Re: Is white racism nec. all bad?
Lane Singer (lsd@ix.netcom.com)
8 Apr 1995 19:37:38 GMT
In <3m5ohc$di5@news.cc.utah.edu> pb1487@u.cc.utah.edu (Paul Bernhardt) writes:
>: >But, there
>: >is Stalin, whose name is almost never mentioned,
>
>: I wouldn't say that. Stalin was truly evil.
>
>: >who killed 5 or 6 times
>: >as many people as Hitler.
>
>: Oh really? Not as quickly, I'd wager. And there doesn't seem
>: to be any record of Stalinists throwing live infants into
>: bonfires.
>
>I did a double take when I read this. I wonder if it matters exactly what
>the attrocity is. Beyond a certain point, all acts of extraordinary
>cruelty seem the same to me. Stalin does not get the same press as
>Hitler. I specualate that it is because Stalin killed based on political
>orientation more so than racial/religious/ethnic lines. While it is
>arguably as cruel (in my eyes it certainly is as cruel), it appears to be
>less capricious.
Trying to determine who was worse, Stalin or Hitler, is a waste
of time. Stalin was responsible for so much death and misery that
the mind boggles. All for reasons as abhorant as Hitler's war against
the Jews.
But this one difference stands out for me: it is, for me, only
matched by the genocide against the Natives in the new world:
Whole families were slaughtered, consciously, intentionally -
tiny children, ancient grandfathers, adolescents and infants,
down to the last one.
Genocide is different, and it's an appropriate topic for a thread
on the evils of racism. The Nazis had a saying, that was, I believe,
an echo of the slaughter of the Natives: "Nits make lice." This was
justification enough for racists to hold aloft an infant Native on a
sword, or smash the skull of an infant Jew against a curb in the
Warsaw ghetto.
Once one accepts that there are inferior and superior races, the
inferior race becomes as dehumanized as the dominant race chooses.
Why, they might even attempt to enslave an entire race and subject
all memebers of that group to a life so horrible that one thinks
only monsters could commit such crimes. But they're not monsters,
exactly. They're just people who are racist.
The question is, given the proper circumstances, who is likely to
behave like a monster: The racist or the humanist? The answer is
clear to me.
--
Lane Singer
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