Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree that it is very important to understand the context and history behind awful events. But the concept of "evil" is still very useful. The point of defining evil is so that you can teach people not to be evil. Humans may not have a "conscience" that comes from God, but our brains have evolved for a sense of conscience that can be cultivated via the social pressure of parents, family, friends, teachers, and lead…
> But the concept of "evil" is still very useful. The point of defining evil is so that you can teach people not to be evil. > But the rise of Hitler was not inevitable. Had Hitler been raised with a stronger, better moral compass, had the people who enabled his rise possessed a better moral compass, the war and the Holocaust would not have happened. Things could have happened differently, but the war was more or les…
Had the Versailles treaty actually been enforced, had the winning powers actually declared war on Germany early in the 1930's when Germany violated the treaty, and before Germany had significantly rearmed, Hitler would have been quickly defeated.
Hilter was just one man -- millions of Germans wanted "war" and were enraged with the treaty even before Hitler became known.
Yes, but Hitler was a genius at using that hate and at giving the Germans a renewed sense of their latent power. The desire to rearm and invade eastern europe to steel their land was the great brainchild of Hitler, no other German leaders at the time had anything close Hitler's level of megalomania.
What? This is extremely condescending to the German people.
To be clear, it was not just Americans who rebuilt the education system. It was the Americans in conjunction with the leaders of the German resistance (who were now promoted into power) and the general population who were disillusioned with war. The prestige of victory is such that the Americans did need to use all that repressive methods to wipe out Nazi ideology.
You really believe that they needed ...Americans to instill a "moral system" onto them?!!!
Well, the Germans sure did not do it themselves in the 1930's before the American occupation! Germans had an ethical system then, but it was the ethics of Jenger's Storm of Steel - "Time only strengthens my conviction that it was a good and strenuous life, and that the war, for all its destructiveness, was an incomparable schooling of the heart..". The American victory taught Germans that the way of evil conquest was not an acceptable path, that it led only to ruin. The Nuremberg trials, the new German constitution, de-Nazification, a rebuilt education systen, etc, all ensured that German morals would be much more pacifist in the future.
As if Americans are ...morally superior people?!!!
The Americans of 1940 were morally superior to the Germans of 1940. Is there really any argument about this? Now, whether the Americans of 1835 were more moral than the Germans of 1940 is a different question. (It is striking how similar the concept of Lebensraum is to the concept of Manifest Destiny)