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

To: Elsewhere who wrote (27476)	4/28/2002 8:05:39 PM
From: Bilow	Respond to of 281500

Hi Jochen Jansen; Re the German rampage. It's funny that the last three student murder suicide rampages at schools happened in Germany, Great Britain and the United States. Not a single Moslem involved. This gives the lie to the concept that taking bloody revenge in a suicide attack is something only Moslem kids would do. The West has as strong or stronger a "berserker" tradition as any area on this planet. If our home were in violent occupation, our children would be going berserk too. (At much higher rates than we see already.) Human nature is universal. I don't think that what the Germans did to the Jews (and others) in WW2 is an exceptional thing, in that only Germans could have done that. Instead, I think the Germans expressed universal human tendencies towards xenophobia and bloodthirstiness in an exceptional manner. In the US we are lucky that our cultural mythology is one of tolerance and the acceptance of immigrants as Americans. This gives us a small amount of immunity to the ethnic, racial and religious xenophobia that characterizes the more violent parts of the world. For example, see the inscription on the Statue of Liberty: #reply-16548296 -- Carl P.S. I forget who it was that was saying that the Moslems must be naturally violent because there are so many wars going on in the Moslem world. Okay. In 1944 the Christian world was mostly at war. So Christians must be naturally violent too. And in that same year, the Buddhist world was mostly at war too, for that matter. Also, for an interesting history of "berserk" in law and mythology (i.e. Grendel was likely a berserker) see: Again, in the sagas, it is a standard practice to dispatch the berserk while he lies helples after his fit, and this would seem to be Beowulf's course of action as well. florilegium.org