Nazis and the Nature of Evil

[Yukaphile]

Also blame 70 years of Allied propaganda becoming the mainstream, thus it's easier to demonize German victims and sort of handwave those who victimized them because we think of them as victims too even when they are not or only victims in a vague, abstract way like how I'm a victim of... of... well, some ancient thing Britain did to France or whatever (I'm part British, part French). It's insidious to fight, going against the conventional wisdom, because people will brand you as a horrible person. But it needs to be done.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I just still can't wrap my head around it. but also, I take back describing the Albert Fish murder in cartoon villain ways, I should have said something like he described the murder in sickening detail and appeared to be both proud and aroused by it.

You're fixating on the morality of it quite a bit (not to come down on you really, just continuing my issue with this topic)... but to me it's just a matter of objectification. Very widespread and common and downright pathological with a lot of people. It's more rare to be someone that emphasizes sympathy than to be a normal person that has a history of objectifying someone to a considerable degree. The sadism aside, Hitler is historically the worst person we consider on that spectrum, albeit with a lot of respect to the context. We don't measure his actions indiscriminately though, we look at him with the lens of oppression as it applies to all known socially dynamic landscapes.

It's really interesting that we consider Hitler to be worst person in history over every other historical person who is also considered "evil". Maybe it's because Hitler lived during 20th century and during his reign he and other Nazis were horrible people as well as had started WWII. So that it's still relatively recent with there still being some people alive that were already around back then as well that time being well known to even those of us that had been born decades later and even to Americans that usually only care about they own country's history thanks to them having had major part to play and Hollywood still making movies about that time. Then again Stalin was also equally bad but we don't regard him as bad as Hitler because he was on side of winners with his Soviet Union having had played major part in ending WWII destroying Hitler's Third Reich.

Well as far as the centrism that you started to allude to, there's really horrible stuff in America's past as well that tends to get dissolved in our hindsight. When I'm reading about "whataboutism" on Wikipedia, I'm really not sure how to make of the example they use when the USSR calls America out at the UN about its past and I'm thinking, "well yeah, but what about it makes America not accountable?"

Anyways, on a lighter note, I was at a local organic grocery store/cafe when a familiar regular was there who seemed bent on collective progressive mindsets, delving into the topic we're approaching about how liberals fixate on Hitler. Bringing up Stalin's death toll is understandable of course, but getting into the political sequencing between Hitler and Mussolini to the point that I couldn't really follow or care... I mean I really don't have a problem with Hitler being as notorious as we're talking about.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

Also blame 70 years of Allied propaganda becoming the mainstream, thus it's easier to demonize German victims and sort of handwave those who victimized them because we think of them as victims too even when they are not or only victims in a vague, abstract way like how I'm a victim of... of... well, some ancient thing Britain did to France or whatever (I'm part British, part French). It's insidious to fight, going against the conventional wisdom, because people will brand you as a horrible person. But it needs to be done.

I'm having a hard time grasping what you're getting at when you talk about victims? Is it possible to be a little more specific what you're getting at as far as victimizers being victimized?

[Yukaphile]

We applied collective guilt to the Germans, and just spammed it at them to the point it's all they think about today, so when the survivors today come out with their stories, it's also filtered through a lens of "Nazis vs. Soviets." And because the Germans led an unprovoked invasion, well, we can conclude the Soviets, at first, had the moral high ground to fight back. Then Stalin was very blase about how badly his pig-soldiers would abuse the women and girls they came across just because they wanted to "own" something pretty, like the treasures they stole. So it's always filtered through a lens of "Germans are guilty, the Soviets are victims." And that's hard to fight. We also misdiagnose them. Most people know that war is hard, but citing their hardships was "traumatizing" and how that led to their brutality I think misses the point. They were raised with excessively patriarchal views, and heavy drinking combined with malnutrition and problems in the digestive tract can lead to psychosis or dementia, which might explain the fact they tortured, brutalized, raped, and murdered innocent civilians out of "trauma-fueled barbarism." I think it's more of a perfect storm of circumstances in coming from impoverished regions, having little, being raised with wrong views, and then being thrown into a very hard war, and so they exploited it to fullest potential, seeing themselves as free-riders and conquerors, not liberators, not heroes. I've seen web sites honoring those women who were the real victims of these crimes right alongside those committing said crimes citing how propaganda-fueled war films are "generous with their sympathy" for the "traumatized soldiers" as well as their victims and so on. It really seems that people are going out of their way to try and misrepresent them simply because we're decent people who hate fighting, who don't think in those crude terms as they did, who cannot understand somebody who thinks that way, who was always that way, who has sunk so deep into chemical insanity because of their own vices that had nothing to do with war hardships, so much as bad lifestyle choices, that we try to apply something else to them, that makes more sense. Doesn't help victim-blaming and trying to wave away the guilty is as old as human civilization.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I think this whole thing about Soviets being victimized is all in your head really.

[Yukaphile]

I hope so, but some people are so damned stupid, they are out there, and they exist. Don't doubt that. Are they the majority? I sure bloody hope not...

[Mecha82]

To be fair that's how German soldiers and especially SS also treated Russian girls and women as well as killing Russian civilians (they were told that Slavic people are inferior to them) when they were invading USSR so likely those Soviet troops found justification from that. There are stories from Finnish soldiers that were part of SS troops that they didn't know what was going on behind lines on areas that they had already taken. Both Nazis and Soviets did terrible things to each other's civilians. As they say two wrongs don't make right.

[BridgeConsoleMasher]

I don't get what that has to do with victimizers being victimized.

[Mecha82]

Simply put, nothing. I just wanted to point out that neither side is innocent when it comes to treatment of each other's civilians including girls and women because while talking about what Red Army did to German girls and women it's easy to forget that Nazis did same when they were invading.

[Yukaphile]

Yeah, but collective guilt applied to the Germans and the USSR technically at first having the moral high ground means people kind of subconsciously like to make excuses for them. Especially if it's applied to white women having this done to them by ethnic minorities, because... there is stigmatization against white people today, because we've been the rulers for centuries, and it's bled over onto them when it should not be, because Germany and Poland and every other Western nation back then was a patriarchy that put women down and tried to hold them back as much as the US. And when these survivors today speak up, they have to frame in context of the Nazis just because they're Germanic white women, which is fucked up. They shouldn't have to take the burden of responsibility of the criminal party onto themselves. I also really doubt women at the time when it was happening to them in droves would show such sympathy to those guilty, like certain political agendas like to make it seem. They felt bad for what the Nazis had done, sure, but that's a far cry from being predisposed to making excuses for them and thinking they were "traumatized," though that paints my own view, that they were good people, not "perpetrators of crimes against humanity" simply for being brainwashed by a corrupt state when they weren't engaged in immoral or illegal acts, or to have their own crimes against humanity downplayed. It's also statistically true that the USSR had the biggest "body count" (in the worst sense of the word) because they had the largest army in the war, of all the nations involved. And that those in charge were quite blase about that. It's also one thing to suggest it's a good way to spread fear and put down dissent. That only applies to the commanders in charge. For the ones actually guilty of having to carry that out, it's a whole other world, a line to step over from not only doing it once and twice and three times to dozens more, but to actually carry it out and do so eagerly. Most decent people would not. And when it's theorized the high-end speculation number could be as much as fifteen million, then that's seriously twisted.