Author Topic: Jordan B. Peterson on understanding the horrors of the 20th century  (Read 3533 times)

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Offline Превед

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Apparantly, in one of his famous YouTube videos, psychology professor and modern alt-right guru Jordan B. Peterson urges people to try to understand the revolutions, genocides, world wars and totalitarian regimes of the 20th century not by trying to put themselves in the place of the victims, as is most often done in education, literature, movies, museums etc., but in the place of the perpetrators, like a gulag or concentration camp guard. Only when you reflect upon your own possible voluntary or involuntary involvement on the "bad side" will you begin to grasp the horror of it - that it actually happened!

Does anyone know in which particular video he talks about this?
« Last Edit: June 19, 2018, 04:22:46 PM by Превед »
Берёзы севера мне милы,—
Их грустный, опущённый вид,
Как речь безмолвная могилы,
Горячку сердца холодит.

(Афанасий Фет: «Ивы и берёзы», 1843 / 1856)

Offline Превед

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Re: Jordan B. Peterson on understanding the horrors of the 20th century
« Reply #1 on: June 19, 2018, 04:20:29 PM »
In the same vein, from an old thread:

I've just finished reading an unusually excellent and engrossing novel, The Exception by the Danish author Christian Jungerson. The book concerns four women who work at the Danish Center for Information on Genocide (DCIG), which in reality is the Danish Center for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. The plot of this truly exceptional novel revolves around anonymous emails threatening death to two of the employees, who, instead of fixing their suspicions on the most likely candidate for making such death threats, an escaped Serbian war criminal, concentrate their fear and hatred on an older coworker and, in the not-so-subtle campaign of psychological persecution they conduct against her on a daily basis, nearly drive her to madness.

Interspersed with the fictional events at the Center are up-to-date accounts of actual, recent research into genocide studies. One of the alarming studies done by the real-life Danish researcher Torben Jorgensen found as follows:

"10-20 percent of perpetrators try to obtain transfer to other duties;
50-80 percent do as they are told;
10-30 percent develop into eager killers and run riot, intoxicated by torture, rape, and murder"

(Jorgensen's statistics, cited in Christian Jungersen, The Exception, New York: Doubleday, 2004, translation by Anna Paterson.)

Apparently the number of would-be perpetrators who actually have the nerve to stand up and say "no, this is evil, stop it now," to their immediate superiors, is so infinitesimal that it cannot even be scientifically measured.
Берёзы севера мне милы,—
Их грустный, опущённый вид,
Как речь безмолвная могилы,
Горячку сердца холодит.

(Афанасий Фет: «Ивы и берёзы», 1843 / 1856)