[thesmallestcat]

The sweet smell of presentism. You can perhaps fault the US for the interlude between British outlawing of slavery and the civil war/abolition, which covers a few decades. But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries. It certainly wasn't "unlimited." Onto the next bit, "stolen...IP from Europe" is a modern characterization of what was in fact a healthy exchange of research and invention between the Old and New World. Much perceived "theft" was fueled by reactionary governments making the US a more appealing locale for the learned.

[freeflight]

> But you can't seriously claim that slavery wasn't the global norm in the 17th and 18th centuries.

That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich.

While African-American GI's fought against the disfranchisement of European Jews, their own home country still had racial segregation laws in place for decades after WWII.

One could easily fathom an alternate reality where the Third Reich didn't happen/didn't turn out as extreme and as a result, racial segregation and bigotry would still be a "global standard" because humanity didn't see the worst and most extreme outcomes of it.

Who knows, a couple of decades from now the US might serve as yet another negative example for one of humanities many follies.

[chrisco255]

"Disenfranchisement" is an understatement at best. They were being exterminated. However, I don't think the world was entirely aware of just how bad it was. Information travels much much faster nowadays. At any rate, there is no other nation or point in time prior to the 20th century that you can pretend those values even exist. Even "equality" itself is a Western value. Every nation in human history has spilt blood, has violated basic human rights, and has been tribalistic in it's treatment of outsiders at various points in history. We could all be living under a North Korean-like regime right now, but instead we live in a privileged Western society that loves to loathe itself.

[freeflight]

> At any rate, there is no other nation or point in time prior to the 20th century that you can pretend those values even exist.

These "values" existed all over the world back then, driven by a scientific movement we aptly named "scientific racism" these days. You know, a whole section of science busy trying to explain why some humans are just so much "better" than other humans based on their skin color, size of the head or other arbitrary physical attributes. This followed right on the tail of an era of colonialization which was also fueled by the racial stigma of "We gotta civilize those heathen savages by enslaving them and taking their lands".

It's exactly those values being so widespread and accepted which lead to the Nazis taking the "next step", which wasn't a really big one. The difference between treating a whole group of people as "lesser humans" by law, having them act as a slave class, and "exterminating" these very same people because there are supposedly too many of them, isn't that big of a difference.

The "values" behind these two approaches are exactly the same, labeling a whole group of people as "lesser humans", the difference was only a matter of execution in how to deal with those people. The US commercialized this behavior by using the slave force, putting a price on people like they are property. Similarly, forced labor drove large parts of the Third Reich's war machine and economic progress.

This might sound cold-hearted or like I'm trying to excuse the crimes of the Third Reich, none of this is my intention, my intention merely to point out how whole nations can be hypocrites about their own moral position because they didn't kill disfranchised people on a supposedly "industrialized scale", but "only" on a commercialized one.

[chrisco255]

Do you know how scathingly critical the French and English were of each other for centuries? At one point, France and England participated in a hundred year war. Europe was engaged in intra-racial international war for hundreds if not thousands of years. Nations and tribes on every continent battled each other with fierce brutality. Look at how the Japanese conquered the Chinese during WWII. When I look at world history, I just see ugly bitter wars and disputes going back to the stone age punctured by precious few moments of relative peace.

The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.

[freeflight]

> Do you know how scathingly critical the French and English were of each other for centuries?

Which was exactly my point, it was the de-facto standard for the longest time and one of the major factors for colonialization, that went on until the Third Reich and at that point, most of humanity decided: "Nope, don't want anything like that anymore".

That still didn't excuse the Third Reich or their crimes, it still serves as a "negative example" and will most likely do so for the foreseeable future. In that regard you are vastly underestimating the importance of the Nürnberg trials in the creation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its influence on the world community.

> The idea of world peace and equality in general was laughable until nuclear proliferation made total war among the world powers suicidal somewhere around the mid 20th century.

Nuclear proliferation mostly impacts governments behavior imho you are overestimating its impact on social progress and people generally becoming more accepting.

Factors like globalization and the Internet play a way bigger role in facilitating understanding between different people, it's also helpful to have a generally accepted standard of "Universal human rights", applying to every human being regardless of ethnicity or nationality.

MAD, with it's attached red scare, only generated generations of paranoid and distrustful people whos paranoid fear rules most of their worldviews, in some cases to this day.

[eighthnate]

> That's an odd standard to set. Racial discrimination, based on ethnicity, also used to be a global norm, yet that didn't and doesn't excuse the crimes of the Third Reich.

It's a terrible habit we have as a nation. We are happy to forgive or excuse our sins but hold others to theirs.

[aaron-lebo]

How exactly do you determine the habit of 300 million people? How do you differentiate that habit from the Japanese who refuse to officially recognize war crimes in China or the Belgians and Germans whose grandparents wre killing Congolese and Jews respectively?

If people in this thread were being honest they'd be well aware that this particularly American flaw isn't so specific to the US.

[eighthnate]

> If people in this thread were being honest they'd be well aware that this particularly American flaw isn't so specific to the US.

Sure. It's probably a human trait. But I'm not japanese or belgian or german so I wouldn't know.

But I'm responding to a comment which "excused" our sins and I'm an american so that's why I made the comment.

If it is a human trait, so be it. But the fact that you are pointing to the sins of others kinda proves my point doesn't it?

[gilleain]

Not to disagree with you, but I found this timeline of abolition very interesting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_abolition_of_slave...

It took a long time, and a lot of treaties and individual countries to act to abolish slavery.

[pizza]

Retroactively arbiting "crimes against modernity" - if computed with modern measurement devices/standards - can be hypocritical. That's because calling the villain evil might ignore the fact that their behavior, being relitigated as evil in the present, did in a fundamental way depend upon their belief that they were doing something ethical in the first place. It is not sadism but sadomasochism; they are especially pained at their awareness of the pain they cause, but they see it as their duty - and the symbols of the time is what mediates their gap between their imagined duty and the reality they operate in.

(Referring to parent of this comment chain.) Something Zizek himself says is evil is not what makes bad people do bad things, but instead what makes good people do bad things. People doing something 'evil' will typically be distressed about it personally. But they would always see it like "I must be fully willing to destroy my own humanity so that I can protect the humanity of my people". They preserve their efficiency and ruthlessness in spite of the further fragmentation of their psyche and conscience.

Brutality relies upon limiting the aesthetic dissonance between the aesthetics of the greater good and the ugliness of violence.

> "In early 20th-century France, the Nobel laureate Romain Rolland declared [Beethoven's Ode To Joy] to be the great humanist ode to the brotherhood of all people, and it came to be called “the Marseillaise of humanity.” In 1938, it was performed as the high point of the Reichsmusiktage, the Nazi music festival, and was later used to celebrate Hitler’s birthday. In China during the Cultural Revolution, in an atmosphere of total rejection of European classics, it was redeemed by some as a piece of progressive class struggle.

> In the 1950s and ’60s, when the West German and East German Olympic squads were forced to compete as a single team, gold medals were handed out to the strains of the “Ode to Joy” in lieu of a national anthem. It served as the anthem, too, for the Rhodesian white supremacist regime of Ian Smith. One can imagine a fictional performance at which all sworn enemies — Hitler and Stalin, Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush — for a moment forget their adversities and participate in the same magic moment of ecstatic musical brotherhood." [0]

But what is there even to conclude from this?

Suppose we are 100% aware that we actively cause harm to people but our moral calculus says we must do it because it is for "the greater good". The more we are uncertain about the uncertainty of net social gain, the more we have reason to avoid doing it.

But this is the opposite of the commonly held belief. People say "we can't judge the people in the past, it's too easy to be certain an idea that was defeated was evil when looking from the future. Before it was defeated they could not have known that the pain they (knew they) were causing for the sake of helping out their own people, wouldn't have triumphed and raised real total benefit instead -- so that it hypothetically was moral".

Here I disagree vehemently. We must, in the strongest terms, condemn any rationalization of the actions of a gambler who bets he'll reach the greater good if he puts his children up for collateral.

edit: forgot link

[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/opinion/24zizek.html?mcubz...