Darth Wong wrote:Yeah, great solution! In fact, it's such a great solution that it could be described as a Final Solution. Hmmm ... that sounds familiar ...
The Jews weren't ever actively trying to provoke the German population into wiping them out. The Nazi's Final Solution was based on fallacious assumptions and beliefs about the Jewish population.
Contrary to rumor the "Final Solution" was NOT just about the Jews. The Jews were not even the first target.
By 1939 the German hospitals were empty of the retarded, brain-damaged, insane, and permanently crippled. No miracle cure - just lethal injections.
Then it was the Jews + other "defectives" - the prison camps had an elaborate coding system for people. Everyone knows about the yellow stars for Jews, quite a few are aware of the pink triangles for homosexuals. "Habitual criminals" were marked, Jehovah's witnesses, Poles, Chechs, "race defilers"...
Observe some links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nazi_conce ... amp_badges
http://www.geocities.com/Paris/5121/badges.htm
http://www.holocaustrevealed.org/_domai ... badges.htm
The purpose was, of course, to label and categorize the prisoners for eventual orderly disposal. The defectives were first, then the Jews and Gypsies, with documents found after the war indicating that the Poles were to be next, followed by other slavic groups - although some of them might be retained as slaves rather than simply executed.
Yes, approximately six million Jews were slaughtered in the WWII - so were at least six million others in the very same gas chambers and ovens. Jews were the largest group in the total, but not the total group.
Sorry for the diversion, but the myth that the "Final Solution" was just about the Jews needs to be debunked.
Islamic fundies are indeed asking us to unleash all hell on them.
Yes, but I would prefer that they not be permitted to set the rules of the game.
So a number of civilians will die, it's an acceptable loss for the eventual good it will do. In war, the innocent will die, but the guilty will be purged, and the means justify the ends in this case.
It's always easy to ask for someone else to die.
What if the innocents caught in the crossfire are YOUR family and friends? What if it is YOU? If it had been your child/parent/brother/sister/cousin in that school would YOU have been able to shrug your shoulders, turn, and walk away? I very much doubt it.
There is nothing more painful than for a parent to lose a child to death. To be forced to watch your child die of thirst, to see you child cut down by bullets, to be forced to choose one child out of many to save and to leave the others --- these are not wounds that will heal. Yes, most folks that this happens to are able, eventually, to get on with life, to function, to even find some happiness, but the pain does NOT go away. The loss will be felt every day for the rest of their lives.
The death of innocents is NEVER acceptable - even if at times it is inevitable. We're not looking at any good choices, we can only choose among evils.
What would you want, for our own people to die to serve their insatiable desires, or for them to be eliminated?
Honestly, I want no one to die by violence.
I can certainly understand the impulse to beat to death such terrorists. I have just as much anger and bloodlust as anyone else. However, I also realize that such violence can lead to a downward spiral of further violence. I also try to act as a moral and ethical being.
We may have to, in order to ensure our own survival, kill a lot of people in the coming years. That doesn't mean it's a good thing. It's not something I look forward to. It's not something to be enjoyed or gloated over.
I am not interested in immediate, bloody revenge (well, OK, maybe a little), I want an
effective solution, a
real solution, the best possible choice, or at any rate the least evil. I don't think "carpet bombing" is it. Or wholesale "depopulation" of an area. Or nukes. Or poison gas. It's all been tried before, and usually with not great effectiveness.
We need a
different solution.
Why have these recent attacks been so successful? 9/11 succeeded because no one seriously tried to use airliners as cruise missles before. This school situation came about because no one had done it before. They're ahead of us on innnovation. We need new tactics, too, because the old ones just won't work here.
What good would it do to destroy a city if the perpetrators of these outrages have already melted away and are halfway around the world, causing trouble elsewhere? This is NOT a war of territory, it is a war of ideas. The enemy does not have a single face and location.
So... any ideas that will actually address the
real problem, rather than simply slake the bloodthirst?
