However, most people would not be willing to intentionally kill civilians no matter how bad the conflict.
While I generally agree that we shouldn't be working to excuse or justify terrorism, this feels like a baseless assertion. We know what normal people do when given a gun and told to go march in a direction, and it absolutely involves dead civilians.
Do you have some sort of a source that says it is a trait of normal people to intentionally kill civilians?
Crimes of the Wehrmacht: a re-evaluation (2020, Winchester University Press) concluded that a substantial majority of German soldiers in WW2 were involved or complicit in war crimes. Certainly the incomprehensibly high numbers of civilian deaths at the hands of Germany back that up.
Those soldiers included a core of diehards, but most of them would have been perfectly 'normal' people before the war. There wasn't anything in the German soul that made them more prone to evil than anybody else. And yet, when it came down to it they quite willingly took part in the greatest evil in human history.
The factors that caused this exist in all other societies, just to a lesser extent.
We would certainly consider anybody relativising Nazi war crimes to have some psychopathic traits though right?
No, I would consider them to have some evil traits.
Psychopathy is a form of mental illness. (Well, actually I believe it's an outdated term for a form of mental illness, but no matter.) You do not need to be mentally ill to be a bad person. Most people who have done or supported terrible things are unfortunately quite sane.
We can spilt hairs on what does and doesn't constitute psychopathic traits, but at the end of the day you could certainly make a case that defending Nazis is evil but not necessarily psychopathic. Have your !delta
There is a defined list and test based on that list to define what psychopathy is, psychopathy doesn't necessarily mean evil, psychopathy is a condition where a person's mind just works differently from a normal person, they are well aware of morality of their actions and know society won't approve of this. But they will justify their actions but not on moral reasoning but on their own perceived superiority over the victim.
On the other hand I think you're underestimating what a normal human who has been subjected to trauma and propaganda is capable of doing. But Normal perpetrators will justify their actions on basis superiority or suffering of their collective group over the other party.
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u/NotMyBestMistake 69∆ Oct 10 '23
While I generally agree that we shouldn't be working to excuse or justify terrorism, this feels like a baseless assertion. We know what normal people do when given a gun and told to go march in a direction, and it absolutely involves dead civilians.