Friday, July 08, 2011
Is It Racism?
Alex: Sorry William, but your thesis is pure racism.
You are stating that ethnical, culural and religous diffrences are the cause of war. It's not, scarce ressources are! Ethical, culutral and religous diffrences are only used to justify a war, they are newer the reason for it. Hitler didn't invade Russia, because the people there were slavic, but for "Lebensraum im Osten" i.e. to expand the living evironment for the Germans.
We also had a long age of war between homogenous european nations. You don't need much diffrences to start a war, but you better find some, if you want to convince your people to die for it. William: Number 1, nothing is pure. Number 2, it is simply a "what if" scenario. Granted that resources and "living space" or liebensraum (aha, I started to write it before I noticed it in your thread" -- The scenario I describe is totally academic because Hitler lost, the Nazis vanished, the Germany and Japan of today are not the Germany and Japan of the 1920s. I will give you an irrefutable example. Neanderthal roamed the earth for 400,000 years but we Homo sapiens have been here only 200,000. For 50,000 years Neanderthal and Homosapien coexisted. It is theoretically possible that Neanderthal were the first victims of genocide. The two groups competed for the same resources. Certainly on the surface religious differences were the cause of the Spanish Inquisition and the Crusades. On the other hand, if the entire world tomorrow converted to Islam I do not thing there would be peace for there would still be discord between Sunni, Sh'ia, Sufi, Kurd, Druze etc. All I am really trying to say is that what seems like an evil event might lead to some good centuries later and what seems like a good event might lead to catastrophe centuries later. We tend to view advances in science and medicine as good and we see the lives of primitive hunters/food gatherers as short and filled with suffering. BUT, with each century our species becomes weaker and more dependent upon antibiotics and ultra purified water, our lifespans become TOO long because we have no natural enemies AND what is worst of all we live many years into an old age where society has no use for us and we have no way to support our needs apart from the charity of state social welfare. We become weak because there is no survival of the fittest or natural selection. For thousands of years the Neanderthal, Australian Aborigines, Bushmen of Africa, natives of the Americas, lived with no health insurance and those who survived were robust, hearty.
