Is Pacifism Ethical?
- Thread starter spidergoat
- Start date
Well either way we are talking about World War 2.
I agree.
I think the impact and responsibility a leader is assumed to have are often overestimated.
Someone does not rise to the position of being a leader just like that; there must be a whole social system that supports and enables prospective leaders; the leader reflects the ideas of the social system.
Some things happen in the blink of an eye...relatively speaking. A leader can also change ideas and heavily influence people. Just look at cults and you will see this.
This used to be the standard explanation, yes.
Newer trends in psychology suggest that people from dysfunctional families are more susceptible to cultist settings. Also, that it is impossible to be manipulated if one is compassionate.
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If those guys are truly guilty of what they've been accused of, the death penalty is very much justified.
That's a big problem with pacifism. Would a pacifist call the police? Because we all know how the police would respond to an armed criminal who resisted arrest.
Pacifism only works when everyone is doing it.
Sometimes but dysfunctional families also produce great children, who do great things. Here we have more of an isolation issue and there were similarities to a cult. It is amazing what people can believe. Often just a matter of time. Look at alternative lifestyles that are damaging yet the subject finds the lifestyle normal.
You get a group of people, isolate them and what becomes normal to them may be very far from normal yet to them...it is how they live. People dont realize these things about that time because they equate the world as it is now to those times. Different time-different place. For one thing access to outside sources was a profound detriment. I mean for the average person.
yeah, i didnt want to be the one to bring that up. Kind of obvious though.
oh yeah...they would call the police. Pacifism is more of a personal stance...but yeah. they get on the horn relatively fast.
If that's the case, the Heinlein quote I posted the other day applies perfectly.
You could be right in most cases but in Hitler's case I very much doubt it, he was the driving force and architect behind his party and he had the skill and charisma to pull it off. Germany was still feeling the humiliation of WWI and crippling reparations the allies imposed on them. Also, the unemployment rate extremely high. Once he started putting people to work, he was in the drivers seat. The allies really blew it big time when they imposed those unlivable reparations on the German population. While I'm sure bad things would have happened without Hitler, it's hard to know if it would have been WWII.