Nationalism's Psychotic Side {why do decent people support evil?}

[Shallah Kali]

Even decent people can be swept along by barbarism when a nation gets sick.
http://www.alternet.org/columnists/story/21975/

Sadly, if not unsurprisingly, I could find no trace of my mother's family left in Lithuania or Russia; whether any survived Hitler, the war and Stalin, I'll probably never know. In my father's hometown in southwestern Germany, life goes on as if uninterrupted, however, and one day I managed to find and surprise another uncle, who had only heard of me as the half-Jewish son of his brother, yet welcomed me warmly.

It was hard, though, while eating the Scheer family's dumplings, to connect the dots between Auschwitz and these pleasant, normal people. When I asked if the Nazis had been strong in the area, my uncle just shrugged. "You were either Red or Brown, and we were not Red," he said.

Even the Protestant church where my father was baptized has been led by a minister who wore a Nazi uniform. My aunt and uncle's wedding certificate was bound into a hardback copy of Hitler's "Mein Kampf," signed by the village mayor.

I believe that my German uncle, the spitting image of my American father, was a decent man who, like the new pope who once joined the Hitler Youth, was swept along by events far beyond his control. He recalled that as a teenager, Hitler was a distant voice on the radio promising to return order and prosperity to a depressed country. Little did he know that the highway built near the town in the '30s, eagerly welcomed for creating local jobs, was intended to carry tanks to conquer Paris, or that the coming war would leave him near death on the Russian front.

It is frightening for me contemplate how easy it can be to go along with something so very very wrong. I saw a documentary about the Kent State massacer a few years ago. It included clips of news broadcast at the time. One clip showed a reporter interviewing people on the street. One conservativly dressed middle aged woman said 'they should have shot every last one of them'. That sent ice up my spin to see such a normal sane appearing person say something like that. Dear God. Even if you disagree with the protestors, why is killing them acceptable? I cannot comprehend it. I cannot. I can understand people saying that of murderers, rapists, & child molestors but not for anything less vile.

[oblivious]

1. The obvious answer is that they are not "decent".

They may be average or normal, but they are not decent or respectable. They are just as evil as the evil leaders they support.

[Birthmark]

2. Maybe they are evil

Maybe they aren't. Perhaps they are just frightened. Few of us really know how far we will go to stay alive or to uphold our principles. Perhaps they are just people who didn't have the necessary courage to resist. We all would like to think that we have that courage, but until it's actually put to the test we'll never really know.

[oblivious]

3. Let's keep it to what we know then.

Would "decent" people support their government's pre-emptive invasion of a defenceless country which was a danger to no one?

[Birthmark]

5. They might if they were deceived.

That's the purpose of deception as I understand it. :)

[Wright Patman]

4. In a way the recruiting numbers in the tank

indicates the young people anyhow do have the necessary courage to resist (although warmongers would call it cowardice).

The fact the recruiters cannot even come close to making their relatively modest quotas is a harbinger of what kind of hell awaits the regime if it reinstates the draft. There will be a new war opened up on the home front and the rumored internment camps will fill up overnight.