And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
Vorbis loved knowing that. A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people.
-Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
(Finding the actual quote was really hard, SEO spam has ruined google, and the LLMs kept hallucinating things that were near, but not real… I had to actually search the raw text of the book)
Once I tried to look up the song that was playing in a part of the book Mila 18 when this one nazi soldier was taking a bath. I encountered the same problem as you, never did figure it out.
Oberfuhrer Alfred Funk soaked luxuriously in a deep warm sudsy tub and sniffed the rising scented steam. The tones of Wagner’s Tannhauser “Overture” crashed in from the phonograph in the living room. Between low points in the crescendo Funk could hear the sound of gunfire from the ghetto. He hummed in tune. “Da dam dam dam.”
Just ordinary people living their lives. That’s what makes the nazis so fucking horrifying. How they managed to make their people disassociate from the atrocities.
That’s why I love the Milgram Experiment
Humanity has rolled along in its uniform ugliness for all of known history. The idea of godliness, or any other aspect of divinity imbued in our mortal forms is a mere mockery of reality- the earliest, most essential marketing spin.
There are at least three Gertrudes in this picture.
This is right up there with that Imperial Japanese soldier smiling his ass off with two comfort women on his knees.
Do you have a link to that picture? I’m not good enough at web searching, evidently.
You just don’t want to be added to a database, right? Safe Search: Off
Slightly different, but I’m 90% sure this is the one I was thinking about.
You’re welcome. Looking at some of the other results gave me mild nausea.
There’s something so fundamentally fucked about those pictures where everything looks harmless unless you know what you’re looking at.
Thanks for digging it up. I cut my search short before even disabling safe search, still saw things I would be happy to unsee.
It’s what horror movies are made of… Familiar, safe scenes where you know something is deeply, horribly wrong.
Yes, good horror movies. The ones where the horror isn’t some lame supernatural bullshit, but just regular ol’ humanity doing realistically evil shit.
Just a reminder that admin staff are just as guilty of war crimes as soldiers.
When talking about the making of Jojo Rabbit (a must see movie, in my opinion), I remember Taika Waititi making a point out wanting to represent the colourful fashion and more lively sides of Germany under the Third Reich. War movies tend to portray Nazis as dark and dull figures with no inner life other than murdering Jews and plotting for world domination. This is probably dangerous, as we won’t recognize the fascists when they’re in front of us. They’ll be laughing and dancing as they murder the innocent.
Similar to how we study Eichmann to learn about the banality of evil, I think pictures like this one should be in every text book. This is what evil looks like — pretty much like anything else, if you’re willing to ignore the atrocities.
Except maybe for children and the dumber types, most people already know what evil looks like. They are willing to pretend, so what more lifelike portrayals will do is irritate them.
Except maybe for… the dumber types,
A non-negligible portion of the electorate, unfortunately.
The latter portion, which wants portrayed evil to be grotesque and not like reality, because they are not going to avoid evil anyway, is even bigger.
I mean, I don’t like fools. Like half of my family are terrible fools. But the “smart” people with no idea of kindness, fair conduct or at least sport are worse, and in my experience more common than fools, not less.
It’s the guys who twirl their mustaches or have skulls on their uniforms, isn’t it?
Didn’t forget the eye patch and scar.
No, it’s the “neutral” types. Who are all good when the guys with skulls are defeated, and all compliant when the guys with skulls are in charge.
Guys with skulls themselves are usually more peculiar types, not really discomforted by open public discourse. Just not limiting themselves to any moral boundary. You’d probably find them interesting.
Jojo Rabbit is recent very rare 10/10 from me. Absolutely amazing.
I thought it was shit, that’s interesting.
“Here grab this grenade and go hug someone that doesn’t look like us”
Highly recommend The Zone of Interest as well. An unusual film about everyday life of nazis.
Very different from Jojo Rabbit of course, but fantastic for showing what humans can come to consider the trivialities of ordinary life.
I’m very happy I saw it in the cinema. Also very happy I was somehow completely oblivious to the thematic when the movie started: I first saw the swimsuits, thinking “huh, is this the 30s?”. Then I heard the German, at which point I realized nothing good was going to go down. I guess the sound during the intro also gave a hint.
Anyway, amazing movie. Worth seeing without distractions.
Came here to mention Zone of Interest. Incredible film.
This is probably dangerous, as we won’t recognize the fascists when they’re in front of us.
Speak for yourself.
Considering how much fascism is on the rise globally and the results in the latest US election, most people do not in fact recognize fascism. Nor see it as the threat it is
I do. I have. Hence my previous comment.
Because you aren’t in a society made of people, its just you and your decisions here apparently.
You know all about me, don’t you?
Calm yourself, little droplet. It is not your movement alone that makes the waves.
Sanctimonious is more like it
What do you want, a medal?
Ugh, why did I ever bother replying to such a dick?
I’ve been calling out this fascism for years. Not sure how that makes me a dick, but okay.
Be the change you want to see in the world
Maybe it’s not enough for you to call it out.
It’s good that you do this, but other people need to learn to recognize it for themselves. I don’t see why images likes this would hurt. The only evil many of these people committed was not thinking for themselves and taking a moral stand. Instead, they got by as best as they could.
I’m not trying to excuse them, but understand them, and that’s part of the problem right now. The current crop of right-wing idealogs think that nobody understands them, except for people like Donald Trump. That’s why the democrats lost.
People can only learn to recognize fascism if other people point to it and describe it where it exists.
But that’s not enough. Please tell me what more I should be doing.
You recognizing it isn’t enough. We need more people to recognize it too, dipshit.
People still do not call russia a nazi state despite the obvious either.
Or the zionist regime.
Yeah, most people don’t realize that both candidates were genocidal fascists. Completely unaware.
Good to not forget that normal people are capable of atrocious behavior.
Normal people are very adaptive to the boring routine, may it be counting inventory or counting skulls. I’m pretty much afraid not of psycos who do evil things intentionally, but of normal people who do them 9to5 without a thought, and then go back to shopping, care for their children and elderly, and resting like that.
the occupants of the internet use a similar photo as a joke all the time
Ugh, teambuilding exercises. Am I right?
The original zionist TikTok.
10% of people are decent, 10% evil and the other 80% will just go where they think is best for them - Susan Sontag
An unrelated example, an estinated 11000 people die every year in Australia from transport pollution, try and redo how we do things based on that horrifying data ? Crickets and push back, 30 a fucking day for decade after decade, way more then any war or terrorist event. Oh we are gassing jews, gays and gypsies, of course we are!
Traffic pollution likely causes more than 11,000 premature deaths in Australia a year.
Now back in Madison Square Gaden a few years before the posted photo
And then to a Trump supporer
History doesn’t repeat but it does rhyme.
The banality of evil
