Stitch,
"The concern I have is the concerted effort by Asian politicians to paint their way out of the heat of culpability with anti-western blame. And the quid pro quo we will see from congress. Only adds a noise factor to a bad situation."
Your concern is, unhappily, well grounded. Here is a quote from a Jewish survivor of the Nazi Regime:
"I believe somehow that that which happened in Germany in these horrible, borrible years, the inhumane, the unimaginable, resides somehow in the potential of all human beings. If it gets woken up by demagogues. And if the necessary and particular political situations exist to exploit these things."
And a memory from a Hindu woman writer who was a teenager in 1947 India--before Independence in India, she said in an interview with NPR last summer, she had a number of friends who were Moslem attending her school. None of them thought anything of it until after independence; then, suddenly, she became aware of a rift developing, the politicians and the media stepped in, and the rift widened until a general fear and emnity developed between the two groups, and they were no longer friends. Even if that fear/distrust actually existed somewhat in the adults before independence, and she was just unaware of it, the fact is that the politicians exploited it and fanned it, with a great deal of bloodshed the result, instead of softening and trying to erase it.
This is why politics matters. Not that I have to tell the people on this extremely interesting thread such things.
Best,
Sam |
