Consenting to Fascism

I watched Night Will Fall on Netflix last night, about the documentary made about the liberation of the concentration camps in Poland and Germany in 1945. It used U.S., Russian and British film footage - and was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his only documentary.

The purpose of creating the film was for society to learn about what humanity is capable of when fascism takes a hold. But for political reasons, it didn't get released for 70 years. The film addresses the fact that people lived near the camps, knew about them, and benefited from the free labor. The liberators brought those people into the camps and made them confront what was happening.

I learned some really interesting things. The SS officers had shares in companies that took the clothing of the people who came into the camps, used free labor to repurpose them into prison garb, and then sold them back to the camps. There's also some color footage that I had never seen before.

We should be attuned to this part of humanity: both the evil and the good, the frailty and the resilience. It exists on a spectrum. Ethics are important. Fascism doesn't rise in a vaccuum, it is given consent by a people who are supportive, complacent, or just apathetic.

What I would like to discuss here is, why is it that people stand idly by while atrocities happen in their own backyards? I know that in WWII not everyone stood by - there were Germans trying to fight the Nazis from the inside - but clearly not enough got on board to really stop the menace. We have seen this repeat over and over throughout human history.

I'm curious what others think about this.

Northern Light said:

I watched Night Will Fall on Netflix last night, about the documentary made about the liberation of the concentration camps in Poland and Germany in 1945. It used U.S., Russian and British film footage - and was directed by Alfred Hitchcock, his only documentary.

The purpose of creating the film was for society to learn about what humanity is capable of when fascism takes a hold. But for political reasons, it didn't get released for 70 years. The film addresses the fact that people lived near the camps, knew about them, and benefited from the free labor. The liberators brought those people into the camps and made them confront what was happening.

I learned some really interesting things. The SS officers had shares in companies that took the clothing of the people who came into the camps, used free labor to repurpose them into prison garb, and then sold them back to the camps. There's also some color footage that I had never seen before.

We should be attuned to this part of humanity: both the evil and the good, the frailty and the resilience. It exists on a spectrum. Ethics are important. Fascism doesn't rise in a vaccuum, it is given consent by a people who are supportive, complacent, or just apathetic.

What I would like to discuss here is, why is it that people stand idly by while atrocities happen in their own backyards? I know that in WWII not everyone stood by - there were Germans trying to fight the Nazis from the inside - but clearly not enough got on board to really stop the menace. We have seen this repeat over and over throughout human history.

I'm curious what others think about this.

Click to expand...

It is, what comes to mind, when only 50 percent vote and populists like Obama and Trump win.

We all watched it happen with the extremely bipartisan PATRIOT Act, and then we watched as the government doubled down and solidified it.

The biggest complainers about it threw their votes away on Ron Paul; the second biggest complainers shut the hell up about it in 2009 for some reason. And now, if some truly despicable types make their way (or have already made their way) into the secret control room... how are we ever supposed to stop them?

Ethics are important indeed. It's game theory. Bad actors can game the system to their own benefit, until it catches up with them, and they may get away with it (betray).
Cooperation is only ideal when nearly everyone is cooperative, sadly.

I may try to watch that one of these days.

You answered your own question. If people benefit from something they will generally disregard the bad aspects of it and only consider the good. You add in the factor of fear of a people or outcome and it becomes quite easy for bad people and things to be approved of by the population.

As for ethics, that's subjective and in the end meaningless.

Gonzo Rodeo said:

We all watched it happen with the extremely bipartisan PATRIOT Act, and then we watched as the government doubled down and solidified it.

The biggest complainers about it threw their votes away on Ron Paul; the second biggest complainers shut the hell up about it in 2009 for some reason. And now, if some truly despicable types make their way (or have already made their way) into the secret control room... how are we ever supposed to stop them?

Click to expand...

Ron Paul was the only solution offered that didn't support it.

It is said Putin is plotting to aid all rightwing candidates throughout Europe and the U.S. hopefully to create a law and order world. So far look at the U.S. and France for starters.

That's a very difficult question to answer; it's one I've been studying since my teens. Perhaps the best starting point is Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's Hitler's Willing Executioners. Various commentators have critiqued his conclusions, but one thing I think cannot be denied is the data he presents and what it means. Fascism as it manifested in Germany wasn't born in a vacuum. Perhaps 75% of the German population went along with the program willingly, and accepted that the Jews and various other groups (Bolsheviks, Homosexuals, Slavs, Gypsies) would be enslaved, displaced, or killed. They invented elaborate and not-so-elaborate excuses for why this was not only morally permissible, but morally correct.

Of particular interest to me are the 25% who resisted, or who at least didn't buy the propaganda and refused to actively participate. We don't know, of course, who all those people were, but I suggest that a few things unite them. First, they didn't give in to lazy thinking. Dr. Goebbels was a master at lying, at weaving a story that people who already want to believe something in the neighborhood could actually believe. The German people were hurting economically at the start of the Great Depression--some of them were actually starving, living in the woods or on the streets among people who didn't have much to give them. And it was terrifying to those people. Most had experienced declines in their standard of living and in the wages they could earn (rather like what's happening here in the U.S., only a little more extreme). So the people of Germany wanted to believe that someone was to blame, and around 75% were willing to accept a skillfully-woven story without much criticism.

The other 25% may have wanted to believe that story, but were unwilling to give up their intellectual integrity or relax their moral convictions to do so, and as a result, they could not believe the story Goebbels told. As I ponder this point, it is seriously frightening, as the vast majority of Americans are pretty lazy intellectually. They are ready to believe whatever story (more or less) is told to them.

It may once have been the case that intellectual laziness was characteristic of conservatives, but that is not really the case at present. Asking liberals or conservatives to justify their positions in a logically valid manner from premises that are true (or even plausible) doesn't often seem to yield intelligible results. Liberals may have a reputation for being less lazy because part of being intellectually competent is recognizing ambiguities and fine shades of meaning, and it is characteristic of liberalism to be comfortable with ambiguity, while it is characteristic of conservatism to demand clear-cut answers. But, while this might seem to indict conservatives more, I have come to believe that, in actual practice as we find it in the U.S., this is really just a smokescreen. Liberals are as ready to accept talking points uncritically as are conservatives, and often have difficulty explaining the apparent nuances in the positions they espouse.

Both sides spend very little time trying to understand the other in any sympathetic manner. This is another problem that is characteristic of the conditions for fascism to take hold--it creates an us vs. them mentality. One thing that I see increasingly on these boards is a kind of ad hominem attack in which one poster questions the motives of the other, claiming that the motive is to establish some kind of tyranny or bring about some other equally vicious circumstance. Conservatives often accuse liberals of trying to destroy the country by establishing thoroughgoing socialism in the manner of the old Soviet Union or Venezuela. Liberals accuse conservatives of trying to destroy the country by establishing some kind of theocracy or plutocracy. Both sides seem to think that the other consciously wants that kind of outcome, and no matter how much the other side protests, those protests fall on deaf ears.

Think about this for a moment. If you're a conservative who has done this, that means you must think that something like a third of the country actually wants to turn the U.S. into an image of Cuba, the old Soviet Union, or Venezuela. If you're a liberal who has done this, that means you must think that something like a third of the country actually wants to turn the U.S. into an image of Medieval Europe or Nazi Germany.

Who the hell wants either of those things? Not even Venezuelans want to be Venezuela right now. And I assure you that very few Germans want a return to the days of the Third Reich. These are just examples of what I mean by intellectual laziness.

The antidote, as I see it, is personal integration and introspection. It takes realizing that some things are worth more than your physical comfort, or even your life.