• kromem@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    The mayor of one of the neighboring towns to a camp hung himself after the forced tour of it post-liberation.

    It’s one thing to ignore authoritarians going after a minority group and turn a blind eye, especially when speaking up or opposing those authoritarians can get you killed.

    But it’s entirely a different thing to be directly confronted with the suffering you’d turned a blind eye to.

    Just as we saw with the Milgram experiment that obedience to authority was not a ‘German’ thing but a ‘human’ thing, I wouldn’t be so quick to ‘other-ize’ the flip side of the empathy of the POWs pictured here.