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On November 15 2012 06:32 farvacola wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 06:26 Xiron wrote:On November 15 2012 06:13 ACrow wrote:On November 15 2012 05:58 Xiron wrote:On November 15 2012 05:36 ACrow wrote:
You don't need to be a scholar to see that genocide is bad. While morality is subjective, anyone that argues genocides might be morally acceptable is a person that I'd call an idiot and morally despiccable and not worth to further discuss with. That's my own, personal and totally subjective standpoint. And ignorant, narrow-minded and all in all uneducated. But whatever.. Then please enlighten me why you would think a genocide might be morally acceptable. I'm all ears. Because genocide follows the same rule, which all of nature follows: The strongest survive. Let's imagine: Your country is poor, in a huge famine. Your little brother already starved, you are skinny as a stick. But then there are those people, in a neighboring country, who are wealthy, but they won't give you anything, just because. All the people in your country, filled with hunger and anger begin to hate those other people, because they don't care about you. Your government, desperate, invades that other country. This country obviously fights back, a war ensues. Your country wins the war, but not after killing basically all of the other country's population. You get to eat again, get to sleep again, without having the fear to wake up next to your dead sister. And you WILL think it was acceptable to kill those other people you don't know anything about, because it secured your own survival. You WILL think this genocide was justified. That's nature. Winning a war and committing genocide are not even remotely the same thing. In a historic sense, genocide is almost always reserved to describe the totally lopsided killing of a population by another, not some precipitation of a zero-sum war's consequences.
Yup I realized.
But what I built as an image is what's in one's head, not what is true. Because what's true and what's not doesn't influence morals. They are influenced by what you THINK is true.
And in this situation, you percieve killing all of those people for your own survival as acceptable. And that's when genocide is morally acceptable. Obviously I just halfassed this example because I don't want to write 3000words just to get my point across clearer, if not necessary.
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On November 15 2012 06:03 mcc wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 05:36 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:27 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 05:21 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:05 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:50 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 04:37 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:06 Aterons_toss wrote:On November 15 2012 03:59 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 03:39 Aterons_toss wrote:
[quote]
This is exactly the problem, if an education makes it impossible for someone to embrace fascist-like ideals than it means that education is obviously based.
Nazism was bad much like communism was bad. But extreme right/extreme left ideal in general are not bad, quite the opposite, if you read any humanist philosophy you will see that similar systems were proposed and they could have even in recent days worked quite well "theoretically".
The Nazi in 20 century Germany were not evil incarnate as a "philosophy", indeed they were not worse than current American and European governs protecting the church and it's rights even tho the church is openly sexists and some of them ( most ) heavily racist as well.
Nazi didn't want all the Jews, blacks, Chinese... etc dead, only some extremist got that far ( and it was due to monetary reasons mostly ), they did believe race inequality and had a right extreme doctrine which is obviously going to be far less than a success when applied in a real situation. If you teach this at school instead " EVERYTHING NAZI IS EVIL INCARNATE" than you are likely to only have a very small majority of people believe nazi was " the right thing " and that silent minority will never be able to grow much like extremist of any kind haven't been able to grow in current 1st world countries.
But if you portray it as the pure evil than it will get people to question the information they are given and actually say "maybe they are the bad guys and trying to make the Nazi look bad".
Twisting the truth and hammering on an issue such as Nazi only to make sure it never comes back is really silly in this day and age.
Not that there are any chances it would in Germany at any rate, but you would likely see less of this if they had not done that.
Or maybe if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace nazism it succeeded spectacularly. Because that is the goal of education, to form people so they are able to function in society. Nazism is (no matter which flavor) evil either as ideology or as practical implementation. Or do you think that wars, racism or genocide are not evil ? Non-evil people seeing nazism for what it really is means that they will never want to embrace it. Thus if education presents nazism as it truly is convincingly enough it will prevent people from embracing it. And that is success. What you are saying is basically the same as someone saying that if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace that 1+1=3, then it is biased. Which I hope you can clearly see as nonsense. Well your are from a country that has much stronger connections to Germany in general from what i know and you likely know more about their education system than me since i was drawing conclusion based on a few posts. If the education system isn't bias to the issue than it's likely that this will never become a problem in Germany... nor would it if it was and to be honest discussing this is kind pointless since, as was pointed out before, extremist right party existed and were quick to fall short in voters, I was only making the argument that circle jerking around how bad Nazism was wouldn't help but rather damage the image of "non Nazi". If this circlejerk happens and at what scale it's not in my knowledge so maybe I just have my facts ( or rather lack of them ) wrong and this is a non issue. Also 1+1 = 2 vs 1+1 = 3 is a whole other thing because we are trying to compare exact science to politics and ideologies. I get the point but i would say it doesn't really work the same way, you can always have an argument for any policy no matter how outrageous because it is in the end subjective and no policy whatsoever is the " RIGHT " but you can never have one for 1+1 = 3 because 1+1 = 2 is objectively the absolute truth. You can have arguments for some evil policies, but that just makes you evil. It is as easy as that. Nazi ideology is not some squabble about taxes and even not the debate about abortion. Good and evil are not as subjective as some people think they are, but that would take us to a discussion that I had in other threads often enough. As for the rest, with your more specific explanation, I get what you are trying to say, but there is no need for some knee-jerk examples of why nazis are bad in schools, there are plenty of clear examples for everyone to see. No circle-jerk is needed for any sane person to not embrace nazism after having objective, but sufficiently exhaustive, lesson on nazism. morality is massively subjective and not applicable to history. Genocide has always been a part of human behaviour. The means might have changed but as long as the outcome does not, there is barely a noteworthy difference. The only difference is that it's used by nations and partys more aggressively to discredit certain states, nations, partys or groups. I see no point discussing with someone who thinks genocide might be a "good" thing. Note that I qualified my statement with "any sane person". The question why genocides happen has caused headaches for a lot of scholars. There are a lot of answers to that question. "The antichrist did come down to the world and infected nations" was never an option, neither was "well, everyone just goes insane." So there must be a factor which leads to people accepting the concept as 'good' in certain circumstances (for romans during the imperial era it was not an evil concept). The actual findings of that historical branch are really interesting. Of course you can also just remain on your horse of morality and look down on people that actually know what they are talking about. Discussing why genocides happen is not the same as saying morality is all relative and genocide might be good. Since we can pretty much be sure that such a big number of people are not all complete psychopaths, big prerequisite for genocides seems to be ideological brainwashing to make the target population not-really-same-as-us/not-really-human. After that thanks to our ability to override our instincts you can do evil things even when you are not completely evil person. so there was morality in our genes. And it magically popped up after ww2? (or was "found"?). And since that point, we know what is wrong and what is right. Everyone else just doesn't know, and our ancestors never knew. And, if (or rather: when) in the future, it happens again, everyone just went insane? Well, I am starting to see the ideological brainwashing, but on another side. Did you even read my post ? I posited hypothesis why genocides happen even though they are against most people's moral code. So no it did not pop up after second world war, if you presented nazi actions to a person from 19th century he would have the same to say about it as us today. Our ancestors 10000 years ago had the same basic moral code as we do. Do you know that most murderers actually consider murder bad, they just override their moral instinct. So why are you surprised that even though we have morality encoded into our genes we still do things that are not in accordance with it ? The only thing that changed throughout the history is that we are treating bigger and bigger chunks of people as we would treat people close to us. Morality remains the same, we just apply it to bigger groups of people as time goes on. We do less of the : "paint the others as not-really-same-as-us/not-really-human" as I said in my previous post.
I think morality is always applied. However, if we use different definitions of morality, we probably just have to agree to disagree.
On November 15 2012 06:09 ACrow wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 05:45 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:36 ACrow wrote:On November 15 2012 05:21 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:05 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:50 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 04:37 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:06 Aterons_toss wrote:On November 15 2012 03:59 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 03:39 Aterons_toss wrote:
[quote]
This is exactly the problem, if an education makes it impossible for someone to embrace fascist-like ideals than it means that education is obviously based.
Nazism was bad much like communism was bad. But extreme right/extreme left ideal in general are not bad, quite the opposite, if you read any humanist philosophy you will see that similar systems were proposed and they could have even in recent days worked quite well "theoretically".
The Nazi in 20 century Germany were not evil incarnate as a "philosophy", indeed they were not worse than current American and European governs protecting the church and it's rights even tho the church is openly sexists and some of them ( most ) heavily racist as well.
Nazi didn't want all the Jews, blacks, Chinese... etc dead, only some extremist got that far ( and it was due to monetary reasons mostly ), they did believe race inequality and had a right extreme doctrine which is obviously going to be far less than a success when applied in a real situation. If you teach this at school instead " EVERYTHING NAZI IS EVIL INCARNATE" than you are likely to only have a very small majority of people believe nazi was " the right thing " and that silent minority will never be able to grow much like extremist of any kind haven't been able to grow in current 1st world countries.
But if you portray it as the pure evil than it will get people to question the information they are given and actually say "maybe they are the bad guys and trying to make the Nazi look bad".
Twisting the truth and hammering on an issue such as Nazi only to make sure it never comes back is really silly in this day and age.
Not that there are any chances it would in Germany at any rate, but you would likely see less of this if they had not done that.
Or maybe if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace nazism it succeeded spectacularly. Because that is the goal of education, to form people so they are able to function in society. Nazism is (no matter which flavor) evil either as ideology or as practical implementation. Or do you think that wars, racism or genocide are not evil ? Non-evil people seeing nazism for what it really is means that they will never want to embrace it. Thus if education presents nazism as it truly is convincingly enough it will prevent people from embracing it. And that is success. What you are saying is basically the same as someone saying that if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace that 1+1=3, then it is biased. Which I hope you can clearly see as nonsense. Well your are from a country that has much stronger connections to Germany in general from what i know and you likely know more about their education system than me since i was drawing conclusion based on a few posts. If the education system isn't bias to the issue than it's likely that this will never become a problem in Germany... nor would it if it was and to be honest discussing this is kind pointless since, as was pointed out before, extremist right party existed and were quick to fall short in voters, I was only making the argument that circle jerking around how bad Nazism was wouldn't help but rather damage the image of "non Nazi". If this circlejerk happens and at what scale it's not in my knowledge so maybe I just have my facts ( or rather lack of them ) wrong and this is a non issue. Also 1+1 = 2 vs 1+1 = 3 is a whole other thing because we are trying to compare exact science to politics and ideologies. I get the point but i would say it doesn't really work the same way, you can always have an argument for any policy no matter how outrageous because it is in the end subjective and no policy whatsoever is the " RIGHT " but you can never have one for 1+1 = 3 because 1+1 = 2 is objectively the absolute truth. You can have arguments for some evil policies, but that just makes you evil. It is as easy as that. Nazi ideology is not some squabble about taxes and even not the debate about abortion. Good and evil are not as subjective as some people think they are, but that would take us to a discussion that I had in other threads often enough. As for the rest, with your more specific explanation, I get what you are trying to say, but there is no need for some knee-jerk examples of why nazis are bad in schools, there are plenty of clear examples for everyone to see. No circle-jerk is needed for any sane person to not embrace nazism after having objective, but sufficiently exhaustive, lesson on nazism. morality is massively subjective and not applicable to history. Genocide has always been a part of human behaviour. The means might have changed but as long as the outcome does not, there is barely a noteworthy difference. The only difference is that it's used by nations and partys more aggressively to discredit certain states, nations, partys or groups. I see no point discussing with someone who thinks genocide might be a "good" thing. Note that I qualified my statement with "any sane person". The question why genocides happen has caused headaches for a lot of scholars. There are a lot of answers to that question. "The antichrist did come down to the world and infected nations" was never an option, neither was "well, everyone just goes insane." So there must be a factor which leads to people accepting the concept as 'good' in certain circumstances (for romans during the imperial era it was not an evil concept). The actual findings of that historical branch are really interesting. Of course you can also just remain on your horse of morality and look down on people that actually know what they are talking about. You don't need to be a scholar to see that genocide is bad. While morality is subjective, anyone that argues genocides might be morally acceptable is a person that I'd call an idiot and morally despiccable and not worth to further discuss with. That's my own, personal and totally subjective standpoint. You seem to be confusing scientific (history is classified as a science in the german language@non-germans) approach with the standpoint of me personally. I never said that I like genocide or that I think it is or even can be good, but THIS opinion (and yours) is based on my own perception of what is morally acceptable. For most of the time, the human race didnt give a flying fuck about morality when it came to people they did not see as part of their own society. I just tried point out that if you look at certain points in history you can NOT just say everyone is evil. That is highly unscientific and you would fail every course in history with that attitude. How would I fail a history course when I argue my own interpretation of morality? That'd hardly be the topic of the course. And if you want to discuss morality from the perspecitve of the time period they were in, then I'd make the argument that there were contemporaries of the holocaust that saw the actions of the Nazis very much as morally 'evil' as well, just watch the black&white video recordings of the GI's that discovered the KZs and the multitude of testimonies of contemporaries that were horrified by the industrialized way that human beings were gased. By pretty much any definition of moral that I know of, the actions of the Nazis were morally corrupt, from today's perspective, as well from the perspective of a person living at that time. I don't deny that there were a plentitude of genocides before and sadly there will probably be more to come, but saying humanity in general doesn't care about this, is something I don't want to accept and is also something I doubt has been scientifically proven... We are being very off-topic here, but I got the (maybe wrong, if so then I apologize) impression that you are somehow defending adhering to Nazi ideology, which is something that really baffles me.
I won't defend an ideology that would have killed me on the spot. However, I don't like scientific approaches that disregard neutrality. If you want to make a point about your 'morality' do that in ethics or in philosophy and not in history. History should be regarded as a neutral entitiy, to extract as much accurate information as possible and learn from it.
Today, research about the second world war is heavily restricted in Germany. The outcome is clear beforehand, getting exact numbers is close to impossible (and if you ask professors where they even got their numbers in the first place, you just made a new enemy, because they don't have a source, just an ideology and estimates from the 40's or 50's).
This is unworthy of a liberal and democratic country.
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On November 15 2012 06:59 sephiria wrote:
I won't defend an ideology that would have killed me on the spot. However, I don't like scientific approaches that disregard neutrality.
Disregarding neutrality means disregarding science and turning it into belief. That's why morals are believes, and that's why morals are only limited to imagination and thus individual.
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"I posted hypothesis why genocides happen even though they are against most people's moral code."
Its pretty simple, humans have 3 brains.
A reptile brain, a mammal brain, and then the human brain.
The human brain holds the reason, (and with that moralty i asume), the mammal brain holds the emotions, and the reptile brain holds the primitive instincts.
These 3 brains operate more or less independant,(thats why you can never realy get rid of negative emotions by just reasoning)
The human brain is not always in control of us,so thats why sane people can at times operate without moralty.
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On November 14 2012 15:12 shinosai wrote:Show nested quote +On November 14 2012 13:26 Cyber_Cheese wrote:
Well, I can't speak for everyone, but.
All I ever hear about with nazis is how terrible this and that are, I feel like I've only ever heard one side of the argument. It's not too dissimilar with things like the twin towers and the Iraq war.
I really want to hear the perspective of the people being ostracised sometimes, especially with nazi's.
-Out of the loop- Unless you believe someone can actually justify genocide I'm not sure you're going to hear a meaningful other side. It's not just a matter of perspective (or perhaps it is, but the perspective is the one that most of us have now adopted for good reason)... they committed some of the most terrible crimes conceivable in the eyes of a mostly liberal population with a belief in equal rights and anti-discrimination. The perspective of the Nazi's is I guess that they were trying to further human evolution by breeding a superior race. They were doing humanity a "good" but this isn't supported by science. There's nothing genetically superior about Aryans.
Why are you guessing what it might be? How does that in any way shape or form try to understand?
For example, I have heard that the holocaust began by transporting most of the Jews out of the country via train to Israel, and only really begun actually being a holocaust when the Germans had their backs against the wall. But that's not something you would know by guessing. I'd like to hear more.
How much of it was the decisions of Hitler himself? Did his underlings decided on the holocaust without him knowing perhaps?
Why were the nazis made to feel like they had to declare war on the world? Why didn't they stop before Poland where it was safe?
If Hitler's to blame and not the majority of the German population who decided to fight for him, why was there no revolutionries? Or was there?
Did the allies have war crimes just as vicious that were covered up because they won?
The point is, there's so many things I don't know about it. Blindly agreeing with what they teach you in school is a recipe for disaster. The winners wrote history.
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On November 15 2012 06:59 sephiria wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 06:03 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 05:36 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:27 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 05:21 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:05 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:50 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 04:37 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:06 Aterons_toss wrote:On November 15 2012 03:59 mcc wrote:
[quote]
Or maybe if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace nazism it succeeded spectacularly. Because that is the goal of education, to form people so they are able to function in society. Nazism is (no matter which flavor) evil either as ideology or as practical implementation. Or do you think that wars, racism or genocide are not evil ? Non-evil people seeing nazism for what it really is means that they will never want to embrace it. Thus if education presents nazism as it truly is convincingly enough it will prevent people from embracing it. And that is success.
What you are saying is basically the same as someone saying that if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace that 1+1=3, then it is biased. Which I hope you can clearly see as nonsense. Well your are from a country that has much stronger connections to Germany in general from what i know and you likely know more about their education system than me since i was drawing conclusion based on a few posts. If the education system isn't bias to the issue than it's likely that this will never become a problem in Germany... nor would it if it was and to be honest discussing this is kind pointless since, as was pointed out before, extremist right party existed and were quick to fall short in voters, I was only making the argument that circle jerking around how bad Nazism was wouldn't help but rather damage the image of "non Nazi". If this circlejerk happens and at what scale it's not in my knowledge so maybe I just have my facts ( or rather lack of them ) wrong and this is a non issue. Also 1+1 = 2 vs 1+1 = 3 is a whole other thing because we are trying to compare exact science to politics and ideologies. I get the point but i would say it doesn't really work the same way, you can always have an argument for any policy no matter how outrageous because it is in the end subjective and no policy whatsoever is the " RIGHT " but you can never have one for 1+1 = 3 because 1+1 = 2 is objectively the absolute truth. You can have arguments for some evil policies, but that just makes you evil. It is as easy as that. Nazi ideology is not some squabble about taxes and even not the debate about abortion. Good and evil are not as subjective as some people think they are, but that would take us to a discussion that I had in other threads often enough. As for the rest, with your more specific explanation, I get what you are trying to say, but there is no need for some knee-jerk examples of why nazis are bad in schools, there are plenty of clear examples for everyone to see. No circle-jerk is needed for any sane person to not embrace nazism after having objective, but sufficiently exhaustive, lesson on nazism. morality is massively subjective and not applicable to history. Genocide has always been a part of human behaviour. The means might have changed but as long as the outcome does not, there is barely a noteworthy difference. The only difference is that it's used by nations and partys more aggressively to discredit certain states, nations, partys or groups. I see no point discussing with someone who thinks genocide might be a "good" thing. Note that I qualified my statement with "any sane person". The question why genocides happen has caused headaches for a lot of scholars. There are a lot of answers to that question. "The antichrist did come down to the world and infected nations" was never an option, neither was "well, everyone just goes insane." So there must be a factor which leads to people accepting the concept as 'good' in certain circumstances (for romans during the imperial era it was not an evil concept). The actual findings of that historical branch are really interesting. Of course you can also just remain on your horse of morality and look down on people that actually know what they are talking about. Discussing why genocides happen is not the same as saying morality is all relative and genocide might be good. Since we can pretty much be sure that such a big number of people are not all complete psychopaths, big prerequisite for genocides seems to be ideological brainwashing to make the target population not-really-same-as-us/not-really-human. After that thanks to our ability to override our instincts you can do evil things even when you are not completely evil person. so there was morality in our genes. And it magically popped up after ww2? (or was "found"?). And since that point, we know what is wrong and what is right. Everyone else just doesn't know, and our ancestors never knew. And, if (or rather: when) in the future, it happens again, everyone just went insane? Well, I am starting to see the ideological brainwashing, but on another side. Did you even read my post ? I posited hypothesis why genocides happen even though they are against most people's moral code. So no it did not pop up after second world war, if you presented nazi actions to a person from 19th century he would have the same to say about it as us today. Our ancestors 10000 years ago had the same basic moral code as we do. Do you know that most murderers actually consider murder bad, they just override their moral instinct. So why are you surprised that even though we have morality encoded into our genes we still do things that are not in accordance with it ? The only thing that changed throughout the history is that we are treating bigger and bigger chunks of people as we would treat people close to us. Morality remains the same, we just apply it to bigger groups of people as time goes on. We do less of the : "paint the others as not-really-same-as-us/not-really-human" as I said in my previous post. I think morality is always applied. However, if we use different definitions of morality, we probably just have to agree to disagree. Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 06:09 ACrow wrote:On November 15 2012 05:45 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:36 ACrow wrote:On November 15 2012 05:21 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 05:05 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:50 sephiria wrote:On November 15 2012 04:37 mcc wrote:On November 15 2012 04:06 Aterons_toss wrote:On November 15 2012 03:59 mcc wrote:
[quote]
Or maybe if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace nazism it succeeded spectacularly. Because that is the goal of education, to form people so they are able to function in society. Nazism is (no matter which flavor) evil either as ideology or as practical implementation. Or do you think that wars, racism or genocide are not evil ? Non-evil people seeing nazism for what it really is means that they will never want to embrace it. Thus if education presents nazism as it truly is convincingly enough it will prevent people from embracing it. And that is success.
What you are saying is basically the same as someone saying that if education makes it impossible for someone to embrace that 1+1=3, then it is biased. Which I hope you can clearly see as nonsense. Well your are from a country that has much stronger connections to Germany in general from what i know and you likely know more about their education system than me since i was drawing conclusion based on a few posts. If the education system isn't bias to the issue than it's likely that this will never become a problem in Germany... nor would it if it was and to be honest discussing this is kind pointless since, as was pointed out before, extremist right party existed and were quick to fall short in voters, I was only making the argument that circle jerking around how bad Nazism was wouldn't help but rather damage the image of "non Nazi". If this circlejerk happens and at what scale it's not in my knowledge so maybe I just have my facts ( or rather lack of them ) wrong and this is a non issue. Also 1+1 = 2 vs 1+1 = 3 is a whole other thing because we are trying to compare exact science to politics and ideologies. I get the point but i would say it doesn't really work the same way, you can always have an argument for any policy no matter how outrageous because it is in the end subjective and no policy whatsoever is the " RIGHT " but you can never have one for 1+1 = 3 because 1+1 = 2 is objectively the absolute truth. You can have arguments for some evil policies, but that just makes you evil. It is as easy as that. Nazi ideology is not some squabble about taxes and even not the debate about abortion. Good and evil are not as subjective as some people think they are, but that would take us to a discussion that I had in other threads often enough. As for the rest, with your more specific explanation, I get what you are trying to say, but there is no need for some knee-jerk examples of why nazis are bad in schools, there are plenty of clear examples for everyone to see. No circle-jerk is needed for any sane person to not embrace nazism after having objective, but sufficiently exhaustive, lesson on nazism. morality is massively subjective and not applicable to history. Genocide has always been a part of human behaviour. The means might have changed but as long as the outcome does not, there is barely a noteworthy difference. The only difference is that it's used by nations and partys more aggressively to discredit certain states, nations, partys or groups. I see no point discussing with someone who thinks genocide might be a "good" thing. Note that I qualified my statement with "any sane person". The question why genocides happen has caused headaches for a lot of scholars. There are a lot of answers to that question. "The antichrist did come down to the world and infected nations" was never an option, neither was "well, everyone just goes insane." So there must be a factor which leads to people accepting the concept as 'good' in certain circumstances (for romans during the imperial era it was not an evil concept). The actual findings of that historical branch are really interesting. Of course you can also just remain on your horse of morality and look down on people that actually know what they are talking about. You don't need to be a scholar to see that genocide is bad. While morality is subjective, anyone that argues genocides might be morally acceptable is a person that I'd call an idiot and morally despiccable and not worth to further discuss with. That's my own, personal and totally subjective standpoint. You seem to be confusing scientific (history is classified as a science in the german language@non-germans) approach with the standpoint of me personally. I never said that I like genocide or that I think it is or even can be good, but THIS opinion (and yours) is based on my own perception of what is morally acceptable. For most of the time, the human race didnt give a flying fuck about morality when it came to people they did not see as part of their own society. I just tried point out that if you look at certain points in history you can NOT just say everyone is evil. That is highly unscientific and you would fail every course in history with that attitude. How would I fail a history course when I argue my own interpretation of morality? That'd hardly be the topic of the course. And if you want to discuss morality from the perspecitve of the time period they were in, then I'd make the argument that there were contemporaries of the holocaust that saw the actions of the Nazis very much as morally 'evil' as well, just watch the black&white video recordings of the GI's that discovered the KZs and the multitude of testimonies of contemporaries that were horrified by the industrialized way that human beings were gased. By pretty much any definition of moral that I know of, the actions of the Nazis were morally corrupt, from today's perspective, as well from the perspective of a person living at that time. I don't deny that there were a plentitude of genocides before and sadly there will probably be more to come, but saying humanity in general doesn't care about this, is something I don't want to accept and is also something I doubt has been scientifically proven... We are being very off-topic here, but I got the (maybe wrong, if so then I apologize) impression that you are somehow defending adhering to Nazi ideology, which is something that really baffles me. I won't defend an ideology that would have killed me on the spot. However, I don't like scientific approaches that disregard neutrality. If you want to make a point about your 'morality' do that in ethics or in philosophy and not in history. History should be regarded as a neutral entitiy, to extract as much accurate information as possible and learn from it. Today, research about the second world war is heavily restricted in Germany. The outcome is clear beforehand, getting exact numbers is close to impossible (and if you ask professors where they even got their numbers in the first place, you just made a new enemy, because they don't have a source, just an ideology and estimates from the 40's or 50's). This is unworthy of a liberal and democratic country.
Morality is valuation of actions in terms of good and bad/wrong. You can do actions without ever attempting to do that valuation, or you can just ignore that as basically everyone does in their lives many times. I did many things I consider wrong, and I knew they were wrong when I was doing them, yet I did them. That is because ethical calculus can be overridden by many other criteria. I doubt we use different definitions of morality, I pretty much wrote it in the first sentence. I see no other definition that you can be talking about.
As for your other point, yes, history as a science should be objective and should not concern itself with moral judgments of the actors. But I have no idea how that is against anything I said. You can still call something in the past evil, it is just not part of discourse of historical science. It is just simply calling something as what it is as part of general discussion. Not everything that pertains to history is part of historical sciences. Ethical judgments are valid even when applied to the past. But even if we took historical perspective, what nazis did was evil even using criteria of that era, even criteria I would say most of German population of that time.
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On November 15 2012 07:16 Xiron wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 06:59 sephiria wrote:
I won't defend an ideology that would have killed me on the spot. However, I don't like scientific approaches that disregard neutrality. Disregarding neutrality means disregarding science and turning it into belief. That's why morals are believes, and that's why morals are only limited to imagination and thus individual.
So you are claiming that empathy, sense of fairness, conscience are completely non-biological phenomena, or are you going to argue that they do not play important part in defining morality ? And why are all moral systems in the world so limited in their core principles by being basically the same everywhere.
And why are you putting science against ethics, they have non-overlapping fields of application. You can easily objectively study history of nazi movements and at the same time say their actions were evil. The ethical statement is just not part of historical discourse, that's it.
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On November 15 2012 07:50 Rassy wrote:
"I posted hypothesis why genocides happen even though they are against most people's moral code."
Its pretty simple, humans have 3 brains.
A reptile brain, a mammal brain, and then the human brain.
The human brain holds the reason, (and with that moralty i asume), the mammal brain holds the emotions, and the reptile brain holds the primitive instincts.
These 3 brains operate more or less independant,(thats why you can never realy get rid of negative emotions by just reasoning)
The human brain is not always in control of us,so thats why sane people can at times operate without moralty.
I would say it is big oversimplification. For example many animals have already their moral codes. I would say it is more about competing valuations : is it good/moral thing to do vs will I get more rich by doing it vs will I be seen as desirable by potential mates vs .... . Different people have different weights placed on different areas thus someone can kill for money and yet consider it a bad thing to do. Just not bad enough. But, except complete psychopaths, people in general have very similar moral codes, that is why society is even possible.
The story about 3 different brains has some truth at the core, but deriving anything from it seems iffy as they are not really that independent and their interactions are extremely complex and still a lot is unknown.
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Zurich15364 Posts
On November 15 2012 06:59 sephiria wrote:
Today, research about the second world war is heavily restricted in Germany. The outcome is clear beforehand, getting exact numbers is close to impossible (and if you ask professors where they even got their numbers in the first place, you just made a new enemy, because they don't have a source, just an ideology and estimates from the 40's or 50's).
This is unworthy of a liberal and democratic country.
I am sorry can you explain that? I have worked in research on the Third Reich in Germany and it was nothing like that. I also don't know what you mean by "getting exact number is close to impossible". I experienced the exact opposite.
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![[image loading]](http://gh.bugs3.com/presta/428-495-large/follow-your-leader-sticker.jpg)
These have been popping up in my country as graffiti, must say I agree with the image.
But tbh a lot of neo-nazis join up because they lack friends/drinking buddies/want people to rage at them for their beliefs so they can get into fights. Very few real nazis actually join these gatherings, the real ones stay quiet and keep their views mostly to themselves. It's more of a stupid bored people gathering, and a result of the economic depression than a nazi parade, however we must keep it from getting out of hand nonetheless. People are bored, jobless and have nothing to lose, so they blame immigrants/jews/whatever.
Anyway, make the planet a better place - follow your leader.
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On November 15 2012 17:51 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 06:59 sephiria wrote:
Today, research about the second world war is heavily restricted in Germany. The outcome is clear beforehand, getting exact numbers is close to impossible (and if you ask professors where they even got their numbers in the first place, you just made a new enemy, because they don't have a source, just an ideology and estimates from the 40's or 50's).
This is unworthy of a liberal and democratic country.
I am sorry can you explain that? I have worked in research on the Third Reich in Germany and it was nothing like that. I also don't know what you mean by "getting exact number is close to impossible". I experienced the exact opposite.
Yeah I'm pretty sure he's just talking out of his ass.
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Right wing will always exist in any country.
I'm pretty conservative myself but not to the extent of fascism or racism.
I want every culture to exist peacefully without any conflict.
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On November 15 2012 07:50 Rassy wrote:
Its pretty simple, humans have 3 brains.
A reptile brain, a mammal brain, and then the human brain.
The human brain holds the reason, (and with that moralty i asume), the mammal brain holds the emotions, and the reptile brain holds the primitive instincts.
These 3 brains operate more or less independant,(thats why you can never realy get rid of negative emotions by just reasoning)
The human brain is not always in control of us,so thats why sane people can at times operate without moralty.
your text is a bit complicated for a common guy like me, referencing biology, philosophy and many other sciences (i guess) at the same time, but after reading it many times i think i understand it.
so there really is a good reason why sane people sometimes dont act morally. This makes me happy.
its the brains! the non-human brains are immoral! normal humans would never act like that with a good conscience, no no.
you filled the equotation "human = good" with new life.
it would be horrible if there would be another reason, but reading your explanation i am relieved.
thank you!
ps: wanna hug?
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On November 23 2012 00:20 cari-kira wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 07:50 Rassy wrote:
Its pretty simple, humans have 3 brains.
A reptile brain, a mammal brain, and then the human brain.
The human brain holds the reason, (and with that moralty i asume), the mammal brain holds the emotions, and the reptile brain holds the primitive instincts.
These 3 brains operate more or less independant,(thats why you can never realy get rid of negative emotions by just reasoning)
The human brain is not always in control of us,so thats why sane people can at times operate without moralty. your text is a bit complicated for a common guy like me, referencing biology, philosophy and many other sciences (i guess) at the same time, but after reading it many times i think i understand it. so there really is a good reason why sane people sometimes dont act morally. This makes me happy. its the brains! the non-human brains are immoral! normal humans would never act like that with a good conscience, no no. you filled the equotation "human = good" with new life. it would be horrible if there would be another reason, but reading your explanation i am relieved. thank you! ps: wanna hug?
or read this; i'm pretty sure what he wrotte was borrowed from Freud. it's not so simple thow
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Id,_ego_and_super-ego
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On November 15 2012 17:51 zatic wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 06:59 sephiria wrote:
Today, research about the second world war is heavily restricted in Germany. The outcome is clear beforehand, getting exact numbers is close to impossible (and if you ask professors where they even got their numbers in the first place, you just made a new enemy, because they don't have a source, just an ideology and estimates from the 40's or 50's).
This is unworthy of a liberal and democratic country.
I am sorry can you explain that? I have worked in research on the Third Reich in Germany and it was nothing like that. I also don't know what you mean by "getting exact number is close to impossible". I experienced the exact opposite.
agreed with zatic, obviously from my location I live in Austria, but it is easily possible to get numbers (as a researcher) here, and I know for a fact that you can order the same books through almost any german university.
Yes some aspects are restricted (if you want to cast doubts on the holocaust you better have some very impressive research to back that up), but we've had that discussion about the verbotsgesetzte before, no real reason to go over it again.
Summa summarum, if you want to write a research paper on WW 2 or any aspect of Nazi Germany, feel free. Of course it might be slightly difficult finding a topic which hasn't been done 200 times before, but that is another matter.
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Why is the title of the topic a Nazi-Uprising? To me that implies some sort of revolt or rioting resulting in possible establishment of political control, but if something like that happened, I would hear about it on the news, so OP is just being a drama-queen?
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On November 23 2012 06:35 Catch]22 wrote:
Why is the title of the topic a Nazi-Uprising? To me that implies some sort of revolt or rioting resulting in possible establishment of political control, but if something like that happened, I would hear about it on the news, so OP is just being a drama-queen?
Yes.
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Nah, my guess is that it is just a translation error. The OP is german, and i assume he meant "Anstieg", which means "increase" or "raise", but if you translate the parts of the words on its own, "uprising" sounds pretty similar to what you get.
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On November 23 2012 06:22 Tula wrote:Show nested quote +On November 15 2012 17:51 zatic wrote:On November 15 2012 06:59 sephiria wrote:
Today, research about the second world war is heavily restricted in Germany. The outcome is clear beforehand, getting exact numbers is close to impossible (and if you ask professors where they even got their numbers in the first place, you just made a new enemy, because they don't have a source, just an ideology and estimates from the 40's or 50's).
This is unworthy of a liberal and democratic country.
I am sorry can you explain that? I have worked in research on the Third Reich in Germany and it was nothing like that. I also don't know what you mean by "getting exact number is close to impossible". I experienced the exact opposite. agreed with zatic, obviously from my location I live in Austria, but it is easily possible to get numbers (as a researcher) here, and I know for a fact that you can order the same books through almost any german university.Yes some aspects are restricted (if you want to cast doubts on the holocaust you better have some very impressive research to back that up), but we've had that discussion about the verbotsgesetzte before, no real reason to go over it again. Summa summarum, if you want to write a research paper on WW 2 or any aspect of Nazi Germany, feel free. Of course it might be slightly difficult finding a topic which hasn't been done 200 times before, but that is another matter.
I deliberately try to avoid everything about WW2 in a professional environment, because I don't want to base my work on stuff I don't experience as waterproof. Problems I generally encountered are closely related to victim numbers on both sides.
Namely the Rheinwiesenmassaker, the victim numbers of the Holocaust (these have always been a joke because they have been corrected like every few years between 1945 and 1990, also there were instances of pictures of Dresden's citizens sold as Holocaust victims, the last one probably qualifies as fraud but the main point still stands).
And there is still the rumor of a neonazi testing the walls of auschwitz for gas residua. He couldn't find any but was arrested for illegal testing or sth. like that, the polish government repeated the tests but couldn't find anything, too. After that the issue just vanished.
One of my university teachers, a respected historian who got his PHD about WW2 and was offered a proffessorship in his late 20's (which he declined) responded to me when confronted with my questions that there just exist proof for 1/20 of victims in the matter. The rest is pulled out of thin air. And he advised me not to contest the official numbers (even if I had proof) for obvious reasons.
I don't say that everything is made up, I think it is way more likely that most things are true, what bothers me is that nobody seems to be allowed to contest that problem, thus, I will never take anyone seriously who got his degree by writing about these aspects of WW2 without presenting actual sources. (Concering that topic: books written by a historian are NOT facts, I am looking for sources not for a paper written by a green-party voter)
There are even professors running around stating that they can proof that there was a 'Führerbefehl' concerning the Holocaust. As far as I know the Nazis were intelligent enough not to write anything down regarding that. So that statement immediately transforms the scientist into a party-goon.
I am not interested in playing down the aspects of war or the atrocities comitted by organisations, people or nations (above I stated that I would have ended up in a gas chamber as well if I had lived in the 30s/40s). I am just a critical mind who does not want to accept unreasonable taboos.
On the matter of diversity of opinions in german universities I would like to point to the case of Martin van Creveld (regarded by the international community as a military genius) and his short appereance in Trier. He (as a professor) apparently was kicked out of the university because he presented a thesis which did not fit into feminist ideology.
http://www.welt.de/kultur/history/article13693394/Wenn-Maenner-sich-schlagen-erregt-das-die-Frauen.html
He basically says that men enjoy war and conflict and that women are attracted specifically to men successful in these conflicts.
I have to add that I personally have never had a problem with political correctness, though there was an arguement that occured because someone else in his first term said Reichskristallnacht and immediately someone was screaming nazi (though that was a student and not a professor)
Maybe I do perceive the general situation differently but I cant really test it because if I am right I'm playing with my future if I do.
To the bold part: You either did not understand what I meant (well, I did not really explain that in my last post, so my fault) or you are not a historian.
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Russian Federation367 Posts
Lets be honest. While nazism is full of racist shit and all about destroying everyone who is not good for nazi party, fascism is not that bad. Italy became a strong coutry economic wise because of fascism (and what is important Italy had not idea to start war with someone), Germany became one of the best economy in the world while being fascism country and everything ended bad because fascist way of improvement was changed to nazi way. So what I am talking about is: if those guys from neonazi party is about fascist way of development its ok and I understand why some people support it, of course it is really bad and stupid if they are all about nazi country. Also we should remember that Hitler started as a guy with fascism ideas and he was a great leader for Germany while he was stick to this ideas, he became a bad leader only after 1939 and him changing his mind towards world empire Germany and nazi ideas.
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EPT
