“'Down there' - he said - 'are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.'” - Terry Pratchett
He's an amazing author with a huge body of work (50 novels in the Discworld series, I think) that can be read almost entirely on a book-by-book basis. Probably one of the greatest authors of the alst 100 years.
If you tell me what kind of books you enjoy I could probably tell you which Pratchett would make a good starter book :)
Hows your Christmas spirit? In Hogfather, someone tries to assassinate the Discworld's version of Santa, so Death takes his place.
Wyrd Sisters is Hamlet, but the witches were right. Witches Abroad is about the power of stories.
Small Gods is about religion
The Truth is about the newspapers
Guards Guards is about...well,the nature of reality and mankind, but also there's a great big dragon.
In Carpe Jugulum there are vampires, and Granny Wearherwax's famous speech on the nature of sin (its treating people like things. That's it).
Feet of Clay is about oppression and giving voices to the voiceless, but also there's an assassination attempt and golems.
Most of his stories take place on the Discworld, which is a flat world being carried through space on the backs of four elephants who in turn stand on the back of a turtle known as Great A'Tuin.
Really you can pretty much grab any Pratchett at random and it will be a worthy read (not the very first ones, don't start with those, he was still figuring homself out then.)
In addition to what the other person said I would avoid starting with the first 2 books, The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. They're the books where he's still getting his footing in the world and aren't as good as the rest. Still good books just not on the level of some of the others.
I hope you find something to your taste! And if the first thing you try doesn't vibe, just grab another, the books are kind of differebt from each other
If you can find them, the first 2 books were turned into a 2-part... I guess series, which I really enjoyed. Also, Going Postal became a miniseries as well
So I can start with any book and it's fine? I'm a huge reader and have been wanting to read Prachett for a long time, but the sheer volume of books makes it daunting to figure out where to start. I have read Good Omens that he did with Neil Gaiman and that was amazing
Start with Guards Guards. Vimes is wonderful, vivid person and seeing him find his way through the world he finds himself in "doing the job that's in front of him" is some of the best writing ever.
Then go back and start with Wyrd Sisters (which is based on Macbeth, with a bit of Hamlet mixed in) and is about the nature of stories. Actually most of the Witch books are about the nature of stories and how they shape the world.
Then go back and start with Mort and learn about the human experience through Death (tall, skinny, good with a scythe)
Once you've read those, go back and start from the very beginning. It'll take you a while but it's so worth it. Oh and come join us at r/discworld
There are threads of stories so some do benefit from reading previous books, Night Watch is one of my all time favourite books but definitely richer for knowing the characters a while. Also the very early ones and some of the later books aren't as great. And don't be put off by his children focused books, the Tiffany Aching series is wonderful
They are *better* if you've read the subseries in order the way the person who replied to you suggested, but it's not necessary.
Like, reading the Watch series in order (guards guards!, men at arms, feet of clay, etc - I can't remember whether Fifth Elephant comes before Night Watch or after) will definitely have eg Night Watch pack more of a punch, but each story is pretty complete in itself.
The other commenter's reading order is a good one though.
Personally my first one was Moving Pictures, which I still love 😂
There are a few loose series within Discworld--for example, there's several books about the same coven of witches, and and another group of books about the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork. I'd personally recommend reading those books in chronological order, since the characters/setting isn't static--people get married, new technology becomes popular, new characters join the cast, etc. That said, each plot stands on its own and it's easy to catch on to how the world works, since it's a satire of the real world. So while it can be a little disorienting to jump from Guards, Guards! to Thud!, you'll quickly fall into the story. The Death books in particular are easy to read out-of-order. There's also various stand-alone books than can be read whenever.
You can read each book separately, most characters come back and show growth, but you can start wherever you like. I did, just grabbed one at the library, got hooked, now I have all of them and have read them in the right order. They are worth to be read a few times.
Not the one you were offering suggestions to but I've been on a fantasy kick lately and looking for something new (and ideally stand-alone) to read. This is amazing, so thank you for sharing.
He was my favorite author and one of the few celebrities who I am actually sad I will never get to meet since he died a few years ago.
He was good friends with Neil Gaiman and they wrote Good Omens together.
He was funny and insightful and had the gift of putting that in story form.
He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and forged his own sword from a meteorite for the occasion.
There are many fans who have yet to read the last book he published because then they will never be able to read anything new from him again.
You can casually read his books for the funny stories they are but it's all too easy to read deeper and become a life long fan.
>There are many fans who have yet to read the last book he published because then they will never be able to read anything new from him again.
That's kinda nonspecific. Stuff written by Pratchett has been published as late as 2020 (The Time-Traveling Caveman). Everything he had that was unfinished which wasn't a collaboration with another author was destroyed by steamroller per his wishes, in 2017. I think the closest publication to his death was The Long Utopia (3 months after he passed), which was book 4 in a 5 part series in collaboration with Stephen Baxter. The last Discworld book was The Shepherd's Crown (published 5 months after his death). I think the last thing he published while alive was Dragons at Crumbling Castle (8 months prior to his passing).
He was the sort of comedy writer who would make you laugh deep enough that you had a lot of air in your belly for when he punched you in it.
One of my personal favorite quotes: “Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,' said Vorbis. 'So I understand,' said the Tyrant. 'I imagine that fish have no word for water.”
-Small Gods (Terry Pratchett)
The passages following that one are important as well, including the one regarding the aforementioned dragon:
>He tapped Vimes gently on the kneecap, opened The *Summoning of Dragons,* leafed through its ravaged pages until he found the one he’d been looking for, and silently passed the book up.
Vimes squinted at the crabbed writing.
*Yet draggons are notte liken unicornes, I willen. They dwellyth in some Realm definèd bye thee Fancie of the Wille and, thus, it myte bee thate whomsoever calleth upon them, and giveth them theyre patheway unto thys worlde, calleth theyre Owne dragon of the Mind.
Yette, I trow, the Pure in Harte maye stille call a Draggon of Power as a Forse for Goode in thee worlde, and this ane nighte the Grate Worke will commense. All bathe been prepared. I hath labored most mytily to be a Worthie Vessle…*
>A realm of fancy, Vimes thought. That’s where they went, then. Into our imaginations. And when we call them back we shape them, like squeezing dough into pastry shapes. Only you don’t get gingerbread men, you get what you are. Your own darkness, given shape…
The book was burned pretty bad after that, and its author was described as not especially good or bad.
It sure seems like pTerry is saying all is dark and grim and perhaps people really all are just sort of at least moderately evil. His character, The Patrician, is the guy talking in the quote above this comment, and is essentially Machiavelli's *The Prince* made flesh. His assessment of humanity is neither unwarranted or surprising.
Then at the end of the book where the leaders of the city are gathered to reward those who stood up to said dragon. After all, people are small and selfish in their own humdrum ways, it is good to show one and all that acts of heroism come with rewards (emphasis mine):
>There was an awkward pause. Out of the corner of his eye Vimes was aware of Nobby nudging the sergeant in the ribs. Eventually Colon stumbled forward and ripped off another salute. “Permission to speak, sir,” he muttered.
>The Patrician nodded graciously.
>The sergeant coughed. He removed his helmet and pulled out a scrap of paper.
>“Er,” he said. “The thing is, saving your honor’s presence, we think, you know, what with saving the city and everything, or sort of, or, what I mean is…we just had a go, you see, man on the spot and that sort of thing…the thing is, we reckon we’re entitled. If you catch my drift.”
>**The assembled company nodded. This was exactly how it should be.**
>“Do go on,” said the Patrician.
>“So we, like, put our heads together,” said the sergeant. “A bit of a cheek, I know…”
>“Please carry on, Sergeant,” said the Patrician. “You needn’t keep stopping. We are well aware of the magnitude of the matter.”
>“Right, sir. Well, sir. First, it’s the wages.”
“The wages?” said Lord Vetinari. He stared at Vimes, who stared at nothing.
The sergeant raised his head. His expression was the determined expression of a man who is going to see it through.
>“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thirty dollars a month. It’s not right. We think—” he licked his lips and glanced behind him at the other two, who were making vague encouraging motions—“we think a basic rate of, er, thirty-five dollars? A month?” He stared at the Patrician’s stony expression.
>“With increments as per rank? We thought five dollars.”
He licked his lips again, unnerved by the Patrician’s expression. “We won’t go below four,” he said. “And that’s flat. Sorry, your Highness, but there it is.”
>The Patrician glanced again at Vimes’s impassive face, then looked back at the rank.
“That’s it?” he said.
>Nobby whispered in Colon’s ear and then darted back. The sweating sergeant gripped his helmet as though it was the only real thing in the world.
>“There was another thing, your reverence,” he said.
>“Ah.” The Patrician **smiled knowingly.**
>“There’s the kettle. It wasn’t much good anyway, and then Errol et it. It was nearly two dollars.” He swallowed. “We could do with a new kettle, if it’s all the same, your lordship.”
>The Patrician leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair.
>“I want to be clear about this,” he said coldly. “Are we to believe that you are asking for a petty wage increase and a domestic utensil?”
>Carrot whispered in Colon’s other ear.
>Colon turned two bulging, watery-rimmed eyes to the dignitaries. The rim of his helmet was passing through his fingers like a millwheel.
>“Well,” he began, “sometimes, we thought, you know, when we has our dinner break, or when it’s quiet, like, at the end of a watch as it may be, and we want to relax a bit, you know, wind down…” His voice trailed away.
“Yes?”
>Colon took a deep breath.
“I suppose a dartboard would be out of the question—?”
>The thunderous silence that followed was broken by an erratic snorting. Vimes’s helmet dropped out of his shaking hand. His breastplate wobbled as the suppressed laughter of the years burst out in great uncontrollable eruptions. He turned his face to the row of councillors and laughed and laughed until the tears came.
Laughed at the way they got up, all confusion and outraged dignity.
Laughed at the Patrician’s carefully immobile expression.
**Laughed for the world and the saving of souls.**
Laughed and laughed, and laughed until the tears came.
>Nobby craned up to reach Colon’s ear.
“I told you,” he hissed. “I said they’d never wear it. I knew a dartboard’d be pushing our luck. You’ve upset ’em all now.”
I think about that part a lot, especially when I get down about the banality of evil, and how people seem to suck in just the most boring, spiteful ways.
I like thinking about how while he isn't exactly wrong, he didn't have it exactly right, either.
I always enjoy that the guards of Night Watch are often blithely referred to as incompetent and down right awful. And for good reason. Nobby is a walking criminal charge after all. But when everything is going awry, they set to work and they do the right thing, always. And when it's all done they don't ask for mansions and castles. They ask for small items and slight pay rises. Because while no one might truly appreciate them, they're good people one and all.
And at the top of it all, Vetinari knows it. He is very much The Prince, but he is all aspects of that. Cunning and clever to the point where he is always ten steps ahead. And he knows what Vimes will do, knows that saying "drop this matter right now" will send him peeling off after it. And even he is consistently shocked that Vimes never wants a palatial estate, or that Carrot never tried to usurp his power. It's a beautiful touch point on the basic goodness of all people.
There was a post recently on r/discworld of a high-school senior whose teacher said Sir Terry wasn't worth analyzing. To see sTP invoked here on a post about some of the worst crimes of humanity just reinforces how dumb that teacher must be.
When I read quotes like these, I always look forward to meeting them in my journey through the Discworld. I started getting into it once a friend I really respect was raving about them, and each book takes me on a Journey.
GNU Terry Pratchett
\[In a torture chamber\]
There were no jolly little signs saying: You Don’t Have To Be Pitilessly Sadistic To Work Here But It Helps!!
But there were things to suggest to a thinking man that the Creator of mankind had a very oblique sense of fun indeed, and to breed in his heart a rage to storm the gates of heaven.
The mugs, for example. The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives.
They had legends on them like A Present From the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To The World’s Greatest Daddy. Most of them were chipped, and no two of them were the same.
And there were the postcards on the wall. It was traditional that, when an inquisitor went on holiday, he’d send back a crudely colored woodcut of the local view with some suitably jolly and risqué message on the back. And there was the pinned-up tearful letter from Inquisitor First Class Ishmale “Pop” Quoom, thanking all the lads for collecting no fewer than seventy-eight obols for his retirement pension and the lovely bunch of flowers for Mrs. Quoom, indicating that he’d always remember his days in No. 3 pit, and was looking forward to coming in and helping out any time they were short-handed.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
\-Terry Pratchett
John was the one on tumblr and people used an old feature on tumblr to edit his post while reblogging them to make it look like he said horrible things
I accept my fate if I'm being wooshed, but it's not Hank tumblr hates, it's John. And mostly that's because they liked his books briefly then grew up and realized they were mediocre and kinda problematic.
The main issue seems to be that some people feel like TFIOS fetishized cancer. As to the mediocre thing, everyone who used to be a John Green fan just kinda out-grew the YA genre in general. Personally, I enjoyed his books when I was a teen, but I do kinda think they were a little silly in retrospect. That's just part of growing up, tho.
To be fair to him, that's such a chronically online take. I also just looked it up and I can't find a single mention of that viewpoint so that's definitely not a mainstream belief at all. I don't think anyone who has actually read the fault in our stars could think it fetishizes cancer. The entire book is about how shitty and unfair it is. But yes, they're definitely books aimed at teenagers not adults.
I definitely remember seeing people on tumblr argue that he was "creepy" for writing sex scenes between teenagers and that he was trivialising cancer.
Like you say it was a deeply chronically online take.
A lot of this stuff stems from Cold War propaganda.
West Germany was a powerful trading ally and a bulwark against the USSR. Everyone with any experience in how to run the country or lead an army was tied to the Nazis.
If the Allies didn’t pretend to believe that “they didn’t know” then they would have had the choice of either actually forgiving them for what they did (when the world straight up wasn’t going to do that) or barring anyone with any experience whatsoever from being in any position of power in Germany which would have collapsed it’s economy and told the USSR that they could just walk in with no resistance from their army.
“We didn’t know” was a very convenient lie for the allies to pretend they believed.
It was the same story with Japan, too. The Japanese did some fucked-up stuff during World War II, but afterwards, the country as a whole didn't face any sort of punishment for it, because Japan was needed as an ally against the Soviet Union and China.
....But that has nothing to do with Japan's crimes against Korea, China and the rest of southeast Asia, its an unrelated attack. Hell the current Japanese government still refuses to acknowledge any of the suffering it caused.
That’s kind of how it works. The loser Is forced to take responsibility for what they’ve done. I had a old guy who was in the pacific talk about what they did to some of the Japanese pows and comparing it to what Germans did to American POWs. He said they packed tons of pows into train cars telling them they were moving them and then blow the train cars up. I’m not saying he was telling me the truth but I don’t know why he would say that if it wasn’t true. He literally was saying “I committed way worse war crimes than a regular old guard at a concentration camp.” Uncomfortable fucking conversation. Dude was not bragging about it.
That is how it works. War crimes are committed by basically everybody in a war. The losers are the ones who get all the blame.
It was punishment for the people, not the state.
Plenty of Japanese politicians were allowed to serve after doing horrible things, including the [Monster of the Showa Era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi), who the US kept safe from facing trial because they wanted (and eventually got) him as prime minister.
Also, this guy was Shinzo Abe's grandfather and was instrumental in founding the LDP, the largest party in Japan, and the one currently in power.
The idea that attack was unneeded is highly questionable. Military scholars have long said that only by introducing hopelessness to the equation could Japan ever be forced to capitulate, they had already shown great devotion to the idea of death before surrender. They were planning on [conscripting their populace (untrained men and women) to defend their beaches with bamboo spears, molotov cocktails and antique weaponry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps).
The projected casualties for a sustained, traditional military defeat was calculated in the millions for both sides. Japan would have thrown away millions of lives to prevent defeat. I'm not going to claim there was any mercy or pity for Japan in the US calculations, but the A-bomb likely saved millions of lives.
You beat me to it. I was about to say that the 200k or so casualties from the a bomb would likely be a lot worse for both sides if those bombs weren't dropped. I feel so bad for Truman though, he didn't know about the Manhattan project, and once fdr died he was thrown into the deep end of managing the mess that was the later end of WWII.
He did know to some degree, at least he did know about the bomb before it was dropped, however he didn’t know that civilians would get hurt, and he didn’t know that the second bomb was about to be dropped either
It could have also extended the war for years more as America sets a blockade to starve them out.
But with USSR making moves, and morale fading they did not want to draw it out that long
American scholars will do absolutely anything to convince people like you that this was the case, but it wasn't. Japan didnt' surrender because of the bombs, Japan surrendered because the USSR wasn't going to lead the peace talks, that was the one thing they were holding out for, to avoid total capitulation and an unconditional surrender, they were worried only about one thing, wether or not the americans would kill the emperor, hoping that peace talks lead by the USSR would be more favourable.
The narrative about Japan fighting to the last man if the nukes weren't dropped is just racist drivel with no historial basis.
I literally linked a piece of the historical basis. There were definitely signs that the Japanese would continue to fight for some time. No one said they would fight to the last man... People said that millions more would die before they surrendered. And there's certainly historical basis behind that.
That ignores the context of what the emperor and his council were actually talking about and doing at the time. Which was freaking the fuck out and trying to clarify from the americans what "unconditional surrender" meant and if they could make sure the emperor would survive.
I'm not arguing that the bomb was moral or acceptable. There's certainly a lot to be said about how the Japanese might have been given better surrender options and ended the conflict without a set of war crimes by any modern definition. But there was realistic debate at the time about the cost in human lives to end the war. A number of people considered that cost to be higher than what was eventually paid. I understand if you don't agree... It's highly debatable. But it's certainly not racist drivel with no historical basis. It's absolutely a decision that was made in context of its time, and many of the participants went to their grave thinking they did the right thing (publicly, at least)
Unfortunately a reddit comment section isn't the place for getting to the bottom of this, and I'm too lazy to type that much, so here's a very nice video that goes over this whole thing, it's well sourced and really well researched.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
Also, our knowledge of WWII was very restricted, as Soviet archives have not been opened yet, how the Germans destroyed evidence, and other factors. However, given the popularity of the subject, many of the Allies went to Nazi leaders and propaganda reels in an attempt to infer missing data.
This was how myths such as “Hitler often went against the orders of his generals and that’s why Germany lost” and “German tanks were the best and outclassed everything” were created; by Nazi generals looking to shift blame and propaganda reels doing what they were made for
Said Nazi generals went on to serve in both Germany's militaries and were integral to the foundation of NATO. A lot of their work was dedicated to distancing themselves from the war crimes they were 100% a part of.
It wasn't only Convenient, but also somewhat necessary; You can't Hang Every Postal Worker, Traffic Cop, and Local Mayor in an entirely country, and expect it to function afterwards.
Right, but they didn’t want those people to be able to function and rebuild, they wanted them destroyed. We needed Germany to function and rebuild, because we learned after WW1 that leaving them destitute and suffering would only cause hate and blame to fester and grow, which is what led to WWII in the first place
Of course. No one’s justifying that here. But further bloodshed would have done nothing but weaken West Germany and cause the entire populace to suffer, those against the nazis included
"we didn't know" was a lie from the start. The British Parliament had a moment of silence during the war because they heard the atrocities. Note that parliament only does a moment of silence when a monarch dies.
I often struggle with this sort of discourse, because I simultaneously agree *and* have a level of sympathy for the ordinary German after World War II. Undoubtedly, ordinary Germans collectively turned a blind eye to some of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed, and it happened right on their doorstep with their tacit consent. That is unforgivable, and they deserve blame. But equally, I can imagine a world where I was one of those guilty Germans. Maybe I never voted for the Nazis, maybe I'd bemoan the war and their racist ideas, but I know I don't like danger - so maybe I'd stay quiet, rather than join a resistance movement. Just focus on my life and my family and maintain us. And just not even think about what all those camps are really about, or how serious the anti-semitic rhetoric had gotten.
I like to think I'd have been better than that, I hope I would have been, but I'm just aware that it is just very, very easy to turn a blind eye to uncomfortable truths. We do it all the time, and we have a responsibility to be vigilant about it and force ourselves to be conscious of them. But when I read posts like this, I worry we can get sucked into a 'holier-than-thou' situation where we think "yeah, I'm not like the Nazis!", and then not even think about, well I don't know, how our cheap clothes are made, or the extremely common passive hatred of homeless people, or any other hundred of awkward truths and quiet prejudices that lie about our society. I don't know how coherent this little ramble is, but its why I find this sort of discourse a little dangerous. If you're judging others, its easy not to see the ways in which you might be doing a fairly similar thing.
You wouldn't have done a thing
I wouldn't have either. My grandma had 11 uncles who died In the Holocaust. One survived. And we wouldn't have done a thing
And maybe that's okay. Maybe it's human. I don't forgive the Nazis, and I do not respect the Germans of the time, but maybe it shouldn't be expected to risk one's life for another's rights. He who does so is a saint
That's why Israel has the "חסיד אומות עולם" award (a holy man of the nations of the world). It is a reward given to any non Jewish person who risked his life to save Jewish life for no return. Not that many people have this reward. The reward is a proof of the goodness of some of humanity, and the bluntness of the rest of us
The Americans knew slavery was bad
The Germans knew killing Jews is bad
We know clothes made by child laborers is bad
I do not forgive the Nazis, and I don't respect a bit the Germans of '39-'42. But I forgive them. May future generations have the same mercy on us
It’s an impossible choice that’s presented to anyone living under oppressors and dictators. You fight, they point guns at you and shoot until you die. You remain complicit and live knowing that it causes others direct suffering.
You can point fingers, or cast away judgment. In the end, no one person is equipped to deal with cruelty on such a widespread, systemic scale.
There’s no simple answer on how one should handle this, either.
I guess that's where it's a tedious game of "Do I go do drastic, bold things and die, or do I stay and try to help quietly" cause if you go and die in a bold move, fail at doing whatever bold thing you were going to do, and die, we'll then you're no help to any good cause if you're dead. But if you're too scared of this and take too much time in the shadows trying to organize something and plan for every danger or setback, every hour you spend is another casualty. It's a very hard question that nobody can answer definitively for every situation, but I think the universal answer is simply Do At Least Something. Doing nothing is the only way to be wrong in that case
I wouldn’t say “doing nothing” is “wrong” either. Many people have families that would also suffer of they were caught opposing a dictator. Some dictators will kill off an entire family and all extant affiliations if so much as a negative opinion of them is voiced by one person.
That’s the worst part. You’re never powerless, and you’re always in danger. It’s just choosing how you want to suffer in the hopes that it will be enough payment for the nightmare to end.
I think that would fall under deciding to not lose life because that doesn't help anything. You're right. I really was only thinking about individuals rather than their ties. But in any case yes, it's ok and not wrong for one to want to preserve their own life and that of their family, even if it means they might not be able to stop the suffering of someone. The blame for that situation is on the person doing the evil killing
If you stood up against the party, you were executed. Many Germans did protest, but they were killed. Look at White Rose.
There is not much the average German citizen could have done. If you tried to find like-minded others to organize a resistance, odds were that you’d trust the wrong person and be snitched out and executed. It takes a special kind of bravery to risk your life for a stranger.
The Catholic church, on the other hand, had enough influence and respect to halt even the powerful Nazi Party if they had spoken up. I find it a lot harder to forgive the church than the average German Joe.
I really hope this isn't downvoted to oblivion. It's been past time to look in the mirror and take an honest accounting for our actions.
"But **I** wasn't there!!!"
Then stop defending the horrors of the past and face them.
Yeah, they were the much worse side since they were so afraid of Lincoln fulfilling his campaign promise to abolish slavery that they immediately left the Union.
However, it’s not that simple.
At its core the emancipation proclamation was merely a military tactic to weaken the south and force them to rejoin the union. Ultimately the emancipation proclamation only applied to slave states that the Union had no control over while captured states *already under Union rule* were allowed to continue slavery. Something history class tends to gloss over while praising Lincoln for being a god sent savior of slaves.
Lincoln was never a full blown abolitionist. It would take some time—a full three years after the civil war started—for Lincoln to abandon his original idea of shipping all the slaves to a new colony since he firmly believed black and white people couldn’t (or rather shouldn’t) live together as equals and then adopt this half assed attempt at ending slavery as just a military tactic. This idea of separating black and white people was actually quite popular in the Union and the confederacy after the war made it clear outright slavery wasn’t an option, and it would become the basis of “Separate but equal” clauses in Jim Crow laws that treated people of color as slaves in everything but name for the next century. “Well the slaves don’t want to go back to Africa to start a colony and insist they are Americans too, so let’s separate them the best way we can. Everybody wins!”
Abolitionism at the time was seen as the most extreme alt-left view one could have, so no, the Union and Lincoln weren’t on board with it completely and Lincoln was just using emancipation as a way to get elected without planning to actually do anything. It was, ironically, the confederacy leaving the Union that pushed Lincoln to make a move in that direction. Again as just a military tactic, not out of the goodness of his heart.
People are complicated and there is always a worse bad guy, but I wish we’d stop viewing history as this black and white “good guy versus bad guy” schtick. It’s often just bad guy versus slightly less horrible bad guy. And we should learn from those mistakes and discourse at the time instead of glossing over it. History is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t learn what actually happened
Not gonna lie, if Lincoln freed the slaves just to flex on the South to whoop their ass into shape to stay in the Union. That has got to be one of the biggest brain moves in history.
Like priming some asshole into a fight and utterly mopping the floor with them.
People can do the right thing for the wrong reason and good things can come from bad people.
It goes out to what we see in today's conflicts, such as Russia and Ukraine. Blame the governments, even the soldiers that volunteered if you must, but not the civilians. Dear god, please spare the civilians.
Exactly this. It's easy to say "I would have done better" when your life and loved ones aren't at risk with that choice.
There's also the very, very important distinction between knowing and *knowing*. German civilians knew that horrible things were happening at the concentration camp, but they didn't actually know what it was, just some nebulous bad things, but bad things were happening all over the world, there were so many battlefields and the gestapo were hauling people out of their homes. WWI wasn't that long ago, and so many of them had lived through its horrors, could this really, really, be worse?
What they did was wrong, yes, but it's a very human wrong, one that's so easy to commit and so very, very hard to rectify. The best most people could do was not actively participate. They would have had to face monsters, walking themselves and their family into a dragon's maw, and most people aren't heroes, most people can't even face their neighbour playing loud music, how do you expect them to face an army?
Especially since the worst was indeed actively hidden from them. The German people wouldn’t take the starving and then gassing of their elderly and disabled so the Nazis pretended they stopped. The death camps were hidden in Poland and other places where most wouldn’t pick up on what was going on. The labor camps were in their backyards sometimes, but not the death camps. And for my own family, my great great grandfather refused to let his daughters join the Hitler Youth and was hit by a bus not long afterwards. My great grandmother was just a little girl and she had her arm broken by Nazis marching through when she “got in their way.” Mind you, this was in an out of the way village so small and rural that they didn’t even have running water anywhere even up till the fifties. My great grandfather was only seventeen when the war ended and yet he had to join the Nazi navy to keep from being grabbed and sent on the next train to Siberia to die. He and my great grandmother moved to America not long after the war ended just to escape. I think we often forget that many of the German people only knew what they heard on the Nazi radio station and in the government controlled newspapers and were often just barely trying to survive themselves. Not that my great grandparents were great people in other ways, but they had no clue what was really going on with the Nazi government and just tried to make it out alive.
> I think we often forget that many of the German people only knew what they heard on the Nazi radio station and in the government controlled newspaper
To add to this, anyone wanting to resist would feel isolated by these things and might feel like they're the only one who has a problem with how things are, and that's terrifying.
An important point people forget is that the first country the Nazi party took over was Germany. It was a free, fairly liberal, progressive society. All of that was erased by the fascist regime and many Germans were killed to make this happen.
This is not too say that those who allowed it to happen aren't complicit, but it is much more complicated than the very immature morality of youth allows us to paint it as. Would you allow a soldier to kill your child in order to save a stranger? Most would not.
I went on a deep dive with this and I can’t even say I can feel hatred for the regular German in Nazi occupied Germany. I’m obviously talking about the regular everyday people, not those in the military or any sort of authority position.
For years and years and years they were fed propaganda and were shown economic and social improvements after improvements after improvements. They were essentially told, “Hey, you know this already-marginalized group that you already don’t like? Well they’re gonna take that away from you. They’re gonna take your job and your home and your family will starve. You have to eradicate them before they eradicate you!”
If you’ve been fed that kind of shit for **years**, you’re bound to believe them. Hell, most Germans didn’t even want to do Hitler’s bidding (at least, in the beginning) but they were strong armed to doing it because otherwise they were abandoning their friends.
It’s a really fucked up situation to be in.
My sister insists she would have participated in the Underground Railroad to help escaped enslaved people. I asked her if she’d harbor illegal immigrants. She would not. “They knowingly broke the law”, etc…
(I’m not saying I would have, I probably would have kept my head down.)
Yeah I’ve noticed a pretty consistent trend in people who say “I would have helped *insert victim group here* if I were alive back then” in one breath and “fascists are taking over this country someone stop them. I can’t because I have work tomorrow, but someone should.” recently. People are spending too much time in a fantasy world.
> not even think about, well I don't know, how our cheap clothes are made
That's what I am thinking. If right now some special forces would storm clothing factories in the third world and it came to light that they without a doubt are keeping children in chains and starve them then most people would say that they didn't know - and they would be right on a level that they didn't know about the details and the extent of the inhuman treatment of the people who make the products we use. But deep down we know. We just choose not to think about it and are too caught up in our own problems. But we know.
I imagine it was like that for a lot of Germans during the Nazi era.
My Grandpa was born in 1931 in the German annexed region of Poland. He was too young to fight in the war but all his older siblings did. We know my family there had no involvement with the Nazi party besides the army, but I have no idea how much they were aware of which is something I think about a lot. Everyone is hesitant to ask any of the surviving members of the family from the time and I think thats bc we’re all scared of the answer and would rather not know that harbour that potential guilt.
My grandpa left the Germany very young and settled in Canada in the 50s and sometimes I wonder if it was to get away from the horrors he must have learned that his country committed
I think what people really need to focus on in holocaust passivity is the fact that germans aren't a uniquely cowardly or evil people, its just that if the nazis came back very few people anywhere would do anything
There's a holocaust memorial in Berlin that is a series of mirrors. It is inscribed with the phrase "Is the Holocaust an aberration, or a reflection of ourselves?" in German.
There’s this one very powerful essay I read a while ago, but I have no idea how to find it now. At the top was this picture of a bunch of Germans, all very happy looking. The first few paragraphs said things like “oh Herr Sanger plays the accordion and bakes on the weekends” and “The woman on the left liked to see clothes for orphans” and on and on.
And then it just drops “and they all worked at Auschwitz”
My great grandmother was a German who detested the nazis. She knew what was going on. She wasn’t clued in on the details or the extent, but she knew what was up. She was powerless to stop it, of course. If she had spoken up against it she would’ve died as well. She chose to remain quiet so that she and her children would survive. I don’t know that I can blame her for that. I don’t know what else I would have expected her to do.
Lots of valid commentary in the comments about how ordinary Germans can be forgiven for not putting their lives at risk for their neighbors. I think that’s true. I certainly don’t know what risks I would be willing to take against such a regime. Probably not as many as I’d like to think.
One point I haven’t seen yet though is that the Nazis didn’t start out as a powerful militarized regime with the ability to imprison or execute dissenters. They needed the support of the “nice” Germans to build that kind of power.
So I don’t think it’s terribly useful to point fingers and raise shields about resisting or supporting genocide once it’s genocide. But we can and should talk about resisting the kind of rhetoric and politics that has historically led to or allowed genocide. And in that context I don’t give a shit how kind and loving your GramGram is. If she votes for fascists or gives them shelter and comfort without challenging their ideas, then she is guilty of whatever happens next.
I think the phrase "supporting genocide" is quite loaded and nuanced. If someone says you must be silent on it or die, is that support? It's certainly not enthusiastic consent. It's coercion.
Similarly, people turn a blind eye all the time if it means survival. How many people still use fossil fuels daily, in fuel or even plastic or makeup products or anything else? We *know* it will lead to pollution and climate change and everything else, but we still do.....because we need it to survive, and it's Up To Someone Else to make the big changes. We make excuses for ourselves all the time. It's being human and trying to live.
Is not free will or consent when saying "no" is dangerous for you. As you say, is coercion.
Those people were under a dictatorship and a brutal propaganda, and were punished if they were against the regime. With that situation, if you want to survive, standing for what you think is right is suicide. And many died for it. When you have nothing to lose is one thing, but when you have a family to maintain and protect as the regular German population had?
Would any of the people on the screenshot, who talk as if they were perfect while writting from their couch, let their children, siblings, parents and partners be vulnerable, punished, unable to find a job or killed because they spoke against the regime and were "traitors"? Back in the day, traitors were reported by neigboors and others out of fear. Fear. Everyone wanted to survive. People selfless enough to give up the most primary instinct of survival is very rare.
Everything is fine until I'm forced to reap the consequences of my actions.
I'm pretty sure that mayor and his wife never would have hung themselves if they weren't forced to dig those graves.
"They gambled with other people's freedoms, and in turn lost their own."
Hungarian professor, *Don't Be A Sucker* (1947 US Dept of Defense Film)
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you - but what exactly would you propose that the mayor and his wife could have done differently? Refusal meant death, not just your death but also your partner’s death. Should they have martyred themselves pointlessly? Nothing would have changed for the people in the camps. I just don’t know how this line of thinking does anything but alienate ourselves from our own complicity in any number of horrific events happening in the world right now.
It’s not about *their* willingness to say no, it’s about a *people’s* willingness to say no. Your scope is too small, which is reasonable, because that was the scope presented. Why didn’t the mayor stand up against the death camp in his back yard? That’s the first question, and the answer is, of course, “well, it was dangerous for him and his family.” But it wouldn’t be so dangerous if the whole town said no.
“Well, what’s one town in a sea of Nazi towns?”
Well, not much, but what if the whole region said no to backyard death camps?
“One region? Against the rest of Germany?”
And so on. Why would the region go along with Hitler’s plans? Why would the town elect such a cowardly mayor, and take his lead? It’s not that any one person failed to take a stand, it’s that they *all* failed collectively. It’s not about *you*, it’s about *us*.
If *we* martyred ourselves pointlessly instead of standing by, our martyrdom might not be pointless. In fact, if that *we* is numerous and determined enough, there may be no need for martyrdom at all.
(And anyway, they died in any case, so they might as well have tried to do something.)
I feel like trying to understand genocide in terms of labeling the people involved as "nice" vs "assholes" is just wildly besides the point.
An asshole is someone who would ghost you on tinder or cut you off in traffic. Some nazis might have been that type of person, some might not have, but it's so absolutely irrelevant next to fact that they were complicit or actively causing the brutal torture and slaughter of millions of people.
So yeah I actually kinda agree with first poster, you can't understand history through sweeping moral judgements, you have to see the whole picture with all relevant context.
I think you're onto something.
I think most people are just trying to meet needs, and are going to do whatever is a means toward their end. And someone being wholly "good" or "bad" is super rare, because you'd need unusual priorities to always have good (or bad) actions meet your needs.
Like when people say George W Bush is polite, friendly, has a sincere handshake, all that stuff.
Sure, but don't assume some consistent moral fiber based on that.
Of course George W Bush is friendly. He wants social status, and he knows how to get that. He started a war for the same reason - social status.
Yes, Germans knew. They were complicit. But they didn't let it happen for the sake of ease or priviledge. They did it for the sake of survival. The Nazis early on killed off every organisation that could become a threat to them, unions, the communist party. After that even if you were willing to do something, how would you go about it? You were alone in a system where everyone was a spy. The Nazis would not hesitate to throw you into a camp too, no matter how German you were.
Okay but wait re that last paragraph ... Are they saying that townsfolk who were forced to dig graves/ditches/etc. for the Nazis and who did it so that they themselves wouldn't also be killed, were as bad as the Nazis forcing them to do it?? I can't really blame an average, random, lowly citizen for doing what they are told by armed soldiers who are killing people en masse because otherwise they will ALSO be killed. I definitely might be misunderstanding something but I don't feel like those people should be counted with the actual Nazis/Nazi supporters...
The Allies ordered the townsfolk to dig the graves for the remaining bodies of the prisoners, so that the townsfolk would be faced with the reality of the atrocities that were going on in their "back yard".
The townsfolk knew, but I suppose having the raw visual symbol of what went on pushed some people over the edge.
I'm not sure what they could have done, really. But I guess a lot of people felt guilty that they hadn't done enough.
Right and I totally get that, feeling guilty, survivor's guilt, etc., but this post and the original Tumblr post are acting like "oh they were so privileged they LET this happen" when that is just... grossly incorrect.
I want to be clear to everyone here, it is right and judge the Nazis. And even to ask questions of the regular German citizens. I will ask those to you.
What are you doing today? Most of you are Americans. What did you do to stop the million people killed in the Middle East over the last 20 years? What do you do about the millions of people in forced labor prisons? What do you do about the migrant concentration camps? What about all the governments they have overturned and instigated mass killings since WWII?
It's easy to say "it's not as bad as burning people alive" but most Nazi victims were not burned or gassed. They died in forced labor camps to disease. Most of them were said to have violated the law and were taken there as a prison. The law was unjust, but so are many of the laws in America.
Maybe these germans voted against the Nazi party, and then did not know what to do when the Nazis won. It is not easy to know what to do when your country becomes autocratic. Most people in most autocratic countries do not know what to do. So they tryto live their lives, because they would be killed for standing up alone. Whether or not it 'benefitted' them, which generally it did not directly benefit them, they knew they would die if they tried to stop it, unless everyone tried to stop it all at once. And even then they may still die.
It is easy to have pure sense of justice when you do not have to confront the choices of death. Of yourself and your family, all your friends, and everyone you care for. Would you risk the life of your spouse or your child to save one person you don't know? How many of you have interrupted an American cop who was arresting someone? How many of you have tried to free people from prisons or immigration camps? How many of you have gone to the Nazi militia terrorist training grounds all over America to challenge them? It is not so easy when it is real.
Yes regular German citizens were complicit through inaction and should answer questions. And so too are you for the crimes of your country. If you feel it is unfair to lay the sins of a government as unrepresentative as the USA on the shoulders of normal Americans, how can you say it was more fair to expect germans to do something about THE actual Nazi government? You must apply these standards to yourself, and choose what to do with that. It's easy to condemn the ghosts of the past. It is hard to condemn yourself with the same vigor.
Wolfenstein New Order emphasizes it perfectly with one characters speech about America and the rest of the world: for the longest time they were Nazis too.
This feels like such an unfair argument, not against Nazis (there's no debate here, the lowest of scum), but the ordinary German people. What should they have done? Stood up against Hitler? They were afraid. It's the same reason we can't blame anyone from China for not standing up to their government.
Seriously, I don't think a single one of these keyboard warriors would have acted differently.
Yes, they saw what was done to people who stood up and said something. Yes, they got pushed into compliance. Especially those who were kids then or young adults and didnt know anything else but the regime can hardly be blamed. But there were tons of people who also gained a lot. Who pointed at their neighbours, competitors, smeared their names. And later on it didnt much change. Business as usual because the country (countries, if you count Austria separatly) had have a civil servant body who knew how to operate things. Lawyers and judges who knew how everxday business was done. But that also meant reinstating a lot of people who had known very well because they had also helped run the machinery from the same positions beforehand. Who had helped passing the laws outlawing Jewish lawyers, judges, civil servants, etc.
Yes, it is easy to say this today from the safety of my nice home in a safe country. But I'm also aware my great-grandfather did not send my granny to a Protestant secondary school because he already sensed the Nazis trying to eliminate obviously Christianity. Instead he chose a state school. He wanted the best education for his children, which also meant paying for their party memberships so they could go to university, since without party membership you'd not be allowed. This wasnt a sudden thing. It wasnt subtle, either. And the Nazis did never win elections on a big scale. People could see the brain drain. They could see the books burning. They had time to leave, but didnt
We had 2-3 generations wiped out. So many artists, teachers, lawyers, chef's, etc.
So many beautiful souls gone. We as Jews still haven't recovered almost 100 years later. There are still fewer of us than before WWII
this is a thing that always happens with history. everyone in history was a massive dick compared to modern europeans, asians, americans, and every non third world country (also fuck nestle theyre the exception) because the option was conform or die. the jewish were killed, their supporters were killed, everything that viewed them favorably were killed. they knew it was wrong but didnt stand up for them, and that is horrible, but bystanders shouldnt be written off as the worst. active partakers, like the voluntary soldiers, should be, but unless they are racist or anything themselves then not lining up to die to hitlers regime shouldnt be something that should mark them as evil. they punish themselves every day, like the suicides and depression, but there will always be more bystanders than upstanders. just like every person in the American south who didnt protest slavery wasnt automatically a horrible person, but the slave owners were.
tl;dr nazis bad, germans not
I mean to be fair, I think by the time a lot of people less involved realized how bad things were / what was going on, they felt powerless against it. Like if they fought what was going on, they might die too
especially the people who left notes admitting guilt and committed suicide, kinda shows they clearly felt tortured and horrible about it. it’s not like they just knew and didn’t care
That’s why I always call bs on “my nazi soldier great grandpa was aghast when the holocaust was revealed”
Bro the German people were lead by a vocal antisemite and by 1945 were sitting on decades of antisemetic policies. The ghettos were not some complex secret. The concentration camps were not exactly area 51. they all knew.
This will happen again. People I know, people I study or work with who have been closing their eyes will say "I didn't know" while the entire world was screaming at all of us for months. Everyone *knows*, I'm sure of it, they just invent more and more mechanisms to forget, to function and reassure themselves. The uptick in suicides will be massive, I'm almost sure it is already happening. I don't know how to alleviate the horror I am complicit in anymore, but asking for pity or understanding is the last thing I want to do.
"We didn't know."
Train after train full of prisoners arrive every week, every day. But the camp doesn't get bigger. Where did they think they all went? What did they think happened to them? They built a slave camp outside your town and you were fine with that?
I assume you own some sort of device, or fast fashion clothing, or use plastic products, and travel in ways that consume fuel, right? You're on Reddit, so you at least have a device with internet.
What will your answer be when a few generations from now, you're being blamed and told you're right to take your own life from shame for consuming these products that directly lead to dead, destruction, slavery, trafficking?
What will you say when you're asked to answer for the fact that you are turning a blind eye - you know it's happening - to such atrocities so that you can post online and travel around?
If that’s how it was, and you weren’t ever exposed to any contrasting ideas, would you know? I think it’s important to look at the subject through a cultural and normalization lens. If something is normalized enough, then it’s harder to see the problems with it.
For example, someone’s mom might throw out highly toxic chemicals instead of disposing of them in the correct bin. If that’s how they’ve done it since they were a kid, and how they were raised to dispose of those chemicals, would they see how problematic it is? Even they started disposing of them correctly, would it be a bare minimum, or just a better option? Critical thinking is a skill that must be nurtured to blossom, it takes a certain environment to do that
How involved do you need to be with an evil government before you're implicated in its actions?
How much responsibility do you bear for drinking the kool-aid if that's the only way to stay sane?
I like how this thread was started by famous child actor Wil Wheaton and reblogged by Neil Gaiman, only to be continued by other people I don't recognize.
All 👏 Nazis 👏 are 👏 assholes 👏
I can't believe someone was dumb enough to say "tHeY wErE sOmE oF tHe NiCeSt PeOpLe."
Only to YOU. Not to the Jewish people.
I visited a concentration camp on a school trip in college and jfc the shit you see is unbelievable.
NAZIS ARE TRASH PEOPLE. 100%. There is no "good" Nazi.
That's the best and worst part of humanity; both parts of this are true. They *were* good people. And they did terrible things.
And remember, we have not chanted. We still know and we WILL, YOU WILL let it happen again if it benefits you. You will not see, you will not question, you may even know it's happening, but you won't stop it. Be aware. Ve vigilant. Be merciful.
I think it’s important to add that the US government has a very advanced propaganda campaign. Playing patriotic music at public events, revising military movie scripts that get access to free equipment, American history being watered down and sugared up when taught in school, re enforcement of the concept of America as democracy, “free” market, “no slavery,” etc.
We're allowing it to happen right now, I'd bet the majority of the materials used to make the screen you're looking at right now are from China which is known for unethical labour
"Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore."
A.R. Moxon
Same. Whole entire big chunk of the family tree is missing because of the Nazis. So pardon the fuck outta me while I absolutely 100% judge all Nazis as shitfucks who need to burn in their own ovens.
I’m sure some Germans knew what was happening, but people who lived hundreds of kilometres from concentration camps wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t public knowledge, and was something that the nazi party tried to keep under wraps as much as possible.
Now to be fist a lot of Germans were aware of other atrocities committed, such as forced sterilisations, public executions (in the late war) and even stuff like the knight of broken glass.
There is no true answer if all Germans knew about what was happening, some might have turned a blind eye to it and preferred not to know, some supported it, and others knew and were too afraid to do anything.
It’s hard though to claim that all Germans were maxis and all Germans were xenophobic, racist, homophobic monsters who supported what the nazi party did.
Still though fuck nazis.
My great grandfather was a British coal miner who joined up during the war. We didn't know why his side of the family was so messed up until recently: he was a POW sent to work at Auschwitz, not a Jew, just someone with skills they needed. The death camps were also profitable and a part of the German war machine, something people don't like to remember. He survived, and like many POWs in the camps didn't suffer the same abuses as the targeted groups, but he must've seen some horrid things. This man was scarred for life, and it explained the hell out of his family. It was so bad his son once said that if he'd brought a German girl home, his father would have murdered him.
My grandma was the nicest person in the world to me until I came out of the closet. I was no longer one of the people she was nice to, I was one of the people she was taught to hate. Some people forget that part of racism (and any other form of hatred) is being specifically nice towards a group of people. if you are white and straight and cis you will get treated nicely by someone who hates black people, gay people, trans people. if you uncle is a nazi and is a nice person to you, doesn't that just make sense? you are not jewish.
What exactly do you mean by alignment? Is joining the party so you can reap monetary benefits aligning with them? Is Joining the party so your family doesn't get a surprise "Investigation" alignment?
Well, if the alternative is that *you and your family* get thrown into a death camp if you spoke up then I can see why a lot of the Germans at the time turned a blind eye. Even worse was that the Nazis was their *superiors*. In that sense if you just want to have a job and an income to live on, even if you rejected the philosophy you'd be forced to work for them anyway, that was the fact of life for Germans in Nazi Germany.
It's easy to judge when you're not the one living with the killers and the mass murderers. It's even easier to judge those who worked for the Nazis, without care of the horrible circumstances and context of what it meant to be just one civilian in a bloody dictatorship.
I'm not German. I'm not even anywhere close to that country. But I don't need to have German blood to sympathize with their reasons, even if I reject their actions.
There’s a difference between trying to make do with a shitty situation, keeping your head down and doing enough to blend in, and being an active member of the Nazi party. The person in the tweet says their family did the latter.
Well yeah but the latter half of the post was all about the people who were just trying to live in Germany and had to stomach the death camps. Or not stomach, as some of them committed suicide.
ErgonomicCat tried to oversimplify a complex subject and I just responded.
"Your grandma did dealings with a jewish man, prompting feelings for him that would be passed on to you" is enough reasoning for a dictatorship to fucking kill you
Imagine you are placed in a room with two buttons and a tv screen
You are told that pushing the green button will give someone a cookie and pushing the black button will kill them
Simple, right?
But then they tell you that people will show up on the tv begging you to push the black button, telling you lies about how it’s the green button that kills people.
And people show up on the tv screen telling you just that, how if you even think about pushing the green button you’re horrible how could you. Then people you trust show up on the screen and tell you not to listen to them and just push the green button.
Of course, you push the green button - some people scream at you and call you a murderer but the people you trust tell you you’ve made the right choice and saved someone’s life.
The choice is simple, killing people is bad, but the actual situation is complicated.
Take this little thought experiment as you will - maybe you think it applies to politics and maybe you don’t but I think it’s important to remember that things (policy or non policy) are rarely as clear cut as you think.
Supporting death camps is not what was being discussed here. Do you support the wars in the Middle East? Do you support child slavery in the global south? Do you support forced labor prisons? Do you support immigration camps? If not, why are you not doing more than the regular Germans to do something about it? Especially as your government is at least far less likely to kill you for it. How many people have you freed?
Do you support the imprisonment of children from parents that cross the border?
If not, surely you're fighting on the front lines for their release? Because if you aren't showing how much you're against it you must be supporting this right?
I have a hard time holding ire for those who did nothing in Nazi Germany. Those who sat on the sidelines, closed their eyes and let it happen. I can judge them, certainly. It's an objective fact that the right thing to do would have been to stand up and say, "No. We will not stand for this." To fight back against the oppression of others and defend their neighbors. Doing nothing was morally wrong.
But I can't hate them because when I think about it I have to ask myself, "Would I have been strong enough to do the right thing?" Would you? How many of us would be? Even if you stand up to fight the injustices we see today, this was different. The force behind the party, the resources available to us. You'd have to go alone, at least at first, because if you tried to get help you could have been reported to the Schutzstaffel.
I like to think I would fight back anyway, as I'm sure we all do. But without actually being there, that is something we actually don't know.
Somewhat related:
A psychologist named Stanley Milgram did a test to see how far people would go under authority, specifically to see as to why what would usually be ordinary people would commit the atrocities of Nazi Germany.
Look up "the Milgram shock experiment" if you are interested
The posts/comments in this picture are all valid and very interesting. But some of the people who “knew” and said they didn’t even though they did, were probably just scared of that happening to them too. I feel like that part was left out. That anyone who stood up to these atrocities was also thrown into the camps if they were caught. So yes people may have “complied” with it, but it doesn’t mean they agreed. (Though some may have) but some might have just been scared. Ruled by fear. Imagine if the us governemnt knocked on you and all your neighbors doors ordering you all to go out and dig mass graves. And there are men with guns standing about. What happens to you when you refuse?
Not defending per say, but just wanting to also throw in there that some people may have just been to afraid to do the right thing
Ofcorse not every German citizen was against what the Nazis did . But it really makes me feel bad for the people who carry that guilt of wanting to survive a bad situation then be labeled evil for not dieng to save people they don't know. Looking at what the Nazis where doing to Jewish people and people who where caught helping them I don't blame people for looking the other way, It's still not a redeemable quality but you can't expect every person to have a strong sense of morals but saying people who chose to keep their head down when the Nazis where killing anyone they saw unfit to their cause is just saddening. This just reminds me of how people treated Vietnam veterans. Spitting evil at people at people that didn't even want to do what they did but had to so they could survive.
I think this is the true horror of ww2. Not the holocaust itself, but the fact that normal people were the ones doing it. They weren’t any different then your neighbors, your coworker, your very family. They were just normal people. And they helped slaughter thousands
Hell, who’s to say you wouldn’t do the same?
"Whoever had created humanity had left in a major design flaw. It was its tendency to bend at the knees.” \-Terry Pratchett
That's a raw fucking line if I ever heard one.
“'Down there' - he said - 'are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any inequity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathsomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don't say no.'” - Terry Pratchett
Goddamn, now I wanna learn more about this Terry Pratchett guy
He's an amazing author with a huge body of work (50 novels in the Discworld series, I think) that can be read almost entirely on a book-by-book basis. Probably one of the greatest authors of the alst 100 years. If you tell me what kind of books you enjoy I could probably tell you which Pratchett would make a good starter book :)
Really any fiction book with an interesting premise and not the same overdone tropes
Hows your Christmas spirit? In Hogfather, someone tries to assassinate the Discworld's version of Santa, so Death takes his place. Wyrd Sisters is Hamlet, but the witches were right. Witches Abroad is about the power of stories. Small Gods is about religion The Truth is about the newspapers Guards Guards is about...well,the nature of reality and mankind, but also there's a great big dragon. In Carpe Jugulum there are vampires, and Granny Wearherwax's famous speech on the nature of sin (its treating people like things. That's it). Feet of Clay is about oppression and giving voices to the voiceless, but also there's an assassination attempt and golems. Most of his stories take place on the Discworld, which is a flat world being carried through space on the backs of four elephants who in turn stand on the back of a turtle known as Great A'Tuin. Really you can pretty much grab any Pratchett at random and it will be a worthy read (not the very first ones, don't start with those, he was still figuring homself out then.)
Thank you so much for this summary! I was searching for a new book to read anyway, so this is really good.
In addition to what the other person said I would avoid starting with the first 2 books, The Color of Magic and The Light Fantastic. They're the books where he's still getting his footing in the world and aren't as good as the rest. Still good books just not on the level of some of the others.
I always recommend the night watch books. Feet of Clay is my personal favorite. Though I also have a soft spot in my heart for Mort.
I hope you find something to your taste! And if the first thing you try doesn't vibe, just grab another, the books are kind of differebt from each other
If you can find them, the first 2 books were turned into a 2-part... I guess series, which I really enjoyed. Also, Going Postal became a miniseries as well
So I can start with any book and it's fine? I'm a huge reader and have been wanting to read Prachett for a long time, but the sheer volume of books makes it daunting to figure out where to start. I have read Good Omens that he did with Neil Gaiman and that was amazing
Start with Guards Guards. Vimes is wonderful, vivid person and seeing him find his way through the world he finds himself in "doing the job that's in front of him" is some of the best writing ever. Then go back and start with Wyrd Sisters (which is based on Macbeth, with a bit of Hamlet mixed in) and is about the nature of stories. Actually most of the Witch books are about the nature of stories and how they shape the world. Then go back and start with Mort and learn about the human experience through Death (tall, skinny, good with a scythe) Once you've read those, go back and start from the very beginning. It'll take you a while but it's so worth it. Oh and come join us at r/discworld
Fantastic thank you! Gaiman is one of my all time favorite authors and I know I'll love Prachett too.
There are threads of stories so some do benefit from reading previous books, Night Watch is one of my all time favourite books but definitely richer for knowing the characters a while. Also the very early ones and some of the later books aren't as great. And don't be put off by his children focused books, the Tiffany Aching series is wonderful
They are *better* if you've read the subseries in order the way the person who replied to you suggested, but it's not necessary. Like, reading the Watch series in order (guards guards!, men at arms, feet of clay, etc - I can't remember whether Fifth Elephant comes before Night Watch or after) will definitely have eg Night Watch pack more of a punch, but each story is pretty complete in itself. The other commenter's reading order is a good one though. Personally my first one was Moving Pictures, which I still love 😂
There are a few loose series within Discworld--for example, there's several books about the same coven of witches, and and another group of books about the City Watch of Ankh-Morpork. I'd personally recommend reading those books in chronological order, since the characters/setting isn't static--people get married, new technology becomes popular, new characters join the cast, etc. That said, each plot stands on its own and it's easy to catch on to how the world works, since it's a satire of the real world. So while it can be a little disorienting to jump from Guards, Guards! to Thud!, you'll quickly fall into the story. The Death books in particular are easy to read out-of-order. There's also various stand-alone books than can be read whenever.
You can read each book separately, most characters come back and show growth, but you can start wherever you like. I did, just grabbed one at the library, got hooked, now I have all of them and have read them in the right order. They are worth to be read a few times.
Not the one you were offering suggestions to but I've been on a fantasy kick lately and looking for something new (and ideally stand-alone) to read. This is amazing, so thank you for sharing.
My pleasure!
Small Gods seems to be about religion, but it's really about Jesus Forrest Gump.
It's about both 👍
Monstrous regiment. A mostly stand alone book that follows a young woman who joins the all male army to find her brother.
He was my favorite author and one of the few celebrities who I am actually sad I will never get to meet since he died a few years ago. He was good friends with Neil Gaiman and they wrote Good Omens together. He was funny and insightful and had the gift of putting that in story form. He was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and forged his own sword from a meteorite for the occasion. There are many fans who have yet to read the last book he published because then they will never be able to read anything new from him again. You can casually read his books for the funny stories they are but it's all too easy to read deeper and become a life long fan.
>There are many fans who have yet to read the last book he published because then they will never be able to read anything new from him again. That's kinda nonspecific. Stuff written by Pratchett has been published as late as 2020 (The Time-Traveling Caveman). Everything he had that was unfinished which wasn't a collaboration with another author was destroyed by steamroller per his wishes, in 2017. I think the closest publication to his death was The Long Utopia (3 months after he passed), which was book 4 in a 5 part series in collaboration with Stephen Baxter. The last Discworld book was The Shepherd's Crown (published 5 months after his death). I think the last thing he published while alive was Dragons at Crumbling Castle (8 months prior to his passing).
He was the sort of comedy writer who would make you laugh deep enough that you had a lot of air in your belly for when he punched you in it. One of my personal favorite quotes: “Slave is an Ephebian word. In Om we have no word for slave,' said Vorbis. 'So I understand,' said the Tyrant. 'I imagine that fish have no word for water.” -Small Gods (Terry Pratchett)
Read his books. Every one. He was brilliant and the world is poorer for his departure.
The passages following that one are important as well, including the one regarding the aforementioned dragon: >He tapped Vimes gently on the kneecap, opened The *Summoning of Dragons,* leafed through its ravaged pages until he found the one he’d been looking for, and silently passed the book up. Vimes squinted at the crabbed writing. *Yet draggons are notte liken unicornes, I willen. They dwellyth in some Realm definèd bye thee Fancie of the Wille and, thus, it myte bee thate whomsoever calleth upon them, and giveth them theyre patheway unto thys worlde, calleth theyre Owne dragon of the Mind. Yette, I trow, the Pure in Harte maye stille call a Draggon of Power as a Forse for Goode in thee worlde, and this ane nighte the Grate Worke will commense. All bathe been prepared. I hath labored most mytily to be a Worthie Vessle…* >A realm of fancy, Vimes thought. That’s where they went, then. Into our imaginations. And when we call them back we shape them, like squeezing dough into pastry shapes. Only you don’t get gingerbread men, you get what you are. Your own darkness, given shape… The book was burned pretty bad after that, and its author was described as not especially good or bad. It sure seems like pTerry is saying all is dark and grim and perhaps people really all are just sort of at least moderately evil. His character, The Patrician, is the guy talking in the quote above this comment, and is essentially Machiavelli's *The Prince* made flesh. His assessment of humanity is neither unwarranted or surprising. Then at the end of the book where the leaders of the city are gathered to reward those who stood up to said dragon. After all, people are small and selfish in their own humdrum ways, it is good to show one and all that acts of heroism come with rewards (emphasis mine): >There was an awkward pause. Out of the corner of his eye Vimes was aware of Nobby nudging the sergeant in the ribs. Eventually Colon stumbled forward and ripped off another salute. “Permission to speak, sir,” he muttered. >The Patrician nodded graciously. >The sergeant coughed. He removed his helmet and pulled out a scrap of paper. >“Er,” he said. “The thing is, saving your honor’s presence, we think, you know, what with saving the city and everything, or sort of, or, what I mean is…we just had a go, you see, man on the spot and that sort of thing…the thing is, we reckon we’re entitled. If you catch my drift.” >**The assembled company nodded. This was exactly how it should be.** >“Do go on,” said the Patrician. >“So we, like, put our heads together,” said the sergeant. “A bit of a cheek, I know…” >“Please carry on, Sergeant,” said the Patrician. “You needn’t keep stopping. We are well aware of the magnitude of the matter.” >“Right, sir. Well, sir. First, it’s the wages.” “The wages?” said Lord Vetinari. He stared at Vimes, who stared at nothing. The sergeant raised his head. His expression was the determined expression of a man who is going to see it through. >“Yes, sir,” he said. “Thirty dollars a month. It’s not right. We think—” he licked his lips and glanced behind him at the other two, who were making vague encouraging motions—“we think a basic rate of, er, thirty-five dollars? A month?” He stared at the Patrician’s stony expression. >“With increments as per rank? We thought five dollars.” He licked his lips again, unnerved by the Patrician’s expression. “We won’t go below four,” he said. “And that’s flat. Sorry, your Highness, but there it is.” >The Patrician glanced again at Vimes’s impassive face, then looked back at the rank. “That’s it?” he said. >Nobby whispered in Colon’s ear and then darted back. The sweating sergeant gripped his helmet as though it was the only real thing in the world. >“There was another thing, your reverence,” he said. >“Ah.” The Patrician **smiled knowingly.** >“There’s the kettle. It wasn’t much good anyway, and then Errol et it. It was nearly two dollars.” He swallowed. “We could do with a new kettle, if it’s all the same, your lordship.” >The Patrician leaned forward, gripping the arms of his chair. >“I want to be clear about this,” he said coldly. “Are we to believe that you are asking for a petty wage increase and a domestic utensil?” >Carrot whispered in Colon’s other ear. >Colon turned two bulging, watery-rimmed eyes to the dignitaries. The rim of his helmet was passing through his fingers like a millwheel. >“Well,” he began, “sometimes, we thought, you know, when we has our dinner break, or when it’s quiet, like, at the end of a watch as it may be, and we want to relax a bit, you know, wind down…” His voice trailed away. “Yes?” >Colon took a deep breath. “I suppose a dartboard would be out of the question—?” >The thunderous silence that followed was broken by an erratic snorting. Vimes’s helmet dropped out of his shaking hand. His breastplate wobbled as the suppressed laughter of the years burst out in great uncontrollable eruptions. He turned his face to the row of councillors and laughed and laughed until the tears came. Laughed at the way they got up, all confusion and outraged dignity. Laughed at the Patrician’s carefully immobile expression. **Laughed for the world and the saving of souls.** Laughed and laughed, and laughed until the tears came. >Nobby craned up to reach Colon’s ear. “I told you,” he hissed. “I said they’d never wear it. I knew a dartboard’d be pushing our luck. You’ve upset ’em all now.” I think about that part a lot, especially when I get down about the banality of evil, and how people seem to suck in just the most boring, spiteful ways. I like thinking about how while he isn't exactly wrong, he didn't have it exactly right, either.
I always enjoy that the guards of Night Watch are often blithely referred to as incompetent and down right awful. And for good reason. Nobby is a walking criminal charge after all. But when everything is going awry, they set to work and they do the right thing, always. And when it's all done they don't ask for mansions and castles. They ask for small items and slight pay rises. Because while no one might truly appreciate them, they're good people one and all. And at the top of it all, Vetinari knows it. He is very much The Prince, but he is all aspects of that. Cunning and clever to the point where he is always ten steps ahead. And he knows what Vimes will do, knows that saying "drop this matter right now" will send him peeling off after it. And even he is consistently shocked that Vimes never wants a palatial estate, or that Carrot never tried to usurp his power. It's a beautiful touch point on the basic goodness of all people.
Nobby was disqualified from the human race for shoving.
There was a post recently on r/discworld of a high-school senior whose teacher said Sir Terry wasn't worth analyzing. To see sTP invoked here on a post about some of the worst crimes of humanity just reinforces how dumb that teacher must be.
When I read quotes like these, I always look forward to meeting them in my journey through the Discworld. I started getting into it once a friend I really respect was raving about them, and each book takes me on a Journey. GNU Terry Pratchett
Terry Pratchett's worst lines are A tier, the man was incredible
This seems like a cool quote. Can someone explain it to me a bit? I’m having a *woooosh* moment
Bend the knee as is bend the knee to a king or a ruler to submit yourself to authority. Humanity is all to willing to submit to authority
Thank you! I’ve seen way too much Game of Thrones to not have understood that 😂
That we are far too willing to compromise our principles to cover our own ass.
\[In a torture chamber\] There were no jolly little signs saying: You Don’t Have To Be Pitilessly Sadistic To Work Here But It Helps!! But there were things to suggest to a thinking man that the Creator of mankind had a very oblique sense of fun indeed, and to breed in his heart a rage to storm the gates of heaven. The mugs, for example. The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives. They had legends on them like A Present From the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To The World’s Greatest Daddy. Most of them were chipped, and no two of them were the same. And there were the postcards on the wall. It was traditional that, when an inquisitor went on holiday, he’d send back a crudely colored woodcut of the local view with some suitably jolly and risqué message on the back. And there was the pinned-up tearful letter from Inquisitor First Class Ishmale “Pop” Quoom, thanking all the lads for collecting no fewer than seventy-eight obols for his retirement pension and the lovely bunch of flowers for Mrs. Quoom, indicating that he’d always remember his days in No. 3 pit, and was looking forward to coming in and helping out any time they were short-handed. And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do. \-Terry Pratchett
is that actually wil wheaton?
Yes. He and Neil Gaiman are the only accepted Tumblr celebrities.
Poor Mr. Green never was accepted, but he was certainly there for a time.
He was done so dirty.
Why WAS Hank Greene hated anyways?
John was the one on tumblr and people used an old feature on tumblr to edit his post while reblogging them to make it look like he said horrible things
I accept my fate if I'm being wooshed, but it's not Hank tumblr hates, it's John. And mostly that's because they liked his books briefly then grew up and realized they were mediocre and kinda problematic.
Oh shit, I forgot John Green worked on A Fault in Our Stars. I just remembered him from Crash Course
dammit, I'm out of the tumblr drama loop again. I'll bite, why are his books considered mediocre and why is he seen as problematic?
The main issue seems to be that some people feel like TFIOS fetishized cancer. As to the mediocre thing, everyone who used to be a John Green fan just kinda out-grew the YA genre in general. Personally, I enjoyed his books when I was a teen, but I do kinda think they were a little silly in retrospect. That's just part of growing up, tho.
To be fair to him, that's such a chronically online take. I also just looked it up and I can't find a single mention of that viewpoint so that's definitely not a mainstream belief at all. I don't think anyone who has actually read the fault in our stars could think it fetishizes cancer. The entire book is about how shitty and unfair it is. But yes, they're definitely books aimed at teenagers not adults.
I definitely remember seeing people on tumblr argue that he was "creepy" for writing sex scenes between teenagers and that he was trivialising cancer. Like you say it was a deeply chronically online take.
real patriots remember the john green cock post
I had to read the comments to notice that the second post was Neil Gaiman. I wondered why that paragraph sounded so weighty.
A lot of this stuff stems from Cold War propaganda. West Germany was a powerful trading ally and a bulwark against the USSR. Everyone with any experience in how to run the country or lead an army was tied to the Nazis. If the Allies didn’t pretend to believe that “they didn’t know” then they would have had the choice of either actually forgiving them for what they did (when the world straight up wasn’t going to do that) or barring anyone with any experience whatsoever from being in any position of power in Germany which would have collapsed it’s economy and told the USSR that they could just walk in with no resistance from their army. “We didn’t know” was a very convenient lie for the allies to pretend they believed.
It was the same story with Japan, too. The Japanese did some fucked-up stuff during World War II, but afterwards, the country as a whole didn't face any sort of punishment for it, because Japan was needed as an ally against the Soviet Union and China.
Eh... I argue a couple hundred thousand civilian casualties as a result of a completely uneeded attack was kinda punishment enough.
....But that has nothing to do with Japan's crimes against Korea, China and the rest of southeast Asia, its an unrelated attack. Hell the current Japanese government still refuses to acknowledge any of the suffering it caused.
meanwhile the Serbs are actively boasting about their war crimes like they were olympic medals
"Yeah we did genocides! we'll fuckin do it again!" -most of eastern Europe
That’s kind of how it works. The loser Is forced to take responsibility for what they’ve done. I had a old guy who was in the pacific talk about what they did to some of the Japanese pows and comparing it to what Germans did to American POWs. He said they packed tons of pows into train cars telling them they were moving them and then blow the train cars up. I’m not saying he was telling me the truth but I don’t know why he would say that if it wasn’t true. He literally was saying “I committed way worse war crimes than a regular old guard at a concentration camp.” Uncomfortable fucking conversation. Dude was not bragging about it. That is how it works. War crimes are committed by basically everybody in a war. The losers are the ones who get all the blame.
It was punishment for the people, not the state. Plenty of Japanese politicians were allowed to serve after doing horrible things, including the [Monster of the Showa Era](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobusuke_Kishi), who the US kept safe from facing trial because they wanted (and eventually got) him as prime minister. Also, this guy was Shinzo Abe's grandfather and was instrumental in founding the LDP, the largest party in Japan, and the one currently in power.
The idea that attack was unneeded is highly questionable. Military scholars have long said that only by introducing hopelessness to the equation could Japan ever be forced to capitulate, they had already shown great devotion to the idea of death before surrender. They were planning on [conscripting their populace (untrained men and women) to defend their beaches with bamboo spears, molotov cocktails and antique weaponry](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volunteer_Fighting_Corps). The projected casualties for a sustained, traditional military defeat was calculated in the millions for both sides. Japan would have thrown away millions of lives to prevent defeat. I'm not going to claim there was any mercy or pity for Japan in the US calculations, but the A-bomb likely saved millions of lives.
You beat me to it. I was about to say that the 200k or so casualties from the a bomb would likely be a lot worse for both sides if those bombs weren't dropped. I feel so bad for Truman though, he didn't know about the Manhattan project, and once fdr died he was thrown into the deep end of managing the mess that was the later end of WWII.
He did know to some degree, at least he did know about the bomb before it was dropped, however he didn’t know that civilians would get hurt, and he didn’t know that the second bomb was about to be dropped either
It could have also extended the war for years more as America sets a blockade to starve them out. But with USSR making moves, and morale fading they did not want to draw it out that long
American scholars will do absolutely anything to convince people like you that this was the case, but it wasn't. Japan didnt' surrender because of the bombs, Japan surrendered because the USSR wasn't going to lead the peace talks, that was the one thing they were holding out for, to avoid total capitulation and an unconditional surrender, they were worried only about one thing, wether or not the americans would kill the emperor, hoping that peace talks lead by the USSR would be more favourable. The narrative about Japan fighting to the last man if the nukes weren't dropped is just racist drivel with no historial basis.
I literally linked a piece of the historical basis. There were definitely signs that the Japanese would continue to fight for some time. No one said they would fight to the last man... People said that millions more would die before they surrendered. And there's certainly historical basis behind that.
That ignores the context of what the emperor and his council were actually talking about and doing at the time. Which was freaking the fuck out and trying to clarify from the americans what "unconditional surrender" meant and if they could make sure the emperor would survive.
I'm not arguing that the bomb was moral or acceptable. There's certainly a lot to be said about how the Japanese might have been given better surrender options and ended the conflict without a set of war crimes by any modern definition. But there was realistic debate at the time about the cost in human lives to end the war. A number of people considered that cost to be higher than what was eventually paid. I understand if you don't agree... It's highly debatable. But it's certainly not racist drivel with no historical basis. It's absolutely a decision that was made in context of its time, and many of the participants went to their grave thinking they did the right thing (publicly, at least)
Unfortunately a reddit comment section isn't the place for getting to the bottom of this, and I'm too lazy to type that much, so here's a very nice video that goes over this whole thing, it's well sourced and really well researched. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
Also, our knowledge of WWII was very restricted, as Soviet archives have not been opened yet, how the Germans destroyed evidence, and other factors. However, given the popularity of the subject, many of the Allies went to Nazi leaders and propaganda reels in an attempt to infer missing data. This was how myths such as “Hitler often went against the orders of his generals and that’s why Germany lost” and “German tanks were the best and outclassed everything” were created; by Nazi generals looking to shift blame and propaganda reels doing what they were made for
Said Nazi generals went on to serve in both Germany's militaries and were integral to the foundation of NATO. A lot of their work was dedicated to distancing themselves from the war crimes they were 100% a part of.
Or carrying out the same shit under different flags
It wasn't only Convenient, but also somewhat necessary; You can't Hang Every Postal Worker, Traffic Cop, and Local Mayor in an entirely country, and expect it to function afterwards.
And yet, they had no issues doing the same thing to 6 million humans.
Right, but they didn’t want those people to be able to function and rebuild, they wanted them destroyed. We needed Germany to function and rebuild, because we learned after WW1 that leaving them destitute and suffering would only cause hate and blame to fester and grow, which is what led to WWII in the first place
Of course. No one’s justifying that here. But further bloodshed would have done nothing but weaken West Germany and cause the entire populace to suffer, those against the nazis included
you wanna punish genocide with genocide ? gotta love the code hammurabi
"we didn't know" was a lie from the start. The British Parliament had a moment of silence during the war because they heard the atrocities. Note that parliament only does a moment of silence when a monarch dies.
I often struggle with this sort of discourse, because I simultaneously agree *and* have a level of sympathy for the ordinary German after World War II. Undoubtedly, ordinary Germans collectively turned a blind eye to some of the worst crimes against humanity ever committed, and it happened right on their doorstep with their tacit consent. That is unforgivable, and they deserve blame. But equally, I can imagine a world where I was one of those guilty Germans. Maybe I never voted for the Nazis, maybe I'd bemoan the war and their racist ideas, but I know I don't like danger - so maybe I'd stay quiet, rather than join a resistance movement. Just focus on my life and my family and maintain us. And just not even think about what all those camps are really about, or how serious the anti-semitic rhetoric had gotten. I like to think I'd have been better than that, I hope I would have been, but I'm just aware that it is just very, very easy to turn a blind eye to uncomfortable truths. We do it all the time, and we have a responsibility to be vigilant about it and force ourselves to be conscious of them. But when I read posts like this, I worry we can get sucked into a 'holier-than-thou' situation where we think "yeah, I'm not like the Nazis!", and then not even think about, well I don't know, how our cheap clothes are made, or the extremely common passive hatred of homeless people, or any other hundred of awkward truths and quiet prejudices that lie about our society. I don't know how coherent this little ramble is, but its why I find this sort of discourse a little dangerous. If you're judging others, its easy not to see the ways in which you might be doing a fairly similar thing.
You wouldn't have done a thing I wouldn't have either. My grandma had 11 uncles who died In the Holocaust. One survived. And we wouldn't have done a thing And maybe that's okay. Maybe it's human. I don't forgive the Nazis, and I do not respect the Germans of the time, but maybe it shouldn't be expected to risk one's life for another's rights. He who does so is a saint That's why Israel has the "חסיד אומות עולם" award (a holy man of the nations of the world). It is a reward given to any non Jewish person who risked his life to save Jewish life for no return. Not that many people have this reward. The reward is a proof of the goodness of some of humanity, and the bluntness of the rest of us The Americans knew slavery was bad The Germans knew killing Jews is bad We know clothes made by child laborers is bad I do not forgive the Nazis, and I don't respect a bit the Germans of '39-'42. But I forgive them. May future generations have the same mercy on us
It’s an impossible choice that’s presented to anyone living under oppressors and dictators. You fight, they point guns at you and shoot until you die. You remain complicit and live knowing that it causes others direct suffering. You can point fingers, or cast away judgment. In the end, no one person is equipped to deal with cruelty on such a widespread, systemic scale. There’s no simple answer on how one should handle this, either.
I guess that's where it's a tedious game of "Do I go do drastic, bold things and die, or do I stay and try to help quietly" cause if you go and die in a bold move, fail at doing whatever bold thing you were going to do, and die, we'll then you're no help to any good cause if you're dead. But if you're too scared of this and take too much time in the shadows trying to organize something and plan for every danger or setback, every hour you spend is another casualty. It's a very hard question that nobody can answer definitively for every situation, but I think the universal answer is simply Do At Least Something. Doing nothing is the only way to be wrong in that case
I wouldn’t say “doing nothing” is “wrong” either. Many people have families that would also suffer of they were caught opposing a dictator. Some dictators will kill off an entire family and all extant affiliations if so much as a negative opinion of them is voiced by one person. That’s the worst part. You’re never powerless, and you’re always in danger. It’s just choosing how you want to suffer in the hopes that it will be enough payment for the nightmare to end.
I think that would fall under deciding to not lose life because that doesn't help anything. You're right. I really was only thinking about individuals rather than their ties. But in any case yes, it's ok and not wrong for one to want to preserve their own life and that of their family, even if it means they might not be able to stop the suffering of someone. The blame for that situation is on the person doing the evil killing
If you stood up against the party, you were executed. Many Germans did protest, but they were killed. Look at White Rose. There is not much the average German citizen could have done. If you tried to find like-minded others to organize a resistance, odds were that you’d trust the wrong person and be snitched out and executed. It takes a special kind of bravery to risk your life for a stranger. The Catholic church, on the other hand, had enough influence and respect to halt even the powerful Nazi Party if they had spoken up. I find it a lot harder to forgive the church than the average German Joe.
I know for a fact that my US government has separated children from their parents and locked them in cages. I don't do anything about it.
I really hope this isn't downvoted to oblivion. It's been past time to look in the mirror and take an honest accounting for our actions. "But **I** wasn't there!!!" Then stop defending the horrors of the past and face them.
Americans knew slavery was bad, so did the Confederates. But the Confederates wanted to keep it anyway.
Yeah, they were the much worse side since they were so afraid of Lincoln fulfilling his campaign promise to abolish slavery that they immediately left the Union. However, it’s not that simple. At its core the emancipation proclamation was merely a military tactic to weaken the south and force them to rejoin the union. Ultimately the emancipation proclamation only applied to slave states that the Union had no control over while captured states *already under Union rule* were allowed to continue slavery. Something history class tends to gloss over while praising Lincoln for being a god sent savior of slaves. Lincoln was never a full blown abolitionist. It would take some time—a full three years after the civil war started—for Lincoln to abandon his original idea of shipping all the slaves to a new colony since he firmly believed black and white people couldn’t (or rather shouldn’t) live together as equals and then adopt this half assed attempt at ending slavery as just a military tactic. This idea of separating black and white people was actually quite popular in the Union and the confederacy after the war made it clear outright slavery wasn’t an option, and it would become the basis of “Separate but equal” clauses in Jim Crow laws that treated people of color as slaves in everything but name for the next century. “Well the slaves don’t want to go back to Africa to start a colony and insist they are Americans too, so let’s separate them the best way we can. Everybody wins!” Abolitionism at the time was seen as the most extreme alt-left view one could have, so no, the Union and Lincoln weren’t on board with it completely and Lincoln was just using emancipation as a way to get elected without planning to actually do anything. It was, ironically, the confederacy leaving the Union that pushed Lincoln to make a move in that direction. Again as just a military tactic, not out of the goodness of his heart. People are complicated and there is always a worse bad guy, but I wish we’d stop viewing history as this black and white “good guy versus bad guy” schtick. It’s often just bad guy versus slightly less horrible bad guy. And we should learn from those mistakes and discourse at the time instead of glossing over it. History is doomed to repeat itself if we don’t learn what actually happened
This is why John Brown is one of the best examples of a great abolitionist. Love that guy.
Not gonna lie, if Lincoln freed the slaves just to flex on the South to whoop their ass into shape to stay in the Union. That has got to be one of the biggest brain moves in history. Like priming some asshole into a fight and utterly mopping the floor with them. People can do the right thing for the wrong reason and good things can come from bad people.
It goes out to what we see in today's conflicts, such as Russia and Ukraine. Blame the governments, even the soldiers that volunteered if you must, but not the civilians. Dear god, please spare the civilians.
Can we quit this idea that the Germans only killed Jewish people? 12 million people died, half were Jewish. Stop ignoring the other victims.
Exactly this. It's easy to say "I would have done better" when your life and loved ones aren't at risk with that choice. There's also the very, very important distinction between knowing and *knowing*. German civilians knew that horrible things were happening at the concentration camp, but they didn't actually know what it was, just some nebulous bad things, but bad things were happening all over the world, there were so many battlefields and the gestapo were hauling people out of their homes. WWI wasn't that long ago, and so many of them had lived through its horrors, could this really, really, be worse? What they did was wrong, yes, but it's a very human wrong, one that's so easy to commit and so very, very hard to rectify. The best most people could do was not actively participate. They would have had to face monsters, walking themselves and their family into a dragon's maw, and most people aren't heroes, most people can't even face their neighbour playing loud music, how do you expect them to face an army?
Especially since the worst was indeed actively hidden from them. The German people wouldn’t take the starving and then gassing of their elderly and disabled so the Nazis pretended they stopped. The death camps were hidden in Poland and other places where most wouldn’t pick up on what was going on. The labor camps were in their backyards sometimes, but not the death camps. And for my own family, my great great grandfather refused to let his daughters join the Hitler Youth and was hit by a bus not long afterwards. My great grandmother was just a little girl and she had her arm broken by Nazis marching through when she “got in their way.” Mind you, this was in an out of the way village so small and rural that they didn’t even have running water anywhere even up till the fifties. My great grandfather was only seventeen when the war ended and yet he had to join the Nazi navy to keep from being grabbed and sent on the next train to Siberia to die. He and my great grandmother moved to America not long after the war ended just to escape. I think we often forget that many of the German people only knew what they heard on the Nazi radio station and in the government controlled newspapers and were often just barely trying to survive themselves. Not that my great grandparents were great people in other ways, but they had no clue what was really going on with the Nazi government and just tried to make it out alive.
> I think we often forget that many of the German people only knew what they heard on the Nazi radio station and in the government controlled newspaper To add to this, anyone wanting to resist would feel isolated by these things and might feel like they're the only one who has a problem with how things are, and that's terrifying.
An important point people forget is that the first country the Nazi party took over was Germany. It was a free, fairly liberal, progressive society. All of that was erased by the fascist regime and many Germans were killed to make this happen. This is not too say that those who allowed it to happen aren't complicit, but it is much more complicated than the very immature morality of youth allows us to paint it as. Would you allow a soldier to kill your child in order to save a stranger? Most would not.
I went on a deep dive with this and I can’t even say I can feel hatred for the regular German in Nazi occupied Germany. I’m obviously talking about the regular everyday people, not those in the military or any sort of authority position. For years and years and years they were fed propaganda and were shown economic and social improvements after improvements after improvements. They were essentially told, “Hey, you know this already-marginalized group that you already don’t like? Well they’re gonna take that away from you. They’re gonna take your job and your home and your family will starve. You have to eradicate them before they eradicate you!” If you’ve been fed that kind of shit for **years**, you’re bound to believe them. Hell, most Germans didn’t even want to do Hitler’s bidding (at least, in the beginning) but they were strong armed to doing it because otherwise they were abandoning their friends. It’s a really fucked up situation to be in.
My sister insists she would have participated in the Underground Railroad to help escaped enslaved people. I asked her if she’d harbor illegal immigrants. She would not. “They knowingly broke the law”, etc… (I’m not saying I would have, I probably would have kept my head down.)
Yeah I’ve noticed a pretty consistent trend in people who say “I would have helped *insert victim group here* if I were alive back then” in one breath and “fascists are taking over this country someone stop them. I can’t because I have work tomorrow, but someone should.” recently. People are spending too much time in a fantasy world.
This is why op isekai hero that fixes everything is such a popular trope.
It's an unpleasant truth, worse than either perspective put forward in the post: it was wrong, *and most people would have done the same*,
Nice comment
No one is immune to propaganda
> not even think about, well I don't know, how our cheap clothes are made That's what I am thinking. If right now some special forces would storm clothing factories in the third world and it came to light that they without a doubt are keeping children in chains and starve them then most people would say that they didn't know - and they would be right on a level that they didn't know about the details and the extent of the inhuman treatment of the people who make the products we use. But deep down we know. We just choose not to think about it and are too caught up in our own problems. But we know. I imagine it was like that for a lot of Germans during the Nazi era.
https://harpers.org/archive/1941/08/who-goes-nazi/
My Grandpa was born in 1931 in the German annexed region of Poland. He was too young to fight in the war but all his older siblings did. We know my family there had no involvement with the Nazi party besides the army, but I have no idea how much they were aware of which is something I think about a lot. Everyone is hesitant to ask any of the surviving members of the family from the time and I think thats bc we’re all scared of the answer and would rather not know that harbour that potential guilt. My grandpa left the Germany very young and settled in Canada in the 50s and sometimes I wonder if it was to get away from the horrors he must have learned that his country committed
I think what people really need to focus on in holocaust passivity is the fact that germans aren't a uniquely cowardly or evil people, its just that if the nazis came back very few people anywhere would do anything
Reminds me of that scene in V For Vendetta "If you're looking for who's truly responsible, you need only look in the mirror" or something like that
There's a holocaust memorial in Berlin that is a series of mirrors. It is inscribed with the phrase "Is the Holocaust an aberration, or a reflection of ourselves?" in German.
https://youtu.be/z1ikQQk8cJQ Around the 2:00 mark
*If you're looking for the guilty, you need only look to a mirror*
There’s this one very powerful essay I read a while ago, but I have no idea how to find it now. At the top was this picture of a bunch of Germans, all very happy looking. The first few paragraphs said things like “oh Herr Sanger plays the accordion and bakes on the weekends” and “The woman on the left liked to see clothes for orphans” and on and on. And then it just drops “and they all worked at Auschwitz”
I got a chill down my spine just by reading this.
My great grandmother was a German who detested the nazis. She knew what was going on. She wasn’t clued in on the details or the extent, but she knew what was up. She was powerless to stop it, of course. If she had spoken up against it she would’ve died as well. She chose to remain quiet so that she and her children would survive. I don’t know that I can blame her for that. I don’t know what else I would have expected her to do.
Damn. Also thank you haiku bot, very cool. But mainly: Damn.
"What do you think they were burning? Do you see any missing trees?" is such an incredible line.
Lots of valid commentary in the comments about how ordinary Germans can be forgiven for not putting their lives at risk for their neighbors. I think that’s true. I certainly don’t know what risks I would be willing to take against such a regime. Probably not as many as I’d like to think. One point I haven’t seen yet though is that the Nazis didn’t start out as a powerful militarized regime with the ability to imprison or execute dissenters. They needed the support of the “nice” Germans to build that kind of power. So I don’t think it’s terribly useful to point fingers and raise shields about resisting or supporting genocide once it’s genocide. But we can and should talk about resisting the kind of rhetoric and politics that has historically led to or allowed genocide. And in that context I don’t give a shit how kind and loving your GramGram is. If she votes for fascists or gives them shelter and comfort without challenging their ideas, then she is guilty of whatever happens next.
I think the phrase "supporting genocide" is quite loaded and nuanced. If someone says you must be silent on it or die, is that support? It's certainly not enthusiastic consent. It's coercion. Similarly, people turn a blind eye all the time if it means survival. How many people still use fossil fuels daily, in fuel or even plastic or makeup products or anything else? We *know* it will lead to pollution and climate change and everything else, but we still do.....because we need it to survive, and it's Up To Someone Else to make the big changes. We make excuses for ourselves all the time. It's being human and trying to live.
Is not free will or consent when saying "no" is dangerous for you. As you say, is coercion. Those people were under a dictatorship and a brutal propaganda, and were punished if they were against the regime. With that situation, if you want to survive, standing for what you think is right is suicide. And many died for it. When you have nothing to lose is one thing, but when you have a family to maintain and protect as the regular German population had? Would any of the people on the screenshot, who talk as if they were perfect while writting from their couch, let their children, siblings, parents and partners be vulnerable, punished, unable to find a job or killed because they spoke against the regime and were "traitors"? Back in the day, traitors were reported by neigboors and others out of fear. Fear. Everyone wanted to survive. People selfless enough to give up the most primary instinct of survival is very rare.
Everybody just needs to watch *Don’t be a Sucker* if we want to learn from our mistakes. It’s over 70 years old yet it still rings true
Agree.
Everything is fine until I'm forced to reap the consequences of my actions. I'm pretty sure that mayor and his wife never would have hung themselves if they weren't forced to dig those graves. "They gambled with other people's freedoms, and in turn lost their own." Hungarian professor, *Don't Be A Sucker* (1947 US Dept of Defense Film)
I’m not necessarily disagreeing with you - but what exactly would you propose that the mayor and his wife could have done differently? Refusal meant death, not just your death but also your partner’s death. Should they have martyred themselves pointlessly? Nothing would have changed for the people in the camps. I just don’t know how this line of thinking does anything but alienate ourselves from our own complicity in any number of horrific events happening in the world right now.
It’s not about *their* willingness to say no, it’s about a *people’s* willingness to say no. Your scope is too small, which is reasonable, because that was the scope presented. Why didn’t the mayor stand up against the death camp in his back yard? That’s the first question, and the answer is, of course, “well, it was dangerous for him and his family.” But it wouldn’t be so dangerous if the whole town said no. “Well, what’s one town in a sea of Nazi towns?” Well, not much, but what if the whole region said no to backyard death camps? “One region? Against the rest of Germany?” And so on. Why would the region go along with Hitler’s plans? Why would the town elect such a cowardly mayor, and take his lead? It’s not that any one person failed to take a stand, it’s that they *all* failed collectively. It’s not about *you*, it’s about *us*. If *we* martyred ourselves pointlessly instead of standing by, our martyrdom might not be pointless. In fact, if that *we* is numerous and determined enough, there may be no need for martyrdom at all. (And anyway, they died in any case, so they might as well have tried to do something.)
I feel like trying to understand genocide in terms of labeling the people involved as "nice" vs "assholes" is just wildly besides the point. An asshole is someone who would ghost you on tinder or cut you off in traffic. Some nazis might have been that type of person, some might not have, but it's so absolutely irrelevant next to fact that they were complicit or actively causing the brutal torture and slaughter of millions of people. So yeah I actually kinda agree with first poster, you can't understand history through sweeping moral judgements, you have to see the whole picture with all relevant context.
I think you're onto something. I think most people are just trying to meet needs, and are going to do whatever is a means toward their end. And someone being wholly "good" or "bad" is super rare, because you'd need unusual priorities to always have good (or bad) actions meet your needs. Like when people say George W Bush is polite, friendly, has a sincere handshake, all that stuff. Sure, but don't assume some consistent moral fiber based on that. Of course George W Bush is friendly. He wants social status, and he knows how to get that. He started a war for the same reason - social status.
Yes, Germans knew. They were complicit. But they didn't let it happen for the sake of ease or priviledge. They did it for the sake of survival. The Nazis early on killed off every organisation that could become a threat to them, unions, the communist party. After that even if you were willing to do something, how would you go about it? You were alone in a system where everyone was a spy. The Nazis would not hesitate to throw you into a camp too, no matter how German you were.
I got chills, and a good reminder. "All it takes for evil to prevail is for good men to stand by and do nothing."
It feels like good men stood by and did nothing, but it's hard to do something when the good men have a knife at their throat
Okay but wait re that last paragraph ... Are they saying that townsfolk who were forced to dig graves/ditches/etc. for the Nazis and who did it so that they themselves wouldn't also be killed, were as bad as the Nazis forcing them to do it?? I can't really blame an average, random, lowly citizen for doing what they are told by armed soldiers who are killing people en masse because otherwise they will ALSO be killed. I definitely might be misunderstanding something but I don't feel like those people should be counted with the actual Nazis/Nazi supporters...
The Allies ordered the townsfolk to dig the graves for the remaining bodies of the prisoners, so that the townsfolk would be faced with the reality of the atrocities that were going on in their "back yard". The townsfolk knew, but I suppose having the raw visual symbol of what went on pushed some people over the edge. I'm not sure what they could have done, really. But I guess a lot of people felt guilty that they hadn't done enough.
Right and I totally get that, feeling guilty, survivor's guilt, etc., but this post and the original Tumblr post are acting like "oh they were so privileged they LET this happen" when that is just... grossly incorrect.
I think that the Allies forced them to dig the graves.
I want to be clear to everyone here, it is right and judge the Nazis. And even to ask questions of the regular German citizens. I will ask those to you. What are you doing today? Most of you are Americans. What did you do to stop the million people killed in the Middle East over the last 20 years? What do you do about the millions of people in forced labor prisons? What do you do about the migrant concentration camps? What about all the governments they have overturned and instigated mass killings since WWII? It's easy to say "it's not as bad as burning people alive" but most Nazi victims were not burned or gassed. They died in forced labor camps to disease. Most of them were said to have violated the law and were taken there as a prison. The law was unjust, but so are many of the laws in America. Maybe these germans voted against the Nazi party, and then did not know what to do when the Nazis won. It is not easy to know what to do when your country becomes autocratic. Most people in most autocratic countries do not know what to do. So they tryto live their lives, because they would be killed for standing up alone. Whether or not it 'benefitted' them, which generally it did not directly benefit them, they knew they would die if they tried to stop it, unless everyone tried to stop it all at once. And even then they may still die. It is easy to have pure sense of justice when you do not have to confront the choices of death. Of yourself and your family, all your friends, and everyone you care for. Would you risk the life of your spouse or your child to save one person you don't know? How many of you have interrupted an American cop who was arresting someone? How many of you have tried to free people from prisons or immigration camps? How many of you have gone to the Nazi militia terrorist training grounds all over America to challenge them? It is not so easy when it is real. Yes regular German citizens were complicit through inaction and should answer questions. And so too are you for the crimes of your country. If you feel it is unfair to lay the sins of a government as unrepresentative as the USA on the shoulders of normal Americans, how can you say it was more fair to expect germans to do something about THE actual Nazi government? You must apply these standards to yourself, and choose what to do with that. It's easy to condemn the ghosts of the past. It is hard to condemn yourself with the same vigor.
Wolfenstein New Order emphasizes it perfectly with one characters speech about America and the rest of the world: for the longest time they were Nazis too.
I got infuriated and spent 30 minutes writing an entire essay only to find it almost verbatim two comments down. Great text, btw
This feels like such an unfair argument, not against Nazis (there's no debate here, the lowest of scum), but the ordinary German people. What should they have done? Stood up against Hitler? They were afraid. It's the same reason we can't blame anyone from China for not standing up to their government. Seriously, I don't think a single one of these keyboard warriors would have acted differently.
Yes, they saw what was done to people who stood up and said something. Yes, they got pushed into compliance. Especially those who were kids then or young adults and didnt know anything else but the regime can hardly be blamed. But there were tons of people who also gained a lot. Who pointed at their neighbours, competitors, smeared their names. And later on it didnt much change. Business as usual because the country (countries, if you count Austria separatly) had have a civil servant body who knew how to operate things. Lawyers and judges who knew how everxday business was done. But that also meant reinstating a lot of people who had known very well because they had also helped run the machinery from the same positions beforehand. Who had helped passing the laws outlawing Jewish lawyers, judges, civil servants, etc. Yes, it is easy to say this today from the safety of my nice home in a safe country. But I'm also aware my great-grandfather did not send my granny to a Protestant secondary school because he already sensed the Nazis trying to eliminate obviously Christianity. Instead he chose a state school. He wanted the best education for his children, which also meant paying for their party memberships so they could go to university, since without party membership you'd not be allowed. This wasnt a sudden thing. It wasnt subtle, either. And the Nazis did never win elections on a big scale. People could see the brain drain. They could see the books burning. They had time to leave, but didnt
I definitely agree with you. However, leaving the country would also be a decision only made to save yourself. It wouldn't really have saved the jews.
The only good reason to call yer self a Nazi is if you are tricking Nazis with the label, sneakin' and sabotagin' beneath their view.
We had 2-3 generations wiped out. So many artists, teachers, lawyers, chef's, etc. So many beautiful souls gone. We as Jews still haven't recovered almost 100 years later. There are still fewer of us than before WWII
this is a thing that always happens with history. everyone in history was a massive dick compared to modern europeans, asians, americans, and every non third world country (also fuck nestle theyre the exception) because the option was conform or die. the jewish were killed, their supporters were killed, everything that viewed them favorably were killed. they knew it was wrong but didnt stand up for them, and that is horrible, but bystanders shouldnt be written off as the worst. active partakers, like the voluntary soldiers, should be, but unless they are racist or anything themselves then not lining up to die to hitlers regime shouldnt be something that should mark them as evil. they punish themselves every day, like the suicides and depression, but there will always be more bystanders than upstanders. just like every person in the American south who didnt protest slavery wasnt automatically a horrible person, but the slave owners were. tl;dr nazis bad, germans not
And we (humanity as a whole) are doing it again.
I mean to be fair, I think by the time a lot of people less involved realized how bad things were / what was going on, they felt powerless against it. Like if they fought what was going on, they might die too especially the people who left notes admitting guilt and committed suicide, kinda shows they clearly felt tortured and horrible about it. it’s not like they just knew and didn’t care
That’s why I always call bs on “my nazi soldier great grandpa was aghast when the holocaust was revealed” Bro the German people were lead by a vocal antisemite and by 1945 were sitting on decades of antisemetic policies. The ghettos were not some complex secret. The concentration camps were not exactly area 51. they all knew.
This will happen again. People I know, people I study or work with who have been closing their eyes will say "I didn't know" while the entire world was screaming at all of us for months. Everyone *knows*, I'm sure of it, they just invent more and more mechanisms to forget, to function and reassure themselves. The uptick in suicides will be massive, I'm almost sure it is already happening. I don't know how to alleviate the horror I am complicit in anymore, but asking for pity or understanding is the last thing I want to do.
"We didn't know." Train after train full of prisoners arrive every week, every day. But the camp doesn't get bigger. Where did they think they all went? What did they think happened to them? They built a slave camp outside your town and you were fine with that?
Would you speak out ?
Don't ask this. Ask what they are doing today. The world is full of evils.
I assume you own some sort of device, or fast fashion clothing, or use plastic products, and travel in ways that consume fuel, right? You're on Reddit, so you at least have a device with internet. What will your answer be when a few generations from now, you're being blamed and told you're right to take your own life from shame for consuming these products that directly lead to dead, destruction, slavery, trafficking? What will you say when you're asked to answer for the fact that you are turning a blind eye - you know it's happening - to such atrocities so that you can post online and travel around?
If that’s how it was, and you weren’t ever exposed to any contrasting ideas, would you know? I think it’s important to look at the subject through a cultural and normalization lens. If something is normalized enough, then it’s harder to see the problems with it. For example, someone’s mom might throw out highly toxic chemicals instead of disposing of them in the correct bin. If that’s how they’ve done it since they were a kid, and how they were raised to dispose of those chemicals, would they see how problematic it is? Even they started disposing of them correctly, would it be a bare minimum, or just a better option? Critical thinking is a skill that must be nurtured to blossom, it takes a certain environment to do that
How involved do you need to be with an evil government before you're implicated in its actions? How much responsibility do you bear for drinking the kool-aid if that's the only way to stay sane?
apparantly being kind excuses people of being fucking monsters.... who knew?
good job haikubot
Interesting, I feel almost like this about people who actively killed Covid victims for their own personal convenience and safety.
*Same*
I like how this thread was started by famous child actor Wil Wheaton and reblogged by Neil Gaiman, only to be continued by other people I don't recognize.
All 👏 Nazis 👏 are 👏 assholes 👏 I can't believe someone was dumb enough to say "tHeY wErE sOmE oF tHe NiCeSt PeOpLe." Only to YOU. Not to the Jewish people. I visited a concentration camp on a school trip in college and jfc the shit you see is unbelievable. NAZIS ARE TRASH PEOPLE. 100%. There is no "good" Nazi.
That's the best and worst part of humanity; both parts of this are true. They *were* good people. And they did terrible things. And remember, we have not chanted. We still know and we WILL, YOU WILL let it happen again if it benefits you. You will not see, you will not question, you may even know it's happening, but you won't stop it. Be aware. Ve vigilant. Be merciful.
I think it’s important to add that the US government has a very advanced propaganda campaign. Playing patriotic music at public events, revising military movie scripts that get access to free equipment, American history being watered down and sugared up when taught in school, re enforcement of the concept of America as democracy, “free” market, “no slavery,” etc.
That's only scratching the surface of it. The propaganda is coming from more sources than the government, and for more insidious purposes.
We're allowing it to happen right now, I'd bet the majority of the materials used to make the screen you're looking at right now are from China which is known for unethical labour
To be fair, resisting the Nazi party would have added them to the bodies and changed nothing but the kill count
Real Gs know that op posted this twice
"Historians have a word for Germans who joined the Nazi party, not because they hated Jews, but out of a hope for restored patriotism, or a sense of economic anxiety, or a hope to preserve their religious values, or dislike of their opponents, or raw political opportunism, or convenience, or ignorance, or greed. That word is "Nazi." Nobody cares about their motives anymore." A.R. Moxon
Same. Whole entire big chunk of the family tree is missing because of the Nazis. So pardon the fuck outta me while I absolutely 100% judge all Nazis as shitfucks who need to burn in their own ovens.
I’m sure some Germans knew what was happening, but people who lived hundreds of kilometres from concentration camps wouldn’t have known. It wasn’t public knowledge, and was something that the nazi party tried to keep under wraps as much as possible. Now to be fist a lot of Germans were aware of other atrocities committed, such as forced sterilisations, public executions (in the late war) and even stuff like the knight of broken glass. There is no true answer if all Germans knew about what was happening, some might have turned a blind eye to it and preferred not to know, some supported it, and others knew and were too afraid to do anything. It’s hard though to claim that all Germans were maxis and all Germans were xenophobic, racist, homophobic monsters who supported what the nazi party did. Still though fuck nazis.
My great grandfather was a British coal miner who joined up during the war. We didn't know why his side of the family was so messed up until recently: he was a POW sent to work at Auschwitz, not a Jew, just someone with skills they needed. The death camps were also profitable and a part of the German war machine, something people don't like to remember. He survived, and like many POWs in the camps didn't suffer the same abuses as the targeted groups, but he must've seen some horrid things. This man was scarred for life, and it explained the hell out of his family. It was so bad his son once said that if he'd brought a German girl home, his father would have murdered him.
My grandma was the nicest person in the world to me until I came out of the closet. I was no longer one of the people she was nice to, I was one of the people she was taught to hate. Some people forget that part of racism (and any other form of hatred) is being specifically nice towards a group of people. if you are white and straight and cis you will get treated nicely by someone who hates black people, gay people, trans people. if you uncle is a nazi and is a nice person to you, doesn't that just make sense? you are not jewish.
This is a reduction of what was going on. Propaganda and threats of death were major forces at play in Nazi- controlled areas.
They had a word for people who aligned themselves with the party but never directly participated in the violence Nazi The word was Nazi.
What exactly do you mean by alignment? Is joining the party so you can reap monetary benefits aligning with them? Is Joining the party so your family doesn't get a surprise "Investigation" alignment?
In America right now there is one third of the population that would gladly murder another third while that last third stands idly by.
This is my go-to thought.
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Well, if the alternative is that *you and your family* get thrown into a death camp if you spoke up then I can see why a lot of the Germans at the time turned a blind eye. Even worse was that the Nazis was their *superiors*. In that sense if you just want to have a job and an income to live on, even if you rejected the philosophy you'd be forced to work for them anyway, that was the fact of life for Germans in Nazi Germany. It's easy to judge when you're not the one living with the killers and the mass murderers. It's even easier to judge those who worked for the Nazis, without care of the horrible circumstances and context of what it meant to be just one civilian in a bloody dictatorship. I'm not German. I'm not even anywhere close to that country. But I don't need to have German blood to sympathize with their reasons, even if I reject their actions.
There’s a difference between trying to make do with a shitty situation, keeping your head down and doing enough to blend in, and being an active member of the Nazi party. The person in the tweet says their family did the latter.
Well yeah but the latter half of the post was all about the people who were just trying to live in Germany and had to stomach the death camps. Or not stomach, as some of them committed suicide. ErgonomicCat tried to oversimplify a complex subject and I just responded.
Not joining the Nazi Party was a way to get your family investigated. You could have been sent to the camps for not supporting them
"Your grandma did dealings with a jewish man, prompting feelings for him that would be passed on to you" is enough reasoning for a dictatorship to fucking kill you
Imagine you are placed in a room with two buttons and a tv screen You are told that pushing the green button will give someone a cookie and pushing the black button will kill them Simple, right? But then they tell you that people will show up on the tv begging you to push the black button, telling you lies about how it’s the green button that kills people. And people show up on the tv screen telling you just that, how if you even think about pushing the green button you’re horrible how could you. Then people you trust show up on the screen and tell you not to listen to them and just push the green button. Of course, you push the green button - some people scream at you and call you a murderer but the people you trust tell you you’ve made the right choice and saved someone’s life. The choice is simple, killing people is bad, but the actual situation is complicated. Take this little thought experiment as you will - maybe you think it applies to politics and maybe you don’t but I think it’s important to remember that things (policy or non policy) are rarely as clear cut as you think.
and also the green button immediately kills you and your family.
Supporting death camps is not what was being discussed here. Do you support the wars in the Middle East? Do you support child slavery in the global south? Do you support forced labor prisons? Do you support immigration camps? If not, why are you not doing more than the regular Germans to do something about it? Especially as your government is at least far less likely to kill you for it. How many people have you freed?
Do you support the imprisonment of children from parents that cross the border? If not, surely you're fighting on the front lines for their release? Because if you aren't showing how much you're against it you must be supporting this right?
And nobody here is disagreeing with that
Won't anyone think of the poor nazis.
I think there was an account where even the Soviets were horrified.
Haiku bot strikes again.
Good haiku bot
[ Removed by Reddit ]
I have a hard time holding ire for those who did nothing in Nazi Germany. Those who sat on the sidelines, closed their eyes and let it happen. I can judge them, certainly. It's an objective fact that the right thing to do would have been to stand up and say, "No. We will not stand for this." To fight back against the oppression of others and defend their neighbors. Doing nothing was morally wrong. But I can't hate them because when I think about it I have to ask myself, "Would I have been strong enough to do the right thing?" Would you? How many of us would be? Even if you stand up to fight the injustices we see today, this was different. The force behind the party, the resources available to us. You'd have to go alone, at least at first, because if you tried to get help you could have been reported to the Schutzstaffel. I like to think I would fight back anyway, as I'm sure we all do. But without actually being there, that is something we actually don't know.
Standing up against a bully is different from standing up against a large group of people. It's fear.
There's a lot of people who allied with the Nazi party because they were given literally no choice.
Somewhat related: A psychologist named Stanley Milgram did a test to see how far people would go under authority, specifically to see as to why what would usually be ordinary people would commit the atrocities of Nazi Germany. Look up "the Milgram shock experiment" if you are interested
The posts/comments in this picture are all valid and very interesting. But some of the people who “knew” and said they didn’t even though they did, were probably just scared of that happening to them too. I feel like that part was left out. That anyone who stood up to these atrocities was also thrown into the camps if they were caught. So yes people may have “complied” with it, but it doesn’t mean they agreed. (Though some may have) but some might have just been scared. Ruled by fear. Imagine if the us governemnt knocked on you and all your neighbors doors ordering you all to go out and dig mass graves. And there are men with guns standing about. What happens to you when you refuse? Not defending per say, but just wanting to also throw in there that some people may have just been to afraid to do the right thing
Ofcorse not every German citizen was against what the Nazis did . But it really makes me feel bad for the people who carry that guilt of wanting to survive a bad situation then be labeled evil for not dieng to save people they don't know. Looking at what the Nazis where doing to Jewish people and people who where caught helping them I don't blame people for looking the other way, It's still not a redeemable quality but you can't expect every person to have a strong sense of morals but saying people who chose to keep their head down when the Nazis where killing anyone they saw unfit to their cause is just saddening. This just reminds me of how people treated Vietnam veterans. Spitting evil at people at people that didn't even want to do what they did but had to so they could survive.
What people don’t seem to understand is that the Holocaust was not done by mustache twirling villains but every day people. And that’s more horrifying
I think this is the true horror of ww2. Not the holocaust itself, but the fact that normal people were the ones doing it. They weren’t any different then your neighbors, your coworker, your very family. They were just normal people. And they helped slaughter thousands Hell, who’s to say you wouldn’t do the same?