Complicity

So, you butt into this thread to falsely call me a liar because you didn't read your link carefully, and then when confronted with the fact that children have actually died in these camps you apparently don't find it worth commenting on either.

Firstly. Nobody ever "butts in" here. It's an open discussion forum.

Secondly. Are you actually annoyed that I readily admitted to making a mistake? What would you prefer I do? I googled "deaths in ICE custody", got a load of links with the number "24" in the title, looked down the list for something other than a recycled news story and thought the "list of deaths" link would be a good one, and was referring to the same thing. I also immediately scrolled down to the bottom to see how far it went back and then scrolled back up. I didn't notice the heading. My mistake. I also didn't notice that there were more than 24 deaths on the list.

However there still doesn't appear to be anything worth commenting on. The list goes back to the end of 2015, so covers a full year before Trump took office. You can see that there hasn't been any particular increase in (at least) adult deaths since that happened, staying pretty consistent at around 10 to 12 deaths per year. I don't know the exact figures, but a cursory google (and correct me if I'm inaccurate again) shows there are tens of thousands of people in ICE custody at any one time, up into the hundreds of thousands in total per year. Frankly it would be weirder if none had died.

I haven't read your links about the children dying, but again 7 out of tens/hundreds of thousands in (presumably) 2 and half years isn't a massive amount on the face of it. In fact it seems to be a significantly lower child mortality rate than in the US as a whole (which admittedly is pretty bad compared to other developed countries).
 
This was a rather famous exchange between a government lawyer and three judges (one of whom was interned in the Japanese camps in WWII himself) where the government's lawyer tried to argue that detainees don't need toothbrushes, soap and blankets because they are being held for short durations - after admitting the government was holding them for weeks and months. The judges exploded on the lawyer who didn't really have good answers to any of their questions.

A recent NPR interview on this subject pointed out that the smell is so bad at detention centers that the workers there come home smelling like detainees themselves, such is the stench. The detention centers were never meant to hold people long term but the government has adopted a new policy under Trump of indefinite detention which has the net effect of turning the centers into concentration camps. They are also separating children from their families and while they were ordered to stop it last year, it was recently found that the government in fact did not stop family separations but have slowed it down a bit. They are now separating children from families on the pretext of the parents being a danger to the children, the danger being that their parents shoplifted $5 items in the past or got parking tickets or because their speech impediment stopped them from answering questions as quickly as the Border Patrol would have liked.


The question I'm really interested in examining is how bad do things have to get before people assume some level of responsibility for what is going on when a government commits crimes? If people vote against the politicians who commit the crimes, are they not responsible? What if they vote for those politicians? What if those crimes rise to the level of crimes against humanity? As the crimes increase in horror, does this require people to do more than vote to stop them?
 
Again, the reason why I said there is no need is because your link could be misleading, or outright lying. I'd need to do research to find out if that is the case, and I can't be bothered to (I already fell for that trap once and regretted it)
Since HeHeHe has derailed the thread, I will suggest that he is complicit in doing so
It's good to get this out of the way, no? Especially since some people seem to think that there are valid comparisons to be made. Given the recent terrorist attack, I'd say that this is relevant. Also, my name is "Hehehe". Please, my good sir, proper spelling is important here
Because though the Holocaust was a specific terrible (multi-year spanning) event, they did a lot to a lot of other folks, too. And the road to the death camps was paved with concetration or "work" camps, and before that, propaganda and so on. Plenty of historical parallels to talk about without focusing on the Holocaust itself.

I mean, you could discuss other genocidal events too, but the Holocaust is well-taught (at least in UK education) and WW2 and Nazi Germany is also covered pretty extensively. It's good common ground for debate.
Yes, and trying to deliberately mix those up with detention centers is outright disingenuous. Do we even need to rehash the list of reasons why that is so?
 
The question I'm really interested in examining is how bad do things have to get before people assume some level of responsibility for what is going on when a government commits crimes? If people vote against the politicians who commit the crimes, are they not responsible? What if they vote for those politicians? What if those crimes rise to the level of crimes against humanity? As the crimes increase in horror, does this require people to do more than vote to stop them?

I'm not sure there is a "badness threshold", it's more a question of what people know, what they actually can do, and how much danger they incur by doing things.

It's hard to argue that people have a high degree of complicity in the crimes of their government if merely talking disapprovingly of the crimes is punished routinely by death, for example.
 
@Hehehe, calling something disingenuous doesn't make it so. That's a statement, not an argument. You might not think sets of (demonstrably inhumane) holding pens for humans who aren't from "around here" doesn't have any parallels with the camps the Nazis set up for the Romani, German Jews, and whomever else took their fancy for, well, not being from "around there", but others do. I mean to me it's strikingly similar, really.

And besides, like I said, this is all a technicality to avoid examining the issue of complicity as outlined in the OP. It's cool that you think you don't have to participate because you believe all the issues we may be complicit in are in fact, non-issues, but the rest of us obviously want to explore this. You're not going to get far telling us things we believe are issues aren't, because it's a complete derail of what we actually want to talk about. Nobody's forcing you to!
 
@Hehehe, calling something disingenuous doesn't make it so. That's a statement, not an argument. You might not think sets of (demonstrably inhumane) holding pens for humans who aren't from "around here" doesn't have any parallels with the camps the Nazis set up for the Romani, German Jews, and whomever else took their fancy for, well, not being from "around there", but others do. I mean to me it's strikingly similar, really.
Well, in this case, the slippery slope is so long that it crosses time, place and political spectrums. I mean for one thing, Jews weren't trying to get into Nazi Germany, or onto the camps, but rather out of them. The intent is completely different. And, as far as anyone can tell, the Trump administration isn't planning on turning them to extermination camps (and if they were, we'd all oppose it).

But I guess this does bring an interesting point. How would you (or anyone else) secure the border without detention centers? Perhaps a giant wall?

And besides, like I said, this is all a technicality to avoid examining the issue of complicity as outlined in the OP. It's cool that you think you don't have to participate because you believe all the issues we may be complicit in are in fact, non-issues, but the rest of us obviously want to explore this. You're not going to get far telling us things we believe are issues aren't, because it's a complete derail of what we actually want to talk about. Nobody's forcing you to!
I'm not stopping you from discussing the actual issues, as you see them. If you think that my point is not important, feel free to move on. If you want to discuss "the actual issue", then please, by all means, feel free to do so.
 
I'm not sure there is a "badness threshold", it's more a question of what people know, what they actually can do, and how much danger they incur by doing things.

It's hard to argue that people have a high degree of complicity in the crimes of their government if merely talking disapprovingly of the crimes is punished routinely by death, for example.
Absolutely agree with the first sentence.

The second question though raises the issue that reprisals don't usually start immediately with universal effect. Up until the point where dissidents are rounded up and sent to camps, what responsibility do people have to speak out and resist?

Going back to Von Braun for illustrative purposes - he didn't really want to become a weapon maker but got pulled into it. He could have walked away but stayed on and stuck with it even as his work was turned toward terror attacks. And he stayed on even as the SS deployed slave labor to enact his plans and build his weapons. By that point, it was definitely too late for him to attempt to get out of the game but at what point did he cross the line?

And of course his example doesn't have many parallels with the average person of the time but even still, it's not like the rise of the Nazis immediately led to death camps and political reprisals. At some point it really did become suicidal to resist but before that point, what responsibility did people have to speak up and/or resist? I think it's easy to point at the torch bearers at Nuremberg as being complicit, but what about the shop owners who benefited from the looting of their Jewish business rivals and egged it on (before Jews were being rounded up for extermination)? What about the average person who didn't benefit but didn't speak up as these things escalated again and again?

And in the here and now, what level of responsibility do we have for a government that is putting people in concentration camps? Is it enough to be vocal about it or are we morally obligated to up and leave the country?
 
In my head, complicity and moral responsibility are two different dimensions. If you come across a toddler floundering in a swimming pool, you are morally responsible in your decision to help it or not. But you are not complicit.

In my head, complicity would be contributing to the underlying threat. So, we are complicit regarding global warming concerns. The moral responsibility regarding taking action is a matrix of capacity and contribution
 
-noble motives never excuse or mitigate crimes
-we are all complicit in the crimes of our government and it is like a blowtorch on my insides sometimes

it's like a blowtorch on my insides every single day to be honest. ask yourself how often you've bought something from Amazon this year, how often you've had fruit or veggies shipped for literal thousands of miles away, how often you've bought clothes at H&M or other fast fashion outlets, made in Bangladesh.

if you don't hate yourself for speeding up global warming, encouraging child-slavery, loan dumping and horrible work circumstances, then I would argue you're either drinking the kool aid, a sociopath or barely alive. no wonder America needs more powerful sedatives every year.
 
The V weapons killed comparatively few people. Heavy bombers on the other hand killed hundreds of thousands and it was no secret that the allies were routinely destroying axis cities by the end of the war. Is everyone who helped build a Lancaster or a B-29 or any of the bombs they dropped complicit in war crimes?

wow, agreeing with a brennan post, what a weird day. the fire bombings in tokyo alone killed more people than one nuke, though I am unsure if that means that the nukes were "less bad".

I'm not a fan of the idea of judging people either for things they didn't do (sins of their ancestors) or for crimes that were not crimes at the time.

fully agree on the first, definitely disagree on the second. not a big fan of Christian slave morality myself.

This isn't to say that punishing war-criminals shouldn't have been a thing, the aftermath of WWII brought much needed change to notions of human rights, international relations and the conduct of hostilities, but one of the important lessons of the war was the one Hannah Arendt illustrated in Eichmann in Jerusalem: 'evil' is perpetrated by ordinary people doing their jobs. Only a comparative few individuals ever pushed back in their time - said 'no' and that things had to change - and frequently even they look wicked in our time. Literally none of the most lauded ancient philosophers ever wrote negatively about slavery for example (I could be wrong, I haven't read them all yet) in fact Plato and Aristotle certainly thought of slavery as perfectly natural. Seen in this light I think that judging ancient peoples by our standards literally makes no sense at all.

again, fully agree on the hannah arendt case, and also fully agree that some of the worst crimes were commited by neurotypical boring regular people. however I think the conclusion you draw from this is rather dumb. example: factory farming animals is not illegal, most people see it as the most natural thing there could ever be. but it's clearly the opposite of natural, and it is also clearly wrong and utterly ****** up. people from the future have every right to condemn the majority of boomers, x-ers and millenials for supporting these practices and luckily there already are people standing up against it.

your conclusion, it seems to me, only serves the purpose of euphemizing past crimes. though if we're talking about history, as in history the science, I again fully agree that one should not judge people by current standards.
 
Absolutely agree with the first sentence.

The second question though raises the issue that reprisals don't usually start immediately with universal effect. Up until the point where dissidents are rounded up and sent to camps, what responsibility do people have to speak out and resist?

Going back to Von Braun for illustrative purposes - he didn't really want to become a weapon maker but got pulled into it. He could have walked away but stayed on and stuck with it even as his work was turned toward terror attacks. And he stayed on even as the SS deployed slave labor to enact his plans and build his weapons. By that point, it was definitely too late for him to attempt to get out of the game but at what point did he cross the line?

And of course his example doesn't have many parallels with the average person of the time but even still, it's not like the rise of the Nazis immediately led to death camps and political reprisals. At some point it really did become suicidal to resist but before that point, what responsibility did people have to speak up and/or resist? I think it's easy to point at the torch bearers at Nuremberg as being complicit, but what about the shop owners who benefited from the looting of their Jewish business rivals and egged it on (before Jews were being rounded up for extermination)? What about the average person who didn't benefit but didn't speak up as these things escalated again and again?

And in the here and now, what level of responsibility do we have for a government that is putting people in concentration camps? Is it enough to be vocal about it or are we morally obligated to up and leave the country?

I mean, I think morally, abstractly, von Braun crossed the line the moment he started participating in the Nazi war effort. In the abstract, I think people have the moral duty to resist and thwart the crimes of their governments by whatever means are available, regardless of what might happen to them. The line in that sense is very clear to me.

What this means practically is more difficult to establish, though. My position is that basically almost everyone in Germany was complicit in the crimes of the Nazis to some degree, but what follows in terms of concrete action? It would have made little practical sense, and would probably have been unjust, to prosecute and imprison every single person in Germany after WW2 ended. I think the existing framework for prosecuting people for crimes is probably pretty decent, I would say it errs on the side of letting guilty people off the hook but that's what comes of having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a legal system.

In my head, complicity and moral responsibility are two different dimensions. If you come across a toddler floundering in a swimming pool, you are morally responsible in your decision to help it or not. But you are not complicit.

Sure, but the question is more would you be complicit if your government put the toddler in the pool and you did nothing to stop it?
 
Well, that's more a question of how I voted and how much economic activity I generate in order to fund that activity.

I think we have a moral obligation to resist, but drawing the line of causation is a bit more tenuous
 
Then what would be required for us to not be considered complicit in what's happening at the border.

complaining about it on a web sight
complaining about it publicly in newspapers/broadcast
protesting in the streets
voting for the opposition
renouncing our citizenship/leave the country
armed revolution.
 
Well, that's more a question of how I voted and how much economic activity I generate in order to fund that activity.

Yeah, that's the realm we are talking about here. Another important question here of course is how responsive the government actually is to public opinion.
 
I mean, I think morally, abstractly, von Braun crossed the line the moment he started participating in the Nazi war effort
He was participating before Germany even began to re-arm and before the Nazis took over and by the point that they were gearing up for war it was likely too late for him to get out. It was certainly too late to get out by the time he was overseeing slave labor.

Again I know his example isn't super useful for every day people but it useful in that we can see someone with ostensibly good intentions get pulled further and further into moral hazard until he definitely became a war criminal. While most people will never be in such circumstances it does beg the question of where the line is drawn and how 'guilty' people are of crossing it.
I would say it errs on the side of letting guilty people off the hook but that's what comes of having to prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in a legal system.
Yes, this is a huge issue and its made all the worse by the fact that the more horrific the crimes seemingly the easier it is to get away with them. When the witnesses to your crimes have all be gassed to death and the records disposed of, how do you build that case against them? We can all say that some prominent Nazis were brought to justice after the war but so, so many of them got off.

And while the internet is going to preserve a lot of evidence of crimes that would have dissapeared in the past, it's also going to catch people up in dragnets of what amounts to thought crimes that really shouldn't. The recent facebook group with BCP officials is a good example - while it clearly was a bad thing, I'm sure not everyone in that group joined with bad intentions or even participated to any meaningful degree. But people are going to pore over the list of people in that group and likely demonize everyone in it, regardless of their level of participation or intent.
Then what would be required for us to not be considered complicit in what's happening at the border.

complaining about it on a web sight
complaining about it publicly in newspapers/broadcast
protesting in the streets
voting for the opposition
renouncing our citizenship/leave the country
armed revolution.
Yes exactly! I don't have a good answer and as @Lexicus points out, many of these actions are made completely inert by un-responsive government.

I've only done the first two things on this list and this weekend I'm going to attend a coffee meeting with my representative in the House and let her know how strongly I oppose what's going on at the border but I don't know that it's enough.
 
Then what would be required for us to not be considered complicit in what's happening at the border.

complaining about it on a web sight
complaining about it publicly in newspapers/broadcast
protesting in the streets
voting for the opposition
renouncing our citizenship/leave the country
armed revolution.

You're going to get trouble just as soon as voting for the opposition cannot be effective in time or cannot be effective at all (such as in the two party states). People who actually value peaceful democracy instead of the status quo would do well to remember that.

Aside: Thinking that there is a "correct" number of child deaths for an internment camp is just such a wild idea.
 
He was participating before Germany even began to re-arm and before the Nazis took over and by the point that they were gearing up for war it was likely too late for him to get out. It was certainly too late to get out by the time he was overseeing slave labor.

I don't think I know enough about the history of von Braun (that's not a passive-aggressive way of asking you to post more about it, though of course feel free if you want to, I just need to do some of my own research probably).

We can all say that some prominent Nazis were brought to justice after the war but so, so many of them got off.

Yes. I content myself with the thought that it's likely a lot of the ones who disappeared may have been killed unceremoniously by the Soviets, who weren't too fussy about the legal niceties.

The recent facebook group with BCP officials is a good example - while it clearly was a bad thing, I'm sure not everyone in that group joined with bad intentions or even participated to any meaningful degree. But people are going to pore over the list of people in that group and likely demonize everyone in it, regardless of their level of participation or intent.

Oh yes, funnily enough I've already been in an argument about that. People were pointing out that the ICE director claimed she didn't know about the posts but was a member of the group, and I was like "I'm a member of more than a dozen groups that I no longer follow and have no idea what is being posted in them" and people didn't like that, assumed I was a Trump supporter, and so on.

I've only done the first two things on this list and this weekend I'm going to attend a coffee meeting with my representative in the House and let her know how strongly I oppose what's going on at the border but I don't know that it's enough.

Living in the District, I have no Congressional representation :thumbsup:
 
That Facebook group is a case that we'll likely never see the consequences of - the true value judgement is what members of that group do now that these actions are now publicly-known. I agree that the entire group will be demonised, but I think I tend towards that especially as time goes on, the group (specifically, the people still in it) should be.

Like you though @hobbsyoyo, I don't have any good answers. I buy video games (as a lesser example of worker exploitation, to varying degrees), I buy branded stuff (more tech devices than something luxurious like clothes, but the origins in a lot of cases are the same). I'm from the UK, so I don't have the specific moral issues with the status quo that Americans would about their country. I have a different set! Though approaching similarity faster than even I thought would happen. I certainly didn't think Boris was a shoe-in until about a month ago, for example, and I'm . . . well not what you'd call cynical, but I thought we had a bit more time before we followed America willingly into the black hole of morality. We do have the baggage of the Empire additionally, too, which surfaces in really, really dumb ways (like, well, the nationalistic pride underpinning Brexit as a whole).

That said a fun line was brought up with regards to feeling shame for what your ancestors did. I go back and forth on this, because we also value the things our ancestors (arguably) did right. And as you get more mainstream (or centrist, really), people like to extol virtues of past society, but its faults are disregarded along the lines of "it was a different time" or "you're not responsible for what happened then".

I mean, directly, no. But if we're going to praise the things they got right, then we should also burden ourselves with remembering what they do wrong. And I think that's probably a bit different to castigating yourself over it or whatever, but it's also something that society as a whole doesn't like to do. Probably because it equates the burden with the blame, or the self-castigation, or similar. I don't know. I just think we have a moral obligation to remember the good and the bad, so we can repeat the former, and avoid repeating the latter.
 
I don't think I know enough about the history of von Braun (that's not a passive-aggressive way of asking you to post more about it, though of course feel free if you want to, I just need to do some of my own research probably).
I've covered him in detail here and the book thread but some key facts -
He was genuinely a space cadet who wanted to work on space exploration.
He got recruited into weapons research before the Nazis came to power.
He stuck with it after they came to power.
He oversaw war crimes both in the development of the V-2 and in the slave labor deployed to build it.
He heavily censored his own record after the fact with a ton of help by the US government.
He went back to weapons development after the war though the US didn't give him a choice.
Eventually he got to live out his space cadet fantasies.

Also he married his 18 year old first cousin when he was almost 40 which is double-gross.
 
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Yeah, that's the realm we are talking about here. Another important question here of course is how responsive the government actually is to public opinion.

My personal opinion is that we're complicit in a lot of things, and morally responsible for a lot more. There are some arenas that can be marginally (as in 'actually move the needle') affected by token actions but those token actions will have a spread of effectiveness. We can then spread our proactive efforts based on how we view our individual effectiveness as well as the importance of the underlying problem. In essence, we have to budget and try to think in terms of cost:benefit.

We trim the ways in which we're complicit. We seek for high-value actions that we can easily afford to do. And then we actually focus on the things where we think our effort will make a difference. I think that people have a 'charity budget', or a slotted amount of time or money they're willing to devote in total. Building moral character allows us to increase the proportion of this budget as a function of our total capacity.

Edit: I'm separating the idea of 'complicity' and 'moral obligation' because I notice some people are conflating the two and others are objecting to the conflation without spelling things out.
 
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