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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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