Aswad
Posts: 9374
Joined: 4/4/2007 Status: offline
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Au contraire, Kittty. It would be disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust not to take an important lesson to heart: laying blame for society's ills at the feet of a group of people who are not responsible for it, or casting all people of a group into a mold set by our misconceptions of what they are about. And that is what I see happening with increasing frequency. In the 1930's, the atmosphere was similar, but less hostile. Sure, Hitler brought it to a boil, but you can't really get a genocide going if you don't have some support among broad layers of the population, or at least have a population that has an irrational dislike for the group to be eradicated. How many people on this forum alone are talking about turning the whole Middle East into a glazed parking lot? How many people on this forum alone say they condone torturing Muslims on mere suspicion? How many people on this forum alone are suspicious of Muslims by default? Seriously, I don't like a lot of the stuff that goes on in the Middle East, but it's their countries, so I am content to let them move along at their own pace. If progress (whatever we define that to be) isn't important enough to the inhabitants to be worth dying for, then torture, warfare and so forth isn't really called for, except to preserve our own interests. And right now, that isn't what anyone is doing down there. Would we approve if aliens came to Earth and tried foisting their values on the West? Yeah, I'm an isolationist. That doesn't mean I don't pay attention. Health, al-Aswad. P.S.: No, it didn't make me the least bit angry. That takes quite a lot, so please don't worry about it.
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"If God saw what any of us did that night, he didn't seem to mind. From then on I knew: God doesn't make the world this way. We do." -- Rorschack, Watchmen.
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