So when I have free time I read forums (duh!) and one of the forums I was reading this afternoon was Cracked. Now I've rarely posted there, but what with the violence in Paris and other places I feel the need to speak out. I feel VERY strongly that the Muslim community needs to unite against the extremists and I also feel that every non-Muslim should back them to the hilt. However, I also feel that this community needs to address the realities within their community that has allowed extremism to flourish. In other words I want them held to the SAME EXACT STANDARDS as anyone else. For me this is equality. When I wrote this and questioned why other people didn't support this concept my posts were removed. I have to say this bothers me.... A LOT! Maybe I'm just deluding myself, but I feel that all we have done is replace one form of racism with another. Instead of westerners being superior, now the west is this great bogeyman and has destroyed the world. With this new way of "thinking" non-westerners are just incapable of working things out for themselves and have to be saved from western evil by westerners!!! So before westerners believed they were civilizing and enlightening the world by brining western civilization, now the new racism seems to be we will civilize the world by getting rid of western civilization. I have a radical thought: how about we take a middle road? How about we allow these people from other areas to work things out for themselves and hold them accountable and so on, just like we expect from ourselves. In other words, how about we actually treat them truly as equals instead of with kid gloves. THIS WAS CENSORED! I am dumbstruck. What am I missing here? And why do I feel like I can get a better, more constructive debate on a football forum than most other places?* *-not that there isn't anything wrong with that, but I think it is interesting. EDIT: oh, can a mod please add (not here) to the title? I don't want to mislead people. You guys are great.
where Dierking goes, so goes the old man here. Aewhistory, don't get too pissed at having posts removed, humans are broken toys and sensitivity is at an all time high. don't buy into it too much, its a waste of your energy.
Any site that focuses strictly on politics is going to be a bitch when it comes to an unpopular opinion. And thats on both liberal and conservative sites. Personally anyone that gets offended by words or someone else's opinion, is the reason this country is the way it is right now. Everyone wants to be a victim. Im all for your thought, IF they handle it in their part of the world. But that will never happen because Muslims have already given the extremists all the power in their country. But the question that no one asks and its one that needs to be asked , is how come so many "peaceful" Muslims flipped the script and became extremists? I dont have any problem with religion. But when people are force-fed religion day after day for their entire life Im sure it might make a couple of them crazy. If that part of the world was civilized, had attractions/entertainment that didnt include throwing gays off buildings and stoning women to death , Im sure they wouldn't be as unhappy as they are. Maybe throw a pair of tits in their face. That always makes me happy on a rough day.
Thanks for the reply. I know you're right and that it shouldn't bother me. It is such a petty thing, right? I think what bothers me is this: I was brought up in a supposedly liberal family that really espoused freedom of thought and equality. I admit that I was also raised with a prejudice that conservatives generally didn't share this belief. But in the nearly twenty years I've been posting on various online forums I have only ever been censored twice and both times were by people who claimed to be big tent, liberal, open minded types. This bother me a lot. I have become far more moderate over time and more appreciative of both liberals and conservatives, but I find myself still genuinely bothered by people who claim to be liberal, or even leftist, who so openly censor any opinion they don't care for. I realize now that many conservatives feel the same way. This is not the way forward for our society..... and yet I know you're right and that it is a waste of my time, that these are broken people, and so on. I think at the heart of it what bothers me is that this is the death of ideals I once believed in. I sympathize with moderate conservatives who have at times found themselves relegated to the sidelines while people further to the right took over and hijacked their beliefs. I think I have finally come to understand what that feels like..... and no one lubed me up for it or anything! BTW, I think Dierking was joking... Wasn't he?
He was joking. Duh. Come on. Aew, you are one of the most thoughtful and interesting posters on here. I get it, thats like praising you for being the tallest midget, but keep up the good work.
Thank you as well for the reply. I agree with so much of what you're writing. I've come to accept, reluctantly, that often the worst place to discuss politics is a political website. The irony is truly rich though. It really does illustrate how ideological people have become that we start forums so that folks will come and agree with us. Like you I am VERY concerned at the relative ease with which extremists have attained power in certain parts of the Islamic world. Here is the glimmer or ray of hope I still hold out: most folks today forget that at the end of the Second World War lots of people thought that Germany and Japan weren't salvageable. They were thought to be too far gone, too fascist, too extreme too be turned back into productive, moderate nations. This turned out to be wrong and I sincerely hope that will be the case here. But that took a shitload of effort and, perhaps most importantly, it took a fair amount of introspection. This is particularly true of Germany where they had to come to grips with what had happened in order to move forward. IMHO the Muslim community need to deal with extremism, accept the reasons why it exists, cope with those reasons and fix them just like the Germans once did. That means they must become responsible for themselves and not simply blame the west, Europeans, Jews, other Muslims, etc. Perhaps the key element of your point, right? What IF they don't?
I do like that you pointed out Germany and Japan. The only difference is we weren't bringing over German refugees in the 40s in hopes that they weren't nazi's and the Japanese that were here after Pearl Harbor were forced to relocate. Now whether those were the right moves or not is anyone's opinion but what it did was keep the threat out of the US for the most part. Something this regime is trying not to do.
Actually we made internment camps and stuck all of the German, Japanese and Italian immigrants we could in them until after the war, then we deported them.
From what I've read the only German's brought over to escape the Nazi occupied areas were doctors and scientists. So really only "smart" people that could be useful for us. Not people just wanting to escape the extremists of their country. I've never seen anything that said German Americans were put in camps. Only Japanese were. But the differences with the way they are treating the civilized Muslims are the reasons why I wouldn't compare these days to those. Even if we go over there and destroy ISIS there will still be enough Muslims left over to want to start up another extremist group. And what makes it even worse in they'll be doing all that building from inside our country. Also, what happened with Hitler and Pearl Harbor wasnt based around the world's oldest death sentence..religion. Thats the difference for me.
This is only one of the internment camps local to me, but you get the gist: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_City_Internment_Camp
Abyzmul, thanks for the link. I had been meaning to find something like this to post, but this is great. Here's an interesting story that's related: My grandmother was an Austrian Catholic from the old Austro-Hungrian Empire. OTOH, my grandfather can trace his family back about 300 years in this country, with a sojourn in Canada when we fled for siding with the British during the War of Independence. Anyway, because Austria was part of Nazi Germany during WWII and my grandfather was 'married' to an Austrian he wasn't allowed to have any job that required security clearance. My grandmother was deemed a security risk because of her ethnicity. However, Germans and Italians who were deemed to be high risk were simply locked up. This is in stark contrast to the Japanese, of course, where the bar for being put into a concentration camp was set as low as possible, but it is true that people of European descent were rounded up as well. As an aside, in retrospect, my grandmother was the last person who was a security risk, but I did have some extended family who sympathized with the Nazis. My grandmother hated them and, so I'm told, informed on them to the authorities. Apparently it is why I don't have any relations with the Austrian branch of my family today and why she insisted that I be raised Jewish. There is a LOT more to this story but I'll leave it here for now. I have an odd family and I think this is why I became an historian.
and let G-d sort it out..... It's a pretty attractive philosophy my friend. The problems with it rears it ugly head when I end up in the group being nuked. All of a sudden that's when I find this to be a really bad idea. Otherwise, I'm cool with it....
