https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/ikvmpv/black_american_jesse_owens_wins_an_olympic_gold/
Super cool. Definitely a good thing that reddit isn't being used to radicalize people to the alt-right, otherwise this comment might be a bit problematic, eh?
Im so sick of people bringing up Schindler like that. There is a reason you know Schindler. A reason he has 100 books and movies. Hint: its not because his actions were common
There is a reason you know Schindler. A reason he has 100 books and movies.
Capitalist PR propaganda?
Look, not everyone who was a registered and participating member of the NSDAP was a Nazi, okay? Some people joined for the hors d'oeuvres at the meetings.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht
Every time I think we've reached a peak in how fucking derranged segments of society are becoming I remember what a dumbass I am.
About a decade ago when NextDoor became a thing it fucking blew my brain out of my ears. I already knew libs were apologist spineless pieces of shit, but to see racism happening realtime from neighbors who I recognized all around me, just fucking surrounded by them, really drove it home. Like, no matter how woke you think your white community is, be they bougie or be they broke, a gigantic terrifying cross section of them will consistently be fash, cryptofash or protofash. Like clockwork.
Oh man, I didn't know about NextDoor until my friends who live in the burbs had kids. Suddenly I started to realize why they were becoming increasingly concerned about black people coming from the city to loot their houses and shit. These are people who were NEVER this fucking stupid before, but as society became a little less comfortable, media went into overdrive, and they started reading paranoid bullshit in NextDoor, they started thinking this shit was more plausible.
Quite literally if a black person drove down the street there would be a NextDoor post about someone "casing the neighborhood."
Good take: not everyone who served as a soldier under the Nazi regime intended to do evil stuff, which is why you should be careful about following nationalist leaders who glorify the military even if you think he wouldn't do anything wrong.
Bad take: not everyone who served as a soldier under the Nazi regime intended to do evil stuff, which is why the Nazis as a group should be forgiven some of their crimes/some of the Nazis should be considered less responsible.
Flaming garbage take: not everyone who served as a soldier under the Nazi regime intended to do evil stuff, which is why your obsession with playing as them in a videogame/obsessing over their historical wars/having pictures & posters of Nazis in your room is a good thing and shows nuance instead of revealing that you're a braindead fascist chud. Bonus points for 'but the Nazis fought the Communists, who were worse'.
Trust reddit to pick the flaming garbage take every time.
Good reddit post here about (lack of) punishments for refusing to commit war crimes once you were enlisted: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6zpwuy/what_happened_to_members_of_the_german_military/
I can't find any good sources on the specific punishments for refusing conscription, but the majority of soldiers who joined 1935-1939 were volunteers. I'm assuming that refusing to be drafted wasn't a viable option during WWII, but leading up to it, there appears to have been a great deal of leeway.
I know it's dumb to focus on the personal merit of individuals who are caught up in a great evil machine like the Nazi Party, but I think this is an interesting window into how people view "evil."
I assume it's a cultural thing reinforced by the myths that surround us, but I think a lot of people expect "evil" to be like the Emperor from Star Wars or Snidely Whiplash: bad people doing bad things with no real justification beyond the fact that it feels good to do bad. Now, I actually do think that sometimes people are capable of being precisely like this. I recently read the book Kill Anything That Moves and it's clear that the US soldiers carrying out atrocities in Vietnam were motivated by personal greed (which was reinforced by US Army ideology/practices). The kill counts looked good on their record. The ones killing innocent civilians didn't usually seem to have any justification beyond that and racism.
But I think the far more commonplace, and therefore greater, evil is that of carelessness. Of looking away from the plight of the global south, at best wringing their hands and giving money to a do-nothing non-profit to soothe their conscience. Of, say, voting for Joe Biden and then doing nothing else rather than working hard at any kind of political action. The evils of the White Moderate MLK warned of, or for instance the Northerners who knew something had to be done about slavery but passed the buck for nearly a century. The carelessness of being a cog in a machine and never once stopping to examine that machine as a whole, your place in it, or what you grinding to a halt might do to said machine.
I don't know, maybe trying to draw a distinction between active, malicious evil and a passive, careless evil ultimately doesn't matter? Whether or not you're personally executing jews or just stamping papers in an office, it all amounts to the same thing in the end. When Luz Long chose to serve in the Whermacht he chose to support Nazi ideology, so maybe it doesn't matter that the guy apparently didn't hate black people. By not fighting back and accepting your place in the machine, surely you are complicit in the crimes of the machine? So it doesn't matter if you are personally honorable and just or a raving homicidal lunatic if the end result is still the holocaust.
It's a complicated thing, I suppose, the nature of evil.
the smokescreen and flash grenade are just as much important military tools as as guns.
the liberals won't shoot you. they'll just blind and disable you until the fascists do. same fucking machine.
If you haven't already read, discussions about the "banality of evil" touch on this very issue, i.e. how can we reconcile extraordinarily horrific actions with their very ordinary perpetrators.
It’s a complicated thing, I suppose, the nature of evil.
it really isn't
People need to bone up on Hannah Arendt's The Banality of Evil because that studies exactly as you said, and she was looking into it by studying honest to god Nazis.
But he was drafted (not voluntarily) into the Wehrmacht and in the last years expressed his doubts and disillusionment with the Nazi regime (more details in the German wiki).
Oh, that makes it better.
Also some people seem really triggered by me saying “not all Nazis are evil.” I guess they misinterpreted that as Nazi-apologism, which was not at all my intention. I’m simply pointing out the fact that we cannot lump everyone under a nametag and just assume they are all “evil.”
I mean... sure. But the guy still did the nazi salute at the Olympics. Kind of... hard... to mental gymnastics that away, even if he was friends with a black athlete and that athlete attended/cared for the guys kid after he got shot/killed in a battle for the party that he "supported"/saluted for.
(Being fair though: If he DIDN'T salute, I'm sure Hitler would've sent him off to be gassed/etc.)
This is pretty tame. ANAB obviously but I legit don’t know any Jew IRL willing to say all wermacht were bad. I’m a Jew from a pretty Jewish place, needless to say, I know a lot of jews. I liked the recent three arrows vid on the subject.
Read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_the_clean_Wehrmacht
Obviously no one wants to take the so-called 'extreme' position that all members of any group are evil or unjust, but that gets widened to "no, they were largely conscripted", then to "well, they just loved their country", and then to "they didn't really participate in that whole Nazi project anyway", and then to the reality of "Now they control West Germany and are protected by the CIA".
