Controversial Political Opinions

[pbrower2a]

(07-21-2022, 02:39 PM)JasonBlack Wrote:

Quote:Confederate politicians and generals, people who sacrificed large numbers of cannon fodder in the defense of slavery. Those are not heroes. We have plenty of military heroes from John Pershing to Norman Schwartzkopf to replace them, as well as genuine heroes who stood for the denied liberties of southern blacks.

I'm unsure what this was in response to,

It is about statues raised in honor of Confederate generals and politicians. Ironically most of those date from around 1915, about a half-century after the end of the Civil War. Some white Southerners wanted to remake the Confederate side in the Civil War into some noble purpose. 1915 is -- perhaps not coincidentally -- the year of the founding of the Second Ku Klux Klan, a group that had most of the salient characteristics of European fascism. Mussolini was still a wayward socialist, and Hitler was a failed artist who found soldiering as his calling.  Mussolini and Hitler learned from the KKK -- not the other way around. 

The Civil War was a catastrophic blunder for the slave-holding interests. The best hope for them would have been the abolition of slavery as done in the British Empire a quarter-century earlier. It's hard to know what abolitionists were thinking, but that might have worked had it not been for the hot-heads on both sides. The end of Reconstruction allowed Southern whites to get away with some bad habits that in the end left them mostly poor, ill-educated, and lacking in opportunity. Southern blacks were taking the capitalist path to prosperity by starting businesses and getting formal education; consigning people to a new form of serfdom is one way to waste the talents not only of the victims but also of the enforcers.    

Quote:but like most people, I have asked myself "what would I have done if it were me in Nazi Germany?" The answer is quite straightforward: war has nothing to do with justice, nothing to do with heroism and nothing to do with morality. War has to do with survival and protecting your friends, your family and your way of life. That means, in all likelihood, I wouldn't enlist at all, but neither would I wage war against my countrymen. If I were drafted, I'd probably find a way to escape, even if that involved murdering a few people and/or faking my own death.

Nazi Germany is so extreme that it makes most philosophical and moral arguments mute. The clampdown on immigration ensured that the only valid way to get Jews out of peril would have been an Underground Railroad that got whole families out of Germany. Jews faring well in such places as the British Raj (India) and the American colony in the Philippines would have made a mockery of Nazi antisemitism. 

Nazi Germany was a Hell in which the definition of morality was "what does the Fuhrer want?" instead of older definitions of morality. Jews may be no political or social monolith, but Jewish morality is well developed. A people that has been discussing the fine points of the Torah has a clear edge in discerning Right and Wrong. To put it crudely, there was nothing wrong with the German people between 1933 and 1945 that Judaism would not have solved. Tradition is often a viable alternative when moral and intellectual innovations implode or when novel technologies have unwelcome consequences (as with drunk driving as a consequence of alcoholics starting to drive). It was a strange world in which any semblance of freedom came with abject conformity and deference, hatred became an expression of official patriotism, people who had done nothing wrong became scapegoats for all recent failures of the German people, objective reality became irrelevant, and old standards of Right and Wrong had been reduced to sentimental prudery,  The one group of Germans who consistently did not fall for this was the Jews. German Jews were really Germans of Jewish religion, and many 'foreign' Jews (from Poland, Russia, Romania, etc.) assimilated into German culture completely. 

I doubt that anyone can say what he would do if he lived in Nazi Germany. Knowing what one now knows, even if as a German, would be impossible. People who hear enough one-sided propaganda get their morals, psychological makeup, and sensibilities eroded. The Nazis well kept the Holocaust a well-guarded secret. Anyone who suggested that the Nazis were up to no more harm than dispossession, abuse, and robbery of Jews would have been seen as insane or guilty of listening to Allied propaganda.  

Quote:I would apply this same logic to any war, even if I believe in one moral cause over another, or view a war as necessary for some broader collective reason (ex: if you are invaded, if another country is taking over a region with whom trade is vital to your economy, etc).

Evil people are often remarkably competent at believing that what they do is the Will of God.