[quote]Cortes wrote:
[quote]ephrem wrote:
…perhaps i’m simply a better person than you?
I kid, but is it really necessary to trot out Nazis again and again?
Repeat a lie over and over again and people will start to believe it’s true.
The dehumanisation of Jews began long before the Endlosung. IOW, they prepped the germans to think of Jews as subhuman. I kill mosquitos without a shred of guilt. I can’t imagine thinking the same about another human being, but many a nazi did.
The most important aspect of my way of living is honesty. Clear, unrelenting and bold honesty. Without that, you’re right; it would just be a go-with-the-flow kind of thing. Wishywashy.
You’ve made me change how i format my posts. Don’t know how, but i’ll keep it this way.[/quote]
In Sloth’s defense, eph, using Nazis as examples in a moral relativity argument is extremely relevant, as they are a perfect study: A society only a few years removed from us, that virtually everyone, in every society in the whole world, can agree was fucking evil. Argue this or argue that, but it’s pretty hard for anyone to say that they actually feel, deep down, that the Nazis were just going with their own feelings, doing what was right for their particular situation and society at the time.
I just got done watching the Russian film “Come and See,” and had my eyes opened to a heretofore unknown aspect of the pure, absolute evil that the Nazis embodied. Ever seen it? There’s a long scene where they load an entire Belorussian village, basically peasants, men, women, little boys and girls, babies, all, into a wooden church house. They tell the adults that they can leave through the side windows, but they will have to leave their children inside. After shooting round after round into the farmhouse, laughing maniacally, they set the entire thing on fire, burning up every last person remaining inside. One woman is “allowed” to escape. She brings her toddler, but they throw the child back into the window, drag her away by her hair and rape her repeatedly. At the end of the movie, we learn that this happened some 628 times.
Now, again, can any one of you tell me that it just happens to be because of the particular environment that you were raised in that you happen to find this morally repugnant? Can you think of any excuse for this?
No, using Nazis in internet debates may be cliched, but when the example calls for some pure, unadulterated, absolutely Satanic evil, the Nazis are your go-to guys every time. [/quote]
Chiming in just to say that, yes, using the Nazis as a case study can be fruitful, and sometimes extremely relevant. What you described above is harrowing.
In my mind, the Asch conformity experiments only go so far to explain the sort of situation you’ve described. Not quite made up my mind how/why this happens.
As for moral compasses, and where people get theirs from. I can’t accept that it all flows from judeo-christian tenents. Yes, a lot of it does, but at the end of the day, we guarantee our own moral compass. We declare some of the teachings as immoral or irrelevant.
For me, the clincher is in the fact that I don’t believe that such commandments are god given. It means that we’re building civilisations on moral guidelines given to us by men of old. I’m ok with that, just as long as we remember that these commandments are man made.