Monday, April 23, 2018

What the Nazis did to Morality


Stuart Hampshire was a British Philosopher who worked as an Intelligence officer for Britain during the second world war and interviewed some of the leading Nazis in captivity immediately after the war ended.  The quotes are taken from his book, Innocence and Experience (1989) Chapter 2:  “Justice and History”.  

One of Hampshire’s insights is that there is a bottom ground to morality that is more basic, and, without which, any part directed at increasing the public good is ineffective.  It was this bottom ground of morality, a sense of justice, that the Nazis destroyed.
“ There is a sense in which justice, both procedural and substantial, can be called a negative virtue…. It is negative in comparison with love and friendship, or courage, or intelligence.  One has to ask, in a Hobbesian spirit, what it prevents rather than what it engenders.”


“The Nazi revolution was a revolution of destruction, and more particularly, of moral destruction...The aim was to eliminate all notions of fairness and justice from practical politics, and, as far as possible, from person's minds; to create a bombed and flattened moral landscape, in which there are no boundaries and no limits...”


According to Hampshire,  a strong influence on his moral ideas, “was the sordid behaviour of the leading politicians in Britain confronting Nazism in Germany and Fascism elsewhere...It became obvious that they were ready to tolerate Fascist outrages and threats, and even to curry favour with Fascists, for the sake of protecting private property….I could observe this servility of Conservatives in the face of Fascism at first-hand, because I had become a colleague at All Souls’ College, Oxford, of some of the leading appeasers of Hitler."


“Revenge was to be substituted for justice in relation to enemies, loyalty to party and to race was to replace impartiality, and favour and maltreatment were to depend on a person’s origins rather than on his character… The weak and the handicapped and helpless minorities were to be destroyed, rather than helped...Justice was to be identified with the interest of the more powerful, and the exercise of power was to require no justification and to admit no restraint…”

“Below any level of explicitly articulating hatred of the idea of the Jews was tied to the hatred of the power of the intellect as opposed to military power, hatred of law courts, of negotiation, of cleverness in argument, of learning and the domination of learning:  and in this way anti-Semitism is tied to hatred of justice itself, which must set a limit to the exercise of power and to domination…”

“Hitler and his thousands of devoted followers were furiously impatient with all moral complexities and anxieties as such, and were determined to destroy in Germany, once and for all, the tradition of moral and disputable limits in the pursuit of power.”

Is it a coincidence that we now have an American President whose egregious behaviour challenges basic standards of decency, who openly admires Dictators and Authoritarian leaders, and who calls American Nazis "some very fine people"?




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