Think before you speak

Our world is rife with ethnic violence. Consider the following:

“In Omarska, Keraterm, and other Serbian death camps in 1990 and 1991, torture was recreational; the victims were typically executed anyway. In one case a guard cut off one prisoner’s ear and forced another prisoner to eat it. In another case a man’s testicles were tied to the back of a motorcycle, which then sped off, leaving the man to die of massive blood loss.

In Rwanda in the 1990s, a Tutsi woman, who had already seen seven members of her immediate family shot or hacked to death, begged a kindly Hutu couple to hide her twenty-month-old-son from roaming death squads. The couple took the boy in, then killed him” (Chua 163).

“In the spring and early summer of 1994, Hutu Power began broadcasting nationwide calls for the slaughter of Rwanda’s Tutsis…In just one hundred days, ordinary Hutus killed approximately eight hundred thousand Tutsis, mostly with machetes (Chua 169).

          This video was created by a high school class in the United States.

You read and watch this and are horrified.  Your stomach turns.  Some of you deal with this information by tuning it out.  Others: ABJECT DESPONDENCE. We need this horror explained. We pacify ourselves with its inexplicability---an evil that has surely never touched our lives. We privileged citizens derive a morbid pleasure in demonizing those who have committed the acts described in the previous passages.

Yet, dear students, I would like to remind you that your moral superiority is merely circumstantial.

Consider the following:

The Milgram Experiments set out to study individuals’ willingness to obey an authority figure even when doing so meant causing physical harm to others.  Volunteers were asked to participate in an experiment about the study of memory.  The volunteers would ask a test subject a series of questions and for each wrong answer they were required to electrically shock the test subject.

Unknown to the volunteers, the test subject was an actor only pretending to be shocked.

When volunteers heard the actor in pain and yelling, some asked to stop.  However, when prodded by the experimenter most volunteers continued to shock the subject. 

What Horror.

Consider the following:

This is the inscription outside of the Holocaust Museum in Washington D.C. 

It is crucial that we study the Holocaust and become aware of what happened in places like Yugoslavia and Rwanda.  We must remember that evil has taken place to avoid it from happening again.

Our privileged situation has not led us down the path of such moral depravity.  But, I would implore you to think about the intolerance and hate you see in your own life, and especially that which you express so casually.