Perhaps teaching children to never question authority was a bad idea

  • Smeagol666@crazypeople.online
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    17 hours ago

    We should give Hitler a posthumous peace prize for killing the leader of the Nazis. Maybe that could inspire a certain fat orange pedophile to follow suit.

  • Sunflier@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Only 13 million? I think that severely limits his responsibility. Hitler didn’t cause just 13 million deaths. Hitler caused 13 million jews to be killed + 65 million allies + ~44k in the blitzkreig + ~5 million german soldiers + all the other groups targeted in the holocaust (Roma, Gypsies, LGBT, mental patients, etc.) + all the civilians that got caught up in the battlefield (Africa + Europe). In total, Hitler mighta got 100 million.

  • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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    1 day ago

    I think Hitler is said to have killed people in the first world war.

    • ultranaut@lemmy.world
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      20 hours ago

      There was recently news about Hitler probably murdering his niece in 1931. She supposedly killed herself in his apartment but historians found old archives that apparently suggest that’s not what actually happened.

    • SippyCup@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      He was a courier. There are no records and no eyewitness accounts of Hitler ever killing anyone in combat, and he saw very little of it. Hitler himself makes no claims at ever killing an enemy soldier.

      He also dodged the draft in Austria-Hungary so that’s fun.

      • bedwyr@piefed.ca
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        1 day ago

        Oh thanks for the correction then, even if he did claim it I wouldn’t believe it obviously, I thought he was supposed to have taken a bunch of prisoners at gunpoint but that memory of reading that is from like decades back now so idk.

  • Crewman@sopuli.xyz
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    2 days ago

    The only difference between Osama Bin Laden and Brian Thompson, is that Brian got people killed for money.

  • daddycool@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    I have always wondered about this sort of thing. Powerful people are only powerful because people choose to obey them.

    • Bubbaonthebeach@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      Not even obey. Many people willingly follow along mostly because they think someone they don’t like will get hurt. Trump isn’t destoying the US on his own. He is being aided by a large portion of the conservative population.

    • drunkpostdisaster@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      ThenUS basically has a nation wide grooming campaign tonget boys to join the military. You’re not wrong, but the problem is deeper then that.

  • taiyang@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    Studies on obedience (e.g. replications of Milgrim Experiment) suggest a lot of factors play into people harming and killing others on behalf of an authority. Original was 65% of participants, but it can to up to 90% with men in authoritarian cultures.

    My favorite was Australian women having the lowest rate of obedience in the shock experiment, at only 16%, being relatively individualistic and rebellious culturally, but even less obedient then men as women are less likely to conform when it involves harming others. That may have changed in recent years though, as people more comfortable with authoritarianism tend to be more likely to obey.

    Typically, people least likely to obey the order have better social intelligence and moral development. Unfortunately, those traits are far and few between lately…

    • OwOarchist@pawb.social
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      2 days ago

      Typically, people least likely to obey the order have better social intelligence and moral development. Unfortunately, those traits are far and few between lately…

      There’s a reason American fascists are trying to demonize the concept of ‘empathy’.

      • GraniteM@lemmy.world
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        16 hours ago

        In all of the discussions, Höss is quite matter-of-fact and apathetic, shows some belated interest in the enormity of his crime, but gives the impression that it never would have occurred to him if somebody hadn’t asked him. There is too much apathy to leave any suggestion of remorse and even the prospect of hanging does not unduly stress him. One gets the general impression of a man who is intellectually normal, but with the schizoid apathy, insensitivity and lack of empathy that could hardly be more extreme in a frank psychotic.

        From the Wikipedia article Rudolf Höss, about the commandant of Auschwitz.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Absolutely, empathy is easily the enemy of fascism. And the worst thing to them is unity, as we have the most empathy for people we consider in-group, so division only feeds into their agenda.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        I picked up a fair amount from an OER textbook that references the studies on its chapter on conformity and obedience, but I bet there is a meta analysis out there with a more comprehensive list. The only issue is later studies on this can’t ethically go beyond a certain amount of fake voltage, as the original studies went a bit too far it’s getting people to think they killed someone.

        The textbook in question is available here: https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/

    • fosho@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      but even less obedient then men as women are less likely to confirm when it involves harming others

      Yo, please do better. I really want to know what you’re saying but I cannot figure it out.

      • taiyang@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        Sorry, my phone corrected conform to confirm. I think most people picked that up by context, but simply typing it several times just now it reverted to confirm. Lol

    • FlyingCircus@lemmy.world
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      16 hours ago

      Capitalism kills as many as the most inflated numbers attributed to communism every 10 years. The Black Book of Communism, widely cited for its accounting of deaths allegedly caused by communist states, estimates that communism has killed 100 million people. This includes Nazi soldiers killed in WW2 and, bizarrely, the unborn children that hypothetically would have been born if there hadn’t been a famine or a war.

      To this day, 10 million people who live under capitalism die from starvation and preventable disease simply because it isn’t profitable to save them. If we take the Black Book seriously, and agree that every death that happened under a communist state (preventable or not) is attributable to the communist ideology, then we must also agree that every death under a capitalist regime is attributable to capitalism. If we do that, then capitalism is the most murderous ideology there has ever been.

      Even if you don’t want to agree with the above logic, we can look at how US sanctions have directly led to the deaths of 38 million people in 50 years. These sanctions are murder done solely to coerce countries into falling in line with US interests.

      • Hobo@lemmy.world
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        4 hours ago

        …the unborn children that hypothetically would have been born if there hadn’t been a famine or a war.

        One of those kids could’ve gone on to have a kid that has a kid that helps populate the whole universe. So the real number is closer to 500 kajillion million trillion.

  • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    The point still stands, but did Hitler never kill even one person with his own two hands? Did he not find the time to go down to a camp and kill a few innocents himself? Seems like a thing would be bound to happen.

      • WoodScientist@lemmy.world
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        19 hours ago

        Yeah I knew he was in WW1, and may have taken a life there. But I’m wondering about when he was actually in power. Like, did history’s greatest anti-Semite really resist the temptation to do a little dirty work himself? Did he never take an afternoon to go throw the lever on a gas chamber himself? It’s not like he couldn’t have easily arranged such a thing.

  • khaleer@sopuli.xyz
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    2 days ago

    “They only followed orders” is the most fucking stupid way to defend the oppressor, yet it works, because people have no balls to stand for themselves in such situations.

    • SippyCup@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Notably, it didn’t work.

      Adolf Eichmann is the guy who made that claim famous, and he was hung almost immediately after his trial.

      • Nouvellalia@lemmy.world
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        20 hours ago

        Notably it worked really well

        A few dozen people were executed for German war crimes. These people were not “just following orders”, regardless of what they said. They were creating orders.

        Thousands and thousands of people directly responsible for nazi slaughter were safely smuggled out of Germany by the CIA, given new names, and resettled in America, Canada, South America, South Africa, and more.

        These people were also creating orders, and yet they were freed from any consequences, including even the economic ones that followed in postwar Germany. They went on to fertilize many of the fascist, racist movements we see taking over today.

        Millions more lower level people who only directly murdered others by pulling a trigger, were let off the hook completely. Many got to keep their positions of violent state enforcement. These were the only people “just following orders” and they all escaped prosecution.

  • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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    22 hours ago

    This isn’t even a cop thing, though I have no doubt the rate would be higher if empirically tested; cops tend to be very Conventional Morality in the sense that If Legal -> Moral.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milgram_experiment

    TL;DR: 65% of people would kill someone if given an order to do so (and some plausible deniability).

    My money’s on it being 70-80% for US cops, maybe higher. My only real metric on this is the one guy I knew who made an arrest he was ordered to that he (should have) known wasn’t legal and shrugged his shoulders about retelling the incident, saying “I’m a soldier (he was an Army veteran); I follow orders.”

      • HCSOThrowaway@lemmy.world
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        58 minutes ago

        Did you just not read the Wikipedia article or what?

        Maybe you’re implying shooting people running away is common in US law enforcement?

        Don’t be glib; state your point with some conviction.

  • naught101@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    This also applies to everyone in tech blindly contributing to the AI bubble and the rise in fascism

      • CrimeIsLegalNow@ani.social
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        2 days ago

        He was a war hero from WW1 so it was presumably a bit higher than that, but the vibe is there.

        Also both the Holocaust numbers and war deaths are wrong so I’m very curious about where exactly 13 million came from, especially considering one of the things Nazi did was militarize law enforcement even more than Germany already did, which was considerable.

        • Aqarius@lemmy.world
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          2 days ago

          I don’t remember him being a war hero, just a veteran. And the number isn’t for the war, it’s “law enforcement”, so, death camps (including the Jews, Slavs, Roma…) and various raids and mass executions all over the occupied territories.

          • CrimeIsLegalNow@ani.social
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            1 day ago

            He received the second and first class Iron Crosses, the first class famously on the recommendation of his Jewish officer.

            People compare them pretty frequently to the Bronze Star. I don’t think that’s quite right because the award systems are simply different but by all accounts the first class award was a rarity for his rank.