This post really bothers me. I understand why it's important not to demonize people who do evil acts, and to be able to see how any person could be responsible for similar acts. What I fear, here, is that you are taking seriously the self-justifications of a mass murderer. Was it somehow less obvious that people with disabilities didn't deserve to die in the 1930s than it is today? Was it somehow less evil to say, "I'm going to enslave and kill my Jewish neighbors because Jews are bad," back then than it is now?
I'm sorry, I never buy these arguments. When you use this kind of language, "he was sent to a place...called Treblinka"--no. Don't create a moral equivalence of passivity between the Nazis who took paying jobs to efficiently murder my people and the people whom THEY sent to Treblinka.
There are better examples of people who colluded with racism because of their fear of violence or because they didn't understand what they were doing until it was too late. (Or maybe there aren't. I don't know. Somehow I don't think the people who are the targets want to know how the local Grand Dragon of the KKK was forced to be a racist.)
And no. That could not be me, and not merely because I would have been that person's target for murder. Because passively accepting white privilege is wrong, but it's not the same as figuring out how to kill the most people with the least poison in the shortest time.
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I'm sorry, I never buy these arguments. When you use this kind of language, "he was sent to a place...called Treblinka"--no. Don't create a moral equivalence of passivity between the Nazis who took paying jobs to efficiently murder my people and the people whom THEY sent to Treblinka.
There are better examples of people who colluded with racism because of their fear of violence or because they didn't understand what they were doing until it was too late. (Or maybe there aren't. I don't know. Somehow I don't think the people who are the targets want to know how the local Grand Dragon of the KKK was forced to be a racist.)
And no. That could not be me, and not merely because I would have been that person's target for murder. Because passively accepting white privilege is wrong, but it's not the same as figuring out how to kill the most people with the least poison in the shortest time.