Lying To Nazis

[Hassan]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' date='09 May 2010 - 08:11 PM' timestamp='1273450318' post='2107859']
Exactly. Killing the gestapo officers at the door will not solve anything. It will only cause a world of hurt to immediately come crashing down upon one's head, so that both the homeowner and the jews would be killed.
[/quote]

And any neighbors who might not have reported it.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' date='09 May 2010 - 07:11 PM' timestamp='1273450318' post='2107859']
Exactly. Killing the gestapo officers at the door will not solve anything. It will only cause a world of hurt to immediately come crashing down upon one's head, so that both the homeowner and the jews would be killed.
[/quote]

Read the Solzhenitsyn quote again. It's a big sandwich, and everyone is going to have to take a bite out of it to finish it. Cowering and placation is what kept the trains to Oswiecim and Dachau running on time. Standing up to evil is what burned Treblinka to the ground.

~Sternhauser

Edited May 10, 2010 by Sternhauser

[Hassan]

[quote name='Sternhauser' date='09 May 2010 - 08:15 PM' timestamp='1273450518' post='2107862']
Read the Solzhenitsyn quote again. It's a big sandwich, and everyone is going to have to take a bite out of it to finish it.

~Sternhauser
[/quote]


What Solzhenitsyn quote is this?

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='Hassan' date='09 May 2010 - 07:16 PM' timestamp='1273450571' post='2107863']
What Solzhenitsyn quote is this?
[/quote]

From page 4. "And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat therein their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand? After all,you knew ahead of time that those bluecaps were out at night for no good purpose. And you could be sure ahead of time that you'd be cracking the skull of a cutthroat. Or what about the Black Maria sitting out there on the street with one lonely chauffeur – what if it had been driven off or its tires spiked. The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt!"

~Sternhauser

Edited May 10, 2010 by Sternhauser

[HisChildForever]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' date='09 May 2010 - 08:11 PM' timestamp='1273450318' post='2107859']
Exactly. Killing the gestapo officers at the door will not solve anything. It will only cause a world of hurt to immediately come crashing down upon one's head, so that both the homeowner and the jews would be killed.
[/quote]

Yes, and the neighbors' homes will probably be raided. What if Jews are found there?

[Vincent Vega]

Doing an individualist action with no fore-planning or cooperation with anyone else would hardly have overthrown the Third Reich.

Forethought and conspiracy (gee, that word has implications/connotations similar to lying, doesn't it?) are what burned Treblinka to the ground.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' date='09 May 2010 - 07:24 PM' timestamp='1273451064' post='2107873']
Doing an individualist action with no fore-planning or cooperation with anyone else would hardly have overthrown the Third Reich.[/quote]

One person? No. Tens of thousands of individuals not cowering and waiting for [i]someone else[/i] to tell them what to do? Yes.

12-year old Hungarian children destroyed Soviet tanks worth thousands of dollars with a few dollars' worth of petrol. In the Serbian war, a $40 microwave in the middle of a field attracted HARM missiles costing hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[quote]Forethought and conspiracy (gee, that word has implications/connotations similar to lying, doesn't it?) are what burned Treblinka to the ground.
[/quote]

Forethought and conspiracy on the part of a few half-starved, unarmed Jews, who didn't whimper, "But what if they find out and inflict a reprisal?" because they recognized, as rational beings, that they had nothing to lose. Yes. The same type of Jews that delayed the liquidation of the Warsaw ghetto for days on end. Conspiracy bears no implications or connotations such as lying. Conspiracy means two people talking about something. "Con-spirare." "To breathe together."

~Sternhauser

Edited May 10, 2010 by Sternhauser

[Vincent Vega]

You missed the point.

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' date='09 May 2010 - 07:37 PM' timestamp='1273451844' post='2107886']
You missed the point.
[/quote]

I guess so.

~Sternhauser

[Hassan]

[quote name='Sternhauser' date='09 May 2010 - 08:39 PM' timestamp='1273451987' post='2107888']
I guess so.

~Sternhauser
[/quote]

I think he's focusing on the collective action problems

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='Hassan' date='09 May 2010 - 07:47 PM' timestamp='1273452452' post='2107889']
I think he's focusing on the collective action problems
[/quote]

In other words, because nobody else will step up and do the same thing you do, one should let the purges continue unopposed? I don't think I'm following where his ideas have gone.

~Sternhauser

[Vincent Vega]

No, I'm saying that while there is power in the collective, one cannot expect a collective to materialise without any previous planning or communication.
If the gestapo showed up at your door, they probably did so unannounced. Hence, you would not have had any time to plan a course of action whereby you could neutralise them effectively (i.e. without unwanted repercussion).

[Sternhauser]

[quote name='USAirwaysIHS' date='09 May 2010 - 08:23 PM' timestamp='1273454613' post='2107901']
No, I'm saying that while there is power in the collective, one cannot expect a collective to materialise without any previous planning or communication.
If the gestapo showed up at your door, they probably did so unannounced. Hence, you would not have had any time to plan a course of action whereby you could neutralise them effectively (i.e. without unwanted repercussion).
[/quote]

These circumstances, even if true, do not justify an intrinsically immoral act such as lying.

But I am not speaking about a collective, as you know. I am speaking of the need for individuals to act on their own. Without relying on a network. Without waiting for directions from other people. History repeats itself. We would not be rehashing events in Nazi Germany if we had no anticipation of similar situations in modern times.

I am not denying that resistance is more effective when it is organized. What I am saying is that given the past, people in the future [i]must[/i] take individual initiative, even in the absence of an effective organized resistance. They must [i]not[/i] cower, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out, waiting for the aggressors to come and arrest them or their neighbors for one non-crime or another. One Gestapo agent could be responsible for the death of a hundred, perhaps a thousand Jews. If you killed him, it might mean 90 fewer Jews that would be dead, if they then did kick in the door and round them up. Contrast that with the 10 Jews you did save by committing the immoral act of lying if they miraculously took you at your word after knocking on your door and inquiring politely. This isn't a consequentialist argument, because lying is immoral whether or not the lie is a successful means to the end. I am not advocating lying. I am advocating doing [i]a[/i] morally acceptable thing. Whether or not the most prudent morally acceptable action includes violence against the aggressors is beside the point.


~Sternhauser

Edited May 10, 2010 by Sternhauser

[havok579257]

[quote name='Sternhauser' date='09 May 2010 - 09:42 PM' timestamp='1273455736' post='2107903']
These circumstances, even if true, do not justify an intrinsically immoral act such as lying.

But I am not speaking about a collective, as you know. I am speaking of the need for individuals to act on their own. Without relying on a network. Without waiting for directions from other people. History repeats itself. We would not be rehashing events in Nazi Germany if we had no anticipation of similar situations in modern times.

I am not denying that resistance is more effective when it is organized. What I am saying is that given the past, people in the future [i]must[/i] take individual initiative, even in the absence of an effective organized resistance. They must [i]not[/i] cower, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out, waiting for the aggressors to come and arrest them or their neighbors for one non-crime or another. One Gestapo agent could be responsible for the death of a hundred, perhaps a thousand Jews. If you killed him, it might mean 90 fewer Jews that would be dead, if they then did kick in the door and round them up. Contrast that with the 10 Jews you did save by committing the immoral act of lying if they miraculously took you at your word after knocking on your door and inquiring politely. This isn't a consequentialist argument, because lying is immoral whether or not the lie is a successful means to the end. I am not advocating lying. I am advocating doing [i]a[/i] morally acceptable thing. Whether or not the most prudent morally acceptable action includes violence against the aggressors is beside the point.


~Sternhauser
[/quote]


and yet by killing those 2 gestopo agents, you have now put a death mark on you, your wife and children, your neighor's families, all the hiding jews and so on. so by your action you are now responsible for the death of over a handful of people. that is morally wrong and those death's are on your head for your actions. and i would say your sinning at the same time. cause knowing that killing the gestoppo would mark everyone around you for dead, is not morally right. all your neighbors who did not turn you in would be dead. your family would be dead. all because of your selfish actions. actions which if you did not directly take at the time would not have lead to the deaths of all those people.

it would be better just not to hide jews if your refusing to lie to the nazi. cause if you hide jews and then don't lie tothe nazi, you are just as responsbile for those deaths as the nazi since it was you who put the jews in the situation that guarented them to die.

[Resurrexi]

Lying in intrinsically immoral.

Even in this situation, lying would be a venial sin; however, I would probably do it anyway.