Reply #19: You are going to start getting into validating the point that [View All]

what's his crust from the University of Colorado was saying about little Eichmann's and that's a good thing. This is just a much more eloquent way of saying that bureaucratic indifference within the modern machinery is quite a dangerous toy. It produces a culture of folks staring down the barrel of a narrow task and following orders un reflectively. Drive the train, build the engine, deliver the gas tanks, administer the treatment-all performed by different folks full-filling a specialized role directed from above-a directive often times mangled down the hierarchy.

The thing about modern warfare and collective violence is that personal responsibility is nearly a myth, however every decision chain has someone at the top, and so...well responsibility for the machine resides in the arms of the person driving it. Yet he or she never pulls the trigger, greases the engine, nor drives the train themselves.

The same can be said about My Lai, about the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, and other modern atrocities, they are enabled by collective conspiracies of silence and a widespread indifference to humanity that pervades a group, in each case a different group of variable size-only very rarely is a whole nation complicit, save for the folks being purged.

The only thing that will keep me from thinking the worst is when a place like DU no longer feels as if it must be "underground". I think despite that appearance we all know that the collective indifference is no were near that of WWII Germany. There are many more of us today that can look back and say, I told you so, than in that case. Be glad you are one of them, and that many more of us exist.

You might also like reading Zygmaunt Bauman's book "Modernity and the Holocaust" it's pretty powerful.