MeanwhileOnGrad

Yes. A good chunk, if not most, of Egypt is guilty for allowing the military back into power. I mean heck, Sadat was assassinated and we’re letting Sisi roam free?

Man, it's not reasonable or realistic to regard entire nations as guilty for a failure of the populace to become suddenly heroically active in matters other than trying to keep themselves alive and sane in a hard fucking world.

One of the reasons why mass democracy, historically, has been such a powerful thing is because it allows people to effect significant change with minimal participation. Most people are not going to end up on the streets even in incredibly dire or unjust situations - not even incredibly dire or unjust situations that affect them, personally. Most people spend their lives just trying to survive.

There is a spectrum here, but the level of guilt over not overthrowing one's government as some working Joe is so minimal as to be not worth a serious discussion beyond the matter of extremely abstract principle. You may as well condemn anyone who buys goods to sustain themselves as capitalist dogs. The envisioning of a 'moral' society as a society of waiting martyrs is neither realistic nor, really, all that moral.

Not quite, but it would warrant those who didn’t actively resist (especially when they could) being punished. There is, however, a proportion of accomplice to resister that makes society-wide consequences start making sense.

Man, that collective punishment shite is exactly the same fucking twattery that Israel peddles. If Israel was a long-standing nation instead of a post-Ottoman construction of the British, would you be asspatting them right now for applying collective punishment to the Gaza Strip? After all, they're 'just' judging that the proportion of accomplices of Hamas to resisters is sufficient that the entire Palestinian people warrant 'punishment'.

The majority of Germans in 1945 were also there for the Nazi takeover. Why didn’t they do something about it?

For the same reason I outlined - most people spend their lives trying to keep their heads down and survive.

Things get more nuanced when you consider people who were children at that time, but they still had a duty to do what they could to avoid contributing to the Wehrmacht. Simply put, the life of the aggressor isn’t worth any more than the life of the victim, so why should the aggressor get to prioritize one over the other?

That the life of the aggressor isn't worth any more than the life of the victim is why brutal methods like strategic bombing were, theoretically, justified. In practice, I must note, postwar analysis suggests that terror bombing of German cities was pointless at best and counterproductive at worst. When working to stop the aggressor, the level of culpability of a citizenry is legitimate to consider when discussing collateral damage. When the entire nation is at your mercy, collective punishment is a vile and disgusting act which violates the basic tenets of human rights and human decency that have arisen with the Enlightenment and the rise of Leftist thought in the 19th century.

It's the same reason why soldiers are permitted to shoot a resisting enemy (though some modern militaries even quantify this, with the resistance necessary to be of a certain intensity before firing is lawfully permitted), but not put a bullet in the back of the head of even a surrendered one. A greater intensity of means are morally permitted for stopping an evil act than for punishing it. Prevention comes first - punishment only as it is moral to do so. And collective punishment is not fucking moral.

If they knew (or were willfully ignorant of) the consequences of their inaction, yes. Someone eho was legitimately uninformed due to no fault of their own can’t be reasonably subjected to the same standard.

So you support punishing everyone who abstained from voting in the 2024 American presidential elections, correct? You regard them as evil and in need of very real and serious punishment and suffering?

There was a real effort to stop the Nazi takeover of power, so (just like my position on America) I’d hope that succeeded.

And if they didn't, would it be acceptable to wish not just suffering, but fascist-empowering suffering on the whole of the nation?

I’m not well-informed enough on Weimar history to make a judgement beyond that, but the active contributors and passive onlookers did deserve what they got.

Unfortunately, what actually happens when you punish an entire nation is that punishment is distributed largely randomly across the fucking nation, regardless of innocence or guilty - save for the ability of some to escape punishment by criteria other than their own morality. IE when you punish a nation, you get a few of the powerful (regardless of guilt, even though they're the most likely to be guilty and the ones who carry the most intense guilt), and a lot of the powerless (regardless of guilt). The 'active contributors and passive onlookers' are not especially punished by collective punishment; they are punished LESS than the resisters, because the resisters are less likely to hold power in the regime which would allow them to escape the punishment.

You may as well wish a fucking plague as a collective punishment. There's no morality to it.