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I think you're overlooking how quickly just become inured to their immediate circumstances. I'm sure the guys running slave markets, both today and in history, were largely 'regular guys' who made stupid jokes and fucked around a lot. I've worked in industries where I've done things that are fairly questionable morally (Mostly gambling) and like within two weeks you just get used to a lot of stuff.
I shill it a lot but the documentary Act of Killing is probably one of the best, simply since it pushes this reality. Literal mass murderers who are just wandering around as kinda-awkward uncles in Indonesian society now. https://youtube.com/watch?v=QKoP2PnU60s
Sure, there were plenty of soldiers who go around and massacre or torture civilians for grain or just out of racial/religious hatred. And they might say 'well I don't care, she was Jewish/Palestinian/Slavic/White/Black/Catholic so who cares' or 'we need to eat and it's these peasants or me and my friends'. Some proportion of sadists emerge from any population.
But these guys are different, they weren't conceptualizing any of that justification or discriminating between people whom it's unacceptable to target and those who it is. There's no tribal difference, no religious difference (or at least they don't mention it), they just predate. In your video it's political violence, anti-communist terror or calculated greed 'oh the communists didn't want to watch American films, so we gangsters made less money.'
I realize that I wasn't so clear in that paragraph about what I was saying. I think it's more helpful to watch the video and then it's more visible, something in the expression and miscomprehension in their voices distinguishes it. They don't try to justify what they're doing.
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There's that classic medieval joke from the one Pope at a slave market, after all...
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