I've generally tried to avoid comparisons to Germany in WWII. Most such posts tend to be alarmist, imho, and much like 'The Boy Who Cried Wolf', it's become too easy to tune such things out. (I do generally click on them anyway, though. In order to evaluate the arguments for myself - and in some cases I do learn some interesting bits about the time period.)
It's been a while since I'd read up on the topic, and I'm by no means a historian or dedicated scholar to the topic. What's about to come up is the (rather typical, for me) musings that combine a variety of different sources into my own understanding of the subject. In other words: Reader Beware, Enter At Your Own Risk.
WWII and the Holocaust are important for a variety of reasons. It's the most recent 'Great War', in which nations truly rose or fell upon the consequences. It had a clear sense of good and evil (once word of what was going on got out), so that soldiers who fought against Germany could legitimately take pride in doing so. That sense of good vs evil transcended the more normal historical trend in which each side paints their opponent in the worst colours and makes horrific claims about how evil they were, and most of the time neither side is any better or worse than the other. This time the other side truly had done terrible things.
It's also interesting, because most of the people involved were - well - ordinary. If humanity has a spectrum of good and evil...
If saints illustrate the best of human nature, and serial killers and other sinners the worst...
Then it's shocking that so much harm could have been carried out by people who, in other circumstances, are no better or worse than any of us.
The history of the Holocaust reminds us that evil doesn't come in with claws, fangs, and devil horns, it generally looks just like us.
Studying the history of the Holocaust (and the other dark elements of human nature) is important for a variety of reasons. Only one of them is because, if we're honest with ourselves, we all have the same innate potential for good and evil as anyone else, and we could easily be complicit in the Holocaust, just as many Germans were. In hindsight it's easy to see that they were wrong, easy to think that if we were living in that time period we would somehow be different... but unless we understand the forces that led to it, we're probably wrong.
So what are these forces? Well... scholars have been debating that for a long time now, and I don't claim to have the one true answer here. Just some basic guesses based on my understanding of human nature.
To start with...
To start with, I think it's important to revisit some classic experiments in social psychology - the Milgram experiment, Stanford prison experiment, as well as the Asch conformity experiments.
Taken altogether, they remind us that we are social beings. Being part of a group matters, and we will often ignore or dismiss anything that threatens our sense of agreement. We'll lie about which line we think is correct if we hear everyone else pick a different one. We will obey an authority figure, even if it feels wrong. And there's just something about giving one group of people power over another that leads to very, very, disturbing behavior.
If you think you'd stand up to the Nazis in Germany, you have to ask yourself - can you bring yourself to speak up when you disagree with what everyone else is saying? Are you willing to stand up to your boss if they order you to do something wrong? Would you, and be honest with yourself, pay attention to that nagging feeling that something is off, or wrong? Or does it make you uncomfortable, and you forget it as soon as you can?
That wikipedia article on the Asch conformity experiment included this statement from a subject who yielded to the majority and chose the wrong answer: At the other end of the spectrum, one "yielding" subject (who conformed in 11 of 12 critical trials) said, "I suspected about the middle – but tried to push it out of my mind."
And that's what we do, when confronted with something that challenges us. That's why we have to study these sorts of things, so we can be aware when we're trying to push something we don't want to face out of our minds. (And this, ultimately, is why I'm writing these posts. But I'll get to that towards the end.)
Germans committed horrific mass murders during WWII, and historians debate just how complicit the average person was. Yes, there was the SS, and various police forces. And then there were those who helped send trainloads of Jews to the concentration camps. Who processed the paperwork. Who were, in so many ways, utterly banal. One of the books I'd read pointed out that if there wasn't a widespread perception that Jews were a problem, and agreement with the need to get rid of them, that there would have been more reports of Germans letting Jews go when nobody else was around to enforce it. (The wikipedia article on the book also mentions some questions and concerns about the historical validity, but most of that seems to center around the role antisemitism had on this behavior, and whether or not the Germans acted differently when dealing with opposition from other groups. Like Polish Catholics. From what I can tell, those concerns don't have much to do with the main point... which is that if support wasn't widespread there were numerous opportunities to display that disagreement, and they mostly didn't happen. I actually think it's probable that once German forces were willing to massacre Jews, it wasn't much of a stretch to do the same for other 'enemies' like the Polish Catholics mentioned here, but I don't claim to know the history well enough to argue anything here and I'll get into the reasons for that belief shortly.)
It's been a while since I'd read up on the topic, and I'm by no means a historian or dedicated scholar to the topic. What's about to come up is the (rather typical, for me) musings that combine a variety of different sources into my own understanding of the subject. In other words: Reader Beware, Enter At Your Own Risk.
WWII and the Holocaust are important for a variety of reasons. It's the most recent 'Great War', in which nations truly rose or fell upon the consequences. It had a clear sense of good and evil (once word of what was going on got out), so that soldiers who fought against Germany could legitimately take pride in doing so. That sense of good vs evil transcended the more normal historical trend in which each side paints their opponent in the worst colours and makes horrific claims about how evil they were, and most of the time neither side is any better or worse than the other. This time the other side truly had done terrible things.
It's also interesting, because most of the people involved were - well - ordinary. If humanity has a spectrum of good and evil...
If saints illustrate the best of human nature, and serial killers and other sinners the worst...
Then it's shocking that so much harm could have been carried out by people who, in other circumstances, are no better or worse than any of us.
The history of the Holocaust reminds us that evil doesn't come in with claws, fangs, and devil horns, it generally looks just like us.
Studying the history of the Holocaust (and the other dark elements of human nature) is important for a variety of reasons. Only one of them is because, if we're honest with ourselves, we all have the same innate potential for good and evil as anyone else, and we could easily be complicit in the Holocaust, just as many Germans were. In hindsight it's easy to see that they were wrong, easy to think that if we were living in that time period we would somehow be different... but unless we understand the forces that led to it, we're probably wrong.
So what are these forces? Well... scholars have been debating that for a long time now, and I don't claim to have the one true answer here. Just some basic guesses based on my understanding of human nature.
To start with...
To start with, I think it's important to revisit some classic experiments in social psychology - the Milgram experiment, Stanford prison experiment, as well as the Asch conformity experiments.
Taken altogether, they remind us that we are social beings. Being part of a group matters, and we will often ignore or dismiss anything that threatens our sense of agreement. We'll lie about which line we think is correct if we hear everyone else pick a different one. We will obey an authority figure, even if it feels wrong. And there's just something about giving one group of people power over another that leads to very, very, disturbing behavior.
If you think you'd stand up to the Nazis in Germany, you have to ask yourself - can you bring yourself to speak up when you disagree with what everyone else is saying? Are you willing to stand up to your boss if they order you to do something wrong? Would you, and be honest with yourself, pay attention to that nagging feeling that something is off, or wrong? Or does it make you uncomfortable, and you forget it as soon as you can?
That wikipedia article on the Asch conformity experiment included this statement from a subject who yielded to the majority and chose the wrong answer: At the other end of the spectrum, one "yielding" subject (who conformed in 11 of 12 critical trials) said, "I suspected about the middle – but tried to push it out of my mind."
And that's what we do, when confronted with something that challenges us. That's why we have to study these sorts of things, so we can be aware when we're trying to push something we don't want to face out of our minds. (And this, ultimately, is why I'm writing these posts. But I'll get to that towards the end.)
Germans committed horrific mass murders during WWII, and historians debate just how complicit the average person was. Yes, there was the SS, and various police forces. And then there were those who helped send trainloads of Jews to the concentration camps. Who processed the paperwork. Who were, in so many ways, utterly banal. One of the books I'd read pointed out that if there wasn't a widespread perception that Jews were a problem, and agreement with the need to get rid of them, that there would have been more reports of Germans letting Jews go when nobody else was around to enforce it. (The wikipedia article on the book also mentions some questions and concerns about the historical validity, but most of that seems to center around the role antisemitism had on this behavior, and whether or not the Germans acted differently when dealing with opposition from other groups. Like Polish Catholics. From what I can tell, those concerns don't have much to do with the main point... which is that if support wasn't widespread there were numerous opportunities to display that disagreement, and they mostly didn't happen. I actually think it's probable that once German forces were willing to massacre Jews, it wasn't much of a stretch to do the same for other 'enemies' like the Polish Catholics mentioned here, but I don't claim to know the history well enough to argue anything here and I'll get into the reasons for that belief shortly.)
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