There is plenty of evidence of slaves owning slaves, and ex-slaves owning slaves, and of slave rebellions taking slaves. That you are not aware of it, or had not thought of it doesn't change this fact.
If you were a slave in a time and a place where almost everybody saw slavery as a natural and inescapable aspect of human society, and where successful slaves commonly owned slaves, then it is probable that the average slave likely bemoaned their own condition, but was not an abolitionist, especially as there is no evidence of ex-slaves leading abolitionist movements. Slaves even ran entire nations at times yet not a peep about abolition.
If you think outrageously false and hypocritical to argue the evidence suggests average slaves 4000 years ago were representative of their time and place and thus were unlikely to have had modern conceptualisations of universal human rights, you may need to broaden your horizons a little bit.
You're still being overly hyperbolic. Again - if there were absolutely ZERO inkling of slavery being a wrongful institution, and (as you seem to be claiming) very little empathy from former slaves when viewing current slaves, then we'd still have slavery around because no one would have thought it a very bad thing. But that's not the case. And you know as well as I do that people didn't suddenly wake up one day and think "Oh wait! Slavery just isn't nice!" No. It took those who had the thoughts and feelings against slavery speaking up and finally acting out. But to assume there weren't any of those types of people whose conscience tugged at them when they saw slavers and masters mistreating people much like themselves is just asinine - even The Bible talks about the punishments that can be doled out to slave owners who mistreat their slaves.
Even The Bible (I could scarcely believe that part myself, believe me)! You keep wanting to downplay it to near non-existence. I doubt it was ever so. You have as much "evidence" as I do. You have singular, anecdotal incidents of slaves taking their own slaves after they were out of it themselves, and I have the fast that some people freed their slaves, and that people helped others get out of slavery. That shows an understanding that the condition of being a slave is undesirable. And you want to assume that no one could even see that it might be undesirable to their fellow man trapped in the same condition. Preposterous.
It's not about sympathising with the oppressor, but making people understand how systems of oppression operate and how we could all potentially be oppressors if our circumstances were different.
And what does this get us, honestly? Informing people that they could very well be the oppressor? What does that do? Does it further get them to sympathize with the victims of oppression? If not, then that is really all I care about in this discussion. So I still view it to be, at worst, opening up the ideas to people who may actually think they aren't such bad ones. At neutral - a waste of time. And at best, a way to have people experience something, and afterward say: "Do you see how it might feel to be an oppressor? You might become one, just as easily as anyone else, so keep in mind how it made you feel - well, I mean, assuming that it made you feel guilty or bad - and then watch out if you find yourself slipping into that mode. Try to remember back to the bad feelings you had when you did this exercise - I mean, assuming you had bad feelings that is. There now! Don't we all understand oppressors and why they do these things so much better?!" And if THAT caricature of a potential conversation after one of these types of exercises isn't what you'd envision, then I would absolutely love to hear your take on what a "serious" and well-intentioned discussion might actually look like following something like that. In fact, I am so intrigued to see what you might come up with.
Role play is not necessarily about acting out and imitating, but looking at how and why certain things may happen from the perspectives of those involved.
I think trying to understand how normal people can do evil things is a very valuable lesson.
I'm not seeing why it is necessary to role play to do so. You examine their motivations, you try and talk to them if you can, you get their input, and once you piece it all together, you have the picture. You doing it yourself will only get you what your reactions to the situations would be. Which works just fine if those reactions are pretty much guaranteed to be negative and to understand that you are worse off.
I can't agree that the best way to learn about totalitarianism is by steadfastly refusing to look at it from the perspective of Nazis, Soviets and their enablers and only thinking purely from the perspective of the victims. The victims didn't choose to be victims after all.
Yes, go after why these people chose to do what they did - but does that mean you necessarily try to be one yourself for a bit? Again - I feel the rape analogy works here. Do I necessarily need to put myself in the rapists shoes to understand why he's doing what he is doing? I have urges myself, and left without a conscience worth its salt to defend against acting on those urges what happens? Oh gee... I have no earthly idea... maybe I should pretend to be a rapist and see if I can gain some understanding. Why not get ahold of some Nazis and question them? Oh wait... that
WAS done! but why? Couldn't we just have pretended to be some Nazis instead? How about those people that are even today trying to emulate the Nazis? Maybe they're just role-playing to get a better sense of what it is like to be the oppressor? I mean - why are we so worried about it? Maybe it's just a school assignment after all. Point being that I still don't think it is necessary, nor 100% safe to have people put themselves into these roles in order to come to some further understanding about it. Some of the people who have investigated it enough to come to understanding have decided to side with the Nazis. Fact.
How do you best answer the question "How did many good, selfless, empathetic people end up committing such atrocities in the name of Communism" without ever thinking from their perspective?
Ask them. Seriously. You ask "How do you best..." as if the answer was just SO OBVIOUS. And it is... you ask them. Your method is less desirable, for the reasons I have been stating.
No doubt you could role play that scenario in a beneficial manner in the right circumstances and given a sufficiently experienced educator.
Yeah... and that scenario isn't children's school. And the "sufficiently experienced educator" isn't a kid's school teacher.
Not in the sense of acting out a psychopath violently raping someone, but for looking at something like consent.
"Pretend you're asking this girl for consent, and pretend she says 'No.' Now pretend that this makes you angry, and that you decide that 'No' just isn't a good enough answer. What do you do next?" Should it go something like that? Do you see how ridiculous that might be? How do you get into the shoes of the rapist without contemplating that the "No." from the prospective sexual partner then leads to rape? Does someone need to put themselves into that sort of mind-frame (and indeed,
CAN someone even do so who would readily accept the answer of "No?") in order to understand that a person might do these things, and have some motivation for it? And can we really rely on ourselves to produce that motivation in ourselves in order to better understand it, if we aren't the type to get angry at such a situation? And if we are the type to get angry in that situation, then what? Does this type of exercise teach the person what we, as a society, would ultimately want them to be taught - even more so than to understand the impetus of the rapist - and that is, to back down when the "No." is what is proffered?
For example, something like asking boys to imagine a scenario where they (as in them personally not 'in character') have been justly convicted of rape, and think of the most likely situations that could have led to this. What bad decisions did they make? How could they have avoided putting themselves in a position where such decisions were even possible?
This makes some sense, but this is putting yourself into the shoes of the
convicted rapist. That's not exactly apples to apples here. We're not talking about negative consequences being laid down, and you have to realize what you did wrong, or why it was wrong, and how you could avoid it. We're talking about asking someone how they are going to punish a slave who just told their "rightful" master that they don't own them.
Make them consider things like intoxication, peer-pressure, intimidation etc. so they don't simply think about rape as an act committed by psychos, but may be drunken sex at a party which they viewed as consensual or something people may feel forced to commit by other boys who they are scared of.
Again not apples to apples. You should understand why - I shouldn't need to explain it.
