12-18-2018, 08:07 AM
(11-17-2018, 07:16 AM)Bill the Piper Wrote:(11-16-2018, 04:24 PM)pbrower2a Wrote: We have plenty of excellent movies from the early 1940s that portray Germans and Japanese in an unflattering light. Do most Americans except that the unflattering light about America's wartime enemies is relevant today? Of course not.
There was a LOT of bad things about traditional German and Japanese culture. The reason it is not relevant today is that the Americans forced them to change after 1945.
As national pride that thuggish leaders offered to get people to see that their sons going off to war as cannon fodder, that criticism of their results became treason, as the prospect of glorious victory turned into ignominious defeat, as hunger arrived instead of plenty, as the casualty lists mounted, as buildings crumbled in bombings or became death traps in fires, as the currency became worthless, as refugees from what one thought was always part of one's nation, as living standards fell to those at the start of the industrial era, as returning soldiers returned from promises of a glorious future to doing the farm labor that slaves used to do, as the victors inundate you with tales of Bataan or Buchenwald, as the best hope for young women who lost their boyfriends or husbands in war see that the best thing that they can do for meeting basic needs like food is to throw themselves at the victors occupying their land... any nation wil change its ways.
Quote:Cultures can also change under the pressure of internal forces. Hopefully this will happen to the Muslim world. I suppose anybody who takes humanistic and democratic values seriously would find it hard to respect Mohammed. Do modern Germans respect the Teutonic Knights?
Casting off a religion that defines practically everything is exceedingly difficult. So how does one adapt such things as liberal democracy and objective science to Islam?
The Koran is a revelation in wartime, and it reflects the values of a warrior society that must remain a warrior society to be true to the religion.
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.