Ah, Necros, remember saying that and actually meaning it?
You people think I’m sanctimonious and humorless now. You should have known me in '68!
dropzone, I wasn’t even born in '68. 
Dropzone said:
Please don’t misunderstand…I’m not trying to trivialize the Holocaust in any way. But there’s one aspect of your arguement I don’t understand.
You say that the police were “right” to enforce Jim Crow, but the Nazis were morally wrong to do what they did, with which I agree. However, laws treating people differently based on the color of their skin are morally wrong. To use an earlier example, laws that allowed the owning of other people as slaves were morally wrong also. So my question boils down to, why do you take for granted that the Nazis were morally wrong, but allow that racist cops can be "just doing their jobs’?
Please do not get me wrong. The cops were morally wrong, too, but, like the Nazis, were working within a lawfully constituted system. As long as that system remained in power its police were legally right to enforce its laws. That is where my extremely narrow definition of what is “right” can get confusing.
You must separate what is legally right from what is morally right. Strongly religious people of all faiths do not wish to separate them. Anarchists consider them both to be human constructs that should have no bearing on behavior. Historians see both as constantly in flux. The majority of the electorate thinks they are the same, but can be convinced to change, sometimes.
The Nazis were not to open to prosecution until they were beaten in the war. Because the states that had Jim Crow laws or engaged at one time or another in a systematic denial of black people’s civil rights (meaning most if not all states) were not conquered; because of a tacit agreement that those who had created and supported these laws would not be prosecuted except for the most egregious violations of human rights; because the Federal government chose healing (or lip service—you choose) over a second rebellion we did not have an American Nuremburg trial. The Nazis lost badly and we could vent our anger on them. The South only lost in that the rules were changed. Its governments continued with most of the same people in power.
Excuse me, but doesn’t this thread belong in GD? There is a reason I avoid GD: I need to sleep sometimes and it takes me too long to make sense of just what I think to do so.
If your superiours order you to commit “a crime against humanity” (genocide, mass rape, etc) you have the moral & legal obligation to refuse to obey- “I vas yust followink orters” does not cut it. Jim crow laws, and the like, are not likely to be considered a 'crime against humanity". Now, if one was ordered to “Lynch that nigger” (excuse the word, it was needed in context), that would likely be considered a “CAH”, and there would be no “out” by saying “its the law”.
However, there are so many stoopid laws on the books, that on any given day, any given Cop spends more time NOT enforcing the law, than enforcing it. Thus, that is when a moral police officer does not choose to enforce those laws he knows are stupid, or passed by pure politics.
PL dennison: are you going to respond to my prior post?