Quote:
Originally Posted by peter12
You always have the ability to choose right or wrong. Denmark choose to save their Jews, so did Bulgaria, both in the face of massive Nazi retaliations. 1000s of Germans died resisting the Nazis. Fear is never an excuse.
I'm not excusing the way the Western world treated the Jews before the war, but there is a big difference between racist immigration policies and gassing 10 million + people. However, we did fail, we failed to recognize a tyrant, but we succeeded in not following him down his path of evil. One of the express purposes of Winston Churchill in fighting Hitler to the bloody end was to end the atrocities against the Jewish people.
Hitler seemed like a swell guy to the intellectually lazy. However, not everyone thought he was a great guy. In 1933, after Hitler was elected, Churchill warned Parliament that this man would start a war in Europe. Leo Strauss, Hannah Arendt, and Eric Voegelin all had to flee Nazi Germany because of their anti-Hitler publications.
The lesson we should learn is that once we start viewing things like morality as being a construct and relative to outside perspectives is when we start missing moral evils like Adolf Hitler.
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I think we're arguing the same thing from different viewpoints. I'm defending the actual average German citizen.
I'm not arguing that Hitler wasn't an evil SOB... he sure was. So were many of his lieutenants and buddies.
Many people saw the inherent trouble signs of a build up, but chose to ignore it. Hell, how can anyone watch Triumph of the Wills and not know Hitler was gonna throw down? Appeasement is a scary thing when dealing with a man like Hitler.
People were willing to sacrifice some freedoms in exchange for what Hitler promised... I propose that the Germans were a victim of their own inherent self-interest... Hitler was their best option to forward that, but it came at a massive cost few wanted to take note of.