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Comment by stcredzero | Hacker News Reader

Hey, we'd only disregard the truth for a couple of complete innocents, so let's just treat this entire group of individuals as fungible and disposable? Sorry, but that's not properly valuing individual human rights. As I point out above, almost every one in the faction is culpable. However, they should still be held individually culpable, in accordance with their particular facts and individual human rights and the stated principles of the founding of the United States.

If one starts allowing group culpability without regard for the innocents, no matter how few, then this destroys the principle of individual culpability. Sorry, but that's something the good guys shouldn't be doing, and only something one should expect the bad guys to do.

Good guys don't treat entire groups of people as fungible and disposable. Period.

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I have no idea why you are injecting the founding of the United States into this.

Nobody can possibly weigh every Wehrmacht member’s actions. Those that acted with distinction have been documented. They are the exceptions that prove the rule. If they were not, the outcome of the Wehrmacht’s actions would have been very different.

Your criteria is impossible to satisfy, by design. An attempt to rewrite history.

Nobody can possibly weigh every Wehrmacht member’s actions

Strawman. Should you ever meet a former member of the Wehrmacht, you owe them the same general regard to be given any human being.

An attempt to rewrite history.

False. You are projecting. My words state the opposite of what you suggest. I take it you are invested in the idea that it’s okay to throw away individual rights in some situations and simply punish groups. If that is the case, then you are advocating for committing exactly the moral failing we should hold against the Wehrmacht.

In this case, this is the least popular implication of the principles which were fought for in WWII at the price of millions of lives.

In short, in 2019 terms, “Punch a Nazi” is committing the exact moral failing at the root of the discredited philosophy being fought. Peacetime politics through violence is wrong. Period.

(No, punching for political gain doesn’t make you a war criminal, obviously. No equivalence, obviously. What you are doing is introducing that moral framework. Best to avoid the moral framework of the worst villains.)

Should you ever meet a former member of the Wehrmacht, you owe them the same general regard to be given any human being.

Most human beings have not taken up arms to make war on behalf of a genocidal regime led by a fanatical anti-Semitic tyrant. It’s okay to look askance at those who did.

However, most human beings in their situation did. There but for the grace of god go I.

There but for the grace of god go I.

I also use that phrase. In my youth, I would even have meant it literally. Now, I will respond to it in the sense of cognitive traps which people too easily fall into and are lucky to escape. I have been "lucky" to have experienced racially motivated harassment in my youth, so I have had a direct view of what people taken by groupthink are like.

Far too many human beings in 2019 are falling into groupthink where they will gladly throw young people and children under the bus, just to serve their "side." Note that this applies equally to the political Left and the Right. Once one wants one's own side to win so badly, that basic principles go out the window, one's mind has been taken by groupthink.

The following is directed generally: If one is of the Left and cannot see or automatically excuse all of its transgressions, then one's mind has been taken by groupthink. If one is of the Right and cannot see or automatically excuse all of its transgressions, then one's mind has been taken by groupthink. If one is of the mindset that critics are automatically enemies, one's mind has been taken by groupthink.

Most human beings have not taken up arms to make war on behalf of a genocidal regime led by a fanatical anti-Semitic tyrant.

Too many people in 2019 are caught up in groupthink and outright hate, but camouflage it and justify it to themselves as a worthy cause. This is what happened in Germany prior to WWII, and it is something we need to look out for.

It’s okay to look askance at those who did.

Yes. So long as you view them as individual human beings and the particular facts. So long as you're not responding to a shallow label and taking action with little thought. That is the underlying philosophical mistake which is the foundation of the very wrong you would hold against them.

I too would look askance at them. But if you treat them as fungible and disposable, then what exactly did our side fight for?

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