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Comment by t-3 | Hacker News Reader

> To someone living in Ukraine, it probably feels like a much closer fit.

You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with, especially when there's no convenient ring to throw in a volcano?

The black-and-white starkness of LotR is what makes it unfit for use as an analogy to the real world! There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing, even if it may be a comforting and inspiring story to tell ourselves.

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>> To someone living in Ukraine, it probably feels like a much closer fit.

> You may be right, but is it a better fit? Is there any hope left when you face overwhelming hordes of evil orcs that cannot be negotiated or reasoned with

"The world changes, and all that once was strong now proves unsure. How shall any tower withstand such numbers and such reckless hate? ... I will not end here, taken like an old badger in a trap. Snowmane and Hasufel and the horses of my guard are in the inner court. When dawn comes, I will bid men sound Helm’s horn, and I will ride forth. Will you ride with me then, son of Arathorn? Maybe we shall cleave a road, or make such an end as will be worth a song – if any be left to sing of us hereafter.

'I will ride with you', said Aragorn"

-The Two Towers

Seems like it fits to me...

For one the demographic curve for the Russia vs the Orcs is much more dire - it was bad already when they started the senseless war and it is much worse now. Their soldiers are not made in spawning pits & they will run out of the willing/forceable sooner or later. With all the consequences for their country which they gambled for the imperial fever dream.

well, they've got an orange unprincipled opportunist and his 'friends' on their team now, so it appears they will be able to pull through

The jury is out on that.

Little known fact: a while ago Russia doubled the sign-in bonus fot contractors to approximately $4.5k to keep the flow of people going. With Trump taking office this produced a wave of recruits who are betting on the chance that the war will be over before they finish training and actually arrive to the front.

Some of them are already there and the results are not good (for them).

I'm not saying the situation isn't difficult, but it doesn't serve the free world to see Russia as this unstoppable force, as it paints efforts at helping Ukraine as pointless.

> There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing, even if it may be a comforting and inspiring story to tell ourselves.

To use the example already given, how about Ukraine? I have a very hard time not placing that in a good vs evil framing.

It’s true that Ukraine isn’t perfectly good, and Russia isn’t purely evil, but it’s pretty damn close.

Here’s a nation that was just keeping to themselves and growing closer to the ones that didn’t want to annex them (surprise surprise) and the evil overlord thought that was too threatening and decided to pre-emptively annex them.

Ok. Russia evil, Ukraine good. Now what? Do we sit around and wait for the chosen one? Is Zelensky the one? How much time should we give him? Maybe Trump is the one?

Don't get me wrong, I'm swede and like most here I'm firmly on Ukraine's side and see the pure evil shit Russian military does _every _day without any illusions. But this framing of good vs evil does not seem to pan out. A common sentiment is just to wipe out Russia from the map. And tempting as it might be, that doesn't seem very noble/good and the alternative, "Russian people finds the good in them and throw out the oligarchy forcefully and install democracy", is very naive. I mean even the US, a fully armed populace of strong freeminded men can't seem to see that they are treading the same path as Russia and take action. How reasonable is it then to have that expectation of a people systematically disempowered for decades.

"Throw the Russians out of Ukraine" would suffice. No need to wipe anything out. (Except what logistically is needed to achieve said goal.)

Good vs evil is simplistic, but it serves as shorthand for "it's worth fighting for".

"Good vs evil is simplistic, but it serves as shorthand for "it's worth fighting for"."

Are you in Donbas currently? If not, you are not fighting anything.

> Are you in Donbas currently? If not, you are not fighting anything.

That's a very simplistic world-view. One does not have to be on the frontlines to help an effort. People donating to https://ukrainedefensefund.org/ are still "fighting", even though they aren't literally gunning people down in Donbas.

No, it is not simplistic. People donating are, well, donating. It is a right thing, a noble thing, it is a necessary thing.

But they are not fighting. They do not take the same risk, they do not suffer the same, they do no share burden with those that do.

No one said they were.

How do you want this worded? It’s worth giving the Ukrainians a fuckton of equipment, and potentially organized military intervention for? You can summarize that as ‘fighting’.

The problem is that as a European, giving in here means they come closer. Next time it’s the Polish border, then the German.

Why would you want to wipe Russia off the map? I don’t think we’d achieve anything with that except our own destruction. I’d settle for giving them a good punch in the face instead of strongly worded letters.

Asassinate Putin, a sponsored coup. Something like that.

Good vs evil is simplistic enough that It can be used to convince basically anyone that those are a good idea. The only thing we really have to be wary of is that thing someone said:

The only thing that’s necessary for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.

Emotionally it makes perfect sense, and it's great for propaganda purposes, but rationally it has no appeal. How does making Russia into an enemy that needs to be obliterated and destroyed for the safety of the world help anybody or serve to end the conflict? If you say they are evil and don't want to destroy them totally, what is the point of labeling other than for propaganda?

>especially when there's no convenient ring to throw in a volcano?

We tossed the ring away in the 90ies, it turned out to be not the smartest idea

> There is very rarely ever a situation in which Good vs Evil is a correct or useful framing

This may or may not be true, but Ukraine vs. Putin is absolutely one of those times where it's 100% accurate and useful.

Putin invaded Ukraine unprovoked, motivated by visions of restoring an empire to its former glory. He cannot be reasoned with, he cannot be appeased. The only hope that any of the formerly-occupied countries have is to defeat him, and any and all efforts to make the issue appear to be more grayscale than that will necessarily lead to disappointment and to further wars and bloodshed.

While I agree with you that Ukraine vs. Putin is clear-cut, morally speaking, I don't think we can apply pre-Atomic Age logic to the situation. I just watched this scene in Crimson Tide:

XO Hunter: "...I just think that in the nuclear world, the true enemy can't be destroyed."

Captain Ramsey: "Attention on deck. Von Clausewitz will now tell us exactly who the real enemy is. Von?"

XO Hunter: "In my humble opinion... in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."

I think that's the difference. In WWII, appeasing Hitler was a mistake because it only emboldened him. Even back then, Tolkien had reservations about how far to take the war. While he abhorred Hitler, he initially supported Neville Chamberlain's "appeasement" policy.

But today, a nuclear Russia cannot be defeated the way Germany was. "In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself."

We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.

The question everyone is wrestling with is, how do we save Ukraine while preventing nuclear war? Unfortunately, we don't know the answer, and the risk of getting it wrong is catastrophic.

> We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.

As soon as you decide this, and let others know you have, you have lost everything. Because if that logic applies to Ukraine it applies equally to Poland, to Alaska, France, to Washington, D.C., to your hometown. You've committed to surrender everything to any power that has the potential to escalate to nuclear war.

(It's even worse if you don't believe this -- or if you think you do but would think differently if the thing to surrender was closer to home -- and let people think you do, because that makes it almost inevitable that things will escalate beyond your trigger point, resulting in nuclear war.)

Ukraine didn't have nuclear weapons. America does, as do many others, which is largely why none of them have put boots on the ground beyond "training". If they did, they would actually be entering the war, and nuclear weapons are back on the table.

That's also the reason why Alaska and France are safe, why Iran wants nukes, and is the best argument against disarmament you can find. The cat is out of the bag, and the attempts to put it back are starting to leave scars.

Ukraine did have Soviet-era nuclear weapons at the time of their independence, which they let go of in exchange of US, UK and Russia security guarantees in 1994. It is amazing to me how this fact is being memoryholed.

>It is amazing to me how this fact is being memory holed.

Because every time it is brought up it is easily demonstrated that nobody actually agreed to defend Ukraine. They each agreed not to invade Ukraine.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum

The only assurance of assistance built into the agreement is that parties would complain to the UN security council.

The Obama administration let Russia violate the agreement when they took Crimea. Putin's justification that Ukraine isn't a nation but a historically Russian territory only works if Russia pretends it was never a signatory, since recognition of Ukraine as an independent and sovereign nation was a part of it.

In short, pieces of paper do not trump the fear of nuclear weapons.

> Ukraine didn't have nuclear weapons. America does

So? If nuclear war is always an intolerable choice for America, then America's nuclear weapons will never be used in any case, and any aggressor who can plausibly threaten nuclear war is free to seize anything from America with that threat.

If nuclear war isn't always intolerable, then, well, we've eliminated the premise off the upthread argument about Ukraine, and are in a different discussion.

The intolerability of nuclear weapon usage is not a simple binary. We didn't have the same kind of security agreements with Ukraine that we do with NATO countries, hence we are not at war with Russia.

Had Russia invaded a NATO country, we still would not have launched first, but rather used conventional weapons, given the fallout (literal and metaphorical), but actually using them to prevent greater numbers of casualties from protracted war is not fully off the table, so to speak.

It's also the best argument for nuclear weapons you can find. If every country had nukes, invasions wouldn't be very likely for states with any semblance of rationality.

How does the logic “apply equally”?

It’s only rational to start a nuclear war if a country faces a direct existential threat: i.e. a significant percentage of the population will be killed or conquered and enslaved. The perceived outcome of nuclear war (widespread devastation) has to be preferable to what would happen otherwise.

Conflicts over territories at the far fringes of a great power’s sphere of influence (or desired sphere of influence) obviously don’t meet the bar. If it’s trivial to call your bluff, it’s probably better not to bluff.

Agreed! That's the key problem: we are not going to blow up the world to save Ukraine.

But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.

Unfortunately, I think the rational thing to do is to apply increasing pressure to Putin until he either backs down or proves that he is willing to blow up the world over Ukraine. If the latter, then we back down. Of course, the risks of that strategy are all too obvious.

> But what if Putin thinks that unless he takes Ukraine, Russia will cease to exist (or Putin will cease to exist). In that scenario, taking Ukraine is an existential goal for Russa, and he will blow up the world unless he wins.

Russia's nuclear arsenal is a perfectly adequate guarantee of Russia's security. Putin knows this, which is why he's happy to leave Russia's western border with NATO practically undefended while he pursues Ukraine. (This also disproves the "Putin invaded Ukraine because he's afraid of NATO" lie.)

It's more plausible that Putin's survival depends on the outcome of the Ukraine war. But "mad Putin blows up the world" is as much a problem for the Russians as anyone else.

Indeed, when Finland actually joined NATO, Russia did nothing at all, despite Finland having a longer border with Russia than Ukraine has.

Nobody said "start a nuclear war". They said "maybe we shouldn't roll over for the nuclear power just because they want something and make insincere threats involving nukes"

The logical consequence of disagreeing with this is that every country that doesn't want a significant percentage of their population killed or conquered or enslaved should get their own nukes, because nobody else wants to help them. And I'm not sure every country acquires nukes is a safer world than maybe we don't let Putin have everything he wants

Putin’s threats are not obviously insincere though is the problem.

He knows it would be strategically impossible for the US or Nato to respond in kind to a nuclear attack on Ukraine. It can be rational for him to climb the escalation ladder if he knows his enemy will have to back down before he does because they have less to gain and more to lose.

I don’t like this situation at all, and I understand the point about rolling over to threats. Unfortunately, this is just how nuclear game theory works whether we like it or not. You can’t win in a conflict under MAD against an opponent who has more at stake than you.

They are obvious insincere, because they've been idly making them about every minor gesture the West has made in Ukraine's favour. And ultimately it is strategically impossible for there to be any good outcomes of a nuclear attack on Ukraine for Russia, never mind "better than conventional war Russia have marginal advantages in" or even "better than retreat to pre-2014 borders".

If they were obviously insincere, they could just be ignored. But we can see that in practice, US/Europe have been hesitant to escalate too much or get directly involved with troops. Which is part of the reason for making those threats over and over. While each one is most likely posturing, they cannot be blanket ignored, because Putin has an advantage in an escalation scenario. Making those threats is a way of repeatedly emphasizing that fact.

And of course there can be an advantage for Russia in using nukes. They could destroy Ukraine's entire army, kill all its leaders, destroy all its infrastructure, etc. with no risk of (nuclear) retaliation. There would be many negative consequences too, so it's not likely to happen unless the conventional war is going very badly for Russia, but it's certainly a card they hold.

> with no risk of (nuclear) retaliation

Putin doesn't know that. Putin doesn't know quite what the repercussions would be. That's why he hasn't used them so far.

The idea that there would be no nuclear retaliation the moment Russia launches any known nukes is ridiculous. If they actually launch a nuke, any non instantaneous retaliation will be too late.

The reason the EU countries don’t just waltz into Ukraine probably has more to do with the knowledge they’re not dealing with a rational person, but with a bunch of ego. It’s not hard to predict how Putin will respond if his ego is threatened, but how the rest of Russia will respond to the command to launch nukes.

It’s not unlike the US, except it’s currently still fairly easy to predict that any US commander will just say no when ordered to fire on the EU.

The US would not start a nuclear war with Russia over an attack on Ukraine, nuclear or otherwise. Do you really think it would?

If Russia nuked the Ukraine, I would be astonished if the West didn't invade Russia. The primary goal being the end of Putin, and all those who aided him. If resisted, and Russia threatened more nuking, then Russia would need to be nuked.

(I expect a first response would be a single city, with warnings to evacuate. A show of what's next.)

The goal would be that Russians assist in taking out an out of control, lunatic who will destroy us all.

Understand, this isn't just about today. Over the next 100 years, every country will obtain the capacity for nukes. Every person on this planet needs to see, and know that using them indiscriminately means you lose.

The consequences are too dire otherwise.

> I expect a first response would be a single city, with warnings to evacuate. A show of what's next.

And when a US city is taken out in response? Do you keep going? Over a country that ultimately has very little impact on the US?

Your premise is basically that US military leaders are irrational to the point of insanity.

At that point, as I stipulated "The West", multiple countries would be boots on ground, invading Russia. If Russia gave an ultimatum to nuke at that point, and was serious, it would make perfect sense to nuke a city of theirs first.

This isn't a game you win by backing off. There is no safety in that move.

Understand, the claim that the Ukraine is "Russian" is an absurd bluff. No one truly believes that, not Putin certainly. There are a dozen other countries in that region that Putin could make the same bluff about.

By allowing this bluff to continue for this long, matters have only gotten worse. We allowed 2014 to happen. Now, we're here. It won't stop a a peace agreement, or at Ukraine in whole.

The insanity is Russian. And you don't leave a rambling, insane man with a gun outside your house, shooting randomly at houses, because they're not quite at your doorstep yet.

I’m more inclined to think it’d be a direct beeline for moscow with a swarm of jets (kinda like what Russia tried, only successful). Nobody in Russia has any appetite for this war and they’ll take an out when it’s given to them.

They wouldn’t start a war over Ukraine for certain, but are you going to bet those ballistic missiles target Ukraine?

Ukraine has crossed many of Putin's red lines, and all that happened was Putin drawing a new red line, or revising nuclear doctrine, or whatever they call it at the time.

The game theory works roughly like this: Putin wins the most if his threats work. If they don't work, he has the choice between drawing a new red line, launching a limited nuclear attack on Ukraine, or full-on nuclear war. The last option is obviously out (guaranteed destruction is in no proportion to the reward). A limited nuclear attack would likely make him a pariah on the world stage and make it even more difficult to find trading partners. So instead he redraws the line.

If he ever went for the limited nuclear attack option Ukraine might give up, and the west would have to choose between war against Russia (high risk, low reward) or just tightening economic sanctions to the max and punishing anyone who dares to trade with him.

If we assume rational actors I don't see how this would ever escalate to nuclear war. And as long as Ukraine doesn't find a way to decisively push Russian troops out Russia has no incentive to climb the escalation ladder. Even as prolonged war leads to internal instability

> Ukraine has crossed many of Putin's red lines, and all that happened was Putin

Ukraine can cross as many of Putin's "red lines" as they wish. Ukraine did not start this war.

Sure, but that's irrelevant to the question at hand. In a discussion of cold game theory, morality doesn't apply. I'd even say that explicitly excluding morality from the discussion is much of the point of boiling a scenario down to game theory in the first place.

>You can’t win in a conflict under MAD against an opponent who has more at stake than you.

That's purely a psychological trick, if you take this as true then it would be rational for everyone to place madmen in the negotiating seat. A better example, if I had Trump say to China, if you don't open up your markets and drop your tariffs on us, we will nuke you. If I can guarantee as thought exercise that Trump will fire nukes if demands are not met (and that's not difficult to do in reality), do you think Xi Jingping will concede here?

It has to be believable. Even if it were true in your hypothetical, Xi would not believe that Trump or any other leader would sacrifice their life and the existence of the entire country over an issue that isn’t of existential importance, either to the leader or the country.

That’s, again, the whole problem. You don’t have to view Putin as “mad” to see him taking a nuclear last stand over Ukraine. He is already invested and taking risk at an extreme level to the point that no one can doubt the importance to him and his willingness to make heavy sacrifices to win. There is no believable narrative where a US leader would be willing to gamble at an existential level over Ukraine.

Unfortunately, MAD likely requires that you can't let Putin have Ukraine. And if MAD fails, well then we're all screwed anyway.

That's assuming Putin would use nukes in case Ukraine succeeds in winning back their territory.

Which he won't do if mutually assured destruction is credible. He's not going to destroy the world including himself and everything he loves for Ukraine.

Once there are doubts that use of nuclear weapons will be punished, then all bets are off.

The problem is that it’s simply not credible on its face. No matter what is said, there is no possibility of US leaders launching nukes over Ukraine.

It’s a bad idea to bluff in situations like this, because when the obvious bluff is called and you are forced to back down, it makes enemies more likely to test all your commitments and “red lines”.

While Putin might not be willing to risk MAD either over Ukraine, it’s a lot more believable that he would than that the US would. There have been direct kinetic attacks on Moscow and parts of Russia have been invaded. There have been assassination attempts against people close to him. This is not some far away conflict for him. He’s already taking on a huge amount of risk, a lot more than the US has taken on in a long time—even in WW2 there was no direct attack on the continental US.

If it's not such a far away conflict then why isn't Putin looking for a way to stop? If anything the war shows how little Putin cares about his own people, even those close around him and how willing he is to spend their lives to burnish his legacy. In that case why would you think that any backing down on Ukraine leads to anything other than him or his successors wanting to swallow more?

Personally I don't see any real chance of nuclear escalation over Ukraine on both sides. The war needs to end but to do that Putin needs to be given a way to deescalate and claim a win at home. But that can only be allowed to happen if Ukraine is made safe and secure once again and if Putin is willing to swallow that. And I see no evidence of that being true.

There's definitely a chance it does lead to Russia wanting to "swallow more", which is a terrible thing, but that doesn't really change the strategic dynamics. Until they try to swallow territory that is as important to a nuclear-armed enemy as it is to Russia, they will have an advantage and it will be difficult to stop them.

Putin created a system of carefully balanced violent psychopaths around himself. Showing any weakness (like losing against little Ukraine) can quickly lead to a coup there. I can very well imagine Putin think "if I'm going to die, I want the whole world to die with me".

Fortunately, unlike the US, Russia does not give a single person the authority to launch nuclear weapons. Putin would need one of those other psychopaths to go along with him.

https://www.ucs.org/resources/whose-finger-button

It has become very clear over the last couple of years that Putin doesn't want nuclear war either. Lots of nuclear threats, all of them backtracked. If we marched on Moscow the way we marched on Berlin that might change his mind. But If we push Russia back to Ukraine's rightful border and build a line of fortifications there, Russia has no point where launching nukes is actually advantageous to them.

If anything, nukes only remain an option because of the lack of Western troops in Ukraine, allowing Putin to make a limited nuclear attack that hits Ukrainians but isn't worth war a nuclear war for the West. And even that is a trigger Putin has repeatedly refused to pull, preferring to win the war the conventional way even if that takes years

This is exactly how you make sure EVERYONE will get nuclear weapons.

And it was just so simple - provide Ukraine with all the weapons necessary to help them defend itself from the clear Russian agression. Or, you know, do that before the Russians started their main war in 2022, there was long enough warning from 2013, including hundreds of inocents murdered in an airliner the Russians show down...

> including hundreds of innocents murdered in an airliner the Russians shot down

As much as I felt the Dutch marines should have marched in there to retrieve the bodies when the Russians were faffing around, I do think the shooting down itself was an accident. Zero upside to doing that.

> We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Putin have Ukraine.

No. We cannot let people just walk over other nations even at the cost of nuclear war

Anything else means the evil ones eventually win.

In the case of nuclear war, everyone loses everything. For most of us in the US, and I'm guessing most people not directly impacted by the war, that's not an acceptable outcome (not that Russia seems to be able to take any more than already have anyway).

With that kind of mindset you won't have anything anyways at the rate you're going.

I'm sorry, but when you argue that Ukraine losing some territory is bad enough to call for the extinction of the human race, I can't help but think you're not sane enough to be taken seriously.

I think what the GP is saying is that it never stops with losing some territory. In particular, "some Ukrainian territory" is not what Russia wants. They may settle for it for now (like they sort of did with Eastern Donbas in 2014), but sooner or later they'll come for more. Yes, even after they have all of Ukraine, they will come for more. Look up Russia's ultimatum of Feb 2022. Or the appeasement of Hitler at the onset of WW2. Or just watch some Russian TV... just kidding, I wouldn't hoist that upon anybody :)

Of course not, the extinction of the human race would suck.

But when you are talking about nuclear threats there is no other way to respond if you don’t want everything taken from you.

If you constantly back down by giving the playground bully your lunch money he’ll keep coming back for more. Punch him in the face however, and…

> everyone loses everything

Exactly. Which is why I need to be perfectly willing to start one, because the alternative is that only I lose everything.

A good refresher on deterrence seems necessary here. https://www.ndc.nato.int/news/news.php?icode=1570 There's a very real, game theoretic reason why nuclear riposte is fully automated with no way for even commanders to cancel. A rogue actor _menacing_ nuclear attack as a tool of invasion and war of aggression is an obvious case study for this.

And finally: "We cannot allow a nuclear war to happen, even if it means letting Ukraine win the war" is foremost in russian minds, no?

I mean we need to speak plainly: Ukraine certainly didn’t provoke Russia, but the U.S. did, using Ukraine as a pawn. Thats what makes Trump and Vance’s actions so terrible: Ukraine would be a lot better off if the U.S. (and Europe to a lesser extent) had never interfered with its affairs.

This is pure Russian propaganda that seeks to justify an unjustifiable war.

All wars are unjustifiable in the modern era. What I said is simply a description of what happened: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4

Aside from the lack of convenient ring I'd say that sometimes it's quite a useful framing. To avoid derailing into politics I'll use Nazi Germany as another example.

Funny you bring them up, I was going to use them as an example but didn't want to Godwin.

The Nazis had a black-and-white ideological viewpoint and seemed to believe themselves to be heroes fighting to save their people from evil Jews and their brainwashed minions. Do you see why those narratives are so dangerous now?

I guess it strikes me as weird that we can't just say "Well, yes, 'both sides' thought they were right but in fact one (the Nazis) was wrong."

To be sure, there are situations where there is some genuinely complicated moral situation. But that doesn't mean we have to pretend to be moral morons and sagely nod our heads and say "Yes, but Nazis thought they were right too, hmm, hmm."

You're not even wrong. No sane person has said we can't judge Nazis for what they did and believed. What we shouldn't do is set ourselves up to fall into the same trap by using binary narrative framings.

Falling into the other trap of treating both sides of every conflict as equally valid is probably just as dangerous, no?

We can start by not separating everything into two sides, one of which we must take. Look at each conflict as a whole rather than a sports game with a winner and a loser or a Good and an Evil or a My Team and Their Team. Maybe one side really is actually very bad and needs to be stopped. Maybe there are other ways.

There are times when this is true and admirable - "us vs them" rhetoric in political discourse is indeed harmful and only serves to help those in power - but there are times when it's more dangerous to treat both sides as equally valid that we should both listen to - like when a superpower invades another country and wages a war for years.

They both thought they were right but only one knee they were doing good. I cannot believe any Nazi thought they were actually "good", I would understand if they thought their action were needed but definitely killing millions of non-combatants cannot be seen as good; in the right light it can be seen as non-evil given the circumstances.

If one truly believes that it’s “us or them,” and that your enemies are inherently, genetically irredeemable, then exterminating them is good.

The problem, of course, is that belief. It’s catastrophically wrong. And it’s the sort of thing that black and white good vs evil thinking can lead you towards.

We can simultaneously say “the Nazis thought they were good” and “the Nazis were profoundly evil.” We can acknowledge the relativity of perspective without needing to apply a relativity of good and evil.

A necessary element of true goodness is a willingness to consider new ideas, a constant reevaluation of one’s beliefs, and an acknowledgment that the world is complicated and messy. Someone who does these things can justifiably conclude that they’re good and the other guys are evil, but you have to maintain that openness and reevaluation or you can slide into Good vs Evil where you can see no wrong on your own side, and that leads to disaster.

Before they started a war they were mainstream-acceptable in the USA. Henry Ford, Charles Couglin, Friends of New Germany etc. It can be argued the mainstream culture / value system doesn't reject Nazism because it's evil, but because they were "the enemy" in WW2.

All this tells me is that your average american is a moral midget, which is not surprising to me.

The average Americans went to war and defeated the Nazis.

The average person can be fooled into supporting anything most of the time. The list of bad wars Americans have supported (at least initially) is longer than the good ones.

Normative language used as shorthand for current consensus for whether the conflict was justified given the likely alternative outcomes for not engaging.

"things changed as more and more facts came out"

is learning and changing hypocrisy?

> Do you see why those narratives are so dangerous now?

Only when they are "narratives". When they are caution stories from historical facts we want to avoid repiting then they are not so stigmatising but a warnins.

Nobody should trow that storises again and again and some behaviour schamas should be always avoided. Unluckily that stories need to be reminded from time to time.

Even better: people should not only know about WWII-nazi-communism works but should know broad historical contects - what bring that evilness to Earth: communistic imperialism wanting to take over globe and using Germany poor situation (eg. sponsoring nazi party) after WWI to make attempt at concuering Europe (first).

Or maybe it was just another part of "Great Game" and reaults with using new technologies are worse and worse...

In opposition to the Nazi tenets (and your characterization of it as being "black and white"), LOTR explicitly counsels mercy and not being too confident in your judgements.

"What a pity Bilbo did not stab the vile creature, when he had a chance!

Pity? It was Pity that stayed his hand. Pity, and Mercy: not to strike without need.

I do not feel any pity for Gollum. He deserves death.

Deserves death! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some die that deserve life. Can you give that to them? Then be not too eager to deal out death in the name of justice, fearing for your own safety. Even the wise cannot see all ends."

-The Two Towers

Well, yeah, but they also started a giant war of conquest and killed nine million civilians in gas chambers, so I'm still gonna say they were on the evil side even if they used similar narratives themselves. There's a point where the "both sides" thing finally breaks down. If we don't have enough moral clarity to say the Nazis were bad, then we're really in trouble.

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