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Comment by fractallyte | Hacker News Reader

So was everyone who followed his directives...

That's simply not true. That example should tell you that, if anything, a good part of their motivation was a healthy sense of self preservation. This is by the way what we're literally seeing play out in the US right now. Tim Cook, Zuck, all the other rich guys chipped in for the inauguration to signal their deference. Because they know Trump and Musk would remember if they didn't.

If you're interested in why this happens, try reading some of The Gulag Archipelago by Alexander Solzhenitsyn. If the choice is comply or die, fine upstanding morals don't really come into play except in very rare cases. And even then, what good does getting shot for a minor detail do in the grand scheme of things? You're not going to spur a revolution to overthrow a dictator because you were shot for not following an order to the letter in a Siberian concentration camp.

Vaclav Havel has a few things to say about that: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Power_of_the_Powerless

I haven't read that, but I imagine I'd agree with most of it having read the precis. My beef was really with the idea that everyone who follows orders in that kind of a system is a "piece of work". I think that's holding everyone to an incredible high - and unrealistic - standard.

I have read it, and much more.

That's why I wrote what I did: passive acceptance of a Führer's insanity leads to the kind of Stalinist nightmare that the Soviets experienced last century. (Yeah, I'm blending dictators: this scenario seems to be common to them all, throughout history.)

Such behavior needs to be put down immediately, with a bullet to the head. I guarantee those soldiers were better armed than that POS dictator.

Do I sound angry? Why, yes, I am. We need more individuals, not slaves.

Interesting that you'd read that and much more (like me) and had a very different reaction. I came out of it feeling understanding for people caught up in such a cruel system. To be clear, not the stoolies or collaborators, but the vast majority of people who were swept up in a system that they had no control over. I just think it's human nature. Slightly hand-wavy figures here, but I feel like you have 10% of people who are bullies and will absolutely buy into the system, 10% of people who are brave and will try to fight somehow, and 80% of people who aren't either. And as much as I'd like to think you could tip the balance significantly in favour of the brave, I just don't think that's human nature, so I don't really feel like I can blame those people for just wanting to keep their heads down and survive. If you don't have it in you, you don't have it in you. My reading also taught me that when push comes to shove, many people aren't nearly as brave as they think they are. The Gulag Archipelago in particular was instructive about what happens to people when they're starved and worked to the bone. Any notion of humanity goes out of the window, and it's the airy-fairy "we should all share" people who die almost immediately.

Coincidentally, a comment from a Ukrainian woman in Odesa, just yesterday:

"I remember in the 11th grade during an English lesson, we discussed how Freud’s student saved him and literally bought him out from the Nazis. At that time, my teacher (she was a child of the war) said one strange phrase: “War divides people into humans and non-humans.” Thirty years later, I can say how right you were." (https://x.com/tatyanaodesssa/status/1880920634978386335)

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