just about Jews. There was a lot more to the ideology: race hierarchy, need for living space, survival of the fittest ideology and so on. Russia now resembles more Tsarists imperial wars mixed with communist practices.
      - trhway 5y ago
        if you understand Russian - on the "new people, new Russia" https://rutube.ru/video/6a82ce7cc138125d6c9d0f3a47c5e74e/ https://rutube.ru/video/6a82ce7cc138125d6c9d0f3a47c5e74e/ (by one of the main Russian propagandist who is every day on the state TV) where they also talk about "new blood" being not IT/programmers/entrepreneurs/artists/etc., instead it is those "heroes" of the war "who will break that needs to be broken and will build what needs to be built" . If you ever watched "Man in the High Castle" - that has significant overlap with "The Year 0".
  - trhway 5y ago
    >Putin isn’t a Nazi. His ideology, in its details, is quite different from that of Nazism. no. Just read his war declaration speech. Classic Nazism. They had "master race" and inferior "races" of Jews and Slavics. Putin has master nation of Russians and inferior Ukrainians. And he is using that the same was as Hitler as a reason to claim the master race's/nation's right to the territory and to conduct ethnical cleansing and genocide there. >especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian) The "War and Peace" opens with the scene of an aristocratic party in St.Peterburg where French language - de-facto language of Russian nobility in the years before - is totally banned because of Napoleon invasion.
planb 5y ago
I’ve often thought about this. But, if I would have been raised during the Nazi era, I wouldn’t be me. If you would take back via a time machine now, I definitely wouldn’t become a Nazi. But what if you’d erase my memory and everything I know about history and then transfer me back? I hope that it’s ingrained values and not just knowledge that would let me make the right choices.
- philosopher1234 5y ago
  I wonder if nazis had any realistic hope of resisting. In russia today there are a handful of people who will take open action against Putin, and pay for it with years in prison. If you aren't willing to sacrifice yourself on that scale, could you have done much in Nazi germany, either? Maybe it's like being a part of a bad company. It's too big a machine for you to meaningfully change, and the only way to remain on board is to help it along.
  - karpierz 5y ago
    Of course it was realistic to resist, there are many examples of people that did. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler Is it realistic to resist and live comfortably? No, but you have the choice, and the choice you make is a reflection of your character.
  - watwut 5y ago
    People in position and with experience to meaningfully resist were targeted by regime first. There were actually attempts to resist, but simply, they lost.
monkeybutton 5y ago
There was a doctor in Nazi Germany whose clinic was vandalized by people who though he was a Jew (he wasn't) so he joined the party out of self preservation. Then, being a good party member, he started treating other more affluent party members at his clinic. As a reward for this, he was eventually gifted a lavish property (formally owned by a Jewish businesses man) but it was a bit of a white elephant. The upkeep was very expensive, he was expected to keep it staffed (maid, butler, groundskeeper, etc.) and being a gift, he couldn't sell it. He was trapped into having to continue doing business with the party in order to pay for it all. I found the story interesting because he wasn't a Nazi at the start, he was just acting out of self preservation and his life spiralled out of control as he got sucked further and further into the party.
- titzer 5y ago
  This pretty much describes my worst fears about political leaders in the US. They are absolutely beholden to those who finance their campaigns and prop up their respective national committees. I will and won't "both sides" this, from time to time, because both major parties have serious corruption, but it seems to have become way worse on one side than the other recently.
  - ls65536 5y ago
    > both major parties have serious corruption, but it seems to have become way worse on one side than the other recently It's interesting because any two random people might not agree on which side is "worse" in this regard. People often think they're immune to the tactics and propaganda of the other side, but they'll frequently fail to see the same or very similar stuff happening on their own side, or they'll downplay it because it doesn't affect them so much personally.
gwbas1c 5y ago
> I know, chances are, I would have most likely ended up as one of those German citizens who would have gradually become part of the Nazi machine You can think about how you handle current events: If you live in the US, how did you handle the Trump presidency? If you live in Russia, how are you handling the current situation? A few weeks ago a Russian colleague of mine IMed me looking to move out of the country. That night I told my wife how lucky I felt that we didn't need to leave the US when Trump was in power.
- ModernMech 5y ago
  Putin has been in power for 20 years. It takes a while to dismantle all the democratic institutions that make is so that you can stay here without worry. Trump made an attempt to dismantle every institution from the 3-letter agencies like CIA, FBI, CDC, DOJ, the media, rule of law, even the concept of the presidency and elections themselves. We won't be so lucky if Trump has a second go at dismantling these institutions, because it took him a while to figure out how, but now he's pretty much an expert. It seems like the institution of presidential debates that has been a hallmark of our democratic process for decades was destroyed by the GOP just yesterday, so speaking in the past tense as if the damage has ceased is a mistake.
  - watwut 5y ago
    I would argue that Russia did not had much of democratic institutions in the first place. And Putin was just returning back to the practices he learned when he was young and middle aged KGB agent the first moment it seemed useful.
ggpsv 5y ago
It is certainly more nuanced and complex than reducing it in terms of a persons's propensity towards good and evil. You must look into the psychosocial conditions that made Germany the breeding grounds for Nazism. Why was it appealing to the ordinary Germany citizen? I recommend reading Erich Fromm's book Escape from Freedom as he explores this at depth. Still a relevant book almost 80 years after being written — where might observe similar phenomena today?
- nuancebydefault 5y ago
  where? Not a question hard to answer these days. Somehow, like the story descibes happened almost 100 years ago, this gradual mindshift seems to have happened over the past decades without people noticing it.
pastor_bob 5y ago
A question that seems pointless to me unless you believe you have some sort of innate fundamental morality, which history has shown usually isn't the case for people. Your upbringing and circumstances would have been totally different, and therefore your mindset unpredictable. Your greatest chance of being anti-Nazi, for instance, would have been just to be a card-carrying Communist.
- zasdffaa 5y ago
  His question is interesting (I have often wondered similarly) but your response is also interesting. So... > unless you believe you have some sort of innate fundamental morality to suggest otherwise would be to say that most people don't, but most people will help others - a lot of support is going to Ukraine which would simply not if Ukraine were the aggressor (and I acknowledge such ethical behaviour is patchy and sometimes not there but often it is).
fit2rule 5y ago
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cortesoft 5y ago
This understanding of ourselves as being as flawed as everyone else is so important, I think. One of my favorite sayings (even though I am not religious at all) is, “therefore but by the grace of god go I.” It is about realizing that so much of our behavior is dictated by circumstances. We don’t like to think of it that way, but it is true. One of my favorite essays of all time is called “A muscular empathy” (https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...). It is about using this idea, and thinking about why we would behave the same way as all these people who we would like to believe we would have been better than if we were in their shoes. My favorite quote from it: > It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, or if we were slave masters, our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct. > Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre. > That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.
- ficklepickle 5y ago
  I also love that quote, but I believe it is "There, but for the grace of god, go I". One of the best things that ever happened to me was becoming a member of a group that I was previously prejudiced against.
jl6 5y ago
> I can think of many recent occurrences where people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue. Case in point is that nearly every terrible political act in history has been perpetrated by someone proclaiming to be fighting the good fight. They all had their rationalisations. I can’t think of any examples of political groups that declare themselves pro-evil. In a sense, this is encouraging. It means there is widespread low tolerance for transparently evil ideas. In another sense, this indicates we have widespread low capability to determine which ideas are actually virtuous, and which merely have a veneer of virtue (masking great harm).
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  > people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue. They say majority of Russian people really support Putin and his war on Ukraine. Similarly many Germans supported Hitler and his invasion of Poland. I think the situation in Russia is now very similar to the early Nazi Germany. It could happen here too. But I hope and pray if there's anything good about Putin's war it is it makes people realize Fascism is alive and well, and will not go away by itself.
  - paulmd 5y ago
    > It could happen here too. What makes you think it hasn't? How do you know all those drone strikes were on bad people? How do you know that standards of evidence before employing military force haven't been slacked off to the point of meaninglessness? How do you know those secret FISA courts are actually giving full and complete due-process? How do you know that every person in the world's largest slave-labor force definitely deserves to be there? There is an awful lot of stuff that one could point to as being fascist in the modern US system. And we have a habit of "military adventurism" ourselves... we got ourselves into Iraq through acts of aggression, and that's far from the first. This is precisely the problem discussed in the article and the comments here - the framing of "us, good wholesome people who love our country, vs dirty vile Russians who support an evil military aggressor" is itself the result of propaganda and messaging. No country is going to message themselves as being the bad guys. Most people support their country because it's what one does, and there's immense social pressure to do so. And we tend to rationalize away the bad because "well, there's always some bad, but it's mostly good". Most people really don't have (and aren't allowed to have) a full picture of whether the sum is actually good or not, we just assume it. So in the end, Germans support German tyranny, Russians support Russian tyranny, and Americans support American tyranny, because that's what one does. Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?
rgrieselhuber 5y ago
- _fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
  That's a problematic comparison and actually pretty offensive to survivors of the holocaust.
  - rgrieselhuber 5y ago
    [flagged]
    - ls65536 5y ago
      Some might be offended by holocaust comparisons here, but if we are to really take the ideal of "never again" seriously, then it's absolutely crucial that we be free to openly discuss in good faith how situations gradually snowballed from one thing to another and ended up at a certain point in history without needing to censor ourselves so much to avoid offending someone. And thankfully we've had nothing close to approaching the horrendous events of the holocaust during our present pandemic difficulties, but opposing discussion on the grounds of it being potentially offensive isn't doing any service to the survivors (and victims) of those past atrocities, and it risks us following some of those dark paths of the past into the future if we cannot apply what we learned to our own times. The various lessons of history must be applied as much as possible in order to better understand our present time and to avoid repeating those mistakes of history.
      - rgrieselhuber 5y ago
        [flagged]
        tomhoward 5y ago
        As an Australian who lived here throughout the pandemic, it's massively hyperbolic and bad-faith argumentation to relate Australia's pandemic response to Nazi Germany, or even to what is going on in China now. Yes we had lockdowns - as did many other countries/states/provinces/cities, including in the U.S. And yes we've had vaccine mandates in order to work in many roles - as has been the case in the U.S. and many other places around the world that have always been regarded as highly liberal and democratic. And yes we had quarantine for people entering the country - which has been utilised widely throughout history. It sucked to experience, and yes, sometimes there was cause for concern as to how far it was going and how permanent the restrictions would be. But we can now see the outcome; the country is almost completely back to normal, and ended up with one of the lowest per-capita fatality rates in the world, hospitals were only briefly strained when omicron surged this past January but quickly returned to normal, and the country has fared well economically compared to most other countries. And even if the outcome wasn't so positive, this distinction is crucial: Nazi Germany was defined by persecuting, imprisoning and murdering huge numbers of people; Australia's pandemic response was intended to prevent the premature deaths of huge numbers of people, and it succeeded at doing that whilst impinging on people's freedoms for only a limited period of time and to only a limited extent. Screeching ideologues on Twitter and cable TV who were not here and know nothing about our societal values are not the people to be informed by on this topic.
hindsightbias 5y ago
A lot of it is acquiescence. Here is something I think most Americans should ponder: https://www.afcent.af.mil/Portals/82/November%202021%20Airpower%20Summary_FINAL.pdf https://www.afcent.af.mil/Portals/82/November%202021%20Airpo... These are US airstrike counts since 2014. They stopped counting once a Taliban agreement was reached. Now we all know these were all done for freedom and only bad people get bombed, but I wonder what Americans would think if the aftermath of every one showed up on their twitter feed.
jliptzin 5y ago
Being able to shift moral responsibility onto someone else helps a lot. “I was just following orders…” etc etc
aidenn0 5y ago
Or as a friend of mine put it somewhat sarcastically: "It was really unlucky for George Floyd that none of the millions of people who definitely would have physically intervened on his behalf were present"
- monkeydreams 5y ago
  This mirror, shone back on everyone else, casts a far darker image.
imtringued 5y ago
Not willing to associate with Nazis is something that only happened after Germany lost the war and people wanted a specific group to blame, which is ironic because that is exactly what the nazis did by blaming the jews.
- ceejayoz 5y ago
  The Nazis falsely blamed the Jews. It's hardly "exactly" the same.
- galaxyLogic 5y ago
  There are Nazi-minded people in every country. Also anti-Nazis. It is not like a war between Nazi-nations and anti-Nazi nations. It is a cold war between autocracy vs. democracy, happening everywhere. SEE: https://www.nhgazette.com/the-bushnazi-stories/bushnazi-link-continued/ https://www.nhgazette.com/the-bushnazi-stories/bushnazi-link...
- TMWNN 5y ago
  >Not willing to associate with Nazis is something that only happened after Germany lost the war From the Wikipedia article on German PoWs in the US during WW2 (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the...>): >Scholar Arnold Krammer noted that in his years of interviewing prisoners he never met one who admitted to being a Nazi
agumonkey 5y ago
This is something hard to word. The boiling frog is hard to fight, because there's no big event to go against, it's just a mellow dilution of behaviors and values. The Ukraine invasion made me see how Russia is today, and it doesn't take much to turn a society into a fog of nothingness. A bit of leeway regarding police forces, a bit of good old propaganda, and now you can't speak, nothing is true anymore.
- AwaAwa 5y ago
  As an immigrant, and therefore not beholden to either side, it is hard for me to distinguish whether your last line is with regard to Russia, or the US. Which is very much the point of the article.
  - agumonkey 5y ago
    It was about Russia, but I see this creeping up a little bit in France. The recent president was a bit too quick to put police blocks everytime there was a manifestation. They were a little more brutal and unhinged than usual and the president didn't seem to be annoyed about it. If he pushes further in that direction I'll be afraid of the police in the streets and will suddenly lie about my beliefs in public out of fear of being threatened or arrested. Western countries have flaws, yeah the media spread bullshit depending on which interests each channel has, US police is too gun-ready, the financial world is rigged, etc etc but so far people can still speak up, it's a subtle but crucial difference.
Enginerrrd 5y ago
The thing about the Nazi's is it wasn't just the obvious "Jews are bad" stuff. They really framed themselves as being scientific and holding an interest in not just making the nation better but humanity itself. They did a lot to project strength, progress, modernization and scientific thought and inspire people to get behind them. Of course, it all blends together... There was insidious breadth in their messaging... They would do things like go to elementary schools and cherry pick the most pathetic and weak (who "happened" to be stereotypically jewish-looking) child and then pick a child known amongst their peers to be athletic, intelligent, and handsome/beautiful (and who "happened" to be Aryan-looking) and then they'd talk 'scientifically' about the distinctive features of the two races, and the physical differences between the two children, espousing the 'good genes' of the Aryan looking kid. Even today, in 'more virtuous' societies, people love to think of themselves as superior to others in some capacity. It's less common to emphasize the inferiority of others, especially using race as a basis, but at the end of the day, we're talking about basically the same human tendency toward contempt.
akvadrako 5y ago
This is something Jordan Peterson talks about often and he's done quite a bit of research on. I know (I would say) that I wouldn't become a Nazi, but only because I'm aware of how easy it is. But something similar I can't recognize? The best approach is probably to stay humble and assume you can't tell the difference between good and bad.
- aklemm 5y ago
  Research or merely reading?
BarbaPeru 5y ago
Me too, it is simple to judge after the facts. In the future we will be judged the same way, and many will not understand how we could not see the catastrophic end of our journey.

caiob 5y ago

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trhway 5y ago

Just look at Russia - a real Nazist regime while most Russians conveniently believe they are fighting world Nazism. The truth is actually available to them, yet it is so scary and inconvenient that they instinctively choose to ignore it. Their propagandists on state TV even stated recently discussing Ukraine that Nazism = political nationalism + totalitarism. Which obviously doesn't apply to Ukraine, yet absolutely describes Russia.

philosopher1234 5y ago
If you hate something about yourself, maybe it affords some reassurance to see that thing in someone else and then try and destroy them. I wonder if thats what's going on with some of these Russians.
skissane 5y ago
I support Ukraine and oppose Putin - but Putin isn’t a Nazi. His ideology, in its details, is quite different from that of Nazism. Russian propaganda that “Ukraine is a Nazi state” is stupid, but you have to understand that “Nazism” means something quite different to Russians than to most Westerners. Most Westerners focus on the Nazis’ genocidal Antisemitism; in Russia, the focus is more on the Nazis’ genocidal Russophobia. That different focus makes the propaganda seem not quite as ludicrous as it does in the West, especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian), which the Russian government paints as Russophobic discrimination.
- somethingreen 5y ago
  The only difference is that German Nazis believed Jews were themselves evil, and Russian Nazis believe Ukrainians are irreversibly corrupted by evil West. The exact flavors of their victim complex and exceptionalism are irrelevant.
  - watwut 5y ago
    There are more differences tho. Nazism was not just about Jews. There was a lot more to the ideology: race hierarchy, need for living space, survival of the fittest ideology and so on. Russia now resembles more Tsarists imperial wars mixed with communist practices.
    - trhway 5y ago
      if you understand Russian - on the "new people, new Russia" https://rutube.ru/video/6a82ce7cc138125d6c9d0f3a47c5e74e/ https://rutube.ru/video/6a82ce7cc138125d6c9d0f3a47c5e74e/ (by one of the main Russian propagandist who is every day on the state TV) where they also talk about "new blood" being not IT/programmers/entrepreneurs/artists/etc., instead it is those "heroes" of the war "who will break that needs to be broken and will build what needs to be built" . If you ever watched "Man in the High Castle" - that has significant overlap with "The Year 0".
- trhway 5y ago
  >Putin isn’t a Nazi. His ideology, in its details, is quite different from that of Nazism. no. Just read his war declaration speech. Classic Nazism. They had "master race" and inferior "races" of Jews and Slavics. Putin has master nation of Russians and inferior Ukrainians. And he is using that the same was as Hitler as a reason to claim the master race's/nation's right to the territory and to conduct ethnical cleansing and genocide there. >especially when one considers the language policy issue (encouraging the use of Ukrainian language over Russian) The "War and Peace" opens with the scene of an aristocratic party in St.Peterburg where French language - de-facto language of Russian nobility in the years before - is totally banned because of Napoleon invasion.

planb 5y ago

I’ve often thought about this. But, if I would have been raised during the Nazi era, I wouldn’t be me. If you would take back via a time machine now, I definitely wouldn’t become a Nazi. But what if you’d erase my memory and everything I know about history and then transfer me back? I hope that it’s ingrained values and not just knowledge that would let me make the right choices.

philosopher1234 5y ago
I wonder if nazis had any realistic hope of resisting. In russia today there are a handful of people who will take open action against Putin, and pay for it with years in prison. If you aren't willing to sacrifice yourself on that scale, could you have done much in Nazi germany, either? Maybe it's like being a part of a bad company. It's too big a machine for you to meaningfully change, and the only way to remain on board is to help it along.
- karpierz 5y ago
  Of course it was realistic to resist, there are many examples of people that did. Ex: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oskar_Schindler Is it realistic to resist and live comfortably? No, but you have the choice, and the choice you make is a reflection of your character.
- watwut 5y ago
  People in position and with experience to meaningfully resist were targeted by regime first. There were actually attempts to resist, but simply, they lost.

monkeybutton 5y ago

There was a doctor in Nazi Germany whose clinic was vandalized by people who though he was a Jew (he wasn't) so he joined the party out of self preservation. Then, being a good party member, he started treating other more affluent party members at his clinic. As a reward for this, he was eventually gifted a lavish property (formally owned by a Jewish businesses man) but it was a bit of a white elephant. The upkeep was very expensive, he was expected to keep it staffed (maid, butler, groundskeeper, etc.) and being a gift, he couldn't sell it. He was trapped into having to continue doing business with the party in order to pay for it all. I found the story interesting because he wasn't a Nazi at the start, he was just acting out of self preservation and his life spiralled out of control as he got sucked further and further into the party.

titzer 5y ago
This pretty much describes my worst fears about political leaders in the US. They are absolutely beholden to those who finance their campaigns and prop up their respective national committees. I will and won't "both sides" this, from time to time, because both major parties have serious corruption, but it seems to have become way worse on one side than the other recently.
- ls65536 5y ago
  > both major parties have serious corruption, but it seems to have become way worse on one side than the other recently It's interesting because any two random people might not agree on which side is "worse" in this regard. People often think they're immune to the tactics and propaganda of the other side, but they'll frequently fail to see the same or very similar stuff happening on their own side, or they'll downplay it because it doesn't affect them so much personally.

gwbas1c 5y ago

> I know, chances are, I would have most likely ended up as one of those German citizens who would have gradually become part of the Nazi machine You can think about how you handle current events: If you live in the US, how did you handle the Trump presidency? If you live in Russia, how are you handling the current situation? A few weeks ago a Russian colleague of mine IMed me looking to move out of the country. That night I told my wife how lucky I felt that we didn't need to leave the US when Trump was in power.

ModernMech 5y ago
Putin has been in power for 20 years. It takes a while to dismantle all the democratic institutions that make is so that you can stay here without worry. Trump made an attempt to dismantle every institution from the 3-letter agencies like CIA, FBI, CDC, DOJ, the media, rule of law, even the concept of the presidency and elections themselves. We won't be so lucky if Trump has a second go at dismantling these institutions, because it took him a while to figure out how, but now he's pretty much an expert. It seems like the institution of presidential debates that has been a hallmark of our democratic process for decades was destroyed by the GOP just yesterday, so speaking in the past tense as if the damage has ceased is a mistake.
- watwut 5y ago
  I would argue that Russia did not had much of democratic institutions in the first place. And Putin was just returning back to the practices he learned when he was young and middle aged KGB agent the first moment it seemed useful.

ggpsv 5y ago

It is certainly more nuanced and complex than reducing it in terms of a persons's propensity towards good and evil. You must look into the psychosocial conditions that made Germany the breeding grounds for Nazism. Why was it appealing to the ordinary Germany citizen? I recommend reading Erich Fromm's book Escape from Freedom as he explores this at depth. Still a relevant book almost 80 years after being written — where might observe similar phenomena today?

nuancebydefault 5y ago
where? Not a question hard to answer these days. Somehow, like the story descibes happened almost 100 years ago, this gradual mindshift seems to have happened over the past decades without people noticing it.

pastor_bob 5y ago

A question that seems pointless to me unless you believe you have some sort of innate fundamental morality, which history has shown usually isn't the case for people. Your upbringing and circumstances would have been totally different, and therefore your mindset unpredictable. Your greatest chance of being anti-Nazi, for instance, would have been just to be a card-carrying Communist.

zasdffaa 5y ago
His question is interesting (I have often wondered similarly) but your response is also interesting. So... > unless you believe you have some sort of innate fundamental morality to suggest otherwise would be to say that most people don't, but most people will help others - a lot of support is going to Ukraine which would simply not if Ukraine were the aggressor (and I acknowledge such ethical behaviour is patchy and sometimes not there but often it is).

fit2rule 5y ago

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cortesoft 5y ago

This understanding of ourselves as being as flawed as everyone else is so important, I think. One of my favorite sayings (even though I am not religious at all) is, “therefore but by the grace of god go I.” It is about realizing that so much of our behavior is dictated by circumstances. We don’t like to think of it that way, but it is true. One of my favorite essays of all time is called “A muscular empathy” (https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscular-empathy/249984/ https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...). It is about using this idea, and thinking about why we would behave the same way as all these people who we would like to believe we would have been better than if we were in their shoes. My favorite quote from it: > It is comforting to believe that we, through our sheer will, could transcend these bindings -- to believe that if we were slaves, our indomitable courage would have made us Frederick Douglass, or if we were slave masters, our keen morality would have made us Bobby Carter. We flatter ourselves, not out of malice, but out of instinct. > Still, we are, in the main, ordinary people living in plush times. We are smart enough to get by, responsible enough to raise a couple of kids, thrifty to sock away for a vacation, and industrious enough to keep the lights on. We like our cars. We love a good cheeseburger. We'd die without air-conditioning. In the great mass of humanity that's ever lived, we are distinguished only by our creature comforts, and we are, on the whole, mediocre. > That mediocrity is oft-exemplified by the claim that though we are unremarkable in this easy world, something about enslavement, degradation and poverty would make us exemplary. We can barely throw a left hook--but surely we would have beaten Mike Tyson.

ficklepickle 5y ago
I also love that quote, but I believe it is "There, but for the grace of god, go I". One of the best things that ever happened to me was becoming a member of a group that I was previously prejudiced against.

jl6 5y ago

> I can think of many recent occurrences where people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue. Case in point is that nearly every terrible political act in history has been perpetrated by someone proclaiming to be fighting the good fight. They all had their rationalisations. I can’t think of any examples of political groups that declare themselves pro-evil. In a sense, this is encouraging. It means there is widespread low tolerance for transparently evil ideas. In another sense, this indicates we have widespread low capability to determine which ideas are actually virtuous, and which merely have a veneer of virtue (masking great harm).

galaxyLogic 5y ago
> people who think they are acting virtuously, are in fact the perpetrators of harm, without knowing it; so convinced they are of their own virtue. They say majority of Russian people really support Putin and his war on Ukraine. Similarly many Germans supported Hitler and his invasion of Poland. I think the situation in Russia is now very similar to the early Nazi Germany. It could happen here too. But I hope and pray if there's anything good about Putin's war it is it makes people realize Fascism is alive and well, and will not go away by itself.
- paulmd 5y ago
  > It could happen here too. What makes you think it hasn't? How do you know all those drone strikes were on bad people? How do you know that standards of evidence before employing military force haven't been slacked off to the point of meaninglessness? How do you know those secret FISA courts are actually giving full and complete due-process? How do you know that every person in the world's largest slave-labor force definitely deserves to be there? There is an awful lot of stuff that one could point to as being fascist in the modern US system. And we have a habit of "military adventurism" ourselves... we got ourselves into Iraq through acts of aggression, and that's far from the first. This is precisely the problem discussed in the article and the comments here - the framing of "us, good wholesome people who love our country, vs dirty vile Russians who support an evil military aggressor" is itself the result of propaganda and messaging. No country is going to message themselves as being the bad guys. Most people support their country because it's what one does, and there's immense social pressure to do so. And we tend to rationalize away the bad because "well, there's always some bad, but it's mostly good". Most people really don't have (and aren't allowed to have) a full picture of whether the sum is actually good or not, we just assume it. So in the end, Germans support German tyranny, Russians support Russian tyranny, and Americans support American tyranny, because that's what one does. Why do you think you (or americans in general) are the exception here?

rgrieselhuber 5y ago

_fizz_buzz_ 5y ago
That's a problematic comparison and actually pretty offensive to survivors of the holocaust.
- rgrieselhuber 5y ago
  [flagged]
  - ls65536 5y ago
    Some might be offended by holocaust comparisons here, but if we are to really take the ideal of "never again" seriously, then it's absolutely crucial that we be free to openly discuss in good faith how situations gradually snowballed from one thing to another and ended up at a certain point in history without needing to censor ourselves so much to avoid offending someone. And thankfully we've had nothing close to approaching the horrendous events of the holocaust during our present pandemic difficulties, but opposing discussion on the grounds of it being potentially offensive isn't doing any service to the survivors (and victims) of those past atrocities, and it risks us following some of those dark paths of the past into the future if we cannot apply what we learned to our own times. The various lessons of history must be applied as much as possible in order to better understand our present time and to avoid repeating those mistakes of history.
    - rgrieselhuber 5y ago
      [flagged]
      - tomhoward 5y ago
        As an Australian who lived here throughout the pandemic, it's massively hyperbolic and bad-faith argumentation to relate Australia's pandemic response to Nazi Germany, or even to what is going on in China now. Yes we had lockdowns - as did many other countries/states/provinces/cities, including in the U.S. And yes we've had vaccine mandates in order to work in many roles - as has been the case in the U.S. and many other places around the world that have always been regarded as highly liberal and democratic. And yes we had quarantine for people entering the country - which has been utilised widely throughout history. It sucked to experience, and yes, sometimes there was cause for concern as to how far it was going and how permanent the restrictions would be. But we can now see the outcome; the country is almost completely back to normal, and ended up with one of the lowest per-capita fatality rates in the world, hospitals were only briefly strained when omicron surged this past January but quickly returned to normal, and the country has fared well economically compared to most other countries. And even if the outcome wasn't so positive, this distinction is crucial: Nazi Germany was defined by persecuting, imprisoning and murdering huge numbers of people; Australia's pandemic response was intended to prevent the premature deaths of huge numbers of people, and it succeeded at doing that whilst impinging on people's freedoms for only a limited period of time and to only a limited extent. Screeching ideologues on Twitter and cable TV who were not here and know nothing about our societal values are not the people to be informed by on this topic.

hindsightbias 5y ago

A lot of it is acquiescence. Here is something I think most Americans should ponder: https://www.afcent.af.mil/Portals/82/November%202021%20Airpower%20Summary_FINAL.pdf https://www.afcent.af.mil/Portals/82/November%202021%20Airpo... These are US airstrike counts since 2014. They stopped counting once a Taliban agreement was reached. Now we all know these were all done for freedom and only bad people get bombed, but I wonder what Americans would think if the aftermath of every one showed up on their twitter feed.

jliptzin 5y ago

Being able to shift moral responsibility onto someone else helps a lot. “I was just following orders…” etc etc

aidenn0 5y ago

Or as a friend of mine put it somewhat sarcastically: "It was really unlucky for George Floyd that none of the millions of people who definitely would have physically intervened on his behalf were present"

monkeydreams 5y ago
This mirror, shone back on everyone else, casts a far darker image.

imtringued 5y ago

Not willing to associate with Nazis is something that only happened after Germany lost the war and people wanted a specific group to blame, which is ironic because that is exactly what the nazis did by blaming the jews.

ceejayoz 5y ago
The Nazis falsely blamed the Jews. It's hardly "exactly" the same.
galaxyLogic 5y ago
There are Nazi-minded people in every country. Also anti-Nazis. It is not like a war between Nazi-nations and anti-Nazi nations. It is a cold war between autocracy vs. democracy, happening everywhere. SEE: https://www.nhgazette.com/the-bushnazi-stories/bushnazi-link-continued/ https://www.nhgazette.com/the-bushnazi-stories/bushnazi-link...
TMWNN 5y ago
>Not willing to associate with Nazis is something that only happened after Germany lost the war From the Wikipedia article on German PoWs in the US during WW2 (<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_prisoners_of_war_in_the...>): >Scholar Arnold Krammer noted that in his years of interviewing prisoners he never met one who admitted to being a Nazi

agumonkey 5y ago

This is something hard to word. The boiling frog is hard to fight, because there's no big event to go against, it's just a mellow dilution of behaviors and values. The Ukraine invasion made me see how Russia is today, and it doesn't take much to turn a society into a fog of nothingness. A bit of leeway regarding police forces, a bit of good old propaganda, and now you can't speak, nothing is true anymore.

AwaAwa 5y ago
As an immigrant, and therefore not beholden to either side, it is hard for me to distinguish whether your last line is with regard to Russia, or the US. Which is very much the point of the article.
- agumonkey 5y ago
  It was about Russia, but I see this creeping up a little bit in France. The recent president was a bit too quick to put police blocks everytime there was a manifestation. They were a little more brutal and unhinged than usual and the president didn't seem to be annoyed about it. If he pushes further in that direction I'll be afraid of the police in the streets and will suddenly lie about my beliefs in public out of fear of being threatened or arrested. Western countries have flaws, yeah the media spread bullshit depending on which interests each channel has, US police is too gun-ready, the financial world is rigged, etc etc but so far people can still speak up, it's a subtle but crucial difference.

Enginerrrd 5y ago

The thing about the Nazi's is it wasn't just the obvious "Jews are bad" stuff. They really framed themselves as being scientific and holding an interest in not just making the nation better but humanity itself. They did a lot to project strength, progress, modernization and scientific thought and inspire people to get behind them. Of course, it all blends together... There was insidious breadth in their messaging... They would do things like go to elementary schools and cherry pick the most pathetic and weak (who "happened" to be stereotypically jewish-looking) child and then pick a child known amongst their peers to be athletic, intelligent, and handsome/beautiful (and who "happened" to be Aryan-looking) and then they'd talk 'scientifically' about the distinctive features of the two races, and the physical differences between the two children, espousing the 'good genes' of the Aryan looking kid. Even today, in 'more virtuous' societies, people love to think of themselves as superior to others in some capacity. It's less common to emphasize the inferiority of others, especially using race as a basis, but at the end of the day, we're talking about basically the same human tendency toward contempt.

akvadrako 5y ago

This is something Jordan Peterson talks about often and he's done quite a bit of research on. I know (I would say) that I wouldn't become a Nazi, but only because I'm aware of how easy it is. But something similar I can't recognize? The best approach is probably to stay humble and assume you can't tell the difference between good and bad.

aklemm 5y ago
Research or merely reading?

BarbaPeru 5y ago

Me too, it is simple to judge after the facts. In the future we will be judged the same way, and many will not understand how we could not see the catastrophic end of our journey.