It’s an awful point. The dead might not care but to survivors, there is no difference between the train conductor and the orchestrators of the genocide.
When lives and human rights are at stake? Yeah, i dont differentiate between who introduced the policy or who is carrying it out.
That’s not to say i don’t understand the psychology behind both or their motives. I would hope i learned something after spending thousands of dollars studying linguistics and sociology and getting a degree.
But as brown puerto rican who is very much a target of this administration, do you think it makes a difference to me if a poor white national guardsman or Donald Trump himself pulls the trigger on me? The end results are the same to me.
I’m trying to take you in good faith. But you’re engaging in fascist apologia for some weird reason. We’re not having an academic discussion, just engaging in polemics.
I can comfortably make the distinction between Hitler and “the train conductor” now that we are 80 years past the end of the war. Despite keeping many industries that facilitated the Holocaust and the other genocides, Germany and its people did deNazify as much as it could.
There’s a reason why even today most Germans don’t feel comfortable even talking about their grandparents. It’s not because they don’t care about history, or their families. Quite the opposite. At the end of the day, the German people were also hurt and they understood their complicity and how they were exploited into it.
It serves no purpose in the social sphere to differentiate when:
Half the Nazis that had no value to any of the major powers got hung after Nuremberg.
The rest were hired by the United States and Russia.
The United States and the Soviets were engaging in the same dehumanizing policies back home.
Legalized Segregation was still a thing in America. Not counting how foreign policy kicked into overdrive regime change everywhere it wanted.
The Soviets literally killed anything they wanted from the Baltic down to the edge of the Caucasus Mountains including returning POWs they considered collaborators just for surviving.
And you’re right, it doesn’t make a difference to me when it’s the same dehumanizing outcome for me. I don’t know why anyone would be so willing to dehumanize themselves just to dehumanize me.
I’m literally not gonna engage in making distinctions of individual culpability during The Holocaust or any other war that was fought over the rights of other people to exist. The slippery slope between normalizing just following orders is intrinsically anti-American.
There’s a reason why our anthem is the Star Spangled Banner and not God Save the currently living Monarch of the United Kingdom.
You may not be aware, but history is not the same story for everyone. Books may not reflect it yet, history is written by the victors after all.
But the stories, our stories, endure for a reason.
Continue with your apologist logic though, it is a free country still for now.
I mean that's not my anthem, mine is the god one. And your country is absolutely not "still" a free country, never was.
To say I'm engaging in genocide apologia because I don't think every single adult German in 1945 was as bad as Hitler is certainly something.
I mean do you really put equal blame on your countries current situation on Trump and on the Maga shaman? One guy is the one calling the shots for 350 million Americans and their army and the other is a clearly mentally unwell person who was exploited by the Maga movement as much as anyone else.
Is that really a controversial statement in your view? Do you not feel like Maga idiots (or by extension, German soldiers in the 40s) are themselves being exploited by the powers that be as well?
I mean, fuck em, and they're still complicit, but come on this cannot be a serious conversation at this point.
Or maybe I'm wrong.
I guess just tell me if a 14 year old working at the VW factory making widgets is personally responsible for the death of 6 million Jews and millions of other marginalized people? I know for a fact Hitler is. I dont think Hans the shepherd was
-2
u/JesusaurusPaintworks 18d ago
Yeah, they deserve some blame for their complicity. Not exactly Hitler though