• AcidSmiley [she/her]
      ·
      1 year ago

      I think the best translation is "causality of deception" or "what makes one blind to wtf is going on". It's "the straight line that leads from the jollyness of the beer cellars to the human slaughterhouses in Poland", the alcohol-and-marching-band fueled stupor of red-faced Weimar era chuds that allowed them to fully instrumentalize themselves as part of the nazi machinery. The ideological gauze they pulled over their own eyes. To give a modern example, reddit libs envisioning politics exclusively as a marvel movie is a Verblendungszusammenhang.

      • Frank [he/him, he/him]
        ·
        edit-2
        1 year ago

        That seems like a pretty good translation. The in-group/out-group dynamics that lead ordinary, boring people to commit atrocities, the effects of hazing on group solidarity but also group brutality, all that good shit. There's scads of research on it, from analyzing how bullying happens to how genocides happen. We've got the same concepts in english, we just have to use a couple of sentences instead of gluing verbs together like we're afraid we'll run out of spaces.

        Not at all coincidentally, i was having a lovely conversation about someone's flight-simulator set-up when they casually mentioned that they were ready to fight the entire Chinese airforce, entirely unprompted.