{"id":1213,"date":"2017-03-15T14:15:15","date_gmt":"2017-03-15T22:15:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/?p=1213"},"modified":"2017-03-20T14:13:07","modified_gmt":"2017-03-20T18:13:07","slug":"sifting-through-the-ashes-part-fifteen-who-are-the-monsters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/blog\/2017\/03\/15\/sifting-through-the-ashes-part-fifteen-who-are-the-monsters\/","title":{"rendered":"Sifting Through The Ashes, Part Fifteen: Who are the Monsters?"},"content":{"rendered":"
Greetings and Salutations;<\/div>\n

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This post, from Michael Adam Latz, \u00a0showed up on my FaceBook feed this morning. \u00a0 It is so full of truth and foreboding \u00a0that I decided to post it here, \u00a0so, \u00a0with luck, \u00a0many more will see it, and think about its message.<\/div>\n

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Of all the photographs at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum that wrecked my heart, this one was the absolute worst.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Why?<\/em><\/p>\n

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It shows soldiers from Auschwitz, the Concentration Camp where more than 1,000,000 Jews and others were murdered in the gas chambers, enjoying a day off.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Look at these people!<\/em><\/p>\n

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Seemingly ordinary soldiers on a day off, enjoying themselves. How many people had they already tortured and murdered? How many more would they gas to death?<\/em><\/p>\n

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Photos of Trump and Bannon don’t frighten me.<\/em><\/p>\n

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What terrifies me are the seemingly ordinary Americans who work at the Justice Department, for ICE, for the police department, for the airports and customs and TSA, for any department of government, who, in the course of their job, will carry out atrocities and fail to resist immoral orders and directives.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Our moral obligation is to encourage resistance and resilience in every sector of our society. Keep speaking about resistance! Call upon “ordinary” people to act morally, to resist immoral directives from their superiors, to rise every day with moral courage.<\/em><\/p>\n

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It is up to each and every one of us to resist.<\/em><\/p>\n

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The fact is, \u00a0as this comment shows, \u00a0 the lie that “Only Monsters could do this” \u00a0is wrong. \u00a0 It is a fact that each of us has, within ourselves, \u00a0the ability to be that Monster that would dutifully herd people into gas chambers, \u00a0and their corpses into the ovens. \u00a0 Think this is simply the opinion of one, \u00a0flaky guy out there, \u00a0ranting on the Internet? \u00a0 Let me introduce you to the work of Ron Jones, \u00a0 a teacher at Elwood P. Cubberley Senior High School, Palo Alto, California, USA. \u00a0 In 1967, \u00a0he \u00a0created what was supposed to be a small experiment to see how difficult it would be to get a group of ordinary kids to act as the guards mentioned above did. \u00a0 I suggest you take a moment to read\u00a0the entire story of the experience<\/a>. \u00a0There were other article<\/a>s and movies that looked at this experiment. \u00a0 In short, \u00a0it took almost NO time for the privileged students to begin acting JUST like the Auschwitz guards.<\/p>\n

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I mentioned the Stanford Prison Cell experiment above. \u00a0 This psychological experiment, \u00a0done in 1971, \u00a0was also designed to test how long it would take for ordinary people to treat others as the guards at the German Prison Camps treated them. \u00a0 As it turned out, \u00a0once again, \u00a0 the results were quick…and chilling. \u00a0 Here is a link to the page which documents the experiment<\/a>. \u00a0 \u00a0 \u00a0Here is a discussion of how the results of that experiment could be applied to today’s world, specifically, \u00a0the abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib<\/a><\/p>\n

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\nFinally, \u00a0 there is the infamous “Milgrim Experiment”. \u00a0 \u00a0The test was created to see if people would follow orders to electrocute strangers. \u00a0 Well, \u00a0sadly enough, \u00a0they were, \u00a0and, \u00a0thought nothing of doing it. \u00a0 I recall this experiment, \u00a0and the reports that the people pushing the button to turn the electricity on would keep punching it past the point that, \u00a0if it had been “real”, \u00a0the subject would have died. \u00a0 \u00a0Sadly enough, \u00a0as\u00a0this article<\/a>\u00a0 describes, \u00a0a recent re-run of the experiment shows that things have not changed in the least.<\/p>\n

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As Mr. Latz \u00a0points out…All that Evil needs to succeed is for people of good will to do nothing. \u00a0 Right now, \u00a0we are in a political situation that bears chilling resemblance to the two experiments in the psychology of humanity I have quoted here. \u00a0 Specifically…read the techniques used in the Stanford Prison Experiment…and compare them with what is happening today with the current Administration. \u00a0 We must not choose to be the good people who stood by and did nothing to stop the evil. \u00a0 We must not ignore what is happening just over the hill. \u00a0 We must not pretend that the fall of ashes the winds blow into our village, \u00a0like a flurry of terrible snowflakes \u00a0has nothing to do with us, \u00a0or is not as bad as it might be.<\/p>\n

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RESIST!<\/p>\n

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God Help Us All<\/p>\n

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Bee Man Dave<\/p>\n

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Greetings and Salutations;     This post, from Michael Adam Latz, \u00a0showed up on my FaceBook feed this morning. \u00a0… Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[22,9,10,23,12,13],"tags":[693,697,694,695,696],"class_list":["post-1213","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ethics","category-humanity","category-nuttiness","category-political-rants","category-politics-2","category-questionable-decisions","tag-auschwitz","tag-evil","tag-holocaust","tag-monsters","tag-taking-action"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1213"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1238,"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1213\/revisions\/1238"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1213"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1213"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beemandave.com\/beemanblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1213"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}