Hacker Cinema
Conspiracy
2001 · Film · 96 min
Directed by Frank Pierson
At the Wannsee Conference on January 20, 1942, senior Nazi officials meet to determine the manner in which the so-called "Final Solution to the Jewish Question" can be best implemented.
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Too true. See also the movie Conspiracy.
These type of people are the people who haven't realized they've been indoctrinated, addicted, and tortured.
They have been induced towards a corruption by dependency scheme in subtle ways, and as a result their rational thought has diminished without them realizing it.
This naturally happens in any totalitarian state where you become dependent on the state for your decisions and values.
Religion in a way used to help protect against this, but with the spread and rise of nihilism and pacifism, religion has taken a back seat especially given the recent controversy and destructive path orthodoxy is taking.
These are the values that are so widely promoted and embedded in things today, following a War and Peace philosophy, which is acceptance of evil, or rather towards inducing a wilful self-inflicted blindness towards evil.
You may find the book "On Resistance to Evil by Force", by Ivan Ilyin, an enlightening read, written around the early 1900s, near the dawn of modern psychology. It discusses the topic of evil, in a objectively tied way (not delusion or mere opinion). It does this in a fairly refined way properly following rational principles, first with definition, and then building from there following Method, and the Hyper-rational practices of that generation. A translation to English only recently became available, it was originally written in Russian prior to and through the Bolshevik/Communist takeover.
There are aspects discussed that you can see were used incompletely in the design of the modern day prison system in the U.S and many other insights.
The book was published to refute War and Peace, since the philosophies written about in that book induce evil over time which follows in line with the Banality of evil (the complacent/slothful) becoming the radical evil (related to the Nazi's, and the Wannsee Conference). A semi-recent movie was produced in 2001, that uses the minutes taken at that conference to depict how it happened (quite excellently, albeit dark). Conspiracy(2001).
The problem with totalitarian regimes is people in these societies will attack those that threaten their belief systems, and that threat might include the imposition of the responsibility of deciding things for themselves.
See these authors for more material on the torture/menticide aspects: They are all experts in their fields, or have been recognized by established experts for the excellence of their published works.
Joost Meerloo, "Rape of the Mind" (1950s) Robert Cialdini, "Influence" (1990s) Robert Lifton, "Thought Reform and the psychology of Totalism" (1950s)
They aren't there yet though.
Reminds me of the 2001 movie 'conspiracy' with how that all played out.
First you follow the vision, then when its untenable, and left you in a inescapable position, you redefine words and talk about what you aren't talking about.
Arguably you can't let robots take over a large portion of the jobs because rational pricing goes out the window, and you end up just like non-market socialist economies did at the turn of the last century. A lot of people generally get culled when food shortages occur.
Yes, you're overreacting.
I'm Russian-Canadian. I have no love for Putin. He's an evil monster that would blow up hundreds of his own citizens to justify invading Chechnya and killing hundreds more.
But he's also not Hitler in the 30s. OK, I don't know what's in his heart. And I'm sure if you tried to describe the final extension of the Holocaust in 1936, people would laugh at you and say you're overreacting. Probably even German leadership itself in 1942 had no appetite for the details of The Final Solution. (There is a truly tremendous film about this from 2001 called Conspiracy [0])
But even if he had the ambition and drive and hatred of Hitler, he doesn't have the means. Germany was the 3rd largest economy throughout the 1930s. The military was in the same range, and it was arguably the most technologically innovative in tanks, submarines, and rockets until the rest of the world struggled to catch up throughout the war.
Russia isn't anywhere close, so it couldn't support or succeed in a land invasion even if tried.
The only fear might be if it actually launched ICBMs, but such actions cannot be done by the whims of one madman, and I believe there is enough reasonable people to stop Putin from doing so.
That's not to say things can't get much worse before they get better. The only thing that will stop Putin now is an internal coup, and while the protests are rising, the majority of the civilians still support him. The new sanctions look like they're helping, but there could still be tens of thousands of civilian deaths in Ukraine before this ends.
I also wouldn't put it past Putin to commit wholely to attempting to punish any non-NATO countries now via invasion. I think Finland has every reason to be EXTREMELY worried.
But i ultimately think the dominoes are falling. Russia can't survive being cut off from the rest of the world the way they have been. We're going to look back and remember this as the first step in Putin's fall. But whether it will take 2 weeks or 2 years remains to be seen.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(2001_film)
> It does sound wild (to me as well), but then there is evidence of USSR party elites (e.g. Kaganovich) turning from maniacs and terrorists into peaceful bureaucrats overnight upon Stalin's death.
They were "murderous bureaucrats" for whom mass murder was a faceless statistics. They would not fret or get emotional about it neither before nor after the fact.
A glimpse of artistic rendition of how plain and "bureaucratic" a mass murder machine could be is a historic re-enactment movie "Conspiracy" [0] about Wannsee conference of 1942 (it is about Nazi Germany not USSR but the theme of "murderous bureaucracy" seems to be universal).
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(2001_film)
> And damn, I've heard a lot of dumb anti-socialist arguments before, but "people who are not able to provide labor to a market economy should starve to death" is a new one.
Horrible indeed. The callousness of it reminded me of this exchange, loosely recalled, in the "Conspiracy" HBO movie about the Wannsee conference:
Some nazi bureaucrat: - "Hard labour? But many haven't picked up anything heavier than a pencil in their entire life?!"
Heydrich: - "Yes, and subsequently most will perish of natural causes." casually moves on the the next point
Some nazi bureaucrat: leans back visibly shaken.
The HBO film "Conspiracy" ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(2001_film) ) is a great example of (domestic) diplomacy, diplomatic language, persuasion vs force, using language to steer actions that will have terrible consequences. There is no "action" ... it revolves around the preparation and execution of an elaborate meal and conference at a Third Reich mansion ... and yet it's one of the most gripping movies I've ever seen.
There's a great movie that's worth a watch if you are interested in this history. It's a fictionalized ( and likely highly dramatized ) version of a real meeting[0] that took place between the SS leaders and German governmental types at the midway point of the War to discuss the "final solution" for the Jews.
But it does illustrate how regular men whether through self-interest, fear, bullying, or expediency will let themselves be talked into, or rationalize themselves into some truly horrific things by fanatical types.
I believe I caught it on Netflix or HBO[1].
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wannsee_Conference
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conspiracy_(2001_film)