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Oh, but the german army was full of such honorable, patriotic men. They had made an oath, and they had a duty to their state and people. And by God they carried it out.
Complete misunderstanding of my point: It doesn’t matter if I’m a decent person as long as I serve an evil cause.
You might need to hurry up, because there's not a lot of them left, but talk to anyone who lived on territories that over the course of the years were occupied by Germans as well as Russians, and ask them their relative opinion of the Wehrmacht vs. the Red Army.
You're the one misunderstanding him. The point is that people like you are known to turn non-evil causes into evil ones.
Well who doesn’t love the germans. Those slavs could have taken solace in the fact that they would have starved to death in a very orderly manner.
Which causes, slavery, nazism? Anyway, we are not even disagreeing on the sides here.
Obedience, a sense of duty, loyalty, professionalism, those things are not good in a vaccuum. When they are present in people who serve evil, they become evil. They make things worse. It is morally blind to evaluate Lee’s qualities as if he had served the good. Had he been a cowardly, dumb, lazy drunkard, thousands of lives would have been saved. His honor has been a net negative for humanity. He failed morally as very few people fail. A mean-spirited, sadistic soldier in his army only has a small fraction of the blood on Lee's hands, he's an angel compared to Lee.
It’s like Scott’s ‘asymmetric weapons’ concept. Obedience, or, say, loyalty to your home community, helps both Hitler and Roosevelt, it’s a symmetric weapon. Otoh, disobedience, ie, asking the question ‘am I really doing the right thing here, should I give my loyalty to this guy?” is asymmetric, it is more likely to help the good guy and harm the bad guy.
Who's opinion do you think I'm asking you to ask for, if not Slavs'?
Nazism seems to fit nicely into the "would not have happened were it not for people deeply convinced they're on the Right Side Of History" template.
A quick glance at the modern progressive movement says otherwise.
Slavs. I think slavs who prefered germans to russians were a bit blindsided by the neatly polished hugo boss boots and would have died in much greater numbers under Generalplan ost than under any 5 year plan.
Show me people who fought for any side, anywhere, who thought they were wrong. I implied my side is morally good, that must mean I’m a nazi. Please. You said ‘people like me’ turn good causes into evil causes, then use nazism as an example, but of course, there was nothing good about nazism from the start. It was always on its predetermined path towards genocide and war. This was apparent. Alas, germans by and large chose loyalty to their country over morality and obedience over conscience. Like lee, like you and hlynka argue, is only right and proper.
Well the way I heard it, it was less being struck by the the polished hugo boots, and more being more or less able to go about your life as much as the war permitted under the Germans vs. hearing your neighbor getting raped by Red Army soldiers, and hoping you're not next.
Some of our fellow posters who read soldiers' journals for a hobby will have to confirm or deny, but I'm sure lots of conscripts found themselves in that position.
It's less that, and more that if you ended up in the position of any power, it would be unlikely you would restrain yourself against your enemies, and would end up committing nazi-esque atrocities.
That's also not quite what I was going for. It's more that Nazism would never had happened without your mentality. There's no reason to think that the more generic cause of Make Germany Great Again had to go to such an extreme.
The difference between you and me is that I'm perfectly willing to acknowledge the failure modes of my approach. That said, I don't buy that Germany would have descended into genocidal lunacy if the honorable and loyal Erwin Rommel was fuhrer instead of the morally certain Adolf Hitler.
Lee and rommel helped the atrocities/slaughter along just as much as if they had personnally, sadistically perpetrated them. What they did was perhaps even worse, as they gave moral horror a sheen of panache and respectability.
You accuse me of imaginary lack of restraint, but what good was their restraint? A few british prisoners thought rommel was a swell chivalrous guy, big deal. Meanwhile the military machine he was the mascotte of was starving soviet POWs in the millions. And lee’s pleasant conversations with his old west point buddies can hardly compensate for thousands of little guys dying in a ditch for nothing.
In effect, they would stab you just like a rabid nazi or Bedford Forrest would have, but they would do so politely and efficiently. Sorry, but you don’t get moral points for being affably evil.
Let’s back up a bit. Forget the woke, the current culture war. I’m not interested in Lee’s statue, but in his moral stature. Let’s say you’re lee, or rommel, or a random officer in the german or newly formed confederate army. You get your marching orders. Your home state, your friends and family, are going along with the program, but you have major reservations about ‘the cause’. What is the morally correct course of action?
No they didn't. No one thinks slavery or the holocaust is more respectable because of Lee / Rommel.
It's imaginary because it is unlikely you will ever be in a position where men will follow your orders to commit atrocities. But you speak with the moral certainty of a crusader, it stands to reason you'd act accordingly given the opportunity.
I once again refer you to the Wehrmacht vs. Red Army example. If the Wehrmacht had less restraint, you'd likely be using that as proof of how evil their cause was.
You're the one claiming that sort of question is answerable, not me. The entire point of my framework is that the big questions are hard to answer, which is why doing the small, answerable, things right is so important, and why people like Lee deserve credit for it.
Lol, no. This is too good of an example to let go.
As an illustration of the above point, I believe the conduct of our medical establishment regarding the transgender issue is the biggest medical scandals since lobotomies. But it is not the fact that they're on the other side of this giant controversy that bothers me about them, it is precisely the little things: the refusal to engage with opposing views, the censorship, the getting people fired from their jobs. I don't think I'm wrong on the issue, but it's not impossible, but if I conduct myself with some semblance of decency I can sleep easy knowing I did what I did with good intentions. This would ring rather hollow if I lowered myself to their level.
With your approach all of that is irrelevant. If I'm wrong, I'm just an evil transphobic chud, and everything done to me is justified. If I'm right, I guess I should be firebombing some gender clinics and WPATH conferences right now, and no one should be able to say shit.
Strong disagree. Isn’t that what the lost cause is all about? That they were in effect just lee-esque, decent, gentlemenlike men doing their duty. By extension, an institution defended by such men couldn’t be all that bad, could it?
I endorse none of these things, even against nazis, so again complete irrelevancy.
cop-out. This is a far more fundamental disagreement than the rest of the comment. Imo after that admission, you’ve forfeited the right to condemn anything the woke, or anyone else, do. Who knows, maybe hitler was right, it’s unanswerable. All you know is that you approve of Rommel’s good manners.
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