Lave wrote:
Doctor Glyndwr wrote:
Mr Chris wrote:
They weren't evil monsters, like you could argue the footsoldiers of the Nazis were. Just regular guys, being told to go and sit in a trench and shoot at other regular guys for no fucking reason at all.
This was true of a hell of a lot of German soldiers in WWII of course, mind you. Very few frontline soldiers were Nazi party members, for example.
Yeah, you don't even need to 'argue' it. The Nazi army wasn't evil. It wasn't filled with evil people. It was filled with people who thought they were good honourable people that were making the world a better place.
I really hate terms like 'evil monsters' and crap like that because it hides us from the bigger problem. What is it about humans that means that good honest nice people can do what the nazi's did?
In the same way that we consider ourselves 'good honest people' but in one 113 year olds person life away in the future, they may well be talking about how all of us in the west were evil monsters for the way we exploited the rest of the world for our comfortable lives.
I think we've had this conversation before on here, about good and evil as sweeping generalisations. And I do see your point, really I do.
But there certainly were a lot of people in the German armed forces, and elsewhere, who were entirely and happily complicit in the evils that the German state got up to. Does that make them evil? Well, for want of a more wishy washy term, yes. It does. SS soldiers who happily gunned down Jews were evil. Administrators who ran slave labour factories were evil. They may have thought they were acting for the greater good of the Fatherland, but that doesn't excuse what they did. Nationalism isn't a moral soap.
Sorry if that offends a sense of relativism and understanding, but there we are.