Before the war, Hitler was inspired by Jim Crow laws when creating the infamous Nuremberg Laws.
After the war - once the US secured unipolar hegemony - they absorbed more than 1500 former SS scientists into the US government.
Birds of a feather
lmfamao
joined 1 month ago
Yup, the mental gymnastics they use to justify war crimes. No other country has nuked a civilian population. They’ve nuked 2
Someone else mentioned in this thread that after WWII, Carl Jaspers wrote Die Schuldfrage (The Question of German Guilt) which discussed and categorized guilt broadly into 4 types. In terms of the people carrying out these orders, moral guilt applies: to act on clearly morally wrong orders does not absolve you of guilt.
I think your comments are obfuscating the role of each of these professions in their proximity to power.
Above all the jobs you mention, soldiers are the closest to power mainly because they hold a device designed for only 1 purpose: to end life. They may be performing this role out of financial necessity, but many still have the ability to avoid killing. In Vietnam, if one couldn’t dodge the draft, there were still many ways to avoid killing. Sure, they may be in a difficult position, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have agency every day to find ways to not kill.
Regarding critique, we can do 2 things at once. We can both be critical of the systems that perpetuate violence and also critical of people who choose to make a career out of taking people’s lives. Sustained pressure (including negative social pressure) applied to both areas can be important. I’d argue that stigmatizing a profession is a necessary step in critiquing and eventually dismantling power.