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Comment by freeflight | Hacker News Reader

I'd also recommend Falsehood in Wartime: Propaganda Lies of the First World War by Arthur Ponsonby. Some really interesting reports in there, it's also quite scary to see how certain themes persist to this day and even seem to have influenced large parts of how WWII ended up being perceived.

Already during WWI the Germans had been depicted as "industrialized savages" who supposedly processed dead soldiers bodies in "corpse factories", of course only if they had not been too busy nailing nuns to churches after maiming them.

It's pretty easy to draw a clear line from that depiction to the narrative of a whole nation of atheist perfectionists trying to industrialize genocide in the most efficient way possible.

I guess our feeble human minds need those simple narratives which pit the perfect "good side" against the inexcusable "evil side", to rationalize our own shortcomings.

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I was surprised that there where a large number of extra judicial killings of Belgians in ww1 as I had thought it was all propaganda.

Are you suggesting most Germans didn't know about holocaust or that it didn't happen?

I'm merely saying it's not hard to draw a line from there to our current state where we've found our ultimate inexcusable evil in the form of Nazis and the Holocaust.

We've created the perfect "bad guy" to fuel our need for a good vs evil narrative in which we can justify all our evil actions by acting for the "greater good" because we are the "good guys", we won! Remember?

Conveniently it's exactly that kind of mindset which allowed the Nazis to do what they did, they told people it was for the greater good and these Jews are the bad guys and they'd need to do bad things to win against these bad guys.

It's not like SS officers thought to themselves "Yay I'm such an evil person, I just love killing people, it's so much fun!", only very few humans are actually broken like that.

In the same way, no normal human being willingly tortures other people, you need to give them a bigger cause, like protecting their country from evil terrorism, to give them the motivation to get over their consciousness.

Maybe I'm naive, but I simply don't think there's such a thing as "evil people" or "good people", there are just people. A few of them might be very broken but still smart enough to manipulate many other people, but they don't represent anything or anybody but themselves.

I really don't see how you can get that idea from the GP post.

Hypothetically, if 95% of a country was 'evil', does that excuse killing the nice 5%?

Further, as an American I recognize America historically committed genocide, that does not mean everyone in that time period was evil.

If 95% really was evil, not merely terrorized themselves or unaware and there was no better way to oppose the 95% then 5% would be unfortunate but perfectly acceptable collateral damage. I would be surprised if any large scale conflict was less damaging.

Now, having said that, I am going to define 'evil' as failure to follow the correct religion.(1) Again, in my original statement I never said anything about what they did or did not do just applied a label and suddenly by your comment total genocide is ok.

(1) Historically a commonly accepted definition of 'evil'.

PS: I am in no way supporting the horrors humanity has produced. Just commenting on how easy it is to apply labels and then by your own words kill millions of innocent people.

Evil is really hard to define in any remotely acceptable way. If 95% of a population was actively dangerous to the safety of me or people I cared about I would totally be OK with harming up to and including killing the innocent 5% if and only if there wasn't a better way.

Herein population can be understood to mean any group of people from a small band of individuals up to the population of a continent.

This isn't morally reasonable because I would in fact probably sacrifice any number of people who are not close to me for those that are however I tend to think that the majority would make the same decision. This is why having individuals make such life and death decisions would probably be a bad idea.

I don't think I could reasonably on the other hand punish the guilty 1% and also the innocent 99%. I guess everyone probably has a line but I don't know if you can ethically define and what point it becomes right or wrong because I don't think most people consider even the mundane choices they make logically.

I think most such choices are actually made emotionally.

> I think most such choices are actually made emotionally.

I would go so far as to suggest most choices are made emotionally. Brand advertising and propaganda are used because they work.

Also, I must complement you for honesty, and I think most people share your views. I can only comment that very rarely is a population a meaningful direct threat rather than at worst a dangerous tool, but those terms will be banded about to leverage our natural responses.

He's referring to Germany after WWI, not generalizing or referring to America as you do. What other way is there to read his comment?

A reference to the power of labels. America rarely gets a bad rap for genocide in such discussions, but it's defiantly a major part of our history.

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