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Clever Pseudonym's avatar

As a Gen-Xer writing on a Gen-Xers' blog I just wanted to point out one difference between the atrocities of the past vs the atrocities of the present and the future:

We were subjected to many hours of instruction, multiple plays, TV shows and movies etc about the Red Scare and how evil it was to condemn and banish people based on their legitimate political beliefs—and then we've sat by and watched the same phenomenon reappear in the guise of DEI, where rigid ideological litmus tests are now applied for employment (not to mention racial quotas), and where many people have lost their jobs over stating an unapproved thought;

We were subjected to many hours of instruction, multiple plays, TV shows and movies etc about the evil and stupidity of judging people by the color of their skin, only for another racial classification system to appear a generation or so later, where now the biggest social faux pas is not granting certain peoples extra moral points for being a member of a protected victim class and where we're all judged by skin color for things like employment and college acceptance;

We were subjected to many hours of instruction, multiple plays, TV shows and movies etc about the evils of Jew hatred, its history and all is barbaric manifestations, only to see so much of our enlightened progressive caste defend (or at least obfuscate and contextualize) a brutal Jewish pogrom out of the Middle Ages, and this by the same people who got years of moralistic mileage out of a handful of fools w tiki torches and the same people who cry "anti-Semite!" if you dislike George Soros.

We've had 50 years of full-spectrum propaganda that claimed to be training us to be more humanitarian and less discriminatory and warning us about the dangers of joining deranged mass movements—and this has all been swept away within a decade and replaced by Who/Whom.

I guess my point is that you can dress the angry tribal ape in fancy clothes and send him to years of academic seminars about tolerance and compassion, but the angry tribal ape is always there, always waiting, and every society is always at risk of being burned down by a return of the angry tribal ape.

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Jonah R.'s avatar

"The skull is always and everywhere just beneath the skin."

This is one of the simplest and most to-the-point lines you've ever written.

Another example: One of the major works of Serbian literature, "The Mountain Wreath," written by a 19th-century bishop, celebrates an event of dubious historicity that may or may not have happened in the 1700s: How Montenegrin Christian Serbs decided to turn on their neighbors who had become Islamicized and who had sided with and in some cases become informants for the Turks. And so the Christians, amid a lot of pro-forma lamenting about the "look what you made us do" necessity of it, kill all of their Muslims neighbors—on Christmas.

I don't think anyone is quite sure if the event really happened as depicted in the poem, and there's also important context: the Turks were brutal colonizers who left a trail of blood through the Balkans. Still, it makes quite clear that we're all capable of anything under certain pressures. The poem is still one of the most quoted works of literature among Serbs.

Look at the videos where people are confronting the college kids who are tearing down posters of the Israeli (and American) hostages taken by Hamas. When confronted, it's like they're zombies. They can't articulate thoughts. They look annoyed, confused, lost, and have that weird, frustrated anger of someone with Alzheimer's. They've lost their individuality in the rush of joining an emotional mob. It's the state that all of us, no matter what position we take in a conflict, should work to avoid.

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