— Unmasking the Dark Side of Conformity: Lessons from History and Today

“Discover the unsettling parallels between Holocaust enforcers and today’s pandemic response. This thought-provoking analysis delves into the psychology of conformity, highlighting how ordinary individuals can be persuaded to commit atrocities under societal pressures.” — Chatbot Zon

A common misconception about the Holocaust is that it was carried out by vicious, war-torn, and perhaps war-weary, and frustrated German soldiers under orders to carry out The Final Solution, or face the same fate to which they subjected Jewish families (including women, children, and even infants).

It is not true.

It serves only to assuage the feelings of ordinary people, falsely assuring them that they would never…could never…do that.

Oh, but they could. They would. Some would seize the opportunity.

Many would step right up and volunteer…and not because of some dark evil lurking within, but the exact opposite: the self-perceived virtue of bureaucratic and social status…of being elevated above what they might be able to achieve through honest hard work and diligence. [Google “Biological Leninism” for a complete treatment.] [See also Hannah Arendt, who covered the war-crimes trial of Adolf Eichmann and coined the phrase “the banality of evil” to describe how ordinary individuals can commit horrific acts under the influence of a totalitarian regime.]

… In 1939, in pursuit of its Final Solution, Hitler and his regime instituted and recruited battalions of “police” from the ordinary population of men. These police battalions were separate and apart from German soldiers who were engaged in actual combat, fighting the war. It was a big hit. It offered ordinary men a chance to escape being drafted as soldiers. As such, it was very popular, tens of thousands applied in excess of the number of men needed, so they could be very selective.

That selectivity honed in on a number of things, but foremost was receptivity to training and indoctrination to the task at hand.

But there was one battalion, Reserve Police Battalion 101, from Hamburg, that was not so meticulously chosen, nor did they receive any special sort of training or indoctrination that would have been considered extraordinary…for Ordinary Men. So it has become a field of study unto itself as to why/how something like this could happen, and the typical comfort-giving assumptions don’t apply.

You may have recognized that as the title and subject of a new Netflix documentary. It is.

What you’ll learn from watching this mere hour of documentary is that Ordinary Men carried out the horrors of the Holocaust, and they were under no dire threat at all.

Uncomfortable?

Inconvenient?

You betcha. It should be, because it calls into question every ordinary man’s and every ordinary woman’s character and courage.

… The gist of it was that they used a clever technique. Typically, when a special task or operation is called for, volunteers are sought. Willing people are asked to step forward, raise their hands, whatever. You have to contemplate what you’re doing, then take the action of volunteering. If you don’t really want to, and you see that many others are reluctant to volunteer, you’re socially safe from scorn and ridicule. Only when the volunteers are into the higher percentages do you feel pressure to step right up…but then, you also have the ultimate chance at a coup: you volunteered, but your services (thank you very much!) may not be needed after all.

That’s as close to getting to have your cake and eat it, too, as you’ll ever get.

Here, they did it differently. They assembled the 500 Battalion members, outlined the task, the Commander, Major Wilhelm Trapp, even admitted it was a shitty task, but that those were the orders.

The first mass murder known to have been committed entirely by Reserve Police Battalion 101 was the most “messy” for lack of training; uniforms dripping wet with brain matter and blood. The murder of 1,500 Jews from Józefów ghetto, approximately 100 kilometers south of Lublin in southeastern Poland, on 13 July 1942 was performed mostly by the three platoons of the Second Company. Prior to departure from Biłgoraj, they were given large amounts of extra ammunition and therefore claiming to have had no idea what the purpose of the mission was would have been a lie. A generous supply of alcohol was procured. Twelve out of 500 policemen opted out when allowed to leave freely.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reserve_Police_Battalion_101

There’s your crux of the matter. Twelve out of 500 had the moral character and courage to opt out when given the chance.

Two. Point. Four. Percent.

Not even three men in one-hundred…

See what a difference it makes when you have to actively “disvolunteer,” rather than actively volunteer?

And people call me cynical and shake their heads over my rather generalized misanthropy I digress…

What values were those who took the action to step away and decline—knowing they faced no repercussions, other than unappealing duty assignments and social scorn and ridicule—acting for?

They were acting for their own principles, moral courage, and conscience. They were men of self-esteem and self-respect, and knew it was worth a lot more to them than some shitty treatment at the hands of their [envious and inferior] peers.

Not giving a general fuck about what anyone thinks about you is a great power that has served me very well since this personal trait was first pointed out to me in the 6th grade by Mrs. Derringer, who said to me, “they’re laughing at you, not with you;” and smiling, not skipping a beat, I replied, “I know.” Since then, I’ve come to delight in it. In fact, the greater the number of the scornful, the more I know with certainty that I’m on the right track.

This is what I’m all about, and all members know that without a doubt. Do you need help learning and loving to not give a fuck?

… What values were the others, the 488, acting for? The most mundane, cowardly, and banal forms of “value”…to be part of the crowd, the herd, the chattel—i.e., the property, wards, peons, subjects, and pawns of the State. They were acting for the “value” of being popular amongst a bunch of other “people” so lacking in moral fortitude and self-esteem that they would murder innocent people on someone’s say-so that they’re very-bad-people-indeed—the source-excuse for all of our problems.

Can you imagine anything more pathetic?

It would be like showing up at your local prison, asking to be let into the child-molester block because you seek to impress them and have their approval.

… At some point along the way over the genocides that followed, ammunition became scarce. They conserved it by killing the infants with their bare hands or smashing them against trees. Someone came up with a more humane way, though. They had the mothers hold her baby in front of her when she was being shot. Two kills in one…

In all, Reserve Police Battalion 101 of Hamburg exterminated 83,000 Jews in the 16 months from July 1942 to November 1943 when extermination-operations moved largely to the prison camps because by that point, most Jews had already been rounded up or hunted down.

Now, I could go ahead and connect-the-dots to Covid and explain why.

But you already know, don’t you?

You saw it with your own eyes when neighbor turned against neighbor, family against family, children against parents. Every possible wedge the evil State—America being amongst the most evil of them all—could use, it used.

Let’s compare the numbers.

We’ll exclude the African continent of about a billion and a half, because they largely didn’t participate in much of the hysteria, lockdowns, muzzling, shuttering, and forced drug-experimenting. That leaves about 6.5 billion usual suspects.

2.4% of that is 156 Million people. Sounds like a lot, but it’s less than 3-in-100…who might have actively not gone along…said something…protested…marched…stirred up as much shit online as possible…said no to employers.

Who knows if it’s an accurate figure. I know that the true warriors who got actual infamous notoriety probably only numbers in the thousands.

So, you can see what sort of force-of-inertia you’re fighting against if you have principles and moral courage.

Each one of the righteous and courageous is against upwards of 40 other people who’re either just dead weight, or actively fighting against you and would gleefully shoot you and your children full of experimental drugs, lock you in your homes, take away your livelihood, and hold a muzzle over your face.

… Every day, I come to a deeper understanding of why Christianity came up with The Doctrine of Original Sin (which I used to mock heartily). It’s logically and morally untenable, of course, but it is a way to dismiss questions and have a stab at sorta “resolving” the issue of why there’s so many “ordinary” but butt-fukingly evil vermin-people in the world, themselves being the ones in dire need of extermination.