[extropy-chat] 'History' and the fulcrum of 1945

[Amara Lynn Graps]

Dear Hubert,

I think, in summary from our comparison of notes, that the people in
Germany immediately after the war and for the next decade were
probably shellshocked, in grief, etc. and not aware of the total sum
of the events, and they needed time to absorb and adjust. So that by
the time you were a boy, they knew. Probably it was still impossible
to face the events very well, and so you saw and experienced your
family and neighborhors in those states of mind. There's some 
interesting psychology studies that could be made here, that is, with
how many decades a culture needs to bring a horror out in the public
consiousness enough to talk about it. Well, maybe many studies have
been made already, this seems like such an obvious topic.

I typed in that passage (sorry for the typos) from the book in order
to show that it is never black and white in war, the victors are
absolutely never 'clean', but comparing 'degrees' of atrocity-behavior
inevitably leads to treating human lives abstractly, which I think is
wrong too. (Dead is dead, each one is another precious life gone.)
Keith H's comments about these evolutionary behaviors are also another
reason to look at all sides in a conflict, because I think the 'beast
within' exists to some extent in all of us, and I agree with the
author that '1945 is our problem.'

Thanks for talking so openly and generously about your experiences.
Sometime this summer or fall when the group I work in begins to write
macros for the many-step sequencing commands for our Dawn instrument
(*), I'll see if I can name one 'humania': maybe it will be the set of
commands to clear the memory buffer ... ;-)


Amara
www.amara.com

(*) http://dawn.jpl.nasa.gov/
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Amara Graps, PhD        
Istituto di Fisica dello Spazio Interplanetario, CNR - ARTOV, 
Via del Fosso del Cavaliere, 100, I-00133 Roma, ITALIA
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"We came whirling out of Nothingness scattering stars like dust." 
--Rumi