Posted on 11/22/2012 1:22:07 PM PST by Morgana
FULL TITLE: Not just 'following orders': Nazi prison camp bosses 'took pride in what they were doing' new study claims
Nazi concentration camp bosses who claimed they were just 'following orders' truly believed and took pride in what they were doing, researchers have claimed.
Landmark studies on human behaviour in the 1960s and 1970s had founded the theory that people carried out evil act because they naturally follow orders from figures of authority.
And Nazi war criminals famously tried the defence at the Nuremberg trials.
But Scottish psychologists have challenged the fifty-year-old findings after going back and re-examining the original experiments.
Professor Stephen Reicher of the University of St Andrews and Prof Alex Haslam of the University of Queensland, Australia, began their research ten years ago with a prison study which was broadcast on the BBC.
They found that volunteers given the role of 'guards' only acted brutally when they identified with their role and believed their actions were necessary to maintain control.
In a series of more recent experiments, they found that people will only bow to authority if they believe it is necessary to serve a greater good.
Professor Haslam said: 'Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous.'
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
Kinda of fits King Obama's pattern. I think he enjoys destroying the greatest society in the world.
I hope those bastards are forever roasting like the turkey in my over.
He can't destroy it by himself. Every EPA, FBI, ATF, IRS, HUD, etc. bureaucrat is right there with him. Taking pride ins destroying freedom and liberty.
On a local level. the state and local cops, bureaucrats, etc, are just as guilty. And let's not forget the morons who voted these socialists into office.
Professor Haslam said: 'Our own research shows that tyranny does not result from blind conformity to rules and roles, it is a creative act of followership that flows from identification with authorities who represent vicious acts as virtuous.'
E\Perfect description of our current crop of thugs in blue and tehir masters.
Didn’t have many picnics in Communist prisons, either.
Seems like dictatorships always commit atrocities - and this continues all around the world.
If only our wonderful university researchers would study some current despotic regimes, tyrants, and death cults.
Meanwhile, come to an American prison, and get a free college edumacation ! We’ve just about gotten rid of the idea of serious punishment of hardened criminals.
Why shouldn’t they have taken pride in their work? What do you think they should have done, stood around bitching about how inhumane everything was?
If you don’t think this could have happened in any nation on earth, you’re deluded. It could happen right here if the leftists gain complete power.
Good one!!!!
There is a reason why they took pride in what they were doing.
First, look at the SS. The SS was created as a pseudo military organization to compete with the SA, the “brownshirts”, who were mostly political thugs and criminals, whose growing power threatened Hitler.
The SS was designed to have high credibility and discipline. This was done by recruiting educated men, many of whom had advanced college degrees. Once organized, this far more professional organization’s first assignment was to wipe out the leadership of the SA.
They did this with some relish, as they despised the loathsome SA criminal scum. But in turn, they presented an even worse threat, were they to remain in Germany, so they were remade into the Waffen SS, and tasked to fight on the front lines next to, but not as part of the army.
Of all things, the SS was under the Finance Ministry, whose duties also included the concentration camps. And so the SS was subdivided into the Waffen SS and the General SS.
Unlike the Waffen SS, the General SS was populated with the same kind of men who had been in the SA. They were intended from the start to commit heinous crimes.
So, and this is my point, take some street punk, put him into an organization with high credibility, give him a snazzy uniform, as if he was “somebody”, and he will gladly do *anything* you ask him to.
He will “take pride” in doing the most disgusting things.
As a parallel example, the Imperial Japanese Army did much the same thing. They took ordinary men, such as shoe salesmen and innkeepers, put them in uniform as officers, gave them swords and pumped them full of the Samurai honor code known as “Bushido”, and let them know that military aggression would be rewarded.
So they “took pride” in committing war crimes like there was no tomorrow.
'It flourishes because they actively identify with those who promote vicious acts as virtuous.
'It is this conviction that steels participants to do their dirty work and that makes them work energetically and creatively to ensure its success.
Moreover, this work is something for which they actively wish to be held accountable - so long as it secures the approbation of those in power.'
These few sentences explain the power and brutality of the Religion of Peace. These sentences explain conversion by the sword. These few sentences explain why fundamentalist of Islam willingly die in the acts of murder against unbelievers.
These people are acting in the name of their god as revealed to them by their religious leaders. Those on the Left that tell you that these are peaceful good people that are reacting to wrongs that we have committed against them are either lying to you or are self deluded.
The Islamic religion is a religion of conquest. Islam throughout history has been spread by conquest in a wave of murder, rape, torture and plunder.
These people expect to be rewarded by their god in the afterlife for the unbelievers that they either convert by torturing them or murder because they would not convert. As the article states they expect to be held accountable by their god for their actions on this earth.
Don’t expect it to change because we talk nice.
The citizens of Germany were not allowed to own guns. Here in America we do.
Right, and those who claim German military could just refuse, are dead wrong. The punishment for disobeying orders was execution, sometimes within minutes. In either the German or Russian army. Basic instinct for survival can trump the desire to do “the right thing”The time to have stopped these atrocities was before the third Reich came to power. We may be headed to learn a similar lesson. My family originally came here from Switzerland, but I had kin on both sides in WWII.The people that did this study are full of bull. I’d love to see one of them tell Hitler or Stalin to piss off, I ain’t following orders!
Scottish psychologists.? Are those as proficient as the ones from Bumfkt, Egypt?
You are correct, too, the most likely to carry out such orders were picked. But Germany didn’t have that many “thugs” These folks doing the study fail to point out the consequences of disobeying orders in those days.
I have been surprised that Americans submitted to the abuse they take at the airports and at the TSA workers (and some cops, too) for abusing people like they do.
They do it for the greater good of “safety” even though it is abuse of people they know are not really a danger to anyone and the abuse is accepted by people who know they not a danger. I feel safer when you abuse me or when I get to abuse you? It’s a dangerous mentality.
I think it will increase in the US as the American styled “anti-terror” KGB and globalism gets more and more power. When you see what happened in Germany and then what happened under communist regimes...it makes me shudder for our future.
I’m not so sure that consequences for disobedience were as much a factor as was cultural obedience.
Even today, in Germany, police officers to not talk or chat with you. Everything they say is an order that they expect to be obeyed. There is a great sense of orderliness.
And this can get rather bizarre. For example, while the German military was supposed to have iron discipline in following orders, soldiers down to privates were required to show initiative when initiative was important, and they would be punished if they failed to do so.
Paradoxical. Yet it meant that they were hesitant when encountering unknowns in the offense, since in that case obeying orders was paramount; but in the defense, initiative was king, so Germans were extremely hard to fight when they were in defense.
It has been noted that the Nazis were indeed brutal against individual defiance; yet they became almost paralyzed when confronted with group defiance.
For example, a prison was filled with political prisoners, and a mob of their wives and mothers formed outside of the prison. The Nazis were immobile in the face of this group of women, who eventually walked into the prison, let their husbands and sons out, and took them home, and the prison authorities just stood there.
There were other incidents similar to this.
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