In article
<synthfilker-4BE01D.15592012052008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>, Joe
Ellis <synthfilker@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>In article <00A797B5.657280CB@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
> winston@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
(Alan Winston - SSRL Central Computing)
> wrote:
>
>> In article
<synthfilker-9A16AE.14521912052008@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
>,
>> Joe Ellis <synthfilker@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> writes:
>>
>> [Anent the horrific Austrian kidnaping/rape/***** case]
>>
>> >This is not the first time that people in this area have closed their
>> >eyes to what was going on around them...
>> >
>> >... though last time, millions died.
>> >
>> >Is it something in the water?
>>
>> I dunno. Is it something in the American water that kept John Wayne
Gacy's
>> and Jeffrey Dahmer's neighbors from noticing their operations right
away
>> and stopping them?
>>
>> -- Alan
>
><<snigger>>
>
>...now THAT'S comparing apples and.... what... zepplins?
Well, tortes and sausages, anyway.
I think your categorization of these things as "people in this area have
closed their eyes" is mistaken.
Here are a couple of different cl***** of thing:
a) Individual psychotic doing something awful in his (almost invariably)
basement/apartment/toolshed.
b) Government sup****ts/legalizes/encourages/practices something awful
done
at least partially in public, though often it's only the first stage
of
preparations that are visible.
Class (a) can go on for a *long* time without anybody outside the house
being aware of it. There's not a lot of incentive for the neighbors to
be
actually complicit in the activity, and not a lot of punishment for
calling
the cops (if you're right). Yes, I find it somewhat implausible that the
wife didn't have a clue, but given that battered wives (yes, and
husbands,
Andre) can often find some kind of way to excuse/minimize/rease the
violence that's done to them, including asserting that it's their own
fault, or that it's not the husband's true nature, etc, etc, I don't find
it uniquely Austrian of her to have lived in complete denial, to not have
put the pieces together to get an answer she didn't want to get, to not
let
herself know. And that not-putting-the-pieces-together thing is in the
backdrop of longtime American serial killers, where neighbors might later
realize that they saw something weird once.
Class (b), on the other hand, is initially impervious to whistle blowers.
If managed competently, there can be enough confusion about what's
actually
happening - the executions/torture/neglect/bodies are kept out of sight,
and there's some cover story, so people who don't want to think their
government is practicing evil have an op****tunity not to think that. Or
because of the government sup****t of the evil, even if you can blow the
whistle loudly and clearly, nothing much happens right away. (Really,
Abolitionists were blowing that whistle it for a over a generation before
the ACW, and if the South hadn't tried to secede, we might have had
plantation slavery there until technology made it cheaper. Various
Germans blew that whistle; Jews tried hard to get other countries to
recognize it.) Stalin's purges, etc, weren't really much of a secret
either. In this class, many people have incentives to be complicit
- driving out business competition, taking the despised parties' stuff -
and many incentives against fighting the tide, including possibly getting
jailed, considered a seditionist, or killed oneself.
You take an instance of class (a) [and if it will help your argument,
I've
read that this case is reminiscent of another Austrian case from the last
decade, where it was discovered that a little girl kidnapped by a stranger
had been held under similar cir***stances for a long time] and hark back
to
an instance of class (b), implicitly call them the same kind of thing, and
use that category error to smear "people of this part of the world",
which
I think has to be considered to be Austria, Germany, and Poland (hmm, and
possibly Vichy France), at the least.
I think this is bogus; I think Austrians/Germans/Poles aren't uniquely
evil, and that we have a fairly handy example to hand in the United States
as having behaved badly in a number of class (b) ways - eg, chattel
slavery and also having had a bunch of instances of class (a) psychos who
operated long enough that you'd really think the neighbors should have
known and done something.
All peoples have the capacity for great evil and great good, and it's a
bad
idea to try to localize the capacity for evil into certain geographic
areas
or nationalities or religions - even if you don't then take the next step
and decide to eliminate those evil people, it makes you complacent about
your own region/nationality/religion.
-- Alan
|
