What I don’t understand is how you expect that attitude to change. Bigottry isn’t some kind of inate human characteristic, it is a tool/weapon used to divide us and stop us from reaching our goals.
I get that it’s nice to imagine people just snapping out of it an realizing all their mistakes, but in the vast majority of cases, this won’t happen by sheer magic…
Bigotry is thaught by your environment. And environment won’t change without great effort. The right is putting in great effort to change people’s environment so they don’t get exposed to ideas which are dangerous to them. What is your suggestion, to just let them and give up? You think leftists and organizers of the past did that?
I don’t expect that attitude to change. My suggestion is not to give up and let them. My suggestion is that this is not a situation where voting in better candidates will make the bigotry end, it would just end the executive power enabling it to run rampant for a time but the lost cause attitude would be passed on until it found a way to power again. I don’t expect them to snap out of it nor do I think the solution is sheer magic. I think the solution is doing what we did against this kind of bigotry in 1861 and 1941, only this time we don’t “reconcile” with our neighbors after. We politely explain the cost of bigotry and, if we succeed (and that’s a big “if” because that’s going to come with a massive human expense) we use the advantage of their loss of legacy bigots to force the next generations to abandon the cause. Even then it’s not a guarantee. Denazification and education hasn’t prevented younger generations in Germany from taking up the cause, but it has helped contain those who pick up the banner of hate.
The cost of freedom of thought will always be that there will be people who choose to think the worst. Some of them are taught this, some of them find their own way there. I will never stand for indoctrination and overriding free will, even in the name of good. Everyone has their right to think however they want to think. But the catch is that allowing that comes with the cost of occasionally reminding them thinking something and acting upon it are not the same and when your worldview involves violating the rights of others to exist, your right to exist and do that becomes a struggle, not of ideology but of physical force between your people and the people who would stand in your way.
“Fuck ‘em” isn’t a dismissal of their beliefs, it’s a dismissal of their right to exist. They have chosen their path and walk one paved with the corpses of those they can victimize. The Confederacy and Germany weren’t defeated by leftist ideology alone, they were defeated by people of a wide variety of beliefs who joined forces to declare “your worldview is intolerable”. Both those eras brought about indiscriminate suffering, hardship, and death. It’d be wonderful if we could have learned from that and didn’t head down that path again, but apparently we didn’t.
Fascism and state enabled bigotry is a capstone, removing it does nothing but make it incomplete for a time. You have to destroy the foundation and support columns, then make the idea of rebuilding that foundation unworthy of the effort. That’s when leftist organization and values come in. Right now we’re just a disparate mass of humans facing another band of disparate humans who’ve agreed hate it their uniting ideology and empowered the biggest haters to do their dirty work for them. The consequences have to trickle down.
What I don’t understand is how you expect that attitude to change. Bigottry isn’t some kind of inate human characteristic, it is a tool/weapon used to divide us and stop us from reaching our goals.
I get that it’s nice to imagine people just snapping out of it an realizing all their mistakes, but in the vast majority of cases, this won’t happen by sheer magic…
Bigotry is thaught by your environment. And environment won’t change without great effort. The right is putting in great effort to change people’s environment so they don’t get exposed to ideas which are dangerous to them. What is your suggestion, to just let them and give up? You think leftists and organizers of the past did that?
I don’t expect that attitude to change. My suggestion is not to give up and let them. My suggestion is that this is not a situation where voting in better candidates will make the bigotry end, it would just end the executive power enabling it to run rampant for a time but the lost cause attitude would be passed on until it found a way to power again. I don’t expect them to snap out of it nor do I think the solution is sheer magic. I think the solution is doing what we did against this kind of bigotry in 1861 and 1941, only this time we don’t “reconcile” with our neighbors after. We politely explain the cost of bigotry and, if we succeed (and that’s a big “if” because that’s going to come with a massive human expense) we use the advantage of their loss of legacy bigots to force the next generations to abandon the cause. Even then it’s not a guarantee. Denazification and education hasn’t prevented younger generations in Germany from taking up the cause, but it has helped contain those who pick up the banner of hate.
The cost of freedom of thought will always be that there will be people who choose to think the worst. Some of them are taught this, some of them find their own way there. I will never stand for indoctrination and overriding free will, even in the name of good. Everyone has their right to think however they want to think. But the catch is that allowing that comes with the cost of occasionally reminding them thinking something and acting upon it are not the same and when your worldview involves violating the rights of others to exist, your right to exist and do that becomes a struggle, not of ideology but of physical force between your people and the people who would stand in your way.
“Fuck ‘em” isn’t a dismissal of their beliefs, it’s a dismissal of their right to exist. They have chosen their path and walk one paved with the corpses of those they can victimize. The Confederacy and Germany weren’t defeated by leftist ideology alone, they were defeated by people of a wide variety of beliefs who joined forces to declare “your worldview is intolerable”. Both those eras brought about indiscriminate suffering, hardship, and death. It’d be wonderful if we could have learned from that and didn’t head down that path again, but apparently we didn’t.
Fascism and state enabled bigotry is a capstone, removing it does nothing but make it incomplete for a time. You have to destroy the foundation and support columns, then make the idea of rebuilding that foundation unworthy of the effort. That’s when leftist organization and values come in. Right now we’re just a disparate mass of humans facing another band of disparate humans who’ve agreed hate it their uniting ideology and empowered the biggest haters to do their dirty work for them. The consequences have to trickle down.