From Marko, the Munchkin Wrangler, comes a link to this story about off-duty photos taken by the Germans who worked at Auschwitz.
Read his post about this.
I hope he won't mind, but for your consideration, let me quote the last two paragraphs of his post:
"I look at the faces of those SS officers, laughing and having a good time at their hunting lodge only a few miles from the extermination camp, and I know one thing for sure: none of them were evil in their own minds. They were all, to the last man and woman, convinced that their cause was righteous, and that what they were doing every day was necessary and morally justified. None of them could have made it a week at their jobs if they hadn't thought their own actions to be normal. Like Robert Heinlein said: the enemy is never the enemy in his own eyes.
"Evil is rampant in the world, but it's not tied to a nationality, religion, skin color, or other factor...and when you propose to fight it by wiping out a group that shares any of those identifiers, you are already well on the path of evil yourself. When you accept that premise, the most important groundwork is already laid--the tilling of your mind--and then putting on the uniform and herding the Others to the gas chamber at gunpoint is a comparatively easy step."
Well said, Marko. Bravo.
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3 comments:
I didn't mention it over on Markos blog but that was the most frightening thing about the movie Conspiracy, a recreation of the Wannsee conference one cannot help but be frightened at the fact that only one person involved seems to be evil, the rest are clerks and functionaries worried about the logistical problems involved in implementing policy.
Except for the subject matter, it's just another meeting.
That's the most terrifying thing about the Holocaust, that for the most part, the people carrying it out were just doing their job.
Or so they saw themselves.
Yes, and when a military dictator takes over here in America after toppling a President who is "soft on terror" in order to "protect us from the terrorist threat to America", the majority of Americans will shrug and go about their business, and the majority of American police officers will just shrug and keep just doing their job, even when their "job" starts including rounding up various prominent liberals as "providing material support to terrorists". Don't think it can't happen here.
-Badtux the Watchin-the-slide Penguin
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