I sometimes wonder if a section of the public just wants plausible deniability for committing atrocities, and their government is happy to provide that for them.
It’s not exactly that they consciously want cover to commit atrocities. It’s more that they can’t really conceive of people they don’t identify with as people. They’ll fiercely defend people they know, and they’ll side with people like them, but everyone else is a sort of vague abstract mass.
We see this in the US today with people who support harsh measures against illegal immigrants while they themselves have friends or family who are the targets (or they are themselves). Then they get very confused when their friends or family get arrested and deported, because “illegal immigrants” is this amorphous mass of bad people, not Jose and Clara down the street. You see it with racists who defend themselves with “I’m not racist, I have black friends.”
Such a person doesn’t automatically think ill of the “other,” but it doesn’t take too much to convince them that the “other” is evil and dangerous and must be dealt with harshly.
Anyone can be mislead factually, but we can't accept the idea that being told a crime is okay gives you a moral license to do it - otherwise every neo-nazi would escape among innumerable other criminals.
That's true, but you have to be realistic about the influence the five to fifteen percent with good morals are going to have in the long run. Especially when they also know the odds and choose to emigrate if they are able. There may have been a resistance in Germany, didn't succeed in the end.
At some point people have to be responsible for themselves if the concept of responsibility is to have any meaning at all. Our views and actions are all the product of our environment.
> Our views and actions are all the product of our environment.
And if that view is manipulated by people way more powerful than you...
I'm all for personal responsibility but we have laws against certain practices because companies can hack brains so well. You don't think states can do it just as well if not better?
Where do you draw the line? Was the thoroughly indoctrinated SS officer shooting untermenschen responsible, or was he just a victim of manipulation? What about the average Nazi who just went to work every day and thought the Fuhrer was doing a decent job?
I just can't implicate a whole country is bad because their regime is bad. I initially had to pause when you questioned "bad regime, good people" but find I can't say all of Iran or China is bad because of their govt - the countries I most often think of when that phrase comes to mind.
Edit: where do you draw the line? Is an immigrant from a 'bad' country a bad person? Why didn't we try more Germans if what you say about support is true?
I don’t mean to suggest that everyone living under a bad government is bad. Just that you don’t have a situation where the entire populace is good but can’t get their government under control. There may be minority rule. Maybe as low as 1/4th of the population supports the government and its actions. But that is still a lot. Far too many for me to say that “the nation” is against it.
There's something deeply sick in a society where the strongest objections to the genocide being carried out are not in opposition to the genocide itself, but rather that the indiscriminate killing could reduce the chances of recovering hostages.
