[broscillator]

I think you're just describing human nature. We can look back and see how incomplete theories about the world led to horrible acts, or to averting our eyes from those acts because we thought it was justified, or because we thought there was no better way, or out of fear.

Yet there's the prevalent sense of "this time we're getting it right".

[pmontra]

People did horrible acts because they did want to do those acts to those other people. They picked a theory to justify them.

[broscillator]

I don't know, there's many stories of modern soldiers doing terrible things, coming back to the civilized world and living horrible lives due to PTSD and not being able to parse what they did.

Are you suggesting every one of those soldiers for example, go out to war with the intent of killing children? Are you not open to the idea that the sense of normalcy can be shifted by the environment and context? Are you familiar with the milgram experiments?

[pmontra]

I'm familiar with Milgram experiments. To refer to recent facts, hundreds of thousands of Russians fled the country after the start of the war in Ukraine [1] Reasons vary but I think both of us remember the wave of male migrants when Russia called for mobilization in October 2022. Some of them probably didn't want to get killed, others didn't want to kill people.

I'm not merciful about this: the people of a country are responsible for who governs them, sense of normalcy notwithstanding.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_emigration_following_t...

[amanaplanacanal]

Somehow I can’t blame the people of North Korea for the crimes of Kim Jung Un. Fill in the country and leader of your choice there.

[pmontra]

Of course the longer they have been brainwashed the less they have matter to think about. North Korea is an edge case now but we have plenty of countries with a forever president. Once it gets to 20 years it got so much time to shape the country to ensure further 20 years of power that's basically over. People had chances to change the president before. Some of those countries have periodic rebellions, other are silent. Even North Korea had less than 20 years of a Kim at a certain point. It was coming from a destructive war, etc, and yet...

I think that the USA have a good balance with their two 4 years presidential terms. If one of their next presidents asks to raise it to 3 terms, be prepared to get a forever president there soon and all that it means.