05-13-2011, 04:18 PM
rjmacs wrote: Nazism didn't (and couldn't) operate because Germans and their allies were just bad people who had no trouble slaughtering innocents. It took a lot of work to make that happen, and much of the work was put into destroying people's capacity to distinguish good and evil.
Which is why you need to establish that you will be punished eventually for crimes as defined by forces greater than yourself, whether or not you have lost your moral compass. If everyone in that country knew they could be hung for what was happening maybe they would have opted to kill Hitler early on instead of 11 million innocents.