Jim Farmelant wrote:
>
>
>
> Does this mean that we should ease up in our judgements
> of the Germans who lived under the Third Reich. I remember
> being in taught in school, how bad the Germans were because
> they wouldn't speak up, when Hitler's regime was waging
> unjustified wars, and committing ghastly crimes like
> the Holocaust. And yet, weren't all the mechanisms,
> that Lou outlines below, in operation, thereby explaining
> the silence, and indeed the acquiescence of the German
> people under the Third Reich?
>
Yes. I would go beyond this. It makes rough sense for people to proceed along the lines Lou describes. After all, most people have enough trouble just getting through the day, week, year, or life. On the "big" things, of which only limited information is available to them (and in the form, moreover, of ideological assumptions generated by the society in which they live), why shouldn't they more or less trust their various "leaders" (media, priests, government, teachers, etc.)? Intermittently the cracks show up more or less vividly, and some proportion, usually not large, of the community shifts its trust. It's up to that proportion to do the best they can to generate activity and forms of activity which can provide an alternative set of motives to a larger number.
This is why Carl's constant bad-mouthing of people begins to irritate. It's pointless, and detracts from the tasks of building alternative activities, which in turn can generate oppostional consciousness. (I'm assuming that for the most part opposition comes first, then only a theorization of that opposition.)
Carrol