01-31-2018, 01:28 PM
(01-31-2018, 12:30 AM)1948 Wrote: The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to say
nothing.
Evil is often quite competent in suppressing knowledge of its own evil. Most Germans knew that the Jews were getting a raw deal before 1941, but once the Nazis started shipping Jews to the 'East' (meaning death camps in Poland) most Germans had no idea of what was going on. Poland was as vile $#!+hole as any country could be once the Nazis took it over and began to brutalize it, and it was not a tourist destination. The Germans who knew what was going on were either the perpetrators or the more innocent of soldiers ... and it is worth reminding you that the July 20 plotters often used the Holocaust as their reason for deciding to plot against Hitler when they were tried for treason.
For another evil -- look at slavery in the South. At one time Southerners could convince people that slavery was necessary for settling a frontier which in 1776 was to the east of such places as Asheville, Spartanburg, Atlanta, and Macon and by 1836 had reached Texas. By 1860 the planters tried to convince people not owning slaves that slavery was a wonderful thing... for the slaves!
One can go only so far.
Jim Crow? When elderly Northerners started to find Florida a good way to get away from the brutal winters of the Northeast and Midwest, they had to drive through the Jim Crow South -- and those elderly people came back with tales of the journey... of the degradation that Southern blacks experienced. Their children and grandchildren listened, and some of those tried to put an end to that. Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner may have been among them. The Klan silenced their mouths and stilled any writing that they might have done, but as any FBI agent will tell you, dead bodies give excellent evidence.
It takes bad people and corrupt institutions to do evil.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.