The Trouble with Isms (long reply)

[Rita Winston]

No: HPFGUIDX 3624

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, "Ebony " <ebonyink at h...> wrote:
> I've had to be quiet for the past few days... there's been a lot in 
> my mailbox from this group that I have strong opinions about.

Wow, Ebony, you wrote a nice long thoughtful post for #3600, a nice 
round number.

> By no means do I want my replies to get me banned from the list... 

Does ANYONE get banned from this list, except for the anonymous 
person who posted (paraphrase) 'Harry POtter is stupid and you will 
all die"?

> PACIFISM 

> I was a pacifist as a teen until my father sat me down and 
> explained to me exactly how he felt coming home from Asia as a 
> shell-shocked nineteen year old and getting spat upon, jeered at, 
> etc. 

People who attacked returning soldiers were NOT REAL PACIFISTS. Real 
pacifists recognize that the soldiers are just as much victims of the 
war as civilian refugees and causualties are. There was an 
anti-World-War-1 socialist pacifist slogan: "A bayonet is a weapon 
with a worker on each end" and even General Patton said 'make the 
other poor bastard die for HIS country'. Even in WW1, people knew 
about 'shell shock', called 'battle fatigue' in WWII, and now 
recognized as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

> Yes, the [Vietnam] war was stupid (as most wars are) and our men 
> shouldn't have been over there.

My pacifism is a sentiment rather than an ideology: I am a big 
supporter of USA having joined the Allies in World War 2 to fight 
against evil (Hitler) for the sake of both virtue AND national 
interest (the Americas's 'ocean moat' wouldn't be much protection if 
the other 3 continents were all conquered by an empire with bomber 
planes and eventually nuclear weapons). American soldiers fought 
(and died in great numbers) for a worthy cause. But German combat 
soldiers, who may have hated Hitler, but had been drafted, fought and 
died in a very similar environment.

I'm afraid that there's no one old enough to remember World War 2 on 
this list (I was born in 1957, 12 years after it ended). I remember, 
back in 1980 before PSYCH TODAY went sleazey, the then-long-time 
editor wrote a piece on the mystery of staying the same person for a 
whole lifetime, in which he made a remark about the 19-year-old 
killer at the Battle of the Bulge being the same person as the new 
great-grandfather hugging the baby.

Get that. "The nineteen year old killer". He said that, not me, and 
he had the right to say it, because it was himself. I never meant to 
suggest that all killing is murder, but that killing, even in a good 
cause, is psychologically stressful. The combat soldier has to learn 
to put up with that psychological stress, which is said to be a kind 
of toughening up. 

Me, I am such a wimp (which is what I was referring to when I called 
myself pacifist) that I don't believe that I could ever learn that 
toughness. So I meant to imply that my theories about Snape (that 
he didn't INTEND to join the Death Eaters and was repelled by DE 
murders) could be highly inaccurate (and perhaps even unfair to 
Snape) by assuming that he has the same wimpiness that I do.   

HARRY POTTER BOOKS

> I find it interesting that while it's okay to chastise JKR for not 
> having more female characters in the limelight, members were shot 
> down at the Yahoo site for:  1) saying that Harry Potter should be 
> more ethnically diverse (the comment was that the ethnic characters 
> were similarly marginalized), and 2) identifying the House-Elves 
> with enslaved African Americans.  I haven't seen those members 
> around here lately.

I recall that many different e-mail-lists that I've been on have had 
conversations where one person wishes there was more ethnic diversity 
in HP and other people replied by listing the diverse ethnicities of 
some of the characters. I recall one discussion on the old list about 
the House Elves' dialect being similar to minstrel show dialect, 
which led into a discussion of how badly the upperclass English 
treated their servants in the 19th century. I don't remember anyone 
being shot down??

If people were shot down then and not shot down now, maybe the reason 
is that the people who did the shooting then have left the list now, 
or learned to be more careful of their words. 

> Nor does my so-called "double minority" status give me the right to
> force my personal ideologies on any other human being, or condemn 
> them for not embracing them as their own.

The problem, and it has nothing to do with whether you or I is in an 
oppressed group or a privileged group, is Good and Evil. Respecting 
Draco's right of free speech to call Hermione a Mudblood and threaten 
Harry what will be done to him when You-Know-You takes over doesn't 
mean that his evil ideology deserves to be respected. 

The trouble is that everyone either believes or claims to believe 
that their issue is a matter of Good and Evil -- the Nazis claimed 
that they were the forces of Good and all the people they were 
killing were the forces of Evil who needed to be eliminated in 
defense of Good.

So Tolerance is a virtue for which I have only limited respect: I 
don't think that Evil should be tolerated. I like to use Abolition as 
my example when I talk about politics, because it is just about the 
only issue of contention in American history that has actually been 
settled. An abolitionist who believed that it is totally immoral to 
hold human beings in slavery, and totally cruel and unfair to the 
enslaved humans, would not be (and was not) satisfied by winning a 
compromise that no new slaves would be imported to USA but the slaves 
already here and their descendents would remain enslaved. How 
Intolerant of that Abolitionist, how disrespectful of the opposing 
viewpoint.