this post was submitted on 11 Aug 2023
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ah yes "nazis are bad" is very unpopular
"Nazis are bad" is not unpopular.
"We should have systemically hunted down and killed every member of a political party" is unpopular, not because of the sentiment, but because actually doing so generally goes against the foundational beliefs of most modern societies.
No, that's not unpopular.
Saying that every single Nazi should have been killed is.
Every nazi party member, every soldier, every sympathizer, everywhere in the world.
That would have included Nazi supporters in the US, all the nazi scientists that got a clean slate by agreeing to work for the allies after the war, every single member of their armed forces from the top to the bottom, and every civilian that worked for them voluntarily. That's the only way to come close to eradicating something like what the Nazi are. You can't let a single one survive to pass on their beliefs, so you end up killing people that didn't believe in it as a side effect.
That's why it's an unpopular statement.
It would have also included a fuckton of people who had nothing to do with naziism but were disliked by someone with the power to decide who was a Nazi. And probably also a whole separate fuckton of people who fell into some bucket that was arbitrarily "close enough" to naziism when the original Nazis were running out. Etc etc
Yeah, thats actually a good point. Its really abusable. Basically just witch hunts.
When the quest to eradicate Nazis turns the eradicator into something at least asbad as the Nazis themselves...
There were so many people, even children, drafted and forced to serve the Nazis, either in the military or in other capacities. Many of which returned as broken, disabled and traumatized shadows of themselves. Genociding them for being abused by the Nazis would seriously not be better than what the Nazis did.
(Disclaimer: I am totally not defending Nazis or Neonazis here. But history is complicated and messy and there where millions of people who just did what they were told out of fear of their own lives and the lives of their loved ones. Also, history is largely written by the winners. Had the Nazis won the war, then we would now talk about the concentration camps for Japanese people in the US, and about the gulags. I wish that we could get rid of Nazis, but genocide cannot be fought by genocide and you cannot fight fascists by becoming one.)
Yeah thatβs the problem with systematically killing tens of millions of people, sure.
Because sometimes some non-bad people get caught in the death machine that would otherwise be no problem.
/s
Yup, that's why people dislike the opinion. I still think not doing it was a bad mistake.
In the end not really that much better than the Nazis.
Yup, I agree.