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@ Kevin's Bacon
2025-05-10 01:06:26
What a strange thing to say.
But ok, let's assume you are right about all that for argument's sake, including your assumption that essentially all individuals who do not consent to a government can realistically leave the jurisdiction over which that government claims rights.
Now let us take Germany's Weimar Republic. The governance of this establishment was consented to by all citizens of said republic according to you. This governance mechanism was a representative democratic one. President Hindenburg appoints one Adolf Hitler as chancellor in 1933. Soon the government granted this chancellor emergency powers to deal with the perceived national emergency at the hands of the communists. This went through all due processes, so the citizens of Germany who still resided there, every one of them, consented to this system and its workings so far. Hitler proceeds with officially sanctioned immunity to assassinate any potential political opponents who he claims to be the ringleaders in an act of treason, abolish the presidency, declare himself supreme Führer, nationalize the press and industry, and enact anti-Jewish laws so to safeguard the economy and the welfare of the citizens from the machinations of the Jews who were, Hitler maintained, to blame for the economic dysfunction in Germany during the Great Depression. All of this was official and binding on the citizens who remained in the country, including those who were by now decapitated, by due process of the law of the land, as well as those citizens who expressed discontent with maltreatment of the Jews and hostility to political opponents without a trial.
And then there is of course the Holocaust. Jews were relinquished from citizenship as they were redefined as not being people. By your standards, because they had every ability to leave up until then and because the supposed contract of citizenship was binding on them, they were not by these acts enslaved, nor were they murdered, but rather they committed a kind of suicide by choosing to live there. At the very least, your standards imply that EVERY actual citizen in Germany consented to live under rules that allowed for a legitimate genocide.
So according to you, every resident German citizen from the Holocaust was participating in a genocide against Jews, and depending on your specific thoughts about whether citizenship remained binding on the Jews, either this was justified or it implicated every German citizen (even ones who expressly opposed the state's actions) as a member of a mass murder gang.
In fact this is the defense the Nazis made at the Nuremberg trials: every Holocaust victim was in fact no longer a person according to the amendments they made to their supposed supreme law of the land. And I hate to break it to you, but you're wrong, that's not how consent or contracts work. The Jews were in fact murdered, not just exterminated as rodents. Harsh to hear, I know.