[lbo-talk] Iraq war "clearer" to Americans than WW 2

loupaulsen at attbi.com loupaulsen at attbi.com
Mon Apr 7 13:42:09 PDT 2003



> 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?
>
> Jim F.

I'm no expert on moral judgments, Jim, I'm a communist, not a priest :-) But I always thought that whole line of argument about how the Germans must have been especially bad people because they didn't speak up and so on, both in the simple form and in the elaborated sociological form about the 'authoritarian personality', was an unconvincing line. Furthermore that line is a defense mechanism in itself: it blames genocides, war crimes, etc., on people being "unnaturally bad". The corollary is that we, who know ourselves and our friends and neighbors to be generally good people, are in no danger of doing any such bad things.

Genocides, historic crimes, etc. are mostly not the work of monsters. They might (or might not) be envisioned by monsters, but they are mostly implemented by "ordinary people" (see the book of that name) and are thought at the time to be ordinary, necessary life activities:

"When you are young,

You learn about life;

And then you grow up

And commit mass murders. [...]

Mass murder is just

Part of your life

(As the train pulls in

And you raise your knife)"

-- "Punjab 1947"

Someday someone will be asking how it was possible for the US to find people morally deficient enough to be executioners, prison guards, Chicago police officers, army recruiters, bomber pilots, etc., and how it was that everyone didn't "speak up" about the mass roundups of immigrants, the torture camp at Guantanamo, and so on. Personally I think that with the exception of a few people suffering from definite disorders, people are generally just about as moral as they can be, given the information, reinforcers, and structure that surround them.

This was also my position a few weeks ago, by the way, when I was defending the radical proposition that a clergyman accused of complicity in the killing of the Tutsis in Rwanda had a right to a lawyer.

LP



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list