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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   34129 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 29, 2024

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Depends if it was mandatory or not - a conscript's less culpable than a volunteer. Note that I'm not sure from the article whether Shapiro was a real volunteer or whether he was subject to mandatory unpaid child labour referred to as "volunteer" only because of the "unpaid" part. We usually don't blame the Jews in Auschwitz who worked the incinerators for doing so, as their only other choice was to be thrown in the incinerators themselves.

His current story is that his "volunteering" was for a required high school service project. I am sure that wasn't the only project available to fulfill the requirement, however.

From the Wikipedia article on Shapiro's private Jewish high school, it looks like doing a semester in Israel was optional, but I assume that once you made the decision to do that the "volunteering" was part of the deal. Whether the decision to do a semester in Israel was taken by Josh or his parents depends on family dynamics.

.... What are you talking about?

  1. People forced to do X are less culpable for the results of X than people who willingly chose to do X; the culpability lessens with increasing punishment for refusing.
  2. The most extreme example of this I can think of is the way Auschwitz worked; to cut costs, most of the labour to build and operate Auschwitz was performed by its Jewish inmates. Among other things, the ones loading all the Jew corpses into the incinerators were other Jews. However, we generally do not blame these Jews for helping to operate Auschwitz, as refusing to perform such work meant certain death.
  3. Some school activities that are called "volunteering" are not really voluntary; the word "volunteering" is used in reference to "volunteer work" i.e. the children are not paid for their labour, but if they do not do the work they are punished.
  4. I suspect that Josh Shapiro's "volunteer" work for the IDF may have been such a case of mandatory unpaid work.
  5. I strongly suspect that schools in China have such "volunteer" programs for the CPC and/or PLA; it's a classic tool of totalitarian systems (it literally shows up in Nineteen Eighty-Four) because it's free labour that also inculcates a sense of being part of the government system and acts as a crude loyalty screen.

Some school activities that are called "volunteering" are not really voluntary; the word "volunteering" is used in reference to "volunteer work" i.e. the children are not paid for their labour, but if they do not do the work they are punished.

I've heard this referred to as being 'voluntold'.

However, we generally do not blame these Jews for helping to operate Auschwitz, as refusing to perform such work meant certain death.

I would not say things are so clear-cut. Generally, helping running a death camp means being an accessory to murder -- former civilian clerks have been convicted in Germany for that in a few cases (Also, this commonly involves octogenarians in front of a youth criminal court.)

"I had to do it to save my own skin" (which is called duress in English law and entschuldigender Notstand in German law) is not a great excuse for serious crimes.

On the other hand, the culpability of Sonderkommando workers providing unskilled slave labor to the Nazi death machine is minimal, so I would call it excusable.

And then of course some members of the Sonderkommando fully redeemed themselves by blowing up a crematorium.

But Shapiro has previously claimed this as a thing he did and valued as an experience.

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