(no subject)

[mangosteen]

Rant: The way I see it, if you look hard enough, any "proud" event in a nation's history that involved direct human conflict can be viewed as self-serving and despicable. Torture the data, and I assure you that it will confess.

It is utterly facile and incorrect to say "no one is completely pure and right, therefore everyone is wrong", because "right" and "wrong" lose their meaning at that point. "Less guilt-inducing" and "more guilt-inducing" take their place.

It's all grey. It always has been. Don't think you're being particularly enlightened becuase you successfully revise history to assuage your guilt or shame on a particular issue.

Everyone else does it, too.

Comments

[gingicat]

Of course it's all grey. But we need to *teach* that it's grey, and that certain things need to be avoided, because that path only leads ot more bloodshed.

Unfortunately, the modern Maccabees are living in the West Bank, and are both Jewish and Muslim.

[laurens10.livejournal.com]

Is this Thanksgiving inspired?

Hannukah scares me for that reason. It very, very much scares me.

[mangosteen]

Thanksgiving and Hannukah come to mind first.

For example, with Thanksgiving, it's a case of "Yes, you can flog yourself all you want about our ancestors taking land from the Native Americans, but guess what? You live here. Right now. In this country, founded by those people, and by my reckoning, it's a national holiday in which one reflects on what they're thankful for. If you want to make it into a day of mourning, great. Break out the sackcloth and leave me out of it."

Purim is another good one. No one ever explains the last chapter of Megillath Esther to the children. That's because the Jews killed a cubic fuckload of Persians, in way of revenge. Seventy thousand, by the recounting of the tale. I don't see anyone wringing their hands over that one. We still have costumes and noisemakers, but I don't see any Jews mourning over the fact that their ancestors went on a homicidal rampage in Shu-Shu-Shushan long ago. Sure, there's the Fast of Esther, but that's from a different part of the story.

You can always find something to be guilty or ashamed about if you look hard enough. Where there is armed conflict, there is death and unpleasantness. If me mourned every day in history that someone was treated unfairly at the hands of others, we'd be rending our clothing every day. I have chosen not to live my life in perpetual guilt. There's plenty around that I don't have to actively go looking for it.

[cos]

Just last night I finished reading Michael Oren's "Six Days of War", which delved yet another level deeper into the political dysfunctions that triggered the Six Day Way than anyone else has before. As usual when I finish a new Middle East book, I went into my compare-and-contrast mode, and the first comparison I did was with the Six Day War chapter in Patrick Seale's "Asad". It's full of wild speculation and unfounded assumption, but I tend to believe that it does achieve its stated goal of "describing how things look from the seat of power in Damascus". Sprinkle in a few first-hand quotes and accounts from "Israel and the Arabs", and that's where I am today in this particular excercise, and see your LJ post here.

Sometimes, everyone is just confused, so confused that "right" or "wrong" don't make any sense. Sometimes the different worldviews are so skewed that each faction's actions mean completely different things in several different contexts, and nobody is aware of it all. Sometimes, there's no well-mixed gray anywhere, just a shattered assortment of fractal fragments that make contact in unexpected places, many of them hidden.