Concur. And you pointed out but one example, I only added another; there are many, many more that could be added. I have seen such now in eight wars in which I've been either a participant or observer, three of which were most uncivil conflicts meant to establish national regime changes; I attended the first at about 10 years of age and expect to be off to the next around January or February of next year, with any luck- though I don't know if it will be good luck or bad needed to get the job done.
Do not ascribe the actions of all of our muslum enemies to hatred as a motivation. ???
Are you serious? In order to initiate a savage act of brutality against another Man, one must surrender their Humanity to irrational hatred for self and others. You may not think so. I get that.
Certainly not. That is very often one VERY common motivation, frequently applied. But often just as effective and despicable is the cold, deliberate elimination of an enemy for pragmatic reasons or those believed to be so justifiable, and that will certainly do. And of course, there are always those who either find it a pleasurable, enjoyable experience to slowly destroy or crush another's life, or similarly take out their own frustrations on thosde they perceive as lesser beings; were this not true we'd have fewer cases of spousal, child and household pet abuse in this country; but the computerized records of those who've come to the attention of the authorities for such acts would be a great starting place should a mass intake of domestic concentration camp guards be required. Happily, such sadism is less prevelant than it can become in a culture in which it's rewarded and helped to flourish, but Americans proved very adept at such things while reducing the numbers of troublesome American aboriginies and during the military campaigns in the Phillipines at the turn of the XX Century.
You would be wrong.
I have seen otherwise. Teaching your rookies to hate their enemy is a common enough tactic when used in desperation, asc by the Americans responding to the sneaky attack by the Japs at Pearl Harbor, followed by Wake Island, Corregidor and Bataan, and preceded by Nanking/Nanjing, but it can lead to counterproductive excess, as per the *Rape of Nanking* or the My Lai Massacre in Vietnam.
And of course it can also lead to wholesale genocide or tribal elimination, as per the Bosnian *Ethnic Clensing* practiced by all parties concerned, and hardly anything new in that region, Hitler's removal of the untermenschen or the decimation-plus of the Ibos by the Nigerians in the 1960s-'70s, the slaughter of the Matabele by Mugabe's M'shona in Zimbabwe, or the nearly one million Rwandan Tutsis eliminated by the Hutus in three bloody months of the mid 1990s.
There is no neutrality between life and death nor good and evil, just as there is no compromise between food and poison.
God, I wish that were so. But most of us can be driven to things much darker than we can imagine ourselves capable of in saner monments. And once the line past that point is crossed once, it can be crossed again.
If someone disregards my existence as insignificant as that of a cockroach, it makes no difference in my life.
Unless they step on you like you were a cockroach. Or try very hard to do so.
If you try to act on that notion, the force that you initiate will surely be slammed upon you like a mass of conceptual concrete, driven by the conviction of my right to exist and the fury of my desire to do so. If we cannot agree ideologically, then we may have to fight until one of us remains. Do get this, however. Of the two ideologies involved in the current struggle only one adopts the notion to "live and let live."
And please do pardon the research slip. I should have run a search for the most obscure incidents in the most backward places at the turn of the previous century when attempting to make a point about what is happen that effects me and my family in America right now.
It depends on your outlook, I suppose. If you believe either that you are immune to the pressures of rage and fury if pressed to hard, or that you need never fear others willing to end their own lives to eliminate yours and those who look upon you as their families' protector, so be it. Most of those 3000 Americans who died in the World Trade Center and Pentagon certainly believed that, as did those in the death camps of Poland who kept hoping that the facility they were going to was really just a delousing shower intended to exterminate vermin. Maybe you feel that their deaths are less meaningful for the details of the numbers involved, or their relative obscurity in backwaters of Europe or New York, in which case ask not for whom the bell tolls so long as you have earplugs.
If like me you hope and pray that such things do not come to the USA in wholesale quantities again in the near future, then our hopes and prayers will be harmonious and sympathetic, and may acchieve more result than their individual weight might carry.
If, on the other hand, you're adopting the ostrich position while bleating *It can't happen here* you are on your own, pal.
-archy-/-
Far from transending however, 21st century Man has been slapped with the reality that human brutality has moved beyond defensive acts of rage and vengeance exercised on a battlefield. Horrors can be enacted singularly and personally. One Man's individual hatred is the motivation for mass murder... on an unimaginable scale.
The essential issue for Man is inevitably his individual behavior, because it has come down to only that when one Man can choose to strap on a bomb and walk onto a crowded bus, insert a microbomb into a toy, or infect himself with small-pox and get on an international flight to London.
For you there are infinite shades of grey. But, I suggest that there is really only black and white. Life or Death.
All Man's actions extend from that one fundamental choice.