usmarine wrote:
Uzique wrote:
usmarine wrote:
hard to say really. as an american, you do not follow orders that are morally wrong or you face a court martial. in nazi germany back then, if you did not follow orders you would be killed almost instantly. tough call tbh. cant say i could put myself in his shoes.
Note though that there was no equivalent of a court martial in Nazi Germany.
twas my point
A court martial is the military form of discipline and 'regulation'- no? A system that imposes punishments upon military personnel if they break the various laws and codes/rules of warfare. My point was more so that this 'legal' system of punishment and reprimand was not there in Nazi Germany- the genocide committed against the Jews was not
illegal in the German law at the time, because the State had basically rewritten (or at least controlled decisions) on German jurisprudence. As I said, a lot of popular morality is derived from law- so without this formal system of punishment and this basic concept of an action being 'wrong' in a legal sense, their perspective and interpretation of their own acts would have been different.
The threat of death did occur though yes, although this was more the thread of a totalitarian regime and State power- not a legal threat or sanction in the same way that a court martial is. That's how I see it anyway, perhaps scholarly articles and historians think/know that the execution of soldiers was a form of Nazi military regulation.
Drakef wrote:
I see morality as completely relative, with no standard whatsoever, and what you wrote does not disagree at all, except perhaps the bit about systematic killings. That, too, is completely relative. Perhaps I mistook what you said, but it appears that we agree.
Characteristically morals don't have a standard really. They change with time and public opinion/views, and are only actually codified and set in concrete in pieces of law and legislation. Otherwise a moral code is just a basic concept of what is 'Right or Wrong' with no severe reprimand for the latter being in place. If you break the moral code of your community / society then of course you are shunned and perhaps even ostracized. But it's not quite the same as being told by your officer that if you don't fulfill an order you will be shot in the head. I would also tend to agree on the topic of there being a 'relative human morality'- you know, a basic level grasp of what is fundamentally right or wrong (e.g. genocide). But you have to remember that popular morality is dictated by the laws of the state and the attitudes of the people within it. In a largely anti-Semitic society with a totalitarian control over outside-influence and the media, you have to question whether any of these acts would have actually appealed to these people's sense of humanity (i.e. the relative moral code). They were basically living in their own propaganda-driven bubble with an extremely distorted view on world events.
Last edited by Uzique (2008-08-13 20:56:03)