5 ms·

I think the lesson is how easy it is for humans to split into groups and start slaughtering each other, and that we need incredible amounts of education to guar

by mkaziz 10y ago

I think the lesson is how easy it is for humans to split into groups and start slaughtering each other, and that we need incredible amounts of education to guard against that.

guard-of-terra 10y ago
I think the lesson is, while we do need incredible amounts of education to guard against slaughtering each other, we're not going to get it. I mean, yes, you can have 50 years of prosperity before 10 years of genocide, but would you bet on continous stability of your society? As an American you might. Rest of the world is not so lucky. If religious/etnhic conflicts are possible in your locale due to population mix, they WILL happen. Will you risk it? Unfortunately, the solution is homogenousness. We would like to have different solutions, but we don't have them.
- mkaziz 10y ago
  Disagree. If you as a Muslim live as a Muslim surrounded by Muslims, you're eventually going to otherize the Christians living across the border. If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove. Fact of the matter is, we're prone to split into groups. If you homogenize, then before long, you'll be a Catholic othering the Protestant, or if you homogenize those even, you'll be a Lutheran othering some other denomination. Your best bet is to use diversity and multiculturalism to teach tolerance to the point that tolerance is institutionalized in your society.
  - guard-of-terra 10y ago
    > Your best bet is to use diversity and multiculturalism to teach tolerance to the point that tolerance is institutionalized in your society. How well did it work for Jugoslavia, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and Syria? It is not a "best bet". It is a long shot and it misses most of the time. The best bet is to stay homogenous. "otherizing Christians living across the border" might sound bad, but it won't lead to genocide because they have their own country with their military and police and you can't just walk in and kill them (they can neither). You can have wars but those rarely result in genocide. Civil wars had much worse outlook on that. However when there are Christians (or Muslim) in your country, it's pretty real that suddently the regime wants to kill them with their military and police and they have no force to stand up for them.
    - anigbrowl 10y ago
      You really need to read more history. a lot more history. Maybe try some scholarly works on a culture you are not familiar with so that you're less inclined to rely on your default assumptions. I put it to you that many conflicts are not so much the result of inevitable animus between diverse social groups, but the willingness of some people to opportunistically exploit a power vacuum for their own advantage by convincing members of one population to scapegoat another one. Rene girard has written extensively on this topic and argues that it may be a fundamental tendency. You keep appealing to homogeneity, but show me a homogenous group and I'll find some fault-lines in it. If that proves difficult, I'll just create some. Once I have two groups who believe their interests to be divergent I can set them against each other and exploit the resulting instability for my own ends. It's really easy to play people off against each other if that's your overarching objective.
    - mkaziz 10y ago
      > You can have wars but those rarely result in genocide. Civil wars had much worse outlook on that. WWII and Nazi Germany > However when there are Christians (or Muslim) in your country, it's pretty real that suddently the regime wants to kill them with their military and police and they have no force to stand up for them. Yes, that's why you need strong institutions. The US has admirable (though not perfect) institutions that incorporate these concepts. In the examples you're citing, the institutions were fundamentally weak. As I mentioned earlier, humans will _always_ find reasons to fight. You can get as white and Christian as you want, but soon some types of white Christians will start fighting other types of white Christians. Medieval Europe and its interminable wars was a great example of this.
      - guard-of-terra 10y ago
        > that's why you need strong institutions I do but I understand clearly that I'm not getting them where I live, any time soon. What's my backup plan? "Fighting other types" is one thing, genocide is another thing. Two different words for a reason.
        10y ago
  - jbmorgado 10y ago
    Sorry but even recent history just proves you totally wrong. You only have to go back less than 20 years and look at the Yugoslavian wars. Specially in Bosnia Herzegovina. In Bosnia neighbours were killing neighbours, friends were killing friends and cousins were killing cousins just because of their religion.
    - tobltobs 10y ago
      Ever heard something about statistical significance?
  - int_19h 10y ago
    > If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove. FWIW, don't rely too much on it, at least as far as neighbors go. There are numerous examples to the contrary during Balkan wars, and various ethnic conflicts that happened when the USSR was collapsing. For example, during the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which involved numerous ethnic cleanings by both sides, one thing that stood out from the surviving victims' reports was that it was often their neighbors, with whom they were on good terms, that led the marauding parties to their house to ransack it and drive them out or kill them. Similar reports have been heard from Kurds and Yazidi in areas of Iraq and Syria captured by ISIS.
  - livinginturkey 10y ago
    But can we always have enough tolerance ? If in your country you had a community of people performing human sacrifices on unwilling victims, would you be able to tolerate it ? When something goes against our morality it may be very difficult to accept. The "usual" problem is religious belief, but it is necessarily the only one. (If you think that the above example is a bit far fetched, consider that it is not much different from what some persons think about other people eating meat).
    - mkaziz 10y ago
      Obviously a line needs to be drawn, the question is where it is drawn. A good rule of thumb is that if it doesn't hurt anyone else and is between consenting people (adults?), you should be able to tolerate it. But you are right of course, some communities feel as strongly about killing animals for food as they do about killing humans. There are all sorts of edge cases involved in these situations. So I can't give you an ultimate answer to that - scholars have been trying to answer it for ages, and the only way to find out is to keep going with this muddled experiment that is modern civilization. :)
    - EdHominem 10y ago
      If that country kills people or keeps slaves then surely I'm not being intolerant by fighting and enslaving them, I'm adopting their views. /s Also, if you're sacrificing someone and I tolerate it, there's no reason I can't listen to the victim and take you out as a favor. Tolerating doesn't mean blindly accepting.
- tobltobs 10y ago
  > Unfortunately, the solution is homogenousness. Thats some crazy stupid Goebbels speak. Sometime those happy homogenousness nations decide to make the whole world homogenousness.
  - ColanR 10y ago
    That's aside from the point - homogenousness works internally. Externally, as you pointed out? That's why he said we need total homogenousness.
    - mabramo 10y ago
      I believe the term you're looking for is homogeny.
      - ColanR 10y ago
        I used what the guy above me used. It makes for a clearer response, in context.
- anigbrowl 10y ago
  I like you, but I think you're wildly overestimating your analytical powers here. You are essentially assuming the truth of your conclusion and ignoring the numerous counterexamples. I might just as speciously argue that it is in the nature of human beings to fight and that absent an identifiable external enemy they'll quickly turn on each other. I often feel that way but assuming it as a fact would lead to all sorts of unwanted result, don't you think?
- guelo 10y ago
  You certainly won't get it if you continuously undermine liberal institutions that promote inclusivity and cooperation. Once society starts attacking those institutions wars tend to become a self fulfilling prophecy.
- asolove 10y ago
  In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Europe organized itself quite rationally along the lines you suggest. The old dynastic borders and multi-ethnic states went away and German, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc. nationalities each aligned reasonably closely with their own single state. It did not end peacefully. While internally-homogenous states may have peaceful domestic politics, their international politics become more troublesome. First because the exact same ethnic hatreds translate perfectly well into wars between nation-states. And second because many cultural groups, when assembled into their own homogeneous state, simply don't have the economic or military resources to defend themselves against aggression from larger neighboring groups. An excellent history of exactly this dynamic -- how domestic government organization and international strategy interrelate -- is the book "The Shield of Achilles".
  - int_19h 10y ago
    > In the 19th and early 20th centuries Do you mean this as in before WW1, or after? If before, then Austria-Hungary was still a thing, and it was a massive multiethnic empire. Ditto Russian Empire in the east, incorporating Poland and Finland and a lot of other stuff. If you mean after WW1 and before WW2, then we're talking about nation-states that involved large minorities from other states - like Germans, Ukrainians and Belarusians in interwar Poland, Germans in Czechoslovakia etc. There were massive Hungarian minorities in areas separated from Hungary and attached to neighboring countries after WW1. Yugoslavia was a new multi-ethnic country created after WW1, with a bunch of internal conflicts brewing. And USSR regained most of the imperial possessions lost after the 1917 revolution. On the other hand, after WW2, the Allies didn't just redraw borders, but they executed a massive population transfer operation to avoid large ethnic minorities on either side of those borders. These mostly involved expulsion of Germans from various areas of neighboring countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland etc), but not exclusively - in Poland, for example, there was also a big population transfer between the areas that USSR annexed (Western Ukraine and Belarus) and eastern Poland, so that ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians would end up in the USSR, and ethnic Poles would end up in Poland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%9350) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vistula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vistula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_population_transfers_(1944%E2%80%9346) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_population_transfers_(1... So I think it's not incorrect to say that post-WW2, European states became more ethnically homogeneous, at least for a while. Whether it actually had anything to do with the period of peace that followed is another question.

by mkaziz 10y ago

I think the lesson is how easy it is for humans to split into groups and start slaughtering each other, and that we need incredible amounts of education to guard against that.

guard-of-terra 10y ago

I think the lesson is, while we do need incredible amounts of education to guard against slaughtering each other, we're not going to get it. I mean, yes, you can have 50 years of prosperity before 10 years of genocide, but would you bet on continous stability of your society? As an American you might. Rest of the world is not so lucky. If religious/etnhic conflicts are possible in your locale due to population mix, they WILL happen. Will you risk it? Unfortunately, the solution is homogenousness. We would like to have different solutions, but we don't have them.

mkaziz 10y ago
Disagree. If you as a Muslim live as a Muslim surrounded by Muslims, you're eventually going to otherize the Christians living across the border. If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove. Fact of the matter is, we're prone to split into groups. If you homogenize, then before long, you'll be a Catholic othering the Protestant, or if you homogenize those even, you'll be a Lutheran othering some other denomination. Your best bet is to use diversity and multiculturalism to teach tolerance to the point that tolerance is institutionalized in your society.
- guard-of-terra 10y ago
  > Your best bet is to use diversity and multiculturalism to teach tolerance to the point that tolerance is institutionalized in your society. How well did it work for Jugoslavia, Lebanon, Azerbaijan and Syria? It is not a "best bet". It is a long shot and it misses most of the time. The best bet is to stay homogenous. "otherizing Christians living across the border" might sound bad, but it won't lead to genocide because they have their own country with their military and police and you can't just walk in and kill them (they can neither). You can have wars but those rarely result in genocide. Civil wars had much worse outlook on that. However when there are Christians (or Muslim) in your country, it's pretty real that suddently the regime wants to kill them with their military and police and they have no force to stand up for them.
  - anigbrowl 10y ago
    You really need to read more history. a lot more history. Maybe try some scholarly works on a culture you are not familiar with so that you're less inclined to rely on your default assumptions. I put it to you that many conflicts are not so much the result of inevitable animus between diverse social groups, but the willingness of some people to opportunistically exploit a power vacuum for their own advantage by convincing members of one population to scapegoat another one. Rene girard has written extensively on this topic and argues that it may be a fundamental tendency. You keep appealing to homogeneity, but show me a homogenous group and I'll find some fault-lines in it. If that proves difficult, I'll just create some. Once I have two groups who believe their interests to be divergent I can set them against each other and exploit the resulting instability for my own ends. It's really easy to play people off against each other if that's your overarching objective.
  - mkaziz 10y ago
    > You can have wars but those rarely result in genocide. Civil wars had much worse outlook on that. WWII and Nazi Germany > However when there are Christians (or Muslim) in your country, it's pretty real that suddently the regime wants to kill them with their military and police and they have no force to stand up for them. Yes, that's why you need strong institutions. The US has admirable (though not perfect) institutions that incorporate these concepts. In the examples you're citing, the institutions were fundamentally weak. As I mentioned earlier, humans will _always_ find reasons to fight. You can get as white and Christian as you want, but soon some types of white Christians will start fighting other types of white Christians. Medieval Europe and its interminable wars was a great example of this.
    - guard-of-terra 10y ago
      > that's why you need strong institutions I do but I understand clearly that I'm not getting them where I live, any time soon. What's my backup plan? "Fighting other types" is one thing, genocide is another thing. Two different words for a reason.
      - 10y ago
- jbmorgado 10y ago
  Sorry but even recent history just proves you totally wrong. You only have to go back less than 20 years and look at the Yugoslavian wars. Specially in Bosnia Herzegovina. In Bosnia neighbours were killing neighbours, friends were killing friends and cousins were killing cousins just because of their religion.
  - tobltobs 10y ago
    Ever heard something about statistical significance?
- int_19h 10y ago
  > If OTOH your neighbour is a Christian and your cousin is married to a Christian, you're going to feel a whole lot more charitable towards Christians when push comes to shove. FWIW, don't rely too much on it, at least as far as neighbors go. There are numerous examples to the contrary during Balkan wars, and various ethnic conflicts that happened when the USSR was collapsing. For example, during the Armenian-Azerbaijani conflict, which involved numerous ethnic cleanings by both sides, one thing that stood out from the surviving victims' reports was that it was often their neighbors, with whom they were on good terms, that led the marauding parties to their house to ransack it and drive them out or kill them. Similar reports have been heard from Kurds and Yazidi in areas of Iraq and Syria captured by ISIS.
- livinginturkey 10y ago
  But can we always have enough tolerance ? If in your country you had a community of people performing human sacrifices on unwilling victims, would you be able to tolerate it ? When something goes against our morality it may be very difficult to accept. The "usual" problem is religious belief, but it is necessarily the only one. (If you think that the above example is a bit far fetched, consider that it is not much different from what some persons think about other people eating meat).
  - mkaziz 10y ago
    Obviously a line needs to be drawn, the question is where it is drawn. A good rule of thumb is that if it doesn't hurt anyone else and is between consenting people (adults?), you should be able to tolerate it. But you are right of course, some communities feel as strongly about killing animals for food as they do about killing humans. There are all sorts of edge cases involved in these situations. So I can't give you an ultimate answer to that - scholars have been trying to answer it for ages, and the only way to find out is to keep going with this muddled experiment that is modern civilization. :)
  - EdHominem 10y ago
    If that country kills people or keeps slaves then surely I'm not being intolerant by fighting and enslaving them, I'm adopting their views. /s Also, if you're sacrificing someone and I tolerate it, there's no reason I can't listen to the victim and take you out as a favor. Tolerating doesn't mean blindly accepting.
tobltobs 10y ago
> Unfortunately, the solution is homogenousness. Thats some crazy stupid Goebbels speak. Sometime those happy homogenousness nations decide to make the whole world homogenousness.
- ColanR 10y ago
  That's aside from the point - homogenousness works internally. Externally, as you pointed out? That's why he said we need total homogenousness.
  - mabramo 10y ago
    I believe the term you're looking for is homogeny.
    - ColanR 10y ago
      I used what the guy above me used. It makes for a clearer response, in context.
anigbrowl 10y ago
I like you, but I think you're wildly overestimating your analytical powers here. You are essentially assuming the truth of your conclusion and ignoring the numerous counterexamples. I might just as speciously argue that it is in the nature of human beings to fight and that absent an identifiable external enemy they'll quickly turn on each other. I often feel that way but assuming it as a fact would lead to all sorts of unwanted result, don't you think?
guelo 10y ago
You certainly won't get it if you continuously undermine liberal institutions that promote inclusivity and cooperation. Once society starts attacking those institutions wars tend to become a self fulfilling prophecy.
asolove 10y ago
In the 19th and early 20th centuries, Europe organized itself quite rationally along the lines you suggest. The old dynastic borders and multi-ethnic states went away and German, Italian, Polish, Russian, etc. nationalities each aligned reasonably closely with their own single state. It did not end peacefully. While internally-homogenous states may have peaceful domestic politics, their international politics become more troublesome. First because the exact same ethnic hatreds translate perfectly well into wars between nation-states. And second because many cultural groups, when assembled into their own homogeneous state, simply don't have the economic or military resources to defend themselves against aggression from larger neighboring groups. An excellent history of exactly this dynamic -- how domestic government organization and international strategy interrelate -- is the book "The Shield of Achilles".
- int_19h 10y ago
  > In the 19th and early 20th centuries Do you mean this as in before WW1, or after? If before, then Austria-Hungary was still a thing, and it was a massive multiethnic empire. Ditto Russian Empire in the east, incorporating Poland and Finland and a lot of other stuff. If you mean after WW1 and before WW2, then we're talking about nation-states that involved large minorities from other states - like Germans, Ukrainians and Belarusians in interwar Poland, Germans in Czechoslovakia etc. There were massive Hungarian minorities in areas separated from Hungary and attached to neighboring countries after WW1. Yugoslavia was a new multi-ethnic country created after WW1, with a bunch of internal conflicts brewing. And USSR regained most of the imperial possessions lost after the 1917 revolution. On the other hand, after WW2, the Allies didn't just redraw borders, but they executed a massive population transfer operation to avoid large ethnic minorities on either side of those borders. These mostly involved expulsion of Germans from various areas of neighboring countries (Czechoslovakia, Poland etc), but not exclusively - in Poland, for example, there was also a big population transfer between the areas that USSR annexed (Western Ukraine and Belarus) and eastern Poland, so that ethnic Ukrainians and Belarusians would end up in the USSR, and ethnic Poles would end up in Poland. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_Germans_(1944%E2%80%9350) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_and_expulsion_of_German... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vistula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Vistula https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_population_transfers_(1944%E2%80%9346) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish_population_transfers_(1... So I think it's not incorrect to say that post-WW2, European states became more ethnically homogeneous, at least for a while. Whether it actually had anything to do with the period of peace that followed is another question.