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also goes the other way:
not everything that is illegal by law has to be wrong. homosexuality was illegal too.
Legal. Ethical. Moral.
These are all different things, although they overlap in a Venn diagram of sorts. Ideally, you want everything in life to be all three, but that’s not always possible.
The moderator has the legal right to censor. The moderator owes you nothing.
Funny, right?
But don’t dare use this argument in favour of animal rights
I think that would depend on which animal rights
The ones that we decided are going to live in a constant hell where they can barely move so we can have our yummy bacon
Please let’s focus on animals when humans stop getting butchered.
Abattior workers have a sky high rate of mental illness and subsequent domestic abuse/murder.
You can kill two birds with one stone, so to speak
That’s not a very animal rights friendly idiom /j
Why can’t we worry about both
I’ve never understood this argument. Like, sure, priorities are important, but humanity can work towards more than one goal at a time.
I’ll stop murdering people when we achieve world peace
My mom kinda has this mindset. She’s tends to follow rules by the book with little to no questions asked. She’d probably turn further right if it weren’t for my dad tempering her.
Some people are just Lawful-Neutral, to use the old DND alignment metaphor.
Personally I think it’s one of the most frustrating world views. At least with evil I understand that they’re getting something out of it.
Hey now some of us aspire towards chaotic good or fuck even chaotic neutral. But I’ve got autism and C-PTSD, I don’t like leaving my house so the best I can do is yell butchered Icelandic curses at bible thumpers.
The “lawful neutral” mindset that you mentioned is about self-preservation. It’s about keeping your head down and not making a ruckus, or else it’s your head that will be on sight. But some people inherently believe in order, and prefer the stability it brings for not questioning the authority.
White House would call you seditious.
Yeah, I’m sure the Venezuelan fishermen who got blown up by Trump admin to smithereens were glad they got to participate in a “be illegal” movement.
It’s the other way around, it’s the admin doing the movement
“You even thinking about racism makes you a racist.” — the US Supreme Court, probably
Common pro-life argument.
Well, “legality != morality” basically just boils down to leaving us with no instructions as to what morality is. It can be an argument for anything. Slavery is illegal now, and legality isn’t morality, so what?
Unfortunately, all these things exist:
- legal and moral things
- illegal and immoral things
- legal and immoral things
- illegal and moral things
So they really give us no information about each other.
I don’t think the post is insinuating that something being illegal constitutes it being moral either… I think it’s just correctly pointing out that there is no meaningful connection between legality and morality.
What’s pro-life? Are those the people trying to abolish capital punishment and end wars?
Surely with a name like pro-life, they’re funding children’s education to enable them to succeed in life, promoting sex education to reduce the number of unplanned births, offering free health care so they can live, and so on and so forth.
That sounds right, but I can’t imagine they would be pro-war or pro death penalty.
The Holocaust was not legal. Only in Germany if they ignore international laws.
I believe that you’re just pointing out a historical accuracy issue here, but it makes it sound like you think that if only Hitler had got international approval first then the Holocaust would have been moral. Hence your downvotes
So, in other words, yes it was legal, within the framework of a system who’s authority is derived from the state that legalises it?
No. Murder was illegal in nazi Germany. There simply was no rule of law.
Formally, part of this was justified by a law that gave Hitler the power to make laws without parliament, without oversight, without regard for the constitution. Of course, that sort of thing is nonsense. People who went along with that made a choice. FWIW, all those generals who felt they had to obey Hitler’s order according to their oath, they also had sworn an oath to the republic.
This can only be understood if one remembers that Germany had been a republic for barely 15 years. A good chunk of the elites (not just rich people, but judges, bureaucrats, … ) were indifferent or even hostile to democracy.
The holocaust itself was not justified by anything. There was no law that made it legal to murder jewish people or anyone else.
Yes
AFAIK it technically wasn’t even legal in Nazi Germany. Some German officer was actually investigating these crimes (abuse of prisoners in the camps) until the Nazis dealt with him (can’t remember his name though).
Even then, there was no law that legalized the Holocaust afaik. The Nazis just did it with impunity, because who would stop them anyway?
because who would stop them anyway?
Sounds like someone else i know. hmm…
(Edited to be slightly less drunkenly angry)
Executive authority in the Reich derived directly from Hitler’s decrees. They superseded existing laws and thereby explicitly authorized the holocaust. This feels very much like you are using “As far as I know” as a way to cloak the uncertainty that arises from never having actually engaged with the topic directly, and it makes me wonder why you felt the need to contribute to this.
What you knew was wrong, and being so unfamiliar with the topic that you are unaware Nazi germany was a dictatorship (or the mechanisms of how legality works in a dictatorship) should probably serve to discourage you from being a further nazi apologist (I suspect unintentionally)
I think you’re reading things into my comment that aren’t there (given the other comments you left here).
First off, I’m strictly speaking about the legality of the Holocaust in the context of the written law at the time, because you wrongly claimed that “the Holocaust was legal”. The Nazi government was disorganized and didn’t exactly do everything according to the book. It’s how they took control and how they ruled. Hitler ruled by decree, but a lot of that were oral orders without formal legal backing. Trump makes vague attempts to keep his shenanigans remotely legal through executive orders; Hitler didn’t even bother with that. Hitler’s prerogative rule was not codified and so normative law should have applied.
As such, there’s no legal justification permitting the Holocaust. This isn’t because Nazi Germany was actually “good” or some other nonsense. Their legal system had broken down beyond repair, leaving those in power to act with impunity. The Nazis didn’t need the law on their side, as it had been rendered powerless.
We know there were Germans who attempted to investigate crimes at the camps. I believe I read about Josef Hartinger before, a lawyer (not an officer, misremembered that). He investigated murders at Dachau, but his reports were suppressed. After the war it helped convict some Nazis though.
There is an important distinction between immorality derived from the legal system and immorality derived from the lack of a legal system (thus usually derived from power). The Nazis derived theirs from power and the lack of strong legal protections. The Weimar state failed spectacularly in this regard.
None of this apologizes what the Nazis did of course. As you said and this post said, morality is not derived from legality. The Nazis effectively bypassing the normative legal system does not in any way justify their acts.
The legal system may fail to protect against immoral acts. But examining the cause is important, as the legal system is supposed to (in a fundamental sense) protect its citizens. When it fails to do so it is important to examine the why, so we may learn from it.
I cheer that you have engaged with the topic!
First a brief note: Josef Hartinger’s investigations, while laudable for many reasons, were for murders carried out years before the start of the holocaust. The investigation was carried out at a time where the Nazi control over Germany was still solidifying, and though it would have taken a great deal to shake it, it was suppressed to prevent revealing the treatment of political prisoners which could have destabilized the still shaky Nazi power bloc (Mainly Germans accused of being communists were killed, it seems. I can’t find the reason for imprisonment for many of the victims, although I’m sure they are recorded somewhere).
If we want to really break down into the legality of the Ermachtigungesetz we’re going to need a big pot of coffee because that’s going to take all night. In short though, yes, the holocaust was legal in that it was authorized through the actions of the chancellor. The position that legality is only conferred by explicitly declared laws is one that sounds reasonable, but wasn’t supported by the (obviously Nazi-dominated) courts as the regime progressed.
By that extension then, yes, the holocaust was legal. Was the murder of an individual jew legal? That’s… much more complicated (strictly speaking no, murder of an arbitrary jew would probably not have been legal - but the legal definitions of what constituted “murder of a jew” were so absurdly warped that there was no chance of that question ever being asked in a court. For example extermination didn’t count as murder, so hey. Also, resisting being murdered was justification for murdering a jew in “self defense”. Nazis, lovely people.), but the mass extermination was carried out by order of the cabinet, and that those orders were secret does not have bearing on the legality of said orders.
What the Nazi regime did was absolutely in violation of the laws of the Weimar Republic (and those various governments that came before it), but the reich was not the Weimar Republic and it went out of it’s way to overwrite and pass laws that explicitly allowed the arbitrary superseding, suspension and nullification of those laws the Nazi cabinet and the Chancellor saw fit to dispose of. The Holocaust, under Nazi rule, was legal. The Holocaust, under the text of the laws Nazi rule used as a basis was not legal. The Nazis had a move-fast-and-break-things approach to governance, and the Nazi legal system was forever in the process of sorting out the legal implications and precedent of whatever new bit of insanity had just been handed to them.
This concept, that the Nazis were somehow doing this completely without legal justification, is often used to isolate the actions of the Nazis from the greater German population. That is wrong, and dangerous to reinforce - it downplays the role the population had in the rise and rule of the Nazis, and tacitly sweeps that support under the great rug of history by implying that the Nazis seized power, rather than being given it by a population that overwhelmingly supported them right up until the end of Nazi rule. (Yes they did brutalize their way to power, but that brutality only happened in a supportive political climate and with huge support from other parties who either aligned themselves politically with them or hoped to co-opt the Nazi’s popularity for their own ends (which did not end well for them…))
I don’t think it’s downplaying or “sweeping under the rug of history” to state facts about the Nazi regime. They did not do things according to the letter of the law. They did a judiciary takeover, allowing illegal acts to happen, and they did seize absolute power, murdering political opponents.
None of these things were possible without a good amount of popular support. And a lot of the population stood by and watched it happen, or even endorsed it.
I do worry you’re falling into the ‘trap’ that neonazis set. Neonazis like to state these things (eg “there’s no written order from Hitler to start the Holocaust”) to deny other historical facts. It’s important you engage these arguments correctly. By arguing against these things being true, you’re falling into the trap, because by and large these arguments aren’t wrong. There is indeed no written order for example.
It’s really important that you deny that the argument even holds any relevance in the first place. It didn’t matter that there’s no written order, the Nazis did it regardless. The Holocaust being illegal does not matter. You can argue the complications of a dual-state legal theory that’s not explicitly codified, and you’ll get lost in the weeds because there’s enough arguments to be brought up there. Instead, you must argue the Nazis didn’t need it to be legal in the first place. Doing so renders the legality argument useless in the context of Holocaust-denial.
The legality aspect is an interesting debate. But be careful that you don’t accidentally legitimize its use in Holocaust denial.
Wanna elaborate on how that comment is in any way “nazi apologist”? Especially when its accuracy entirely depends on whether you define a dictator as the law or someone for whom the law doesn’t matter. I just can’t see how “the nazis broke german laws with what they did” could be considered favourable to the nazis, and by extension, why you feel like it’s your place to tell anyone how they should be posting.
It inherently presents the Nazis as somehow illegitimate, having hijacked their way into power against the established norms of the country and that they were somehow simply ignoring those established rules. The classic whitewashing of “They were so evil they even broke their own laws!!1!”.
This is blatantly not true - the Reich was absolutely a legitimate governing body, recognized by damn near the entire world, even hosting the Olympics, and their executive structure was no less legally legitimate than any other in the world. They were, by the time of the holocaust, a dictatorship. This is how legality in dictatorships works. Internally what they did was completely legal, and even their actions would have been illegal under the prior laws, they very legally superseded those laws.
It’s the same sort of bullshit apologia as the “the average German citizen didn’t know about the holocaust!” thing - it’s just not true, but it’s repeated by the modern-day neonazi propagandists so much that people truly believe it.
I still don’t see how that appologizes for or whitewashes anything they did and makes them look better. Or how their legitimacy plays into this (which is really just a legal concept used to suppress or generate opposition).
Sounds more like appologizing for everyone else than for the nazis themselves.
Though the main takeaway I got from the comment is that the words of the laws didn’t matter because no one stopped them when they went against them.
“Whitewashing” is a reductive, but convenient, term to describe a process that is more complex than most people think. To explain in more detail:
The most simple form of ‘whitewashing’ is just broad reputation laundering, that we’re all familiar with (“Ackchually they weren’t that bad!” brand holocaust denial, or justifications for future actions based on unfair treatment in the Treaty of Versailles etc.) but more commonly, and much less obviously, it’s used to single out a group of “bad apples” or similar that were responsible for the majority of the “bad”, and then exonerate (by lack of inclusion) those people who were not part of that “bad apple” group. Look at the initial comment for a more blatant example of this:
Some German officer was actually investigating these crimes (abuse of prisoners in the camps) until the Nazis dealt with him (can’t remember his name though).
They present this idea hand-in-hand with the idea that to a degree that is significant enough that it bears mentioning German officers weren’t okay with the holocaust! They were even investigating it, until they were silenced by those darn Nazis! (Conveniently we don’t know who this was so we can’t check into this). This ignores that any “german officer” would have had reams of proof of all kinds of the nazi’s crimes available to them in the form of SD reports, which were not in any way an uncommon resource (most officers would have had them delivered daily), so the “investigation” would barely have been necessary. But by having this hypothetical officer investigate it, the potential for exoneration of everyone that weren’t the “Bad Ones” is created.
This the same idea as I was talking about before - by presenting the Nazis as having taken over “illegitimately” it implies that there was a legitimate government that was opposed to them, an implicitly significant group, and thus leaves open the possibility that people were just part of that illegitimate takeover and weren’t really “Bad Guys”, the first country the Nazis conquored was Germany, after all!
… But they were a legitimate government. And claiming they weren’t needs to ignore things like the fact the nazis came to power in an overwhelming (44% of the vote!) democratic victory, and then maintained that huge public support (even higher, actually) right up until the end of the war. The average german knew about this, supported the nazis, and none of the horrifying shit they did was illegal under german law.
I don’t think the initial commenter did this intentionally, judging from their post history, but I do think that in their eagerness to contribute on a subject they very clearly are uncomfortable making strong assertions about, they wound up repeating Nazi propaganda.
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