Post Numéro: 33 de Enrico Cernuschi 26 Oct 2005, 16:51
I dont' believe it's necessary to be so drastic.
You are simply applying today sensibility at a matter which happened when life was much cheaper.
Your categories, according Kant philosophy, are so wrong as you are thinking in modern (XXI Century time) at a tragedy which was staged when the feelings were quite different.
To be clearer. When Hollywood movies shows Roman laughing at the slaughter at the Circus we feel (today) the whole bunch was evil.
According the spirit of the time their reactions were quite common and not different from the feeling of today people in a stadium looking at a soccer game.
The medium lenght of the life, during that time, was about 30-35 years and a violent death was a very common accident, not to mention plagues and other similar accidents which decimated quite often towns and countries.
The human race history is a very hard one and the actual, comfortable condition is quite a novelty, much less than 100 years old.
It's true that christianity changed as a principle the rule of the game 2000 years ago, but for the 1942 people, coming from the hardness of the debacle (and the hungry casued by the German occupation, not to mention the cold winters with little coal and the absence of millions of Soldiers, Pows in the Reich) the common feelings were, at best, cloroformed.
The same sentiment is present after the war. I said it before, the actual considion of great sensibility at the word Jew is a consequrnce of the shock caused to the new generation by the Eichmann trial on 1961. And it it was a shock it's because the parents had not anticipated those horrors to their sons. Why? because they were all perverse or guilty? I don't think so. They were the sons of a generation who had suffered the World War One losses and, just after, the hundreds of deads (or millions?) of the "Spanaird Flu" which had hit just the weakiest, old and pupils.
Of course, if the Germans (and their zealous, local helpers) had claimed loudly they were going to slaughter all the deported people the public opinion would have protested and something would happen (like in Germany since Autumn 1941 when the euthanasia program had to be reduced or, somewhere, stopped or the March 1943 protest of the German women were able to save their Jew husbands), but the secrecy of the massacre and the excuse they were simply removing a fifth column in being, was quite enought to quiet the spectators.
The usual Hollywood's version needs to tell the full history within twho hours of reels; the real story is it was a step by step progress towards damnation; much more difficoult to be understood and much more difficoult to judge.
EC