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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Poet who wrote (7912)	10/28/2001 12:21:51 PM
From: Ilaine	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

People anywhere who use history to justify present acts are dangerous. Oddly enough, the selection of facts is always very self-serving, designed to advance a particular thesis. All inconvenient facts are ignored. Thus, we have the spectacle of an entire spectrum of people all over the globe justifying hatred of America because of allegations such as - Euroamericans wiped out the Native Americans - not true, it was diseases which the Native Americans were not resistant to - and the one known "smallpox on a blanket" incident has been blown up into an urban legend - - Euroamericans dropped the A-bomb on innocent children in Japan living in cities with no military targets - not true, if anyone cares to take the time to see that Hiroshima was a military base and Nagasaki the home a Mitsubishi torpedo factory - - oh, I could go on and on but I am tired of it - I've debunked the allegations so many times I should just bookmark my responses, and treat it like the old joke about the couple whose fights are so old that they just call out numbers to each other instead of insults. Ray comes here calling out insults numbers 1 through 20 - and then when challenged, replies, "obviously you don't read the same books that I do." Dangerous? I would say yes. Ideas have consequences. To the extent that Ray's support for these ideas makes less thoughtful people give them credence, and more liable to act on them, they are dangerous. Ask the families of the people who died in the WTC whether ideas have consequences. The people who killed their families were driven by ideas, including the idea that America is evil because, inter alia, the myths of what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the myths of what happened to the Native Americans. Ray himself would not harm a fly. Ray himself if he was here to argue would point out all the people who died due to mistaken ideas that Americans have about the rest of the world, and he'd be right. Disinformation kills.