“ …war corrupts everybody, corrupts everybody who engages in it. You start off, they’re the bad guys. You make an interesting psychological jump. The jump is this: since they’re the bad guys, you must be the good guys. No, they may very well be the bad guys. They may be fascists and dictators and bad, really bad guys. That doesn’t mean you’re good, you know? And when I began to look at it that way, I realized that wars are fought by evils on both sides. You know, one is a little more evil than the other. But even though you start in a war with sort of good intentions—we’re going to defeat fascism, we’re going to do this—you end up being corrupted, you end up being violent, you end up killing a lot of innocent people, because you’ve decided from the beginning that you’re right, and then you don’t have to ask questions anymore. That’s an interesting psychological thing that you—trick that you play. Well, you start out—you make a decision at the very beginning. The decision is: they’re wrong, I’m right. Once you have made that decision, you don’t have to think anymore. Then anything you do goes. Anything you do is OK, because you made the decision early on that they’re bad, you’re good. Then you can kill several hundred thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Then you can kill 100,000 people in Dresden. It doesn’t matter. You’re not thinking about it.
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Howard Zinn (via azspot)
I was just remarking to a friend this morning about how I noticed over this past holiday that my family does this. And so, trying to have any sort of conversation with them about these things becomes exceedingly difficult, nearly impossible.
I learned at some point in college (actually mostly thanks to studying kung fu and not due to my college curriculum, mostly) that though you must have confidence, you also must always find a way to be open in your mind and heart and this includes being open to the possiblity that you aren’t all right and that your opponent isn’t all wrong. It’s an easy enough idea to write or speak or even agree with, but I am convinced that most people are too lazy to put it into actualization.
