People who think shoplifting is bad but genocide is OK

April 6, 2017 12:20 AM

I'm looking for historical examples of people caring about small-scale ethical issues but not apparently caring about monstrous crimes against humanity happening under their noses. An example might be a letter from someone who lived and worked right next to a Nazi death camp, talking about how littering, shoplifting, lying, infidelity, etc is bad and how it's important to honour your mother and father.

There must be many examples of documentary evidence* but I can't find anything specific. This is for an argument I'm trying to formulate about "being a nice person" and how it's not enough.

* For example, the photos of Karl-Friedrich Höcker of Germans who worked at Auschwitz in 1944. They show dozens of young women eating blueberries, sunbathing, laughing and singing at a weekend holiday camp; they decorated Christmas trees and send gifts home; these are people who had not left behind conventional moral customs like please, thank you, don't steal, respect your parents and elders. (However, I am hoping for an example of someone who was a bystander on the fringes of genocide rather than an actual mass murderer, since the concept of a 'polite psychopath' is slightly different).

posted by dontjumplarry to Society & Culture (10 answers total)

The problem is that you'll be judging yesterday's acts with today's moral standards. Even the notion of crime against humanity is slightly over 100 years old, which is nothing on the human history scale. If you believe that some races or tribes are inferior to yours (as was the case for most of human history, the last hundred years being the exception to the rule), then surely it is alright to enslave its members - even when stealing from your neighbour is reprehensible. Most of human history is riddled with such examples.

Today for example, it is perfectly admissible to eat animals. Who knows how fraught that will be a few hundred years from now? Our descendants will be wondering how we were able to eat animals with a perfectly good conscience all the while teaching our kids to be polite.

As for a direct answer to your question, all mass killings (note that I am not using the world genocide because it is a modern concept) in ancient history fit your definition because they were conducted with a good reason... for their times.
posted by Kwadeng at 2:08 AM on April 6, 2017 [11 favorites]

I think this study of Konrad Morgen, The Conscience of A Nazi Judge may be what you are looking for. Morgen was sincerely keen to uphold some kind of moral standards for the Nazi regime, while being bizarrely blind to the inherent rottenness of the whole system. Thus, he wanted to prosecute SS murderers for random killings but did not consider the gas chambers themselves to be prosecutable because they were legal (being the Führer's will). I found it a strange and compelling read about how well-meaning people who are striving to do what they consider to be right can still be blinded by their context and personal situation.
posted by Aravis76 at 5:04 AM on April 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

How about an SS judge who fiercely prosecuted corruption within the concentration camp system while still remaining basically loyal to the Nazi ideal.

(He later claimed that he was doing what he could to impede the Holocaust — that as a judge working within the system he couldn't charge officers for carrying out killings they'd been ordered by Hitler to perform, but that he could and did charge them for any other little piece of dirt he could find on them. Some people find this believable, some don't.)

There's a book about him if you're interested. (Disclosure: one of the authors is a relative of mine.)
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:06 AM on April 6, 2017 [2 favorites]

(Heh. Jinx!)
posted by nebulawindphone at 5:07 AM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]

There's all sorts of examples of people complaining about audience members' behavior during the Roman games -- sitting in the wrong row, wearing the wrong thing, etc. Off the top of my head, I seem to recall a passage in Suetonius complaining about how Julius Caesar did administrative work at the games rather than paying attention. Of course, all of that etiquette seems a little... quaint... given that it's all about watching people die in various violent ways.
posted by cgs06 at 5:15 AM on April 6, 2017 [3 favorites]

As Kwadeng said, given how many societies countenanced what is now regarded as unspeakable behavior, you really have your pick. If you want to go with fairly recent history (so people whose values are not so very dissimilar to those in vogue today), you have at least a century worth of the American South, which had its share of everyday moralists who had no problem whatsoever with the fact that the foundation of their society was the heinous mistreatment of a huge pool of unpaid labor.
posted by jackbishop at 5:20 AM on April 6, 2017 [9 favorites]

Awhile back I asked a question about ordinary Germans' thoughts and behaviors before and during the Holocaust. Confession: I never actually read any of the books, but I'm guessing you'll find something useful there. This one especially seems promising, from the description.
posted by AFABulous at 6:26 AM on April 6, 2017

This recent New York Times piece on a woman whose grandmother was a Nazi might interest you.
posted by zadcat at 7:56 AM on April 6, 2017

Isn't everybody like this? Who doesn't have poverty and suffering in their own town?
posted by Miko at 8:07 AM on April 6, 2017 [10 favorites]

If you want to narrow your question to exclude the kind of garden-variety hypocrisy that comes naturally with the human condition, you may want to look at situations where people lived as adults through a massive transformation of values in a relatively short time period: ie, so that the ethics they would have internalised earlier in life would likely have condemned what they were seeing and they would have needed to do some work to avoid the conclusions of their own earlier morality.

Nazi Germany is of course a context in which that happened, to a large extent, and Germans from that time period who had some role to play in public morality - judges, civil servants, journalists and artists - may be of interest to you. Similarly, the experiences of Chinese people who were in late middle age during the Cultural Revolution - who would not, therefore, have grown up under Maoism - could be interesting. Or you may want look at the people who managed and survived the Cambodian mass killings under Pol Pot.
posted by Aravis76 at 11:49 AM on April 6, 2017 [1 favorite]