Paula, I get what you mean.
I agree with Anne Frank.
I actually had to write an essay on that quote two years ago.
And I still believe people are inherently good.
I'm in a Holocaust class at school.
And I'm bombarded daily with images, stories, things that make me have nightmares. And you think "How could good people have done that?"
But then you learn about WHY the National Socialist Party (Nazis) came to be.
And why most of these high ranking Nazi officials needed to feel like they were part of something bigger, the kinds of things that happened to them their entire lives, where they were made to feel like less than nothing, had their parents tortured in front of them, how sometimes they were abandoned by their own families...
And you sympathize with them. With what happened to them, not justifying what they did. But you can understand why they would want to lash out at others.
And then you learn about how they did what they did.
And psychologists have studied it, and the majority of people involved in the Holocaust were in this state of mind (I can't remember then name, it started with a D though...) where they had to disconnect their actions at "work"- concentration camps, labor camps, ghettos- from their home lives.
And all people have to do that to be able to perform those atrocities.
And I think they HAVE to, because people are inherently good.
If people were bad, why would they have to disconnect themselves from their murders and terrible actions, make themselves believe they were doing it for the greater good, that it was justified?
If people were bad, they could kill without any justification or reasoning.
But people can't do that.
Again, I'm not justifying ANYTHING that happened in the Holocaust, because what those people did (and didn't do- the Holocaust couldn't have occured without bystanders) was absolutely despicable, and so incredibly wrong.
But, like Anne Frank, I believe people are good.
I wouldn't be able to go on thinking that they weren't.
Sorry, that's long and jumbled... and confusing..
