If you want to think that, so be it, but as Louis B Mayer said "include me out."

okay. Tell me the difference.

I know it's hard to think of that. But if you think differently, tell me why.

How was the terrorist bombing of the kurds in 1920 different from the terrorist bombing of Guernica?

How was the saturation killing of 600,000 Cambodians different from the mass murder of the Pol Pot regime?

How was the killing of 200,000 Mayas different from 9/11?

I don't like to think these things either. But i would like someone to point out the differences that i can believe in.

graeme

I think that there is no difference in the examples you cite, graeme. We are responsible for things done in our name and we are reaping what we've sown. The only true change that we can effect is our own and that's only by making the decision-makers accountable. We cannot force another nation into democracy, into passing laws that we agree with, into adopting monetary programs that we prefer, etc, without violating human rights. For the sake of the world's people and the planet, we need to start being the change we would like to see. This is as true collectively as it is individually, in my opinion.

graeme, you profess to have a very sophisiticated view of politics and history, but practise reductio ad absurdum in almost every post you make on politics.   I wouldn't even dream of attempting to point out differences because your view is one of a kind of fundamentalist for whom there is no historical context.

Don't even bother to reply with another 20 paragraph post of "examples" ripped out of historical context unless it is just to hear yourself speak.

and don't bother to reply if you aren't going to say something. You know as well as I do there are no differences.

graeme

The day that we forget that Hitler was just a man and the German people of the time were people who were just like us is the day that a new Hitler can rise again.  There are so many problems in today's society that occur because we think that different groups of people aren't just like us.  Junkies, most criminals, the poor, soldiers, most victims of crimes and CEOs are all just humans with maybe different backgrounds but, barring severe mental illness such as psycopathy,  they are just like us.  The people who led others to the gas chambers are not different from us, the guy standing on the corner selling drugs is not different from us, the person twisting children's heads off in Rwanda is not different from us. 

We like to think that we are different so that we can feel special and important and better.  That is why most of the worlds problems will never get solved. 

exactly. it is not that the hitlers are better than we thought. It is that we are worse than we think.

graeme

What is the purpose(s) of needing external enemies to exist?

Fascistically anarchist,

Inannawhimsey

You need them to get people to rely on you to protect them so that, in pretending to protect them, you can use them. If enemies didn't exist, we would have to invent them. And the proof is we freqently do invent them when they don't exist.

graeme

graeme, you're just having these thoughts now?  Wow.  I'd have thought you'd have had those years ago. 

I think you need to read up on your Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo.

We're animals. 

where did I say I was just getting them now? like many people, perhaps most people, thoughts like this go back to childhood. I think, though, we often have such thoughts without the reality of them sinking in.

graeme

Graeme - A few points: 

- Germans are not seen as a "perverse people" or a "gross perversion of humanity"; what would make you think this?

- Antisemitism (hate of jews) has existed for well over 2,000 years. It's rather well documented.

- Genocide has permeated history as far back as we can tell. The Mayans likely engaged in some form of genicidal slaughters in their rise to empire from the hunter-gatherer societies that must have existed previously. At the core, genocide typically involves ecnomics and some catalyst to action. This catalyst is historically rooted in religious fervor - or in the Nazi's case, abject poverty coupled with a eugenics (super race) belief.

- In my opinion, where Hitler and the Nazi's stand out in history, is in their meticulous, bureaucratic, "scientific" approach to exterminating an entire group of people. It was slow, deliberate, planned and horriyingly efficient. Whats worse, is that this slow, planned activity required "buy in" by those citizens and soldiers alike to carry it out. Even the current Pope in Rome was a registered "hitler youth" in Germany.

- Where is the difference you ask, between Hitler and the nazi's, and the rest of western society's current and past ignorance of its own participation in similar atrocities? Interesting question. I feel an appropriate starting point is to compare time periods. Are you suggesting that societies from the 1500's - arriving in the New World and exterminating natives are somehow comparable to Nazi Germany? To make such a comparison, you're basically saying that the social zeitgeist was the same in the 1500's as it was in the 1930s-40s. Is that correct? 

Perhaps a better comparison you should make is whether the western world has continued to engage in genocidal activities since Hitler. History will likely be undecided for a long time on whether or not western societies actually learned from their violent pasts and worked towards more humanist oriented principles - or whether their blind ignorance to the realities demanded by global capitalism reflect a latent apathy towards genicide and atrocity.

- I will ask you though, moral high ground aside, have you thought through the consequences are ancestors would have had to accept had they elected to "pass" on the New World's resources or work within some native indian hierarchy? The world as we know it wouldn't exist. Can you imagine asking a population of technologically more advanced people - in need of work, wages, food, resources in general - to ignore resource rich lands? I can't. It would be like Bush invading Iraq for truly altruistic reasons and then expecting Americans to shoulder massive tax increases and long term socio-economic repercussions while they rebuild Iraq. The reality is - Iraq has resources our societies need - so we took it.

wow! lots there. I'll try.

1.Germans are widely seen as a guilty people. And, certainly, Germans are concious of it. My in laws are German, and they are acutely aware of attitudes that many have toward Germans. My sons, who have never seen Germay and are largely French and Scots in their inheritance, have often - and by very scattered and varied individuals, been quite cruelly teased as being Naziis.

2. antisemitism is, as you say, old. And Jews have been anti a number of other peoples. you can see that in the Bible. It's always been a two way street. That's part of the lesson of the Samaritan. (I know. Samaritans were semites, too. But the use of the term has never been terribly accurate.)

3. I know genocide goes way back. As a product of science, though, it is more recent - dating the the mid nineteenth century.

4. The comparison I made between the various US presidents and Hitler wasn't concerning genocide - though the mass murders of Maya could certainly fall into that category. I was thinking of Hitler's general indifference to human life.  The bombing of Cambodia wasn't genocide since it was not intended particularly to kill those people because of their supposed genetic structure. It was just callous. And it has not attracted much of our attention - perhaps because of our racism.

5. I can't imagine our ancestors passing up on all that gold and land and slave labour - though I think it unlikely most would suffer if they had. After all, the poor of England continued to be poor even as the rich were at the height of looting the empire. I don't know what the world would have been like if we had adopted a more thoughtful and sharing approach. For openers, though, we might today have a world - particularly in Africa and Asica and to a degree in Latin America - with far more stability and far less suffering than we do  have.

graeme 

I should have added that you seem to regard morality as something out of touch with the real world - which I guess is why you refer to it as the moral high ground - as t hough that sort of posturing is its only reason for existing.

My only feeling is quite the opposite. It seems to me that morals are there because they are practical - and it's their alternatives that don't work very well.

graeme

The First World War was a farce inflicted by greed, lust for power, massive egos, stuffed shirts, armchair warriors and Generals who believed there is honour and glory in war.

The terrible postwar terms inflicted on the German people and their allies created the reactionary fanaticism and hatred that spawned the Second Word War. If Hitler hadn't showed up, another leader just as fanatical would.

This is not to excuse Germany but to point out that the whole world shares the blame. We must learn the lessons of history.

Indeed, SL.  I had a history teacher in High School who left quite an impression on me, and one of the things I remember him saying was that the name World War 2 was a misnomer.  In reality, it was just WW1 warmed up again, and that the "victors" from the first time around had really set us up for the second.

there is certainly a lot of truth in that for the European part. Admittedly, Germany never really paid those heavy reparations - but the war did leave the German economy a shambles, and created Russia as a powerful force.

graeme