Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Pastimes : Let's Talk About Our Feelings!!! -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: jbe who wrote (74894)	2/22/2000 1:56:00 AM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

I never said that I thought that the Nazis were in a morally ambiguous situation. From their own perspective, at least, they were not. The situation they were in was not ambiguous in the least, it was quite clear-cut. They didn't have to choose between one ethical principal and another, there was only one ethical principal at stake, the preservation of the Volk. When you say that there was "no objective need whatsoever" for the Nazis to do what they did, you ignore the fact that for the Nazis, the preservation of the Volk was, subjectively, important. By "objective," you can only mean yourself, and you can only mean that you don't agree with them. I am not saying that their choices were as good as anyone else's. I just don't know how one judges except by one's own subjective morals. I am certain that the choices that the Nazis made were wrong, by my own morals, and I don't concede that their belief that they were right makes any difference.

To: jbe who wrote (74894)	2/22/2000 11:35:00 AM
From: Daniel Schuh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 108807

Joan, there was an interesting book review this week in the dreaded bastion of the liberal media elite that discusses some of these issues. Hitler's Silent Partners, nytimes.com , a review of "Nazi Terror: The Gestapo, Jews, and ordinary Germans", by Eric A. Johnson. A clip: Johnson explains that the Gestapo performed its duties not through indiscriminate terror but by methodically singling out particular groups of victims and going after them with every pretense of legality. The Jews weren't even the first targets. They were not as dangerous to the state as the Communists, the Social Democrats and other organized political enemies, who were crushed with speed and ruthlessness after the Nazis took power. Next came the religious opponents, including the Jehovah's Witnesses. Jews didn't become a priority of the Gestapo until 1939 and the war, even though the Nuremberg Laws and a host of other restrictions had already reduced them to the direst circumstances. The other side of the Gestapo's policy was that nontargeted Germans were left pretty much alone. Johnson's statistics show that very few of these Germans -- in Krefeld the figure was about 1 percent -- were ever bothered by the Gestapo. Most of them didn't fear the Gestapo, or even know anybody who had had a run-in with the secret police -- and not because laws weren't being broken. Low-level defiance, Johnson shows, was extremely common: people told Hitler jokes, they listened to BBC broadcasts, they went to swing clubs and danced to decadent American music. But the Gestapo had more important things to worry about. In what may be his most provocative statement, Johnson says that 'most Germans may not even have realized until very late in the war, if ever, that they were living in a vile dictatorship.' This is not to say that they were unaware of the Holocaust; Johnson demonstrates that millions of Germans must have known at least some of the truth. But, he concludes, 'a tacit Faustian bargain was struck between the regime and the citizenry.' The government looked the other way when petty crimes were being committed. Ordinary Germans looked the other way when Jews were being rounded up and murdered; they abetted one of the greatest crimes of the 20th century not through active collaboration but through passivity, denial and indifference. Offhand, I'd summarize this as saying the Nazis were pretty sophisticated at harnessing the dark side of human nature for political purposes. It's particularly interesting that they cultivated and used hatred of the political opposition before moving on to the Jews. It makes Slobo and Rwanda style ethnic cleansing politics seem pretty crude by comparison, though the end result is similar. Maybe it's just harder to get a police state established than to use it once you're in control. (Taboo but irresistible aside on the political opposition: Communists and Social Democrats, er, um, in the "Sanity" view of the world I think that means anybody who's not a Republican. Of course, paradoxically, there was always the line that the rise of Hitler was due to the liberals, so never mind. In fact, never mind this last paragraph in general, it's just OCD again). Cheers, Dan.