I honestly tell you now that if my superior officer told me to shoot or hang innocent non combatants I would have to face the consequences of my insubordination and be punished.
What if the consequences of your insubordination were
1) You get tortured to death
2) Your wife gets raped and tortured to death
3) Your children are drowned.
4) Anybody who was sympathetic to you was shot
5) The people you refused to shoot or hang, get shot and hanged.
I realize your point Modulous.
Do you realize mine?
Yes, the German military committed a largely disproportionate amount of moral crimes in the furtherance of their doomed goals.
Is anyone justified to reduce the German Military and the Natzis as "the bad guys" in WWII?
Yep. But if they are talking about it in a thread about 'blurry lines' they can expect their sharply drawn lines to receive some smudging
Or are we now to intellectually evolved for such lables.
Labels have utility.
But the scope and limitations of that utility should be recognized.
When you use broad labels to derive sweeping moral judgements about anyone in that label, you are almost certainly going to be making mistakes.
Simplifying complex situations in such a way helps learning and understanding at first, but it can hamper efforts to learn more (ie., it gives us a bias that can cloud our vision).
I am indeed a cold war relic.
first broadcast: 1975