Comment by firefax
4 hours ago
i had a woman i met at a policy conference confide that many bad people made it through both the nazi period and the east german times -- there's a type of sadist who maliciously complies with the rules in any way they can to the detriment of others who i despise and saw much too much of in the policy context.
i haven't been there in a long time, but this hacker looking across the pond, it looks like germany has changed...
i worry too many hackers have not sufficiently studied history.
> maliciously complies
I think the concept you want here is "just following orders" or even "mindless compliance", rather than "malicious compliance". Malicious compliance refers to a sense of justice obtained from technically following rules, when you either disagree with the rule or the authority, in a way that is counterproductive to the goals of the authority.
See https://www.reddit.com/r/MaliciousCompliance/
Hanna Arendt coined the best term of all for it: The Banality of Evil.
There was a guy from Japanese Unit 731 found working as a pharmacist many years after the war.
A monster hiding in plain sight.
> Operation Paperclip was a secret United States intelligence program in which more than 1,600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from former Nazi Germany to the US between 1945 and 1959 for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe.