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German Collective Guilt
I believe that the majority of the German people as a whole were guilty for the Holocaust. Ideally, during the Second World War (WWII) the huge majority of citizens in Germany as well as the overpowered European states took no risks. They were spectators, attempting to get going with their living the best they could. However, they failed protest against Nazi domination or endanger their welfare attempting to overcome their novel rulers by assisting the person in need. Nevertheless, after the end of WWII, many asserted not to have recognized the right nature of Nazi maltreatments as well as the Holocaust. Or they asserted that they were just being directed (Rensmann 170). This is
Ideally, all through Occidental account, lawless types of administration, for instance totalitarianism, have been deemed as tainted by description. Therefore, in case the government essence is described as justice, and in case it is appreciated that regulations are the calming energies in the public matters of men (as certainly it at all times has been from the time of Plato called upon Zeus, the boundaries god), at that moment, the trouble of the body politic movement along with the acts of its residents occurs (Arendt 366-7). Actually, this dehumanizes them to some degree. This is for the fact that as a consequence of constitutional government ‘Lawfulness’ remains a unconstructive decisive factor in to the extent that it sets the boundaries to other than not capable of explaining the human’s actions’ intention force: the enormity, except as well the confound of rules in sovereign communities is that they merely notify what one is not supposed to, other than by no means what one is supposed to do (Arendt 367). For that reason, Arendt puts downs an immense store by Montesquieu breakthrough of the code of act ruling the deeds of both administration and the individuals under it: in a democracy-virtue, in monarchy-honor, and in totalitarian government-fear (Arendt
One remains officially entrapped between the outlooks of instantaneous sentence from state law, or perhaps delayed sentence from a worldwide court that tries to initiate a ruling from a superior ethical law. Incase one’s life or his or her family's life was endangered, incase the person defied orders the he or she recognized to be ethically culpable; there will be no choice but just follow the order. For instance, “Just Following Orders” or in other words "Nuremberg Defense" remained a famous fault of the
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instant postwar penal code of German, which remained first-degree murder could merely be 'for stand intentions' that did not incorporate 'unflustered' contribution in mass killing note. However, executor evidence as well as the Milgram note points that even at the time the wish to obey the group remains a most important ground for somebody performing a dissipated group act. They more or less constantly structure their conformity on “Just Following Orders,” (Estlund 221).
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Work Cited
Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York, N.Y: Penguin Books, 2006. Internet resource.
Estlund, David. "On Following Orders in an Unjust War*." Journal of Political Philosophy 15.2 (2007): 213-234.
Rensmann, Lars. "Collective guilt, national identity, and political processes in contemporary Germany." Collective guilt: International perspectives (2004):
"I shall show you what happens to people who defy the laws of the land! In the tribunal everybody is equal, here there is no regard for rank or position. The great torture shall be applied to you!" (194)
Not even the most powerful Germans could keep up with the deaths of so many people, and to this day there is no single wartime document that contains the numbers of all the deaths during the Holocaust. Although people always look at the numbers of people that were directly killed throughout the Holocaust, there were so many more that were affected because of lost family. Assuming that 11 million people died in the Holocaust, and half of those people had a family of 3, 16.5 million people were affected by the Holocaust. Throughout the books and documentaries that we have watched, these key factors of hate and intolerance are overcome. The cause of the Holocaust was hate and intolerance, and many people fighting against it overcame this hate
Von Clausewitz, Carl. Translated and edited by Sir Michael Howard and Peter Paret. On War. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1976.
The power of blind obedience taints individuals’ ability to clearly distinguish between right and wrong in terms of obedience, or disobedience, to an unjust superior. In the article “The Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal: Sources of Sadism,” Marianne Szegedy-Maszak discusses the unwarranted murder of innocent individuals due to vague orders that did not survive with certainty. Szegedy-Maszak utilizes the tactics of authorization, routinization, and dehumanization, respectively, to attempt to justify the soldiers’ heinous actions (Szegedy-Maszak 76-77). In addition, “Just Do What the Pilot Tells You” by Theodore Dalrymple distinguishes between blind disobedience and blind obedience to authority and stating that neither is superior;
Despite the overwhelming evidence against Eichmann, he remained concrete in his defense of himself. He played off his responsibility as something he was merely told to do and that he "condemn[s] and regret[s] the act of extermination of the Jews." A far cry in a distant world, falling on dead ears.
Hagen W (2012). ‘German History in Modern Times: Four Lives of the Nation’. Published by Cambridge University Press (13 Feb 2012)
Jus ad bellum is defined as “justice of war” and is recognized as the ethics leading up to war (Orend 31). Orend contends that an...
During the Holocaust the mass murder of jews was a worldwide tragedy and when a tragedy happens usually your first question is why? The two groups of devoted researchers for the Holocaust are split into the Intentionalist group and the Functionalist group. As said by Mimi-Cecilia Pascoe in Intentionalism and Functionalism: Explaining the Holocaust “The intentionalist position suffers greatly from a lack of adequate evidence, and consequently cannot prove Hitler’s intentions beyond reasonable doubt. On the other hand, the functionalist position is better able to compensate for the lack of evidence, and thus provides a more solid historical explanation for the Holocaust (Pascoe 1).” The on going argument of whether the Holocaust was intentional or a choice in the moment is the Intentionalist vs. Functionalist case and either side has many different ways of portraying their evidence on the topic; the arguments are both have convincing arguments but in
“The Holocaust is the most investigated crime in history, as has often been pointed out in response to deniers. Eichmann may be that crime’s most investigated criminal” (Sells, Michael A.). Adolf Eichmann was one of the head Nazis. He had a lot of authority in enacting what Hitler had told the Nazis to do. He was just about as responsible as Hitler was for killing all of those innocent
Botwinick writes in A History of the Holocaust, “The principle that resistance to evil was a moral duty did not exist for the vast majority of Germans. Not until the end of the war did men like Martin Niemoeller and Elie Wiesel arouse the world’s conscience to the realization that the bystander cannot escape guilt or shame” (pg. 45). In The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick writes of a world where Niemoeller and Wiesel’s voices never would have surfaced and in which Germany not only never would have repented for the Holocaust, but would have prided itself upon it. Dick writes of a world where this detached and guiltless attitude prevails globally, a world where America clung on to its isolationist policies, where the Axis powers obtained world domination and effectively wiped Jews from the surface, forcing all resistance and culture to the underground and allowing for those in the 1960’s Nazi world to live without questioning the hate they were born into.
As examples regarding the death penalty and police brutality show, the state of exception is common in modern life. Agamben has foreseen a situation where this state of affairs is not only common, but ubiquitous. “The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule.” (Agamben, 1998, P.68). He refers to this phenomenon as the “camp” or a society where the government routinely exercises the prerogative to kill citizens in ways civilians cannot. Therein, the citizens accept the government’s exemption from the laws of morality and this state of affairs becomes
The focus of this paper will be on criticizing the argument. He effectively explains what justifies the authority of the state by giving reasons that anarchy is better for autonomous nature of man. One might agree that the state can command an individual to obey the rule even if it is against the person’s moral beliefs. His argument, however, seems to undermine the
The thoughtlessness in which Eichmann embodied in the courtroom, along with the normalcy he possesses, aids in the development of the enigmatic structure of the trial. Arendt's battle to find middle-ground between the idea of Eichmann as a common man attempting to fulfill objectives and his connection to the Nazi regime is what defies original theories on evil. The guilt Eichmann carries is clearly much larger than the man himself, especially one so simplistic and thoughtless. Therefore, the evil presented in Eichma...
Introduction Individuals often yield to conformity when they are forced to discard their individual freedom in order to benefit the larger group. Despite the fact that it is important to obey the authority, obeying the authority can sometimes be hazardous, especially when morals and autonomous thought are suppressed to an extent that the other person is harmed. Obedience usually involves doing what a rule or a person tells you to, but negative consequences can result from displaying obedience to authority; for example, the people who obeyed the orders of Adolph Hitler ended up killing innocent people during the Holocaust. In the same way, Stanley Milgram noted in his article ‘Perils of Obedience’ of how individuals obeyed authority and neglected their conscience, reflecting how this can be destructive in real life experiences. On the contrary, Diana Baumrind pointed out in her article ‘Review of Stanley Milgram’s Experiments on Obedience’ that the experiments were not valid, hence useless.
Turner, Henry Ashby. Germany from Partition to Reunification. New Haven, CN: Yale University Press, 1992. Print.