Cruelty

I recently attended a play about two people who were Armenians and who had escaped the ravages of the Turkish Armenian war and the alleged genocide that took place during that war. The alleged genocide was not too different than the results of the continuing genocides that occur on the African continent. Nor for that matter not different from the Stalin genocide of the Ukrainian people. Nor the Jewish genocide; nor the Gypsy genocide; nor the attempt to kill the Polish and the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the sexual deviants. Nor was the attempt by the Eugenics movement in the United States in the early 20th century to sterilize all persons who were not free of disease, improper social behavior or low intellectual levels any different. The Supreme Court ruled that forced sterilization of socially unfit persons was legal. Nazi war criminals used the court ruling as a defense.

These events are still fresh in our minds because the offspring of these groups remind us about the horrible events.

The American blacks still remind us of the days of slavery, their grandparents were slaves; the Jews remind us of their slavery in Biblical times; no one today has living relatives of that event.

None of these memories do us any good. They perpetuate the hatred and longing for revenge and in the case of the Blacks demanding remunerations for the years of slavery and the unpaid earnings due them. We now have a museum dedicated to one of the genocides and it selectively emphasizes one aspect of the event. If all the groups who were victims of genocides built a museum detailing their special genocide, the cities would be full of these buildings.

Freud after years of study of persons caught up in disturbed mental conditions came to the conclusion that we all must come to grips with our past and accept what can not be changed and move forward to a more rich and fulfilling life.

Societies must do the same. Understand what was done and vow not to repeat it again and move forward.