Comment by b112
4 hours ago
First, referencing "Nazi" has an age old tradition of immediately meaning you lose the debate. That's back to old Usenet and mailing list ethics.
Regardless, absolutely, yes, I would take a job in Nazi Germany which required clearance, if that job was to feed poor children. What the hell? I literally used feeding babies as an example, please provide some context in where innocent babies should be left to starve. Children are literally the absolute concept of innocence, and a baby is beyond culpability!
That is... unless you're advocating some form of weird let babies starve, because of the crimes of their parents?! Which is effectively along the lines of suggesting ethnic cleansing???
Any form of ideological stance which is this extreme, is realistically actually inline with fascism, for it puts politics before people.
First, I purposefully avoided drawing direct comparisons to the Nazis, I only used the extreme end of the logic to illustrate my point, that it's a spectrum and value judgement, not an absolute.
Nobody said Trump is literally Hitler. But literal Hitler did exist, so it all becomes a question of where do you personally draw the line?. For you, it seems to be somewhere between Trump and Hitler. For me, it's somewhere before Trump. I'm not establishing equivalency, I'm establishing subjectivity.
Along those lines, who said anything about crimes of parents?
Let me be more concrete: Would you feed children on camera so the propaganda apparatus can film a movie about a concentration camp titled "The Führer gifts a City to the Jews"? [0]
Everything you do can and will be instrumentalized by the regime. The innocents, too, are just a medium for their machinations.
There is a treshold at which even nominally good acts become morally reprehensible because they serve to sustain a harmful system. The only question is which system do you consider harmful enough to pass that treshold?
You're presenting your moral line as if it's objectively correct. I’m pointing out it's a judgment call with no easy absolutes.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_(1944_film)
> First, referencing "Nazi" has an age old tradition of immediately meaning you lose the debate.
True. Though to be frank, before typing my longer response I did consider just telling you the same about the “but forget everything else and think of the children” line of reasoning.