Yes
Then youâre good imo.
Everyone is responsible for what they do to a certain extent (people seem to fight me on this when I suggest they are responsible for things like their CO2 emissions), but the blaming of the soldiers is a dangerously wrong thing to do whether itâs the US soldiers, the Russians or the Germans in WW2. Itâs dangerous because it suggests that they were different than people are here and now. People are the same and people here and now would react the same way people then did in the same circumstances. Being aware of that should help people be more alert at early signs and more critical of things like falling in line in times of war.
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This is a galaxy-brain bad level take.
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Wrong and, as a Jew, you should know better. You donât get ânever againâ by thinking it was something special about Germans.
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It wasnât something special about the Germans, and as a jew you should absolutely be fucking blaming the German soldiers. Jesus Christ this isnât hard.
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Even the Russian stuff is ridiculous. the Russian army engaged in mass rape in Eastern Europe in WW2 amongst other atrocities.
It is hard actually.
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Ukrainians were engaged in widespread shooting of Jews.
No, itâs not. There arenât shades of gray about the fucking holocaust and the soldiers who fought on the side trying to exterminate a people. In your search to make a stupid point youâve extended yourself into fucking absurdity.
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No itâs not. Itâs what Hannah Arendt said.
I mean, you seem to understand that people are a product of their environment, people are afraid, people are vulnerable to patriotism and propaganda, people just accept things as normal, etc, which, I donât know if itâs weird or not for someone who was putting people in prison in the country with the most people per capita in prison in the world.
I canât tell if thatâs ironic or anti-ironic.
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Things are getting a little charged, but I think this is a discussion worth having. Just try to keep the discourse respectful of one another.
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Bit harsh as a mod to narrow that to him. I see this daily in loads of threads from everybody!
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Arendtâs banality of evil posited that someone like Eichmann didnât actually think about the things that he did and therefore was not a rational person with real responsibility for his actions. Thatâs never been a consensus position amongst⌠anyone really. You could make a better case for some grunt on the front lines that would be reasonable, but when youâre saying that one of the major organizers of the holocaust isnât responsible for their actions, youâve clearly lost the plot.
Shit thatâd be like saying Rumsfeld shouldnât be held for his actions in the run up to the Iraq War. There were factors outside his control!
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When I was a kid solitary confinement was just universally considered torture. Possibly mistaken or exaggerated stories were told about people going insane after like a week or something. Now, there are 50000 people in it in the US, many in there for years. Itâs not the holocaust of course, but itâs fucking horrible and almost everyone in the US just accepts it.
The US dropped more bombs in tonnage on Cambodia and Laos in the Vietnam war than were dropped by all sides by everyone including the atomic bomb in WW2. People have an amazing capacity to ignore horrors.
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I was going to ask, can we maybe excise this discussion? Overall Iâd rather have a more (canât excise opinion entirely of course) discussion-y/opinion-y Ukraine/war thread and a more events driven (of course propoganda fairly significant there so maybe a futile exercise). Iâm just guessing that most of the forum is more interested in the latter than the former given its mostly the same half dozen or so people weighing in on the former.
My point was about the ordinary German soldier. It was ridiculous that only 10 people were hung at Nuremberg, but generally blaming the whole generation of Germans is minimizing the dangers of things like patriotism generally.
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I remember when bush said iraq had wmdâs I thought it was obvious he was lying tell wise but got drowned out in the arguments obviously like always. Makes sense why I got into poker after that I suppose.
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