When i think about the ubelievable cruelty of the Holocaust, or the unjust acts of slavery, the mass murders in Cambodia, why does everyone seem so shocked by 9/11? Most people don't even know about the horror that happened in Cambodia. Is it better to vaporize $200,000 innocent Japanese in the name of victory than it is to crash a plane into a building in the name of God? Why does it bother us more; because Americans are untouchable? Because our lives are worth more? A book called Evil In Modern Thought had some good points.
"Many people yearn for measures of absolute weight. But would we be helped by putting the genocide at Auschwitz at 1.0 on a scale that left the genocide in Cambodia at 0.87, or the other way around? It doesn't take much more than naming such yearnings to point out their hollowness. Comparing genocides, or natuaral disasters, makes sense only with regard to particular goals: preferably, preventing future ones."
Susan Neiman, Princeton Press, 2004
2006-08-30
10:07:50
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Anonymous