"Explosion" in Manchester

[Montmorency]

No, the Nazi killing of jews was not a moral decision because "it was the right thing to do", that view forgets several things and you hurt your credibility when you write"Nazi's" as a plural form, resist the dark side of bad grammar!
Nitpicking aside, the Nazis had this idea that the jews were some kind of closed cabal that was trying to subjugate the entire world. There were the Jewish Bolsheviks and the Jewish Capitalists and they were all out to get the Good Aryans back into their world order. Therefore every jew in German-occupied territory was an enemy spy on top of being a subhuman with a lower set of morals and a greater capacity for evil. Their mere existence was therefore seen as a threat to national security and their murder a vital part of the war effort. From that point of view, the killing spree did not hurt the war effort, it helped the war effort by removing enemy agents from within.

The definition PVC uses for barbarism is the widespread one, just compare it to a game like Civilization V, which uses exactly the same definition, where barbarians are distinct from civilized societies. There might be academics who would like to use a different definition but that doesn't count here, cannot be expected to be common knowledge and most of all, doesn't invalidate the point as the definition PVC used is not wrong just because it differs from another one.

What makes this topic further exciting is that I sense a big deal of sarcasm in PVC's posts that seems to have gone by completely unnoticed. Perhaps much like my sarcasm, which might also explain why I sense it. He keeps making quips about how enlightenment and progressivism led the Nazis to do what they did, given his more catholic traditional background, I would say that's an excellent trap.........wait, the EU, seriously? Now you really ruined that and it was so promising... Remove that and leave the calls to remove muslims, because that actually fits.

Hitler felt that the "secular decay" of post-Reformation Europe - and to some extent the broad history of Christian doctrine - was a Jewish contrivance and so he sought to return to the pure "ancient law". The Jews and other races, besides creating a material threat to the future of the Aryan race, embodied a simply incorrect and debased moral philosophy. And that's what had to be replaced in the Nazis' view. You can't separate these issues, and you can only confuse yourself about Nazism if you try to. National Socialism was a sprawling and pervasive school of thought that had something to say about almost everything, and it largely replaced or superseded other ways of thinking in the minds of commoners and scholars alike, 1933-45.

As for barbarism, I have agreed with PVC that calling Nazi or other regimes we don't like "barbaric" is a form of rhetorical distancing, while emphasizing how using the original Greek sense of barbarian on its face undermines his position. The fundamental premise of "barbarian" or "barbarism", as I've said, is no more than rhetorical distancing. This was true for the ancient context, it was true for the Anglo-centric 19th century application that saw a hierarchy between savagery, barbarism, and civilization, and it's true for the contemporary usage. The main distinction for the contemporary usage is that it does not identify barbarians as being straightforwardly inferior, but as violating some concept of international norms of behavior. You all know that the language of transnational human rights has become paradigmatic since WW2; it's all part-and-parcel.

I haven't played Civilization, but I imagine there are some specific mechanical differences between "barbaric" and "civilized" cultures that don't quite relate to barbarism as we've been discussing it here - because Civilization is a videogame and so isn't interested in definitions but in applications. In Civ4, barbarians are mostly stereotypical content like Germanic, Celtic, and nomadic tribes, as well as some non-playable civs such as Etruscans, Hittites and Assyrians. That doesn't impinge on this thread.