Re: MusicWeb and National Socialism

On Apr 29, 12:40 am, "Frank Berger" <frank.d.ber...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"Michael Schaffer" <ms1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1177719677.610442.144430@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



On Apr 27, 10:29 am, "Frank Berger" <frank.d.ber...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:
"Michael Schaffer" <ms1...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:1177673558.448196.144860@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

sechumlib wrote:
On 2007-04-26 18:46:12 -0400, Bob Harper <bob.har...@xxxxxxxxxxx>
said:

I dunno. Somehow I suspect it wasn't *just* because you're German,
but
(if your live persona is at all like the one displayed in this NG)
you
came across as a rigid, overbearing fanatic convinced of his own
impeccable rectitude, contemptuous of the abysmal ignorance of all
your
interlocutors. But I could be wrong.

But I don't think you are.

We have a German in my neighborhood. She is an acquaintance of my
wife's in a musical group. She is a very good musician and has very
up-to-date, progressive views on current political matters. But she
has
an absolute mental block of the same nature as Michael Schaffer's: the
Germans suffered horrible atrocities during WWII, far beyond what
anyone should have to endure.

She won't get real. She won't accept that the Germans brought it ALL
upon themselves. And in this I include the Dresden bombing AND the
atomic bombs, even though they were dropped on Japan. If Germany and
Japan hadn't perpetrated the horrors they did, none of that would have
happened.

It's very interesting you still believe that. WWII wasn't fought for
humanitarian reasons, but simply for larger strategical and economic
aims, like basically every war. In reality, the allies didn't give a
*** about what happened to Jews or other minorities in Germany - Jews
were often targeted by good Christian Americans in the US, too.

There's that scale thing again. You need to acquire a sense of
proportion.

There is no sense of proportion when it comes to crimes on massive
scales against large numbers of - usually completely innocent -
people.

What is your sense of proportion? What is an aceptable form and extent
of racist persecution? Anything under 100,000 victims is OK? A
footnote of history? Is that how you see it?

Is one murder equivalent then to 100? How about 1000? A million?

Probably not. But how do we "measure" that, especially when there are
often no clearly defined groups of victims and, more typically, of
perpetrators? We need to generalize in order to be able to talk about
these things, but we have to be careful about how we do that.

The "key" to this problem is probably in that very element, namely
generalization. If all members of somehow defined ethnic or racial or
political or religious or whatever kind of group are collectively
declared "bad" or "guilty" of whatever the persecutors fancy, then we
have the potential for indiscriminate persecution of people on a large
"scale".

One of the reasons for why it was so easy for the Nazis to "start out"
by targeting Jews (among other groups, of course) is that there
weren't that many of them: less than 1% of the total population, IIRC.
On the other hand, blacks now make up about 12% of the US population,
and that was probably not much less during the decades before 1965.
Until they started deporting and systematically exterminating the Jews
in the late 30s, the kind of "disadvantages" Jews had to endure
weren't worse than what blacks had to endure in the US under Jim Crow
laws. And that went on for a century and targeted more than 10 times
as many people relative to the overall population, and probably 20-30
times as many people in absolute numbers.
So, does that mean that that was 10, or 20-30 times, or if you want to
factor the time into the "scale" as well, 100 or 200 times worse than
the racial laws in Germany before the war and the beginning of the
death camps?
I don't think so. You may disagree because for you "scale" is
apparently so important, but I think it's still horrible.

The other factor is that we tend to decide which kind of persecution
is "acceptable" and which is not. So it seems OK for a lot of people
when people just get "disadvantaged" and persecuted, and it only
becomes a "real crime" when people are then also killed in the next
stage. But one can't separate that either. Typically, when the
conditions are right, one stage more or less automatically leads to
the next. So one can't qualify that in stages either.

What this leaves us with is that we should just see that any kind of
persecution of people because of race, religion, political adherence
etcetcetcetc is just completely wrong, and there aren't shades or
wrong and wronger. It's just all wrong, and the victims always suffer
terribly. Victims are victims, in many cases their whole lives are
messed up, "even" when they don't get killed in the end. Which is
nothing they have to be "grateful" for.

I see a great danger in trying to make some such mass crimes "bigger"
than others. I don't know where the "borderline" is, but I think it
doesn't matter that much either. Injustice is injustice, no matter on
what "scale".

.

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