The blurry line between religious and crazy

For the most part, we weren't fighting the camp officers. They had, erm excuse the term, cushy jobs well away from the front lines. The people that we were actually fighting were basically patriotic Germans. A non-zero amount of whom were ex-patriots who then fled to Germany due to being ostracized and persecuted in their new homelands such as the USA and Britain.The awful treatment of the Jews started a decade before anyone declared war on Germany. I suspect that if Germany had not invaded Poland, or anywhere else, and the holocaust became public knowledge in Britain, that we still wouldn't have declared war. We would probably have said it was awful, and maybe we would have funded resistance units, but another war...just to save the Jews? I doubt we would have bothered to be honest. Oswald Mosley almost beat Neville Chamberlain in an election, and counted Harold Macmillon (Future PM) among those that endorsed him, Britain would soon become embroiled in a Jewish insurgency overseas....I'm not sure the will was there. There were plenty of people that weren't anti-semitic of course, the majority maybe, but another Great War?Incidentally, a better example might be The Milgram experiment(s). A large percentage of ordinary people were convinced to give other humans lethal electrical shocks on the say so of an authority figure. Indeed - when the context was that the participant had to physically force the confederates hand down onto a metal plate that would 'lethally shock' them making it 'immediate' and personal - 30% of people would still murder someone if a suitable authority figure tells them to, even while feeling awful for doing it. The experiments were designed with Nazism in mind during the trial of Adolf Eichmann.So yeah, we were the morally most justified guys, but 'good'? I'm not sure following self-serving interests deserves the title, even if it was the right thing to do. If we lost of course, we may be arguing otherwise...

I should tell them that the allied forces were morally justified? I think they already know. Should I also speak to them of the fact that going to war in Germany was to defend Poland and France and Belgium and consequentially Britain, and that freeing them from concentration camps was the happy and fantastic consequence of their combating Germanic aggressive expansion? Yes. And often that is true of both sides. You are referring to just the 'good guys' now? Or should I also take a trip around Europe, tell the families who lost family who had volunteered to fight for nothing more than the concept of doing good in Germany and Italy and Russia and head over to Japan and continue the trend. Or is it only the ones whose politicians and media manipulated them into committing acts for King/Country/kill the krauts that ultimately justified the means I should be doing that to. The ones that were relentlessly propagandized to while living in cultures where education for the common man was served with side of nationalism who were, like Milgram's participants doing ultimately immoral acts while rationalising it was 'orders'? Because the ends of their politicians didn't justify their means, all of their mental abuse victims should be dismissed as evil or the 'bad guys' because....German blood? In both scopes you are wrong in some way.On the one hand - the scope of the soldier, what you say equally applies to German soldiers. Undermining the 'good' vs 'bad' guy hypothesis.
The other scope, the one I was using it in, is at the governmental scope. In which case, politicians were in short supply on the battlefield, but very eager to persuade men to go get killed for them.But yes, going to war with Germany was in the self-interest of Britain. I am sceptical we would have gone to war with Germany for just the humanitarian reasons occurring within German borders, and if we did it would probably have been too late. Of course, I'm confident that many men and women would feel strongly about intervening should the government allow them to learn it, which they frankly probably wouldn't have done.

Sometimes even the same guy. Claus von Stauffenberg was not a Nazi, but he took part in invading Poland and supported enslaving the Poles for German profit. On the other hand, he detested the Nazi ideology and tried to kill Hitler. Rest assured, we're not ignorant of Nazi evils. My wife visited Dachau and Auschwitz as a teenager - her grandfather had taken part in Dunkirk (posthumously we learned he took a noteworthy part). Two years ago on our honeymoon, we visited the 'House of Terror' in which the dungeons/gulag was preserved. My grandmother was enslaved by the Nazi regime. We're clear that the Nazi regime was something we are all better off without.We're just adding resolution to your broad black strokes (bad guys, period) on the white canvas, which as satisfying as they are to draw, does dehumanize the participants in the whole sorry affair. I get that you aren't ignorant of this of course, but you know, it's interesting to do and public words sometimes need additional commentary for some purpose.After all, though among the belligerents were the Nazi regime, we shouldn't forget that most of German fighters were fighting with just as noble intents as those they were fighting, as corrupted as they might have been. We were fighting the likes of Erwin Rommel, Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz and von Stauffenberg. Maybe even ranking Nazi Felix Steiner could escape the moniker of 'evil' or a 'bad guy', I probably wouldn't like him but that's the case for most high ranking military officers of the mid 20th Century I'd imagine.Again, I'm not trying to excuse or gloss over the horrors, nor am I accusing you of ignoring their are hues to the picture. We should salute the heroes, recorded and anonymous, regardless of which side manipulated them to what ends.

Yes, naturally. Like Tiger Force, for example or My Lai. When you have someone explicitly ordering it, and dissenters meeting sticky ends, I expect there was considerable atrocity caused by German soldiers. And ordered and coerced into service and obedience, yes. Which studies have shown, is quite normal human behaviour in certain contexts, even as we might 'never budge one inch' on the behaviour, I think it is unreasonable to hold no sympathy for the average man who had the misfortune to find themselves in perhaps some of those contexts. He also participated in the killing and enslavement of Poles. Again, heroes and villains is too black and white, and ultimately results in us missing the subtleties of human flavour, as bitter as it often is. Things such as the Enabling Act of 1933 call into question the very nature of lawful and unlawful orders as a distinction. Moral and immoral should be preferred, if only we could agree on that!

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I,____________, do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; and that I will obey the orders of the President of the United States and the orders of the officers appointed over me, according to the regulations and the Uniform Code of Military Justice. So help me God

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Hmmm. Oaths eh? Wasn't there some kind of Hitler oath?

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I swear by God this sacred oath that to the Leader of the German empire and people, Adolf Hitler, supreme commander of the armed forces, I shall render unconditional obedience and that as a brave soldier I shall at all times be prepared to give my life for this oath.

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The American oath at WWII I believe was

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I _____ have, this day, voluntarily enlisted myself, as a soldier, in the American continental army, for one year, unless sooner discharged: And I do bind myself to conform, in all instances, to such rules and regulations, as are, or shall be, established for the government of the said Army

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Which would put them in the same kind of bind as the Germans if the rules insisted on atrocity. You know, if oaths are important. If this is relevant at all, it seems that you are justifying the actions of the German military.

You talk like these are always separate groups. In all wars soldiers commit horrid offences against unarmed civillians. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it...it's not that history repeats, but it rhymes....etc.Look, it's really easy to use narrative structures such as 'good vs evil' or 'heroes vs villains' colour our view of history. But history is not a scripted story, and refusing to budge I'm sure stands you up as a defender of Good and condemner of Evil in your own narrative, but at the cost of the truth. It's your choice, and you do have the ability to understand human atrocity more fully. Good guys and bad guys is only going to hamper your attempts to do so, even if you might (as I do) have strong feelings over what's right and wrong. I notice you avoid my evidence. The part where you characterised someone as a hero who participated in starting WWII, killing innocent people and enslaving them. Well not all of them. Germany is a huge place.Those that might have, let us assume they did. Then what? They couldn't single handedly overthrow the Nazi regime, and conspiring to do so was very dangerous as anybody could grass you up, and you and your family and your friends and people you spoke to in a bar...could all end up in one of those self-same camps. You know what you meant, I have to interpret.Are oaths important?
Do soldiers have duties and obligations to follow lawful orders?If so, you are justifying the German soldier's actions.
If not, why did you bring it up?

What if the consequences of your insubordination were1) You get tortured to death
2) Your wife gets raped and tortured to death
3) Your children are drowned.
4) Anybody who was sympathetic to you was shot
5) The people you refused to shoot or hang, get shot and hanged. Yes, the German military committed a largely disproportionate amount of moral crimes in the furtherance of their doomed goals. Yep. But if they are talking about it in a thread about 'blurry lines' they can expect their sharply drawn lines to receive some smudging Labels have utility.
But the scope and limitations of that utility should be recognized.
When you use broad labels to derive sweeping moral judgements about anyone in that label, you are almost certainly going to be making mistakes.
Simplifying complex situations in such a way helps learning and understanding at first, but it can hamper efforts to learn more (ie., it gives us a bias that can cloud our vision).
first broadcast: 1975