"Perhaps, but we must have some way to screen out the suffering of other creatures. If
we were truly able to empathize with it, we would go insane."
I think you're right, Andrew. I wonder if being really sensitive is a pathway to insanity. It seems to be linked somehow with that poet and painter drug addiction and alcoholism and depression syndrome really--that the price for NOTICING the details that play out in creative expression is a sort of generalized anguish."
"Certainly distance makes atrocity easier. If there were no guns or arrows and people
had to be killed with hand held weapons, there would certainly be a lot less deaths. I
think that in the Viet Nam war, television actually helped to maintain the distance in a
way. One could pretend it was just another war film. We are so used to seeing people
killed on TV. However, IMO, one cannot compare the Viet Nam war with WW11.
WW11 was a moral war, as moral as any war can be, although many immoral acts
may have been committed. Viet Nam was, IMO, an immoral war, and that had a
strong influence on public opinion."
I have a really different memory of Viet Nam than you do. I remember that once peace demonstrators had gotten the attention of the nation, and the press was covering Viet Nam with pretty probing journalism, and color television, which was just then becoming widely affordable showed men with their guts hanging out, dying and dead, and men crying on the battlefield, and the Buddhist monks immolating themselves on the network news, it all became very close and DISTURBING. I think the public's perception of Viet Nam as an immoral war was the result of bringing into our living rooms in such vivid detail. Now such coverage is old hat, but then it was brand new.
I think most people would agree that World War II in Europe was as close as you can get to a moral war. The thing that disturbs me about it is that there were years of appeasement of Hitler's land grab and atrocities by governments in Europe, and by the U.S. as well. If you will remember, justifying a policy of appeasement is what cost Joseph P. Kennedy, JFK's father, his British ambassadorship finally. Certainly a bit of moral courage a little earlier would have saved millions of lives, but Hitler's victims--gypsies, gays, Jews--were minority groups. Just last week the cover of "BusinessWeek", which probably many people reading this have read, featured a captain of Swiss industry whose name escapes me now, who argued that there was no reason for reparations. I think there is still a lot of anti-Semitism in parts of Europe.
I am also really puzzled by what is happening with the Swiss situation with Jewish wealth that was confiscated. Not only did recently declassified documents reveal that the Vatican held for safekeeping 200 million Swiss francs for the puppet Nazi government of Croatia after World War II, but it was also revealed that the British government itself is incriminated in holding plundered gold/money that belongs to Jews who went to the camps. It seems like a huge international secret that is just beginning to ooze out in an ugly way, and that there is lots of complicity. |
