I've been thinking about this for years now and haven't come up with a good answer yet.
Horrible things happen and have happened all around the world throughout the history. People do sick, immoral stuff due to their superiors (dictators & tyrants) commanding them to do so, or some war/qonquest journey giving them the possibility to act like savages and focus their anger on innocent people, thinking that they will get away from it 'cause the situation was exceptional.
Examples:
-Nazi's, they persecuted and slaughtered millions of jews just because their commander: Hitler and the party that had risen to power decided that jews were bad. They put them in gas chambers and in ovens alive and murdered them.
-Soldiers and agents under Stalin's command who excecuted and murdered about two million innocent russian based on made up accusations in the name of communism. These were called the "purifyings". Stalin wanted to show he was in power. He was also a sadist, and the soldiers obeyed.
It was straight madness.
-Americans who dropped atom bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. Hundreds of thousand of innocent men, women and children died/were burned to death.
-Nankin Massacre: was a mass murder, and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. 20, 000 women raped. Don't read the spoiler if you are sensitive.
-Rwanda genocide: almost 1 000 000 murdered just because they represented an ethnic group: the tutsi's who were the majority. Pregnant women killed and their unborn childs butchered.
What connects these all is that they were all done by humans, from different nationalities. Same as you and me. They just grew up in a time and place where war was inevitable, and not obeying the dictators orders was not an option.
My question is:
While people look back in history and disaprove such horrible actions, is it really that we just think we wouldn't do such stuff because we think we're different, but in the end if we were to put in the same situation, filled with hate and frustration 'caused by war, we would do the same horrible things? After all we're all the same...
Horrible things happen and have happened all around the world throughout the history. People do sick, immoral stuff due to their superiors (dictators & tyrants) commanding them to do so, or some war/qonquest journey giving them the possibility to act like savages and focus their anger on innocent people, thinking that they will get away from it 'cause the situation was exceptional.
Examples:
-Nazi's, they persecuted and slaughtered millions of jews just because their commander: Hitler and the party that had risen to power decided that jews were bad. They put them in gas chambers and in ovens alive and murdered them.
-Soldiers and agents under Stalin's command who excecuted and murdered about two million innocent russian based on made up accusations in the name of communism. These were called the "purifyings". Stalin wanted to show he was in power. He was also a sadist, and the soldiers obeyed.
It was straight madness.
-Americans who dropped atom bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki during WWII. Hundreds of thousand of innocent men, women and children died/were burned to death.
-Nankin Massacre: was a mass murder, and war rape that occurred during the six-week period following the Japanese capture of the city Nanking, the former capital of the Republic of China, on December 13, 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War.
Historians and witnesses have estimated that 250,000 to 300,000 people were killed. 20, 000 women raped. Don't read the spoiler if you are sensitive.
The International Military Tribunal for the Far East estimated that 20,000 women were raped, including infants and the elderly.[40] A large portion of these rapes were systematized in a process where soldiers would search door-to-door for young girls, with many women taken captive and gang raped.[41] The women were often killed immediately after being raped, often through explicit mutilation[42] or by stabbing a bayonet, long stick of bamboo,[43] or other objects into the vagina. Young children were not exempt from these atrocities, and were cut open to allow Japanese soldiers to rape them.
-Rwanda genocide: almost 1 000 000 murdered just because they represented an ethnic group: the tutsi's who were the majority. Pregnant women killed and their unborn childs butchered.
What connects these all is that they were all done by humans, from different nationalities. Same as you and me. They just grew up in a time and place where war was inevitable, and not obeying the dictators orders was not an option.
My question is:
While people look back in history and disaprove such horrible actions, is it really that we just think we wouldn't do such stuff because we think we're different, but in the end if we were to put in the same situation, filled with hate and frustration 'caused by war, we would do the same horrible things? After all we're all the same...
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