Quote Originally Posted by Montmorency View Post
I don't know what heretics and Christians have to do with it, but https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BRDq7aneXnk.

The demographic of people who actively participated in atrocities out of fear is smaller than either the demographics of the indifferent and accepting or of the actively sadistic. Anyway, we can condemn cowardice where we see it, while being cognizant of contextual differences between German clerk working paper at a munitions factory in 1940, a lawyer whistling past renditions of his neighbors in 1934, and a Wehrmacht soldier looting and burning a peasant hut in 1941. A Pole in 1943 refusing to shelter a Jew at pain of death is not bad the same way as a Pole joining the local paramilitary in 1943 to hunt down Jews and Resistance with SS assistance. (And if I turn out to be a coward, that's not good either.)
Nazis hunted down Jews for a number of reasons, but often because they believed Jews were evil.

Now we hunt Nazis because we believe they are evil, we put them on trial even when they are old and infirm octogenarians.

The parallel with Christian heretics is apt - once we denounced them as evil and executed them, now we denounce those who take their faith to a logical extreme as evil. Earlier Husar referred to the 9/11 bombers and asked if they were evil if they believed in what they were doing - it's an apt question, and it has two answers. Basically, over the last hundred years or so we've gradually inverted our moral system, whereas we used to value moral purity we now value moral flexibility. This may be progress, or it may be an aberration that future generations will look at as a mystifying and shameful stain on human history.

Nazis are a proxy for this, the Crusades are another, and religion in general is often said to be "the only thing that can make good men do evil things" when that's patently nonsense.

Why the latter? The problem is refusal to accounting.
Sentences require subjects and objects, and verbs. I'm going to have to ask you to re-frame this because I literally can't tell to what it it you are referring here.

I've only recently begun to accept use of the word "evil" and don't really have a sophisticated conception of capital-Evil as compared to Bad or Wrong (which two we may or may not philosophically distinguish themselves depending on your thinking). Suffice to say at the point of committing to a transition out of a colonial regime, the important thing is the process of doing it, how well you set up the decolonized people for self-rule. It's a different subject from the characteristics of colonial rule as a system, though arguably "truth and reconciliation" for the latter ought to play a prominent role in the former (though it pretty much never has).
So, is it more evil to prolong Colonial rule to put in place the machinery of self-government to to end Colonial rule sooner when that machinery may not be functional? If Colonisation happened centuries ago what is the nature of the current Colonial Government?

We could consider the US occupation of Hawaii and Puerto Rico here - is one more evil than the other because one has been granted Statehood?