One thing I can’t seem to comprehend is why people suddenly jump on the bandwagon to help one country and not another.

On the one  hand you have Gaza which is slowly being strangled to death because they had the chutzpah to elect people we didn’t approve of, nobody makes a peep out of that, then you have Haiti which definitely suffered an enormous earthquake catastrophe, where the whole world rallied around them, and then Chile suffered an even bigger one and the news fizzles out after a few days.

I don’t get it.

What makes people decide to care? Was it that Haiti was so poor in the first place? Was it the number of people who died? Do we care in proportion to the number of those killed?

Compared to Haiti, Chile is relatively modern and progressive. But devastation is devastation, isn’t it? Why isn’t there more of an outcry to help?

I wish there was a more measured approach to natural calamities. I wish we could push aside political differences and see suffering for what it is.

When the Jews suffered the pograms under the Czar of Russia, the whole world looked the other way. When the soldiers of the Czar would cull men from the Jewish ghettoes, forcibly march them, as is shown in Carol Matas’ book Sworn Enemies  and force them to convert to Christianity, did anybody in the West care?

True, they might not have known about it. But somehow, I suspect, that even if they had known, many would have thought, ‘well, they’re turning them into Christians. Isn’t that a good thing?’

It’s the same mentality that led to the Canadian government forcibly removing native children from the reservations during the 1950’s and moving them to the residential schools where the children would be punished if they spoke in any other language but English.

I do believe that the Canadian authorities had the best of intentions. They did not see themselves as oppressors.

They were apalled that these natives hadn’t assimilated, hadn’t left their ‘backward’ ways to mingle with the whites. Why hadn’t they adopted the Canadian dream? Why hadn’t they moved off their reservations, stopped speaking that ‘gibberish’ language and taken full advantage of all the opportunities they were being offered?

Basically, why weren’t they more like them???

This generation was lost. They should focus on the next generation. They’d take them away, and teach them to be white, and wouldn’t they thank them for it?

The native community is still suffering the repercussions of that horrible policy.

I think the mistake that the Holocaust Remembrance society makes is that they fail to understand how a society like the Germans could have come to a point where they could rationalize the extermination of the Jews. They just think they were crazy, like we think that psychopaths and sociopaths are crazy. And yet how can a whole society be crazy?

You just can’t paint a whole society as evil and warped. No matter how bad what they’ve done is, they must have had some sort of logic, some sort of reasoning behind it, and isn’t it dangerous if we don’t look at that, and learn from that?

Personally I think that any society can talk itself into committing the most heinous of crimes, if the right sort of logic is used.

Logic is usually considered such a benign beneficial tamper-proof sort of way of thinking. Many people seem to think that it’s not like religion, it’s not ‘corruptible’. I think they are mistaken.

I think Hitler was able, by twisting the whole idea of ‘survival of the fittest’, evolution and the superiority of the Aryan race, to logically show the Germans who followed him that it was a good thing to remove the Jews. His diabolical genius lied in the way he did it. He didn’t start with the Jews.

He started with the physically handicapped and the  mentally ill.

It was not hard for him to argue that the gene pool was better off without them.

Then he used the underlying anti-Semitism that existed in the society and fed it by showing that Jews were inherently and genetically inferior. He did this when they discovered that Jewish people, as a group, were genetically prone to Tay Sachs disease–just as blacks are often genetically prone to hemophilia. (By the way, there’s a reason for blacks being prone to hemophilia. When not full blown, hemophilia helped protect them from malaria.)

Once German scientists discovered this connection between Jews and this disease, it was easy to make the leap to suggest that in their quest to create a ‘pure society’ that they would do well to exterminate the Jews. Wasn’t the race inferior since they were prone to this? Heaven forbid there should be intermingling, intermarrying and their gene pool should be thus polluted.

It’s funny how people always accuse religions of causing the most death and destruction.

Two of the biggest wars: World War I and II were not religiously motivated in the least. You could argue they were motivated by ‘evolution’.  But nobody ever talks about that!

And now, America is on a crusade (didn’t George W. let the term slip when talking about the war on terror?) to bring democracy to all the poor wretches who are suffering under dictatorship.

Lessons not learned are doomed to be repeated.

It was arrogance on the part of the Bush administration to allow Hamas a spot on the ballot in the elections in Gaza.

Nobody would vote for Hamas! How could they? They were terrorists! So what if Fatah (Arafat’s group was corrupt.) So what if Hamas provided badly needed social services. The west did not approve of them.

And yet when Gaza voted, they chose Hamas. I think they considered them the lesser of two evils. And for that they have been brutally punished. Collectively.

And the Egyptians are in on it, closing the border at Rafah.

Why should we care?

You make the choice and you choose the consequences, right?

Right.

And yet, the children suffer.

Out of the spotlight of international scrutiny, the children suffer for something they never played a part in.

And we cry and sing “We are the World” for Haiti, but nobody sheds a tear for Gaza.