I disagree. Duty in the way I understand it is not just something you feel compelled to do.
It means to honor a mutual contract, to give something back to someone or something you feel you receive and/or received something valuable from. Like the care of parents. Or the brotherhood of friends. The dedicated leadership of a military officer. Or the environment a nation provided you.
And this in and of itself always in deed is noble. Everything beyond that may be despicable or may be something you don't like. Fine. Doesn't change the noble nature of true duty.
True duty is to goodness, not to regimes. There would've been no Holocaust or World War II if Germans didn't feel as if it were their duty to be loyal to Hitler. In fact, the word "duty" becomes utterly meaningless if it can legitimately be used to justify fighting for such wicked causes in the same way it can be used to justify fighting for justice.
Dude, your strong opinions obviously cloud your judgment. That or you just like to think in stereo-types which fit your sense of right and wrong.
Heinz certainly did not fight to enslave Jews... He fought for the glory of Germany, and later for the survival of it. That is what military leaders did back in the day.
No, it was Stauffenberg and the White Rose students that fought for the glory of Germany, not Guderian or Manstein.
Granted, but there's a distinction there that Maimonides simply did not acknowledge. One cannot conflate an apolitical soldier in the service of a regime with the regime itself; that Guderain was of a high rank does not change this.
I don't particularly care how political Guderian was, the fact of the matter is that you're going to aid some political cause or another by giving your skills to some interested party. In this case, the interested party was authoring some of the worst crimes in the history of mankind. Supposing Guderian were simply capable of turning a blind eye to what his government was doing is nonsense, since the very premise of this argument is that Guderian was a highly intelligent fellow.
Which is not to say that Guderian is no better than Himmler or Model, but there's no clear reason why we should absolve apolitical Germans that fought for Nazi Germany.
I also respect the leadership skills of Erich von Manstein, who was not a member of the Nazi's.
Are you aware that Manstein promulgated orders to draconically torment Jews, independent of any command from Hitler or the OKH?
There's no reason you should think or do anything. "Should" implies a prescription of some sort, one that is based on a cast iron position - fact rather than belief or opinion.
Having established that, is there any reason therefore why it's amusing that two people's perceptions of fact are not always in agreement, and they argue to determine which is right?
No. It's absurd when people have unprovable beliefs and have no room for another person's unprovable belief. That's not disagreement; that's bigotry.
That presumes
a priori that the aforementioned beliefs are unprovable, which isn't always the case. Even if it were so, "unprovable" is not synonymous with "wrong".
Cool. That's an admirable approach. The threshold between the two stages comes quickly for me in my experience. The court promise "to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth" seems an impossible quest; how can one ever know the whole truth about any situation?
Because they're not asking the testifier to play God and give the whole truth, but rather everything he is aware of.
But there are actually very few things that I would care about that much anymore, and pragmatically there is never anything that would be so distracting as to disturb my happiness.
What you are calling "happiness" is nothing but your personal inclination to pleasure. Such a relativist position is dangerous and irresponsible, and maybe perhaps demonstrably wrong depending on how much of it you have thought through.
lol
