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

To: aladin who wrote (100004)	6/3/2003 2:21:25 PM
From: Jacob Snyder	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

< this guilt trip you seem to be on?> I'm a WASP. My family (one branch) came to Virginia in the 1680s. I don't feel guilty. Neither should you. Those people, in the past, are responsible for their own actions, not me. The point is, not feeling guilty about past crimes, but, rather, to study the mistakes of the past, so as to avoid repeating them in the future. Especially the consistent, repeated mistakes that are deeply embedded in our national culture. Mistakes that we tend to repeat endlessly, without even being aware they are crimes. If we ignore past mistakes, we will repeat them. One of the interesting things, about studying our wars against American Natives, and against Philippine nationalists a century ago, is the continuity of ideology and methods. Generals who carried out ethnic cleansing against tribes in Nebraska and New Mexico, later in their careers, went to the Philippines, where they said and did the exact same things. And, the way we are thinking and acting against terrorists today, has many parallels with other "savages" who we have exterminated, over the last 400 years. The way George Washington thought about the Senecas, isn't too different from the way GW Bush thinks about Al Queda. Guilt is pointless. A better future is the point.