re: #246 Political Atheist

I meant trained and coerced and forced to do the deed.

They were not coerced and they were not forced, no. I cannot really believe you are forgiving them to that extent.

They made their choices.

Propaganda writ large. Absent Nazi propaganda and military/SS training, how many of those soldiers do you think would have been fine with atrocities? The same number or none or just a few?

Um, going by the history of Europe and people being okay with mass murders of Jews up to that point: The same number. The Nazis didn’t invent antisemitism in Europe, or mass slaughter of Jews. They didn’t write Luther’s savage antisemitic rants that formed a large backbone of European protestantism.

What harm is done with research as i suggest?

Your goal— to find what makes a killer— is a phantom. There are many paths to being a killer, including to freely choose of your own will to be a killer. Sure, some people will kill because they’re schitzophrenic— but again, more people will attack schizophrenics than be attacked by them. the mentally ill have more to fear from normal people than we do of them.

Of course people research to try to find warning signs of people who might kill. But there is never going to be some way, absent total violation of privacy rights, of really predicting that.

What ‘research’ do you want done, exactly? Cite something specific.