Hazer

I have not been able to participate on TD as much as I would like since I have gone back to work, I do enjoy looking in on my TD friends.

I appreciate how chelydra is able to reach beyond the superficial chit chat and coax dialog from us that reveals who we are. There is always risk involved when we put our feelings and opinions out there to be scrutinized. We don't know who all will read our comments or whether offense will be taken even if no offence was intended. Considering the diversity of our backgrounds and belief systems we are bound to be at odds from time to time. These times give us the opportunity to learn from each other, and where we cannot agree, to extend grace.

chelydra

I spent a day or two trying to resist my urge to reply to Marg. Alas, I had to yield in the end...

This is a tricky business, for sure — each of us is rooted in at least one tribe, and each tribe has it own history, its own self-image, its own mythology. Looking back into these things, trying be objective (seeing our tribes as others see us), yet trying not to lose that sense of family and belonging that is our birthright ... also, trying to open up to appreciate other tribes' history, self-image and mythology... it is all a mind-blowing experience and it's never-ending...

Just the other day an English friend pointed out to me that the heroes of the Alamo just wanted to own slaves and broke away from Mexico to make Texas a free republic of slave-owners. Despite four and a half decades of learning disagreeable truths about my own tribe, it seems my ideas about the Alamo were still based in Walt Disney's Davy Crockett movie. We all wore coon-skin hats with tails when I was a kid, and those Disney scenes of bright handsome Aryan-looking guys sacrificing their lives for freedom from the dark, inferior Mexican army are indelibly imprinted in America's collective unconscious — so much so that an old friend of mine can cheerfully blog about the sport of "shooting meskins" while helping organize demonstrations against immigrants trying to survive in our home town.

And it's true that Nazi ideology — all those ideas about racial purity, about the need to defend Nordic civilization from Jews, about the Caucasians' divine right to conquer and exploit others — largely came from white America. Henry Ford's book, "The International Jew" was a best-seller, and there was a copy of it in my house, along with books on eugenics, etc. These ideas were thoroughly mainstream "conventional wisdom" among middle-class white Anglo-Saxon Protestant families like mine in the decades before World War Two. This was not just abstract theory, of course. American genocide may have been gradual and relaxed compared to the shocking efficiency of the Nazis, but it was just about as thorough — and it's still going on today, as US-backed regimes and businesses in Latin America invade the last refuges of Native American culture in the Amazon, in Guatemala, etc. The chief moral difference between the US and apartheid South Africa is that the white South Africans did not kill off the original population, and so remained a minority. (Their "bantustans" were modeled on US Indian reservations.)

But every tribe gives its members reasons to feel proud, as well as reasons to feel ashamed. Just as we all have families we might as well love just because they're our families, we need to love our tribes, and our countries — even if we express that love by trying to make things right. I can't retract my opinion that World War Two was a struggle against absolute evil, but I hope I've made it clear that I don't believe the winning side represented absolute goodness. And the rebirth of Germany and Japan as peace-loving societies in the postwar era is one of the amazing and encouraging episodes in the history of our species. Too bad it seems to take a crushing defeat to bring about that kind of transformation. America recovered far too quickly from the identity crisis brought on by the Vietnam War—just as Germany learned the wrong lessons from 1918. (The "liberation" of Iraq brought in our own torture chambers, mercenary forces, looted resources, etc. Surely there are better ways of spreading our ideals of freedom and democracy.)

Did I previously mention my amazement at how Qsilv manages to say more in six or eight lines than I can squeeze into fifty or a hundred?

Qsilv

I hope we do >>celebrate our communal enjoyment in each other's friendship and contributions<<
...and yes, we do need to be extra careful not to spread malice.

Revisiting our experiences, however, whether direct or vicarious, is part of experiencing Art.

But yes, we're in a strange world here. Although it's possible to ignore some of the conversations (and the kidlets running wild now and then), those of us who've been here for a while have seen how poisonous the atmosphere CAN get.

You know I've always urged us all to think of TD as a Garden Party that Rachel has invited us to enjoy, with all ages AND a wonderfully wide variety of backgrounds included here.

So thanks for the reminder.

marg

Hey guys..

Whilst there is absolutely no way that I wish to excuse, pardon or in any other way endorse NAZI concentration camps, I think that this thread, and in particular, the later comments in it, is hopelessly biased.

Just FYI for anyone who only knows one side of events - there were many nations involved in WWII and many countries were fighting for a long time(and the US stood on the side-line for a very long time) - and many people in America and Europe actually expected the US to enter the war on the other side.

There were many atrocities carried out by many different people, and the deprivations and hardships suffered by both soldiers and civilians all over the world was horrendous.

Lone soldiers from every side single-handedly captured disillusioned and desperate enemy platoons - and some POWs put up with incarceration, hard labour and abuse until 1949 (latest date that I know of).

This is 2013. Yes, we all have stories from our childhood or passed down from family members and friends, but can't we please see ThinkDraw as a wonderful somewhere where we celebrate our communal enjoyment in each other's friendship and contributions, rather than rehashing history and (hopefully inadvertently) alienating everyone who may be from a different cultural background ?

chelydra

This part had more than my usual density of distracting typos, so here it is corrected:

If not for my brother and girlfriend challenging my right-wing Republican politics in 1964, I might never have done any thinking at all. So I can hardly fault Jaffee's platoon-mates for failing to appreciate what they were doing. But it still seems strange to me that soldiers in that war could have been just as alienated and reluctant as most soldiers in most wars.

By the way, I still fondly remember Barry Goldwater's acceptance speech at the Cow Palace: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice." And I've yet to find any reason to disown the thrill I felt when those words rang out of our fuzzy little B&W TV. On the other hand, I also never felt any shame or regret for realizing just half a year later (when my gentle sweet girlfriend quietly devastated my enthusiasm when LBJ first sent the B-52'st into North Vietnam) that the other side was where I belonged. If I'd had any lingering doubt about my nation's moral bankrupty in Indochina (which I didn't), it would have been erased by our government's cynical support for the violent remnants of Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge after they were deposed by Vietnam's invasion of Cambodia in 1978.