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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   31567 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 22, 2023

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I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide. So there are two interpretations: "the banality of evil", or that these are just normal people behaving normally.

Hannah Arendt invented the concept of "the banality of evil" to describe the inhuman evil of the Nazis. So then they point to this photograph as an example of the banality of evil. Or, it's just a photograph of normal people doing a normal thing that people do.

  • -13

I guess I believe in the banality of evil in the sense that we can all get used to things and partake of times when dark reality is superceded by our ordinary day to day cares, where going along with is normal, and therefore normalised. I see it enough in modern times to grok the concept.

Or thirdly, that evil or good are categories of behaviour that are actually just labels of emotional affect attached to third party observers, and not fit for use to understand the nuts and bolts whys and hows of the situation.

I think most people would look at that picture and be surprised to be told that these people are committing a genocide

Would they? Especially given that SS members were presumably self-selected to be ideologically committed Nazis, it doesn't seem at all implausible that many were sufficiently untroubled by genocide as to partake in jollity in their spare time. After all, depending on when these photos were taken, they might also not look like people staring down the barrel of total defeat in the war.

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