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Sometimes I wonder if "banality of evil" is just a way to downplay regular evil. In other circumstances, if someone commits or aquiesques to evil deeds for the sake of personal success, that just gets called evil. If an armed robber murders a clerk, they don't get the privilege of having their evil called "banal" even if it was done seeking personal gain. Perhaps confronting the alternative, that some 90% of Germans simply were evil with no qualifiers during the height of Nazi rule, is too politically awkward?
There's a certain sick irony to an article in The Guardian discussing the banality of evil after what transpired over the last few years in the UK with lockdowns. Then again, maybe banality is still the wrong word for it, given that at every turn they wanted the government to go even further, lockdown harder and for longer, and be even more aggressive towards dissenters.
You know, every time I see your username, I involuntarily scan ahead to see where you make the turn. Sure, equate a few months of lockdownism to the Holocaust. Remember that time they gassed the antivaxxers?
@The_Nybbler has the right of it. Do you think a Holocaust film is trying to downplay the evil? Pointing out banality is a reminder not to assume something is good, or even okay, just because it is pedestrian. One must engage with the actual merits and flaws. In that sense, there’s no irony to the Guardian’s coverage. They will tell you with a straight face that lockdowns were good.
Well mapping people who went along with lockdowns to people who probably would have gone along with the holocaust seems like a reasonable thing to assume, even if they didn't gas anyone this time.
How so?
politically motivated mass curtailment of rights, propoganda campaigns led by the military information warfare units to discredit true information if it contradicts government current lines, information warfare on domestic populations to scapegoat dissidents as they're associated with political enemies, etc.
You think these are the core defining traits of the Holocaust? Not, say, the mass murder?
If Hitler had put Jews, invalids, gypsies and various dissidents in camps and then kept and fed them until the end of the war, we would be ... very confused, morally, for one, considering what other claims he made, but we'd probably have a different view on Nazis. Depending whether he'd used them for labor, we may even consider the camps "relatively humane" as far as camps go. Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil.
These are some things I think going along with is evidence that one has the mindset of someone who would also go along with the holocaust. Not all Germans were physically killing jews, gypsies, homosexuals, slavic prisoners, political prisoners, etc. Most, if not almost all, were just going along with the aforementioned government actions.
There are reasons why extermination camps existed, rather than just shooting them all where they found them across the country, that are not just related to logistics and efficiency. Maybe if they had done that people in Germany would have been les likely to go along with it, but we know they did go along with the sort of thing most people went along with during covid.
If non vaccinated, or positives covid tested individuals and families had been shipped off to camps (outside china), and had been killed would that really have been incongruent with the rhetoric and propoganda deployed? The holocaust and covid was a difference in degree, not of kind.
I obviously cannot prove this, but my immediate reaction is "yes, of course, massively incongruent."
We'd need more samples. I was right this time, but obviously n=1.
I think even in China, you could predict fairly reliably if a given camp or campaign was going to engage in mass murder or not, ie. whether the Uighur rhetoric is like the Nazi rhetoric in ways that the Covid rhetoric is not. To be clear, I don't have an opinion on this; I haven't done any research on genocide in China, but I'd expect if there was genocide we should see commonalities in the rhetoric.
edit: Ie. say, nobody was calling Covid victims dangerous parasites.... Okay, I'm not willing to say that. Maybe it's just that the US CW is so hot that the rhetoric on the street was genuinely indistinguishable from Mein Kampf? If so, Scott may be apropos: "Stop telling people they’re going to be killed. ... Stop trying to convince Americans that all the other Americans hate them."
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For those who were aware of the camps but not personally aware of the murder--yes! Those would be the core defining political traits of the Holocaust for German citizens.
Considering how often I was personally accused of literally committing mass murder by being vocally opposed to lockdowns and government-mandated masking during COVID, I have to agree with @Azth here. "Certainly they wouldn't be considered synonymous with absolute evil" seems like a wildly optimistic take on "Nazi concentration camps without the actual executions." Indeed, it is now widely agreed in American jurisprudence that the Japanese internment camps were barely distinguishable from Nazi concentration camps, and they are often offered as an example of nearly-absolute evil, listed alongside slavery and Native American relocation programs as among the worst of U.S. history.
I understand that many people (maybe you?) are utilitarians who think that the reason to favor or disfavor certain things is to just check the consequences. But you don't actually get to check the practical consequences of the laws you pass, before you pass them. Rounding up the Jews in Nazi Germany was not sold to the German people as a campaign of mass murder. There was never a law that said "the penalty for being Jewish is death." The law was: we're gonna massively curtail your rights if you're an undesirable, we're gonna segregate you from the population, detain you, relocate and re-educate you for the greater good.
"But COVID was a good reason to pass such laws, and anti-semitism wasn't" is an argument that does make these things distinguishable in substance. But with regard to the relationship between state action and individual rights, the only difference between the Holocaust and COVID lockdowns was how things turned out in the end. And even then, based on the attenuated logic of the people who accused me of being a mass murderer, COVID lockdowns likely also resulted in unnecessary deaths (e.g. of loneliness), further blurring the lines.
This is why I am so strongly opposed to large, powerful governments. I do not think it is at all unfair to compare those who went along with lockdowns with those who went along with the Holocaust, because the consequences were not knowable in advance in both cases. For non-victims, the question was always and only: "how far will you go along with the government when you think its individual rights-constraining actions are intended for the greater good?" And the answer in both cases, distinguishable though they were, was, "apparently, pretty damn far."
EDIT: I guess I think I should add, for clarity, that while I do somewhat fault the German people circa 1935 for the horrors their government perpetrated, I would not strongly condemn the rank-and-file Germans for the Holocaust (the way I would strongly condemn, say, Hitler or Goebbels), any more than I strongly condemn rank-and-file Americans for putting me through COVID lockdowns. I do weakly condemn both groups! What I think makes this line of reasoning interesting, in part, is that I suspect a lot of people strongly condemn the anti-semitism of rank-and-file Germans as being, essentially, complicity with the Holocaust. For pro-lockdown Americans who feel that way about 20th century Germans, I can imagine being quite offended by the comparison. But I personally do not regard pro-lockdown Americans as "literally Hitler," I regard pro-lockdown Americans as "approximately as culpably and benightedly statist as mid-20th century Germans, who were also not literally-Hitler."
Okay, well, I don't believe that. In fact, I'd consider the US japanese internment camps much closer to a "serious mistake of governance" than an "act of immense evil" that I do the Holocaust. To put a number on it, I would maybe put them on the moral order of magnitude of 10-100 murders?
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I would add to this that the consequences for both covid measures and the holocaust, in my opinion, show how both were wrong. One of those items is not controversial, while the other is, but it's the same attitude and fundamental pattern of behaviour that leads to both.
Covid measures seem to have been, largely, pointless and harmful. The holocaust utterly failed at eliminating jews, and utterly failed at all other possible goals, while also harming Germans and the German state. The harder this sort of wrong measure and behaviour (Obey and punish the dissident) are pushed the worse the outcome seems to be, in general.
If we had covid measures for the same amount of time as the nazis were in power then I would expect about 80% likelihood that extermination camps would have been used for the non compliant/infected/non vaccinated somewhere in the English speaking world. But that's just my opinion.
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