Nazi Evil

Why is that? If cigarettes are available in the commercial booth next door, this does not mean I have to buy cigarettes. If booze (i.e. alcoholic drinks) is available in the pub accross the street, this does not mean I have to enter there to take a drink. What is the government afraid for? Some people are becoming interested in certain materials because they are forbidden. We have to remember that making some drugs legal in Western Europe cut the wings of the illegal traffic.

This story with the Red Star in the U.S. makes me sick. Years ago the Red Star was bad, bad, bad! The evil symbol of communism. Now the chain of stores Macy's chose the Red Star as its symbol. You can buy caps from the street, with the Red Star on it. Now it is cool to wear T-shirts with Che Guevara on them, and Hollywood made a movie with Che Guevara, and this movie was in all American theaters about 3...4 years ago. The same Che Guevara who assisted Fidel Castro in his successful attempt to seize political power, and the same Che Guevara who was killed by the C.I.A. agents in the jungle of the South America. The Red Star still makes me sick. My first 23 years of life were in a Communist country. Why now is cool to wear the Red Star? Why the Red Star is O.K. now, but the Svastika has to be forbidden?

Let the brain of the average guy to filter the information. If the government does not trust the average guy to throw "Mein Kampf" into the well-deserved trash bin, why should the average guy trust the government?

Mein Kampf certainly is not banned here in the UK, we have two copies of it where I work and it's not a big place. A few months ago, one of my colleagues was reading it while she was at work and she said it seemed to be a sensible book. I don't think she knows that much about politics though.

There is also, as far as I know, no law about wearing Swastikas in public or buying and selling Nazi related books, music, the only thing you would get prosecuted for is if you were using racist Nazi propaganda to incite racial or (recent new law) religous hatred and violence. Or where using it to intimidate people.

I don't know about the United States, do they have laws against Swastikas? France has some different laws to the UK at least, which seem more strict.

I wonder if this stuff is banned in countries where there are bigger problems with violent anti semitism, or Nazi propaganda and symbols will massively offend some people and lead to violence and disorder?

Hi "saudadesdefrancesinhas",

It seems you guys in the U.K. are more open-minded.
Here, in America, on one hand the system claims everybody has the freedom to say what he/she thinks, but on the other hand everything has to be "political correct".
Translation:
political correct = keep your mouth shut, fit in and run along with the rest of the herd. Like in the old days of the Communist regime. By the way, those Communist guys also claimed they are a democracy: "the Socialist democracy".

This post has been edited by Florin on November 12, 2006 07:12 am

i thought you did.

i do not claim that. i only say that nobody here explained his scale of measurement that led to the conclusion that nazis were evil. only thing i saw was subjectivism.

again i though you did. if you did not i apologise but i have been attacked from so many sides on this thread that i cannot recall what everyone is saying. opinions on this thread vary from neanderthal-like to complex and coherent ones, but yet again, i might forget what everyone here is saying, since i am alone in this.

i assumed you meant it usinga logical calculus - he says nazis were evil, thus i assume they are evil inside a limited framework. my mistake was that the framework i assumed you were dealing with was the political actors of ww2. now i realise you deal with a much more vast social spehre. having said that, since you said actor A is evil, there automaticaly must be a opposite of the characteristics of that actor present in actor B lets say. that is what i though you said. nazi= evil, allies = good.


which i am sorry, i can never agree with. I can however agree with the description:
nazi = politically extreme, allies = moderate. all this good and evil talk has no meaning inside the political and social sphere of WW2.

However, if you take, as i suspect now that you have, a more vast perspective, the ideas are changed a little, since the core sample is larger.

If you take into consideration the complete social sphere, ok , one could say that compared to a new born baby, lets say, whose deciding abilities are close to none, thus in this sense cannot premeditatively be "EVIL",meaning direct and focused inducement of harm,sure,one can say the nazi regime was closer to being "evil" that other social actors.

having said that, i restate that EVIL and GOOD are subjective forms of measurement, thus inapropriate inside a scientifical realm.

this does not fly. this is exactly what i am trying to do. i am trying to get away from all the propaganda about nazis being evil, while the communists, who were once, as Florin said, EVIL too, are no longer EVIL, since they are no longer the enemy.Well that fits for nazis too,they are no longer the enemy, so why then the discrimination about censorship of the nazi flag,for example. this is what i am arguing gainst.

Double standards eliminate the credibility of any law, rendering it useless and wrong.

yes, ok, but calling me one was uncalled for. sure, name calling is no problem, but this was a way more personal attack. calling me superlube or whatever is no problem, since it has no real connection to who i am.

but giving sentences like "you area psychopath" is different.it is personal. and it has no place in this forum. maybe i have called people names here too, and i apologise, but from you i sensed a different nuance, one im not confortable with at all.

choice of behaviour becomes more and more narrow as the threat to survival increase. if terrible acts are comitted without any presence of a threat (even though lately a cancerhas been growing inside the political sphere, that of PERCEIVED threat, which can be anything passing through one`s mind), the acts are politically extreme,not acts of survival. Not EVIL though.

i am not justifying it. only saying that it is not new, so why then it is used as a landmark to characterise hitler` regime as evil?
why not call ALL politicals actors that used it EVIL? why the double standard?

True. i agree. this does not mean however that empires will change their behaviour.

I agree with this. As a political actor,the nazi regimes had ONE OF THE WORST cases of behaviour. no question about it. But this is different from EVIL. and it should stay that way.

Hi Florin,

I don't know that much about what living in the US at the moment is like, the only sustained contact I have with North American things are automobiles and the vintage cadillac club, and these don't really give you much idea.

However, the other night I was watching some US TV programs, and one stood out in my mind, Naval Crime Scene Investigation, because, the way the 'heros', or some of the main characters in the program were talking about the war in Iraq, and what the program seemed thereby to be endorsing, seemed really repressive.

I have heard that in US universities etc. it is also hard to express views against what in the UK would be considered by many extreme politically correct view points.

There does seem to be more scope in the UK for different opinions without it causing so many problems; most people here are more or less against the Iraq war now for example, and are very open about it. It has been an issue that has really harmed the standing of Tony Blair.

Thinking about the wearing of Swastikas, Prince Harry, went to a party last year dressed as a Nazi officer with a Swastika arm band on, and was on the front of all the papers. This was considered really bad taste in a member of the royal family, but not illegal.

yes, ok, but calling me one was uncalled for. sure, name calling is no problem, but this was a way more personal attack. calling me superlube or whatever is no problem, since it has no real connection to who i am.

but giving sentences like "you area psychopath" is different.it is personal. and it has no place in this forum. maybe i have called people names here too, and i apologise, but from you i sensed a different nuance, one im not confortable with at all.

choice of behaviour becomes more and more narrow as the threat to survival increase. if terrible acts are comitted without any presence of a threat (even though lately a cancerhas been growing inside the political sphere, that of PERCEIVED threat, which can be anything passing through one`s mind), the acts are politically extreme,not acts of survival. Not EVIL though.

i am not justifying it. only saying that it is not new, so why then it is used as a landmark to characterise hitler` regime as evil?
why not call ALL politicals actors that used it EVIL? why the double standard?

True. i agree. this does not mean however that empires will change their behaviour.

I agree with this. As a political actor,the nazi regimes had ONE OF THE WORST cases of behaviour. no question about it. But this is different from EVIL. and it should stay that way.

I am sorry about the not explaining the system of measurement and the terms I was thinking in earlier!

I am also sorry for calling you a psycopath!

I was just really surprised and a bit confused when I thought you were saying that there was nothing negative about using extreme violence and killing people, but, as you explain, perhaps we had different ideas about exactly what we were discussing.

This is true, especially because in many ways the USSR stood for a system that was as negative as the Nazi one, but in different ways. Looking at the early years of WW2, no country seems to have joined the war as a struggle against 'evil'. The USA and the USSR were after all forced into the war by their opponents anyway, and France and Britain seem to have declared war to aid their allies the Poles and limit German expansion.

People in the democracies and the countries opposed to the Nazis may have been able to deduce that the extreme ideas of the Nazis could be dangerous, but I was thinking that the great crimes of Nazism occur once the war is well underway.

This is more similar to what I was thinking, I have been re-reading some books I have about Kant, and have been finding the way he deals with these problems very interesting. He also deals with how the subjective fits into this in a very careful way.

But, I forgot about the way the term evil is used so much in politics at the moment when I started talking about the Nazis in this way.

I think I should, in the future, try and be more explicit and exact when describing the types of behaviour and motivations that I think you could use to make a case about the Nazis and their negative behaviour. Where, basically, they seem to cross the line between things which were bad but the context justifies or explains, to things in which they took things further than was necessary. Or did things for difficult to justify reasons.

I read something interesting about US views on war:

Neither of the two serious American war experience before WW2 (the Civil War and the First World War) were perceived by Americans as wars in the Clauswitzian sense to 'promote national interest'. On the contrary, the First World War (whatever may have been it's actual underpinings) was seen by most Americans as an ideological war, fought for principles, not power. The entry of the United States into WW2 appeared to Americans even more devoid of 'Clauswitzian' motives (reasons of state). It is this perception, rather than the actual determinants of the participation, which is relevant to the argument that follows.

In view of the very real threat which Nazi Germany offered to whole populations, not just to states, the moral justification of WW2 (irrelevant in the political philosophy of war) appeared unchallengeable. The crowning victory over the Axis strengthened American convictions that the forces of righteousness triumphed over evil.

...War became fixed in the American imagination as an extreme effort which one only undertakes when provoked, hence only when one is in the right. Such an effort, to the Americans way of thinking, was bound to be victorious. In other words, identification with the protagonists of good (as in mass-entertainment dramas) and a confident expectation of vistory became the context in which the majority of Americans thought about war.'

Anatol Rapoport, in his introduction to Clauswitz 'On War', 1967.

i think this is still active today.

the problem is that they seem to want to apply that to the whole world. i have no problem with american imagination as long as they do not try to apply it to me.

i think this is still active today.

the problem is that they seem to want to apply that to the whole world. i have no problem with american imagination as long as they do not try to apply it to me.

The same author says more about how, while that is how the American public tends to see big wars, US foreign policy in smaller scale conflicts since 1945 was often 'Neo-Clauswitzian'; ie. quite unscrupulous.

I think with Bush and so on recently these two strands have become intermingled, so that the 'war on terror' looks like a war that appeals to the popular US imagination, an unprovoked attack by 'evil' arabs etc.

Which is partly true, but neglects how US actions in relation to Israel and other places in the Arab world helped create a situation in which that kind of thing was possible. Then, Iraq just seems to have made it massively worse, by confusing the situation more, because I can't tell how that had anything to do with the 'war on terror' at all, but looks like pure neo-clauswitzian stuff gone wrong.

President Bush just makes it worse by talking in black and white terms about evil terrorists; if the USA used it's resources and power to settle some of the problems in the Middle East in an equitable and just way Bush would sound a lot more credible when talking like this. Instead, it looks like all that has happened is that chaos has been created and some businessmen have made a fortune from 'reconstruction'.

Please get back to the original topic.

"Evil" is without doubt a favourite word of the western press, along with the entire nazi is evil system.

just look at the recent attempts by american puntits to "brand" the terrorism movement as , get this, - ISLAMOFASCISM.

this is laughable. what next? bin laden is hitler? al qaeda is wehrmacht...which would be an insult to the wehrmacht.
this is dangerous and limited framework. and it is hard for me to see that some members of this forum actually buy this...

the bigger problem was that he even said - you are either with us or against us. this is awful, since according to bush, i am not allowed to not give a damn about how his friends are making billions out of plunder and murder all over the middle east.

but this is another discussion

getting back to the topic - the whole NAZIS were evil thing is getting old and boring, not to mention counterproductive, since it accustoms the mind with stereotypes, making one look only for those stereotypes.

people who truly believe this are perhaps the same people that think that romanians are dirty and only thieves and hookers...which is party true, but just like the nazi case, cover only a portion of the facts.

Awful? Maybe, but it isnt evil. He did what he had to do.

agree. the problem is that when other people do it, it is evil

the bigger problem was that he even said - you are either with us or against us. this is awful, since according to bush, i am not allowed to not give a damn about how his friends are making billions out of plunder and murder all over the middle east.

but this is another discussion

getting back to the topic - the whole NAZIS were evil thing is getting old and boring, not to mention counterproductive, since it accustoms the mind with stereotypes, making one look only for those stereotypes.

people who truly believe this are perhaps the same people that think that romanians are dirty and only thieves and hookers...which is party true, but just like the nazi case, cover only a portion of the facts.

I get the impression that it's more common in the US than it is in the UK, but I will listen carefully to make sure. I wonder if when you are talking about 'The West' you mean the US?

Because, when you say that I see UK, France, Germany as well, and these are no homogenous block with the US/US attitudes from where I am looking.

Unfortunately, you hear this all the time. It's just dumb generalisations. It's not as bad as other things you hear politicians saying, or newspapers writing, like that Tony Blair is Stalin or Hitler and things like that. Saying that the Labour party has 'Stalinist' tendencies is much more commonly heard than things about Bin Laden.
For some Conservative Newspapers: Social Worker=Commissar/NKVD

It is bad when this becomes a stereotype that people don't even think about.

As to why and how you would class 'them' as 'evil', or if it was possible to discern the 'evil' in the attitiudes they had, these would be more profitable attitudes or discussions. And if they were placed in more of a context; one thing about the 'Nazis' I can see presently in the UK at least, is that they are seen as spontaneously evil, as if they invented all of their attitudes from nothing, and weren't part of an older more general tradition taken to excess.

Partly as you say, this can actually perpetuate an either/or mindset quite similar in some ways to the one held by the Nazis themselves.

I wouldn't abandon the idea of evil though, if only for cases like the following; if a person in power knowingly inflicts suffering on others purely for personal gain/ to satisfy his/her own needs, I think that is bordering on something 'evil'. Example might be the business man who urges George Bush to war because he knows his company will make a fortune, and ignores or disregards the possible consequences for the other people invovled.

There are different schools of thought, it doesnt all boil down to Kant. I think Kant is the main source of inspiration for political idealists, so depends what "political animal" you are. I could give you an example of 18th century philosopher that argues the opposite: Hume. I had to look for it, but I eventually found the exact quote:

As to the violence, and wars, and bloodshed, occasioned by every new settlement, these were not blameable, because they were inevitable.

He talks about power settlements inside a state, but these power settlements, adjustments, "earthquakes", occur at inter-state level too. The theorists of elites would nevertheless look if the leaders that perceived the necessity on which they based their actions were correct or not. But I doubt they would call them "good" or "evil", more like "right" and "wrong" in their decisions.

take care

I think I made that quote because I thought Suparatu was denying that there was any basis or possibility of making any judgement, negative or positive, about the value of a particular action. I think this was happened because we misunderstood what each other was saying and why, and I just quoted Kant as an example of a philosopher who argued that killing was not a good thing and aught to be avoided if possible, and provided a non-theistic rationale for that. But there are many others from entirely different perspectives.

I don't know enough about what context and what assumptions Hume was making when he wrote, or from what work the quote you made comes, so I am not sure how to relate it in more depth to the argument about Nazi evil. It would be interesting to know more about Hume.

But, with some other philosophers from the 18th and 19th centuries, it happens that the background and context that they assumed when writing about things is different from the 20th c.

The thing in the little bit of Hume that you quoted I would disagree with is that statesmen and leader's actions are all entirely inevitable (if that is what he is saying) or that they have no responsibility/freedom of action in what they decide to do. It would be important to know exactly what Hume meant by 'new settlement', 'power settlement' etc. How did new settlements come about, and, does human life have any special value etc. in his philosophy? Is what he writes still applicable in the 20th century?

I have noticed that, from many of the things that I have seen that you have posted, that almost any action, no matter how strange or cruel, appears automatically justified to you, almost as if the fact of being in power means that you are automatically justified to feed your fellow citizens to crocodiles, or bomb and blow them up, gouge out their eyes, or whatever takes your fancy. This is more a general point and not closely connected to the 'Nazi evil' thing.

A quote relating to Clauswitz:

'When Clauswitz glorified war, he knew what he was talking about...War was to Clauswitz an intense human experience; and when he wrote about the glorious future in store for the flowering of the art of war he envisaged an intensification of that experience. He may appear to us to have been obsessed with a cruel passion, but he did not appear absurd.

Today, speculations about 'progress in the art of war' are carried on in a surrealistic mode...I suspect that these discussions are possible only if one seals off from ones consciousness every shred of identification with the human race. This is not hard to do, if one is spared, as are the strategists and their receptive audiences, direct contact with the realities behind the fantasies.'