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Politics : Moderate Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rambi who wrote (504)	4/21/2003 10:49:02 AM
From: Dale Baker	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 20773

I see your point, thanks for explaining it. However, I think he is missing the way that politicians create demonization to serve their own ends, knowing that most people are predisposed to follow the right incitements to group hatred. My point would be that we would have far less group hatred at the individual level if politicians weren't using our own natures to defeat civility and rally the masses behind one cause or another. To assert "the reality of real enemies that need to be dealt with" is abdicating that determination to presidents and generals and Beltway think tanks with their own agendas. And once the average American abdicates that role (which I would argue they have due to a number of factors), the overall result is exactly the divisions that he fears. I spent several years in South Africa, Croatia and Bosnia observing ethnic divisions and what drives human perceptions of them. What I see now regarding America and Iraq is not much different. People accept that we should hate certain groups and nationalities and react accordingly. How can we accept that from politicians and then criticize individuals for wrestling with The Other? An example - most Americans have never met or spoken to a French national, yet hating the French has become almost mandatory to fit in socially. Where did that come from, human nature or the evening news out of Washington? Being much more political (and cynical) than literary, my own frame of reference has trouble seeing it differently.