Literary Discussions

This discussion unfolded in Diaspora* inspired by the photo of a child firing a machine gun. 

I am experimenting with creating a longer post in G+ with photo attached and perhaps trying out BOLD and Underline.

*The Lesser of Evils*

Someone posted a Youtube of a small robotic gun about the size of a german shepherd dog equipped with a machine gun and operated by a human at a computer. The accuracy of the weapon was impressive as it fired at distant human sized targets with pinpoint accuracy. In the course of time, combat as well as deep space exploration will become increasingly robotic. 

I realize what I am about to suggest will be controversial and perhaps even offensive, but the way I see it, the human race cannot survive with sharp ideological polarization bent upon transforming or annihilating the opposing ideology. Therefore, the perhaps the only hope for LONG TERM survival of the species is for one pole (side, ideology and which it does not matter) to seize a window of opportunity in which with certain technological superiority it can annihilate the opposition and thereby homogenize the survivors. I am not trying to be humorous. 

Imagine an entire world of, say, Canadians and Australians. Now PERHAPS in a century or two those Canadian-Australians would once again polarize over some ideological difference and we would be back to the mayhem of war. But certainly when one half of the world is pitted against the other half of the world with Terminator-Robocop automatons then no one will win and no one will survive. The above argument makes ethnocide seem the lesser of evils (although still an evil.)

*Be Neither Sad Nor Happy*

Last year a hypothetical scenario dawned upon me of HOW a Nazi victory might in the long run of say three centuries have meant the long term survival of the human species (and I do see Hitler and the Nazis as an extreme evil): 

Let us say Hitler HAD conquered the world and through a rein of terror and genocide had homogenized the entire world so that religious and racial differences were gone. Now let us say that over the course of a century after Hitler's death, the world revolted against the despotic regime and established a one world democracy. The extreme evil and tyranny of Hitler's conquest would have eliminated all the sources of religious, cultural and ethnic strife. Would such a harmony achieved by evil means lead to a long term survival which would be seen as a greater good?

Of course we know that Hitler and the Nazis were defeated.... BUT America seriously considered using the H-Bomb to destroy Russia and China (a murder of 300 million people) to make the world a safe place for Democracy. At present we see the warlike tension between various nations and factions and we see that many groups may have access to nuclear weapons. Therefore in theory the victory of the good Allied side which took place in WWII might ultimately lead to a diverse and polarized world which destroys itself whereas the monstrous regime of the Nazis might actually have homogenized the world into something peaceful and then fallen away in decay. 

There is an ancient Chinese story about a man who is sad because the barn door was left open and his only horse escaped. The village wise man said "be neither sad nor happy for you cannot see the ultimate outcome" .... the horse befriended a herd of horses and brought them back to the barn so now the man rejoiced but the village wise man again said "be neither sad nor happy" ... the farmer's only son chose the most beautiful horse for himself but was permanently crippled while trying to break the horse, so again the farmer was sad and again the wise man counselled "we cannot know the ultimate outcome of anything" ... but then the King passed by seeking young men as soldiers to die in a distant war, and when they saw the son crippled in his bed, they left him as useless, and the farmer rejoiced... but again the wise man said "be neither happy nor sad for you cannot know the end."

*The Mercy of an Eye For an Eye*

Although, in all fairness to the earliest centuries, when a rule of an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth was instituted it WAS more merciful than the blood vengeance described by, say Tubal-Cain who demanded that if Cain's blood vengeance was to be 7 fold then Tubal-Cain would be 70 fold (70 times greater) and so if one person was murdered than an entire clan or tribe or town would be murdered. The Americans did this in the Philippines around 1902 (under Pres. McKinley)... one American soldier was killed and so the American soldiers rode on a train and annihilated each village they came to.

*Pure 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, what I have described 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. 

Consider the irony that America and the rest of the world decries notions of racial superiority, ubermensch, genocide... AND YET... it is America who pioneered weapons of mass destruction, including the H-Bomb, thousands of times more destructive than the atom bombs used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, AND they accused Robert Oppenheimer of being unpatriotic for objecting to the development of the H-Bomb as a possible plan to bomb Russia and China out of existence killing 300 million people to make the world safe for Democracy. Each and every nuclear submarine possesses a destructive fire power GREATER THAN ALL 5 YEARS OF WORLD WAR II BOTH SIDES COMBINED. 

America grew in its early centuries by means of black slavery and genocidal policies against the Native Americans who owned the continent and had no concept of private property. Look up "the march of tears" which relocated Cherokee and others, hardly different from the Batan Death March.

Furthermore, although we decry notions of racial superiority, we feverishly develop methods of genetic engineering which might in theory allow us to create a superior human strain. Also we labor to develop artificial intelligence and robotics so that in theory one day all of our sci-fi horror stories might come true since the new superbeings or the superintelligent automata might consider their creator humans as an inferior and dangerous infestation. 

Add to that the fact that China AND India have far too many male babies because female babies are considered less valuable. Everyone wants a boy for various cultural and economic reasons. Humans are often capable of inhumane agendas.