I wish for us all many, many news cycles that don't find us waiting on a bare minimum of decency, accountability, moral courage, and maturity from state officials.
Hasn't happened for a long time now, but that just means we're overdue, right? ...Right?
@MLClark We're way into the Twilight Zone when it comes to the behaviour of any government officials in many countries.Never expected to be sitting here watching them not only cheerleading an ethnic cleansing(at best) but actively helping out the perpetrators, contrary to the vast majority of their respective citizens wishes.But......here we are.
The cultural mythology underpinning our sense of righteousness is more resilient than many of us realized it would be.
Most folk aren't ready to sit with our widespread complicity in atrocity--so we won't.
We'll deny it, stay silent on it, rationalize it--even go along with whatever political trickery is next used to keep us invested in it.
And after, we won't want to speak of it. We'll say "you weren't there; you can't judge us". We'll want to move on, and forget. And we will.
@MLClark Some things,some events,you simply cannot forget or refuse to speak up about.Silence,in any case like this,is tantamount to complicity.As is knowingly putting a "positive" spin on it,or propagating disinformation and outright lies as a small handful do.I see,and it gives me a great deal of hope,hundreds of thousands of decent people protesting the atrocities in dozens of countries,dozens of cities across the world.I'm very much on their side.
Relatedly, I'm glad I re-read They Thought They Were Free earlier this year.
The first time I'd read it, I realized that most in the West really aren't different from the caricatures of Germans given to us in easy histories of the 20th C.
And that was gutting, because while many of us are raised to believe that we'd *obviously* never do what they did, we weren't actually learning to defend against human behaviours that are always vulnerable to groupthink.
https://press.uchicago.edu/Misc/Chicago/511928.html%5D
I'd go one further.
I think the self-congratulatory stories we've told ourselves about the 30s and 40s served to compartmentalize a sense of danger to certain regions, when the hard fact is that the underlying threat never went away.
The West has always entertained hateful ideologies, and supported hateful regimes whenever they served petronational interests.
But so long as we prop up simplistic histories of moral superiority in past wars, no further reflection is needed today!
@MLClark I find it incredibly telling that a huge swathe of those that find another term of Trump abhorent(and rightly so)are cheerleading on the exact same kind of person in a different country.
@MLClark We,or rather our respective current governments,have failed the humanity test spectacularly in recent months.What happened in Germany in the 30's and 40's is no longer being taken as a dire warning from history but being used as a blueprint.