When talking about the making of Jojo Rabbit (a must see movie, in my opinion), I remember Taika Waititi making a point out wanting to represent the colourful fashion and more lively sides of Germany under the Third Reich. War movies tend to portray Nazis as dark and dull figures with no inner life other than murdering Jews and plotting for world domination. This is probably dangerous, as we won’t recognize the fascists when they’re in front of us. They’ll be laughing and dancing as they murder the innocent.
Similar to how we study Eichmann to learn about the banality of evil, I think pictures like this one should be in every text book. This is what evil looks like — pretty much like anything else, if you’re willing to ignore the atrocities.
And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.
Vorbis loved knowing that. A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people.
-Terry Pratchett - Small Gods
(Finding the actual quote was really hard, SEO spam has ruined google, and the LLMs kept hallucinating things that were near, but not real… I had to actually search the raw text of the book)
Good to not forget that normal people are capable of atrocious behavior.
Normal people are very adaptive to the boring routine, may it be counting inventory or counting skulls. I’m pretty much afraid not of psycos who do evil things intentionally, but of normal people who do them 9to5 without a thought, and then go back to shopping, care for their children and elderly, and resting like that.
the occupants of the internet use a similar photo as a joke all the time
