Nazis and the Nature of Evil

[Yukaphile]

I wanna confess something here. This is VERY personal to me because of one reason. I'm really just desperate for that kind of physical connection to somebody, to feel loved, and it disgusts me people do that to others with no respect for personal space. I'm quite convinced I'll die a pathetic lonely virgin, and that cuts me to my soul, but even if I knew that with certainty, you wouldn't see me hunt down somebody to conveniently use that way just to make up for my own problems. My principles are too important to me.

[Jonathan101]

It really does feel there's an attempt here by the victims themselves to "take the suffering of the victimizers" and "blame of the Nazis" onto themselves as they retell their stories, which is abhorrent. They were civilians. It's not their duty to be kind to people like that. And then there's historians who really downplay what happened to them. Despite it being a lifelong, double trauma, they still miss the point. It's bad messaging and bad history.

I think you are making assumptions about what is going through the heads of these victims. It's an individual matter what they are trying or not trying to do or how they react or deal with it, and it isn't a matter of message or duty.

If we can't summon an inch of fucking compassion for the victims here in the worst crimes against women in human history, when there's millions of them, when we have to make it fucking political, when people shove their own agendas into this, when they downplay and victim-blame and misrepresent them, assassinate their characters, seriously, it does show we've grown very little in the last 70 years.

Growth is an illusion. Babies aren't born reading a book on world history. Humanity never learns because humanity is a concept; individuals learn, and unlearn, and relearn and so on.

[Yukaphile]

It's true, we never learn. We're preparing to refight all those ancient battles, and nothing's changed, only the players.

[Jonathan101]

I wanna confess something here. This is VERY personal to me because of one reason. I'm really just desperate for that kind of physical connection to somebody, to feel loved, and it disgusts me people do that to others with no respect for personal space. I'm quite convinced I'll die a pathetic lonely virgin, and that cuts me to my soul, but even if I knew that with certainty, you wouldn't see me hunt down somebody to conveniently use that way just to make up for my own problems. My principles are too important to me.

So you're worried that you might be so desperate for intimacy that you might have something bad in you that will make you do something terrible, and this fear makes you get very angry at people who victimise women because it hits close to home (not that you'd be okay with it if you weren't).

Well, for what it's worth, the people who fear and feel guilt about that sort of thing are unlikely to do it.

And also for what it's worth, you aren't the only late bloomer here. Doesn't mean you or I won't find someone eventually.

[Yukaphile]

Maybe a little bit. I mean, my own father was guilty of that very thing. But my mother was wise enough to raise me with Feminist values. So it's never an option. More like I'm so desperate for that, I know if not restrained, it could have led me down a bad path, in another life. I also feel personally outraged the kinds of guys who do that at least have that experience, in a twisted, evil way. Never for me. It's the mindset of an incel, sure, but I never try to deny the hardships for women in the world, a mostly male-dominated society, so it's not misogyny that gets in the way. It's just... me being a prat.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

I'd say I do want to capable because this whole debate IS my attempt to understand from people who might know better then me but I still can't grasp it.

and maybe I was using the word empathy wrong but my main point of all those times I did still stands, people like Hitler and Stalin had nothing but cruelty and hate in them. I don't see any sort of kindness in those individuals or anyone else remotely like them.

Well, firstly, it's your own biases and preconceptions that prevent you from understanding them- that isn't a knock on you, because everyone has those, but it's a thing to keep in mind. No matter how much anyone tries to explain it, the reality is that if you truly wanted to understand you'd need to challenge yourself.

As for Hitler and Stalin, it isn't like they were just born with blood on their hands. They both took paths to becoming mass murderers and they both made choices that took them down those paths, for various reasons. It is a combination of their natural personalities as well as their particular life experiences that led to them turning out the way they did, regardless of how you see them.
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I have actually sometimes opened myself up to other possibilities like when I hear some serial killers regret their crimes but since those individuals are long dead, I now have doubts they did, it can't be double checked and I have sometimes contradictory sources of information on those individuals.

and again, I know about two of American's earliest serial killers, H.H. Homes and Jane Topan. the former did literally NOTHING that didn't in some way, relate to his killings, it was the end all, be all of his life and Jane Topan was the real life Bad Seed.

[Yukaphile]

It's why I want justice so much for those victims. Past my own feelings, past the deplorable acts itself, there will never be full justice until we stop blaming the victims, and acknowledge they were subject to some of the worst crimes against humanity in human history. And people like to make this political or downplay it. It's really kind of sad. We need to stop presenting those guilty as equal victims to those they chose to hurt. They are not. I will concede this far, that they were perhaps victims of state abuse from two imperialistic powers, but that does not automatically translate to a desire to seize women and girls as crude objects to satisfy your own lusts. Most people really don't seem to comprehend the full weight of this, imo. They left behind hundreds of thousands of rape babies. No piece of media or historical essay or whatever has really painted as much of a clear picture as the direct, survivor accounts coming from real people who have names. And it's clear whatever hardships those men faced in the war, which I already acknowledged because war is hard, that the victims were left even more broken than some think they were. Than the commonly held perception. I think there needs to be sides taken here, especially important because those guilty went home and kept on doing it, most likely. We need to side with the real victims. Not pretend somehow both sides were victims. We all bleed on this planet. Some bleed worse than others. I don't see them as being traumatized by war so much as disgusting human beings who were always that way. It's why I doubt that man's account in the anonymous book. I don't think a man guilty of doing that would ever really think back on his actions and feel regret. If he did, I think he'd turn himself in, or confess publicly, let us judge him as a matter of history and record. But he doesn't wanna be known as a baby rapist because of the stigma he will get. People say there's two sides to this story. There's really only one when a man or woman or whoever else is choosing to treat somebody that way. One monster. One victim. Or maybe more on both sides. Victims and monsters. There will never be justice in our time until people realize this. But who am I kidding? Justice is a myth. Same idea behind "rights." They're a cute idea. Cute. But fictional.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I have to say, DBFan, that it's slightly amusing the prerogative you're taking upon yourself to affirm your own definitions sociopathy and empathy based solely on the outset of you and your father's characterized expression manner. I'm pretty sure that logically this falls in the realm of circular reasoning considering you are defining what other people are doing based on how it doesn't apply to you.

[Yukaphile]

My father was a rapist, pet killer, and domestic abuser. Human beings are capable of and do some pretty disgusting, evil things. It gets really bad when you bring politics into it, though.

[Dragon Ball Fan]

I have to say, DBFan, that it's slightly amusing the prerogative you're taking upon yourself to affirm your own definitions sociopathy and empathy based solely on the outset of you and your father's characterized expression manner. I'm pretty sure that logically this falls in the realm of circular reasoning considering you are defining what other people are doing based on how it doesn't apply to you.

like I said, I wasn't trying to be the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn't sociopathy and maybe I was using the wrong word the whole time, I was just trying to find a convenient way to describe evil.