On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, joanna bujes wrote:
> But, in the case of east european anti-semitisim, hmmmmm. I'd be glad to
> find out I'm wrong, but from what I understand, the death camps could
> not have happened without local help and a lot of it....though I grant
> that the death camps were a German idea and not a east european idea.
>
> Joanna
The reasoning above assumes that people simply act on the basis of their attitudes (harsh anti-sem = death camps). In fact, attitudes are very poor predictors of behavior; people often act the way they do in social situations due to situational factors, not due to their own positive or negative attitudes (the classic demonstration of this is the Milgram studies). The sad fact is that people will typically obey legitimate authority, regardless of their personal beliefs or attitudes. (You don't need to be an anti-semite to be a guard at a concentration camp; you just need to be convinced the person giving the orders is a legitimate authority figure.) --Hence the ease with which war is conducted, even if people's religious and moral beliefs are clearly contradicted. (Can anybody who's read the Sermon on the Mount believe that Jesus would have supported the idea of not just war but preemptive war? We'll have to revise Matt 5:38: "whosoever looks like he's going to slap you--beateth him the fuck up!")
Miles