Everyone who reads about the history of the Germany and Hitler during WW2, from the outside of Germany comes away thinking, "How could people have been that way?"
The assumption on our part is that "WE" would never have been like that.
Indeed some were not. But enough where to fuel a genocide and a war.
The humbling realization is that if we were in the same conditions and experiencing the same variables, pressures, culture, words, media, etc, at the time. Statistically, as many of us would have become the same evil, with each little incremental act toward that end.
Our assumption that we would have been better people is naive and simplistic, if not arrogant. We could have risen above, as some did, but most of us are like the majority.
Not as history proves in Hitler's Germany, Stalin's Russia, Mao's China, nor the little discussed Japanese invasion of China. The brutality, the heinous torture and murder in various places when town were captured is blood curdling. The Japanese have a penchant more so for that right?
They were just evil people.
I'm reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's, "The Gulag Archipelago", and he writes about a humbling insight he gained in Stalin's Russia, as he understands the requirement pressure bright or dependable people were under to join the ORGANS (NKVD)
"Confronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were executioners and we weren't."
- Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. The Gulag Archipelago. VOL 1, p16This would apply to Orphanages, church abuse scandals, aboriginal and native boarding schools.
All horrors, we have come to find out after the fact. If we were a politician, or town official, or an educator, at those times and in those situations, statistically, most of us would have went with the flow of our culture, politics, and nation at that time.
You think not?
Humility is the end result. They were not worse people than we are. Like them we are a product of our times. And before you and I put pressure on people to conform to certain ideologies, we better understand that we still don't know the end game result of most of them. Or we have indicators.
Maybe those playing ball will be the villains, maybe those who don't are setting up a catastrophe.
How do you know without hindsight?
Studying history and noticing human and patterns helps.
But you and I have it all figured out, eh?
Ya! Right!
No comments:
Post a Comment