[dtien]

There's a great movie that's worth a watch if you are interested in this history. It's a fictionalized ( and likely highly dramatized ) version of a real meeting[0] that took place between the SS leaders and German governmental types at the midway point of the War to discuss the "final solution" for the Jews.

But it does illustrate how regular men whether through self-interest, fear, bullying, or expediency will let themselves be talked into, or rationalize themselves into some truly horrific things by fanatical types.

I believe I caught it on Netflix or HBO[1].

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(2001_film)

[jacquesm]

Why watch movies about the past when you can observe these things in real life all around you?

The biggest question in my head is where do these power types find the large numbers of people to execute their ill plans? It seems like someone is always ready to jump into the role of camp guard at the first opportunity.

[dtien]

Well something about history and being doomed to repeat it...

But to your question, I don't think it's ever presented to the camp counselors that way initially. I'm sure there's a certain percentage that are maniacs and true believers that are itching to be the camp hall monitors, but I'd wager that's about 10% or less.

I'm sure it all starts with morally defensible, likely very reasonable ideas of personal security or welfare. "I'm keeping my family safe!". Before it slowly starts devolving, and you find yourself rationalizing or being an apologist for the higher ups decisions. And then before long, you're the one pulling the trigger, or kicking someone into the chamber.

I"m sure that's simplifying it by about 1000x, but I'm sure there's some truth there.

Fear of the outsider and self preservation are strong motivators...

How we fight that is probably a better question.

[LyndsySimon]

> How we fight that is probably a better question.

For me, the answer to that question is to advocate for reducing the power and scope of government at all levels, by maintaining the weapons and skills necessary to effectively resist, and by ensuring others have the right to do the same.

[elcapitan]

Another thing which is quite important is to prevent the creation of systems that enable people to abstract away other people's humanity. One of the main reasons why the nazis established this complex system of bureaucracies, secrecy, many points from defamation, registration, exclusion, deportation, degradation to finally extinction and disposal is that the early versions (grab men, women and children from a village, dig a hole and let soldiers shoot them in the head) was, even for tough people, hard to deal with. Having a complex bureaucracy with many small steps towards extinction allows for big-level atrocities. So checking for small things is just as important as preventing the big crime.

[jacquesm]

That's an absolutely amazing realization that I had never seen put to words anywhere. The 'yes ladder' of genocide. Thank you.

[jacquesm]

Replying to my own comment after thinking some more about this: It also explains to a large extent the choice of gas for the murders. After all you can open a gas tap a long way away from where the people are that you are going to kill, in fact the person opening the valve may not even know what they are doing (unlikely in this case, but still you could easily arrange it that way).

Everybody else is just doing their job right? Herd a bunch of people into a room, remove a bunch of corpses from a room. Nothing to do with killing anybody, or so you could delude yourself.

This also ties in with why I'm so totally against drones, robots and other kinds of remote warfare (including aerial bombardment), they make it so much easier to pretend you're not killing real people.

[danieltillett]

Complex bureaucracies allow people to avoid personal responsibility for the outcome - the smaller your percentage contribution to the final decision the easier it is to disown the result emotionally (look at general elections to see this effect in action).

The other major factor is that many small steps are required to turn average people into killers. The military know this hence all the training to get soldiers to kill - it doesn’t take many months to train someone to pull a trigger, but it does take many months to get them to point a gun a person and pull the trigger. There is a fantastic book on this topic On Killing [1].

1. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B00J90F8W2/

[jacquesm]

> reducing the power and scope of government at all levels

Well, you need some level of government

> by maintaining the weapons and skills necessary to effectively resist

That's for the most part an illusion that may give you some comfort but that will likely not be of much practical use if and when tshtf.

[LyndsySimon]

> Well, you need some level of government

While I disagree, let's start with whatever you believe should be reduced or eliminated. Let's work together to make that happen, and once that's done, we can look for the next area of agreement.

> That's for the most part an illusion that may give you some comfort but that will likely not be of much practical use if and when tshtf.

For an individual? Yeah, pretty much. That's what the third part of my statement was about.

[jacquesm]

Others having the right to do the same implies a government of sorts. The alternative is anarchy and I don't think you'd like it, and another problem is that groups would coalesce anyway and would take over a group of anarchists with relative easy because of their better organization.

We are where we are for a whole pile of very good reasons.