So lets just say you were living in Germany in the 30s....
Do you have a civic duty to do something to "stand up" to the Nazi's in whatever capacity you are able too?
Or is your civic duty still to the state and you should be looking for hebrews*etc* to report?
Strictly a philosophical question.
At what point do you feel that "Civic duty" applies to you? (Examples and context welcome - don't self incriminate)
I studied WWII history extensively in university.
In Germany, the people who initially resisted were a small minority. Mostly academics and some lower level bureaucrats. The most vocal people were purged early on. The overwhelming majority of Germany went along with the rise in power, at least outwardly. Secretly, there were many undermining the system (like Schindler), who pretended to go along with it. Historians debate why so many people complied. I believe it was a mass psychosis event, similar to what happened during covid.
With mass psychosis, if there is a situation of intense fear with no clear solution, if the fear gets high enough, you can dangle any kind of fake cause in front of people's minds and they will grab onto that cause in order to experience relief from the fear. The cause doesn't even have to make total sense. The need for fear relief takes over. Similarly, when you provide a one-solution to that cause, people believe in it, even if it doesn't make total sense, and especially when the people around them also seem to believe in it.
Germany came out of WWI and the Treaty of Versailles as a devastated nation. Hitler was actually a really great economist. He entered the political scene when Germany was suffering from hyperinflation and the economy was out of control. People were starving. The situation was dire. He gave the middle finger to the Treaty of Versailles, disobeyed all of its requirements, and proceeded to re-industrialize Germany. He factually lifted the German people out of poverty. The countries in the best position to stop Hitler early on, Britain and France, did not act and instead chose appeasement.
So when Hitler shifted his economic policy to social policy against the enemies of the state, most people obeyed directly or passively because they feared the former chaos if Hitler were challenged. They also redirected their fears about chaos to the people that Hitler persecuted, even though it didn't totally make sense. But that's how mass psychosis functions.
The sad truth is that the majority of people obey the government and media. If the government and media instruct people to hate someone/something, most will do it, without question. I experienced that during covid. I refused the vaccine and refused to go along with the bogus protocols. If the government created concentration camps for people like me and told everyone that it was for the greater good, people who I saw every day would've turned me in. I had people in my community who I knew for years literally tell me to my face that I deserved to get covid and die for refusing to follow bogus protocols. I am still traumatized from seeing this group-think psychology. Humans are not safe to be around when group psychology takes hold. All you have to do is suspend normal reality just a little bit and people lose their shit completely. Then anyone who offers what seems like a reasonable way out, people will cling to like their life depends upon it. It's scary.
In the 1963 Milgram experiment, when subjects were ordered to administer increasingly lethal shocks to other participants (the shocks weren't real, but the people didn't know that), about 65% of the subjects obeyed authority when they were told that the next shock they would administer would kill the person. That means only 35% had the courage to say no or to remove themselves from the experiment. First of all, imagine obeying the order to shock someone in the first place, but then imagine being told that, "Ok, we've reached the highest level of shock you can deliver by pressing the button. If you press the button, the shock WILL KILL the individual." And 65% simply followed orders and did it? And this was an experimental environment with ONE variable, it wasn't the real world which is much more complex.
The sad thing about mass psychosis is that 20% of people remain on that program
for life. Even when the situation changes and there is clear evidence that it was a hoax, they still carry on the program until the day they die. That's why it took so long for post-WWII Germany to de-root the anti-Jew psychology from its population. It took generations to weed it out. You basically have to wait for the old timers to die for the program to die with them. Even then, they taught their children, so the psychosis can be passed on in other ways. Hence why we still have neo-Nazism in Europe and Jews get blamed every time the world goes wrong.
